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Public Voices: Writing Across Lehman College 2003-2012 Edited by Marcie Wolfe and Jessica Yood Public Voices: Writing Across Lehman College, 2003-2012 ______________________________________________________________ Public Voices: Writing Across Lehman College 2003-2012 Lehman College The City University of New York 2016 Public Voices: Writing Across Lehman College, 2003-2012 ______________________________________________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments i Introduction Public Voices: Vision, History, Overview ii Marcie Wolfe and Jessica Yood Writing and Student Identities Writers at Play: The Excitement of Low-Stakes Writing 2 in an Interdisciplinary Leisure Studies Course Robin Kunstler Active Learning in the Sciences: WAC and a Food 15 Nutrition Course Gul Tiryaki-Sonmez Steps and Caves: Teaching Social Work Practice as a 20 Writing-Intensive Course Richard Holody Writing and Academic Rigor Scaffolding a Final Research Project: Music 34 of the Classical Period Janette Tilley Using Dialogue to Promote Intellectual Debate 46 in a Latin-American Literature Course Maria del Carmen Saen-de-Casas A “Revolution” in Reading: A First-Year Professor’s Experience 54 with Reading Journals in a Latin American History Course Kathleen López Writing and Formative Assessment Rethinking, Revisiting, and Revising in a Teacher 65 Education Course Elaine Avidon Public Voices: Writing Across Lehman College, 2003-2012 ______________________________________________________________ Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: The Evolution 82 of a WAC History Course and a History Professor Duane Tananbaum with Celeste Donovan Writing Tango: Tango as a Metaphor for Partnering 96 and Dialogue Among Professor, Writing Fellow, and Students in a Graduate Teacher-as-Researcher Course Abigail S. McNamee We Built This City: Playing with Voice in a U.S. Urban History Class 109 Cindy R. Lobel About the Editors 123 Public Voices: Writing Across Lehman College, 2003-2012 ______________________________________________________________ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We owe our first thanks to the Lehman faculty who volunteered their time, energy, expertise, and passion to experiment with the teaching of writing. The book’s idea was inspired by the challenging and insightful conversations we had with WAC faculty colleagues. The contributors to this volume took these conversations and generated the thought-provoking chapters you find here. We thank them for bringing their scholarship to WAC and for their incredible patience in seeing this project through. We particularly want to acknowledge Richard Holody (1945-2010), Associate Professor of Social Work, whose voice we miss in our current discussions about writing at Lehman. Critical in shaping the vision for WAC and for seeing that vision enacted are the past and present coordinators of Lehman’s WAC program. Sondra Perl, Elaine Avidon, Tyler Schmidt, Cindy Lobel, and Robyn Spencer each offer a unique perspective on leadership, literacy, and pedagogy. Sondra Perl, a founding coordinator of Lehman WAC, provided valuable suggestions regarding scope and focus in the early stages of conceptualizing this volume. We also thank the CUNY Graduate Center writing fellows who have left a lasting impact on learning at Lehman College. We are grateful to the faculty and administrators who have served on the WAC Advisory Committee over the years. WAC-AC sets a standard for critical colleagueship: in spite of complex roles and teaching schedules, the participants join us fully in thinking through new initiatives, strategizing about problems, or raising hard but important questions. We are grateful as well to Professor Vincent Prohaska, the chair of WAC-AC, for guiding those important conversations. Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield designed and formatted this publication. We thank her not only for her skills but also for her remarkable patience and professionalism during the production phases of this work. Thanks also to Jan Gallagher, who expertly edited some of the chapters. Finally, we acknowledge the extraordinary administrative support and thoughtful guidance we received from former Associate Provost Robert Whittaker, who encouraged our work on this publication and was a collaborator with us on Lehman’s WAC program more generally. We have learned so much from Rob about what it means to involve faculty in projects that simultaneously support institutional development and intellectual work. i Public Voices: Writing Across Lehman College, 2003-2012 ______________________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION PUBLIC VOICES: VISION, HISTORY, OVERVIEW Marcie Wolfe and Jessica Yood ublic Voices, a collection of essays written by and for faculty across the P disciplines, focuses on teaching and learning writing in an urban, public, four-year college. Through accounts of their work at Lehman College, one of the 24 campuses of The City University of New York and its only senior college in the Bronx, authors offer an on-the-ground perspective on writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines. Far too often urban colleges and their students are painted in broad political strokes— “underserved,” “unprepared,” “under siege”—descriptors that sensationalize the day-to-day struggles of institutions, students, and faculties. Instead Public Voices shows the work of writing in actual classrooms, illuminating a rich and complex picture of engaged learning and responsive teaching. Each contributor to this volume participated in Lehman College’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program for a year or sometimes more. Several faculty members were also active members of a WAC Quantitative Reasoning study group and WAC’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) initiative. In some cases, faculty write about their courses in the first few years of the program; others reflect on more recent experiences with WAC and WID at Lehman. Descriptions and analysis of their experience using writing to teach are informed by their work in these literacy initiatives. The chapters offer detailed accounts of experiments teaching with writing in the following fields: Education, History, Latin American and Puerto-Rican Studies, Health Sciences, Social Work, Music, and Languages and Literatures. The ten chapters cover general education, majors courses, and a graduate course, and are authored by professors at the beginning, middle, and later stages of their academic careers. The descriptions of courses reveal the differences in when they were written, spanning a ten-year period of the program’s existence. Lehman’s WAC program has evolved over the last decade, beginning solely as a faculty development initiative and becoming a large-scale effort to institutionalize ii Public Voices: Writing Across Lehman College, 2003-2012 ______________________________________________________________ writing intensive courses in the majors. Additionally, our program today, like so many literacy initiatives, involves digital tools that were not yet central to some of the teaching that faculty describe here. But throughout, the program coordinators and faculty participants have shared a common mission: understanding the relationships among writing, learning, and disciplinary knowledge. The program’s aim in exploring these relationships has been to support faculty’s efforts at deepening students’ engagement and increasing their academic success. A central question is at the heart of each chapter: what difference does it make to use writing in new ways, ways that change the dynamics of learning? The contributors invite readers to consider the often hidden challenges of teaching writing-infused courses and how these challenges transform teachers, students, and the larger academic landscape. In courses described here writing makes visible the deep-rooted struggles that some urban students face with academic literacy, the ways in which students’ funds of knowledge (Moll et al 1992) from home and community enhance or complicate their learning, and faculty’s sometimes unexamined pedagogical assumptions about how students should learn in their disciplines. The contributors to this volume, in first joining the WAC program at Lehman and then agreeing to document and reflect on their own and their students’ work, participate in a growing movement in higher education—to make the academy more of a dynamic, cross-disciplinary community of scholars and teachers. Data collected over the last ten years inform our understanding of WAC’s impact on teaching and learning. (WAC’s ongoing research efforts are conducted with approval from Lehman College’s Institutional Review Board. Identities of students described in the chapters were made anonymous as part of the protocol guidelines and in some cases, student work was lightly edited for readability and context.) Course portfolios, created by faculty at the end of their participation in our two-semester and SoTL programs, served as both a resource for the individual faculty members who created them, and a dissemination tool available to faculty outside of or new to the WAC program. The portfolios also became a resource for us as coordinators. They contain a trove of student writing samples, assignments, grading strategies, and writing-enhanced syllabi from which to draw in developing materials and workshops. iii Public Voices: Writing Across Lehman College, 2003-2012 ______________________________________________________________ All faculty portfolios include a syllabus annotated to show where and how writing was incorporated throughout the

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