Not a private inquiry

My MATH 365 (Linear Algebra I) course this term has been designated "Inquiry ARC," the "ARC" standing for "Apply, Reflect, Communicate." "Inquiry ARC" is the theme of the university's Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), a component of our reaffirmation of accreditation through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).

Alphabet soup.

Briefly, every ten years, as a condition of keeping our accreditation, we're asked, as a campus, to formulate a plan for enhancing student learning. This time around we came up with "developing critical thinking," roughly, manifested in the Inquiry ARC program. For the past few semesters we've begun running Inquiry ARC courses, courses which focus intentionally on developing skills relating to one or more steps in the Inquiry ARC process. Last spring, once I knew what I'd be teaching this year, I thought, "what the hell, I'll apply for Inquiry ARC status for Linear I, since the way I teach the course, it's already an Inquiry ARC course." (Not-so-dirty little secret: as any teacher worth her or his salt will tell, you every class should be an Inquiry ARC course...it's just good teaching, folks.)

So far, so good. Communication is always front and center in my courses, given my focus on writing, and I've always been big on reflection. As I've written at length in this blog, I teach this course primarily through applications...and the inquiry? I'm really just going to be able to leave that up to the students.

On Wednesday we spent about 15 minutes on an example I'd meant to take 5, simply because the students kept asking fantastic questions about the example. "What if we changed the number in the last column?" "What would have to happen for us to have a unique solution?" "How does Mathematica know that it's an augmented matrix with three variables and not a matrix with four variables?" and so forth. Not I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-doing-so-I'm-asking-simple-questions-trying-to-get-a-grip-on-this-shit questions, but I've-got-the-basic-operations-down-so-now-I'm-trying-to-take-it-apart-to-see-why-this-shit-works questions. Good stuff!

If they keep it up for the rest of the semester, I'm gonna be a happy man.

Could be worse

Change is in the air. Our Curriculum Review Task Force is currently attempting to overhaul our general education curriculum (the Integrative Liberal Studies [ILS] Program) and provide recommendations and requirements that will guide departments as they redesign their curricula. There's a lot of give-and-take, but mostly give: since our curricular change is being driven by a push for sustainability (faculty simply can't continue to deliver the current curriculum without sacrificing mental or physical health), the curriculum we're proposing will almost certainly be slenderer and more streamlined than the current one.

One potential victim of change is our current "intensives" program. At present we require students to complete intensive courses of four varieties: diversity (1 course), information literacy (2 course), quantitative (1 course), and writing intensives (3 courses). Our tentative plan eliminates all such course requirements. The quantitative intensive requirement will be folded in with the core mathematics requirement, and the fate of the diversity intensive requirement has yet to be decided. Meanwhile, the other two requirements are to be pushed into the departments, made "competency-based" requirements rather than "course-based" ones. More specifically, each department will be asked to design their major programs so that any students completing those program will necessarily complete at least one course treating, intentionally and intensively, discipline-specific information literacy and at least two giving such treatment of discipline-specific writing.

For the past several months I've felt poorly about this move, but several conversations and sessions in which I've taken part here at the 11th Annual International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference (what up, Savannah?) have made me rethink my position. How so?

1. Alignment with departmental learning goals. Under the proposed plan, the courses would be even more closely aligned with departmental learning outcomes, and would involve even more authentic disciplinary writing. Moreover, while several departments currently have only one WI course, forcing their majors to fulfill the WI requirement in part by taking courses from outside the major, under the proposed plan all students would be required to take two writing-competency courses within the discipline: even recalcitrant departments wouldn't be able to escape.

To be sure, currently all proposed WI courses campuswide must meet explicit criteria regarding writing instruction, assessment, and integration into course activities, and we'll lose that in the proposed move. However, now that we've designed careful assessment procedures to keep tabs on writing-intensive courses' efficacy, we'll be able to measure the success of whatever courses department identify as writing-competency courses.

2. Retention of departmental autonomy. It'll be up to the departments to identify the courses they feel offer students the most authentic writing-in-the-disciplines experience. Moreover, we will likely offer leeway to departments in tailoring assessment procedures to their own needs.

3. Campus culture of writing. The proposed plan is a feasible one: almost every department already offers one or two (or more) writing-intensive courses, and I'm certain most departments would have little trouble in identifying one or two more such courses. This feasibility highlights the way in which writing has become a part of the academic culture on campus. Six or seven years ago, when the ILS program was young, there were few WI courses campuswide; now there are many. We've come a long way.

Moreover, moving the WI courses into the departments would likely strengthen writing's presence in the campus academic culture, given its greater proximity to department curricula and learning outcomes.

4. Precedents elsewhere. Chris Anson's keynote address here highlighted several other institutions, big and small, that have implemented or are implementing department-based writing-across-the-curriculum programs. (McDaniel College (MD), the University of Minnesota, and UNC-Charlotte have all adopted some kind of department-based WAC program.) Of course, anyone familiar with Anson's work knows the models he and his colleagues at NC State have promulgated for successful department-based writing and writing assessment. I'd be happy to help UNC Asheville's departments in designing effective WAC programming, drawing heavily on Anson's work.

5. It could be worse. WAC is getting cut back everywhere in the face of budget cuts (here, Sue Doe spoke of defunding at Colorado State University, home of the WAC Clearinghouse), and at least we're not facing system-wide mandates for standardized benchmarks (here, Ohio State's Kay Halasek told horror stories of mandatory granting of credit for certain AP scores and placement for certain ACT scores). We've retained a good deal of autonomy in this regard. Moreover, I'm confident that most of our students, and most of our faculty, recognize the important part writing plays in education...and the particularly important part it plays in our QEP (which focuses on developing critical thinking through inquiry into, application of, reflection on, and communication of course content). Given the recognized centrality of writing, it's unlikely to go away anytime soon.

So...we'll labor on. I'm not so bummed about our situation anymore. We'll see how things work out as we move forward with our plans. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Post 500: A note of gratitude

A natural topic for my 500th post on this blog presents itself. I feel deeply humbled and honored to have been named this year's recipient of the Award for Teaching Excellence in the Natural Sciences at UNC Asheville. Honors like are not won by the recipient alone; I have many to thank.

My thanks go to my friends and family, for their ongoing love and support (and willingness to go without seeing me for long periods of time as I indulge my workaholia).

My thanks go to my colleagues, for their boundless energy and creativity, and eagerness to engage with me in scholarly programs and activities spanning several disciplines.

My thanks go to my students, nearly every one of them tireless and talented, and many of them as passionate about teaching and learning as I am; the future is bright.

Where to go from Post 500? I've not received much feedback on what folks would like to see more of, though a couple of students have asked for more anecdotes about the early days of my teaching. Certainly those are preferable to endless rants about UNCA's QEP (a topic about which I might soon have a few more words to say).

I suppose I'll do what I always do, and let it take shape from day to day.

Thank you all.

CRTF?!

For the past two years I've served as Chair both of our university's Writing Intensive (WI) Subcommittee and of its Integrative Liberal Studies Oversight Committee (ILSOC; the body of which WI is a component). I was on WI for two years before chairing it, and during that time did a good deal of assessment and faculty development work for the body before coming to its head.

I've enjoyed all of this work: as anyone who reads this blog even casually (or anyone who's talked to me for more than a few minutes about my teaching) knows, I'm passionate about writing across the curriculum in all of its manifestations, and I consider myself duty-bound to evangelize and elegize.

I've enjoyed the work, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm tired of it. I'd estimate (if I had to pull a number or two out of a hat) that I've put an average of 5-7 hours a week towards WI during the past four years, and probably 3-5 hours a week towards ILSOC during the past two. This includes the summer months, for much of the assessment, faculty development, and reporting I've had to do for both bodies has taken place over the summer. In all this adds up to well over 1000 hours of work...and this is likely a conservative estimate.

I'll be rotating off of WI (my term is up) at the end of this academic year, and thus off of ILSOC, for it's my chairing of the former body that places me on the latter one in the first place. I've had a few good innings, and, to further that metaphor, I might say I've bowled several centuries. It's been fun.

What'll I be doing with my free time come next Fall, or even sooner? Lest you think I'll be languishing in a non-administrative lull, I might let you know that I've been placed on the "Curricular Sustainability" subcommittee of the latest chimerical beast dreamed up by our Provost and Faculty Senate Chair, the Curricular Review Task Force, or CRTF, for short.

To be clear: I volunteered to be on CRTF when the call went out a few weeks back. I even asked specifically to be placed on the subcommittee I've been placed on. (I'm delighted to find that several colleagues whom I respect deeply will be on the same subcommittee...many of whom have roughly my tenure, and many of whom I've worked with before.) I'm actually not complaining about this new assignment, as I believe it'll prove interesting, challenging, fulfilling, and (yes, I'm going to say it) fun.

But...

...there's something wrong here.

The Curricular Sustainability Subcommittee (CSS..."cascading style sheet"?) will be tasked with mapping out a proposal to make our school's curriculum deliverable by the current faculty (read: "without the adjuncts we cannot at this time afford") without driving them insane or further abrading their already red, rubbed, and raw morale. Sounds simple enough, right? During the CRTF's organizational meeting this past Friday, I began jotting down a list of related issues as they came to me. One after another they came, a few here, a few there, all interlocking and interacting, one popping up as another is squeezed down, like the flesh of a bulbous balloon.

What's involved?

• Class size
• Number of classes
• Frequency of class meetings
• Physical space available for class meetings
• Student enrollment
• Funding supplied by students' tuition
• "Down time" (release time and sabbatical...the latter now euphemistically called "professional development leave," and before that "off-campus scholarly assignment"; heaven forbid we call it "sabbatical": that would make us sound lazy!)
• Comparability with other institutions' policies
• Accounting of courses (cross-listing, "double-dipping," other accounting tricks)
• Meaningful co-teaching and related pedagogical practices
• Relation of our mission and goals to those of the UNC system as a whole
• Time to perform research
• Time to perform service to the department, university, and community
• Use of technology (especially regarding distance learning and hybrid course designs)
• Faculty development (cost of, and targets of)
• Support for curricular development efforts, for faculty development efforts...support in general
• Reassessment of the roles of graders, UG teaching assistants, and other opportunities for student engagement in pedagogy
• The university's identity and mission as a liberal arts institution
  
• Et cetera

As some sample interpenetrations, working off of the unwritten (but widely stated, including over and over at this past Friday's meeting) aim of ensuring a 3-3 load:

Moving to a 3-3 load without the help of several dozen more faculty will lead to...larger class sizes, creating...greater demands for more (and more frequently unavailable) physical space, requiring...further renovations to existing physical structures, or perhaps extending hours during which regular courses are offered...unless...

...enrollment is forced downward, leading to...a decrease in the tuition monies available to fund the university's efforts across the board, raising...the school's dependence on other sources of funding...or, unless...

...a move is made to offer more and more online and hybrid online/face-to-face courses, for which...faculty will need more professional development (to better acquaint themselves with this pedagogical paradigm) and preparation time (you can teach an old dog new tricks, but not overnight), assuming we can all get over...the damage this move might do to the university's identity as a liberal arts institution, in which meaningful student-instructor engagement and student-led learning (undoubtedly harder to orchestrate from afar) are highly prized.

The astute reader will noticed that I've not yet followed up on the "something's wrong here" I threw out above.

In asking faculty to take on the job of resolving this and other equally immense issues involved with overhauling our curriculum, the administration is adding yet another duty to the already vertiginous tower of tasks it's performing (like QEP design and delivery, assessment for SACS, day-to-day operations of the Humanities, Arts and Ideas, Intensives, Clusters, and ILS Colloquia, and various and sundry other sickeningly corporatized bureaucratic functions). Faculty, most of whom are already teaching three or four increasingly large sections every semester, many of whom are facing increasingly great expectations for service and scholarship, are more and more frequently being asked to take on administrative roles.

Like it or not, we're being turned into quasi-administrators, all of us.

Halfway through Friday's CRTF meeting the question was raised: "well, once we've put all of our recommendations together, then what?" Clearly, as it stands, no single body will have the authority to make all of the changes we're likely to suggest; whatever the faculty can't do on an informal basis will have at least to go through Faculty Senate (or at least its subcommittee, the Academic Policy Committee), if not General Administration (GA) itself, far away in a semi-mythical place called Raleigh (a place where the public liberal arts university is not well-, if ever at all, understood). I imagined the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the ark is trundled off into the bowels of an immense warehouse, presumably never to be seen again...so it would be with our report, no doubt: how many months would be wasted in trying to coordinate the several separate bodies whose work it would be to try to implement whatever suggestions we could come up with?

In a delightful moment of daydream, I thought: "Rebel. Revolt. Take over. Throw the Senate out, screw GA, and rewrite the rulebook, starting with page 1. If we've got the backing of the faculty as a whole [there are some 50 or 60 of us on CRTF, by the way], who's to stop us?" It was a childish thought, to be sure, but it was nice while it lasted.

Just minutes before the meeting on Friday I'd been sitting in the Math Lab working with Didi and Belle, two of my favorite new students this semester. They were working at trying to make their submission for the Calc II Integral Insanity miniproject more fiendish (the goal is to make as difficult an integral as possible, while still making it doable). We were trying to figure out how to build a reasonably challenging integration-by-parts problem backwards, through reverse engineering. I don't think any of the three of us had had much sleep this past week, and we were all slap-happy and silly as hell. Progress was slow, but I think we eventually got there.

It's moments like these that make me remember why I do what I do. I'm a teacher (and scholar) first, and an administrator second...distantly second. As important as WI, ILSOC, CRTF, and all of the other academic acronymic entities are in the abstract, there's nothing more important in concrete terms than making sure that a future mathematician understands induction, or that a future engineer or public health official knows how to analyze a simple mathematical model, or that I keep playing an active role in the generation of new knowledge, for my own sake and for my students'.

I can't lose sight of this.

Ahem...

Despite the late start (again!), yesterday was a full day, pedagogically speaking.

Things got underway in earnest with presentations by my 179 students, on the campus offices and organizations they were to investigate and report upon. Though I've not yet looked at them closely, the brochures they came up with to "advertise" these offices' services look quite good. They're creative and colorful, and some of them almost look professionally done. The presentations showed signs of nervousness and trepidation, which is natural with students at this point in their careers. As I always remind them, getting up and speaking in front of other is hard, no matter how often or how many times you do it. I admired both their willingness to get up and speak and the respect they showed one another as audience members.

I am not, on the other hand, admiring their highly imperfect attendance. Though there's a core of students (15 or so of the 21 now registered for the course) who come unfailingly, the remaining students come only to one out of every three or four class meetings. I've never seen such nonchalance in my courses before.

It's easy to come up with reasons for this. Even I have to admit that the course's subject may not be one which is inherently engaging for students not already interested in math, so many students may find it hard to get excited about the course for its own sake. Since mine is the only 179 course running this semester, several students are in it simply because they have to be, and no one wants to do something on compulsion alone. Finally, 179 courses in general (not just mine) are sometimes seen as "throwaway" courses that students expect to do well in with minimal effort. This is in part because many instructors fail to motivate the class by making its purposes clear.

I hope that in this I'm succeeding. I'm trying to strike a balance between writing instruction (to meet the course's WI goal), overview of the campus and its surrounding community, and actual course "content." It's a precarious balance, and sometimes I feel as though I'm making it up as I go along, and this worries me. However, several activities have seemed to work well ("Everything you always wanted to know about UNCA..." was well-received, and the students seemed to have fun making their meddos). I hope it proves meaningful in the end.

Speaking of public speaking...I ended my workday at Mars Hill College, a small school about 20 minutes north of here. The director of their nascent writing program had invited me to come and lead a workshop for the faculty who are spearheading efforts to get their writing-intensive course program off the ground. There was good disciplinary variety in the participant pool, with social work, journalism, history, literature and composition, religion, and philosophy well-represented. Given that Mars Hill can't possible have more than a hundred or so faculty members, I'm guessing that I met with something like 15% of the school's faculty yesterday. However, I must admit that I was a little chagrined, as were several of the attendants, that the sciences didn't send any of their folks over. (There's talk of me coming back to work with them specifically.)

There was energy in the room: given that Mars Hill's QEP is focused on writing and information literacy, there's strong institutional buy-in for their new WAC program, which features phased-in writing-intensive courses and student writing-fellows. The campus is outwardly stoked about the QEP: banners hang from lampposts exhorting "Write! QEP 2010-2013." It's clearly not just a "top-down" mandate, though; the people I met with yesterday were very much on board with the idea of writing across the curriculum. Their energy was authentic and intrinsic, not simply something generated by an administrative fiat.

Owing to this energy, the workshop was a fruitful one, with active (sometimes even fervent, but always friendly) discussion and idea-sharing. We talked about identifying roles for writing, coming up with learning goals writing could help to meet, structuring writing, using low-stakes writing activities, and responding to writing (while guiding students to do the same, through peer review). We packed a lot into two hours! Judging from the exit slips I received from the participants at the end (thanks for this idea, Libby! I'm going to do this from now on), most people were most interested in learning more about low-stakes writing and its uses in the classroom. The most interesting were the technology-driven (and very game-like) "constrained" forms like tweets and texts, as well as my newly-minted "Intrigue, Confusion, and Confidence."

I picked up some ideas, too. One of the conference participants offered a low-stakes writing activity he's used to help his shyer students get their say in in-class discussions. Rather than requiring them to speak up in front of a couple dozen of their peers, he asks students who are hesitant about contributing talking points to email their ideas ahead of time so that he can collect these ideas and share them with the class on the overhead. Those students' discussion points are on display, anonymously, when the class comes in, and in this way even the less outgoing students are able to make their voices heard. I asked if this method of starting the class conversation has helped the shy students come out of their shells (as, for instance, they might be called on to defend the points they've made via email), and he indicated that this is the case.

At the end of the workshop I had a chance to dish about the reception on the part of faculty of UNCA's own WI program. I said that I think it's generally good, and that though there was resistance when ILS was first phased in several years ago, most of the younger faculty have bought into it authentically and this has led to a campus culture in which writing-intensive courses are broadly accepted. I honestly think that this is the case: there are grumblers and groaners, but for the most part the mission of the intensives is unquestioned, and teaching WI courses is a valued activity.

Thoughts?

Latest comment in the Calc I "suggestions box"

This morning brought the third "suggestion" in the envelope hanging from the bulletin board outside my office: "Make it easier! :)"

That is all.

Oh, and in completely unrelated news, the broad area of our QEP was announced two nights ago (I'm amazed that I haven't commented on it yet): "Undergraduate experiences that foster the use of open inquiry, critical thinking, creative expression, and effective communication."

At this point the area is simply meaninglessly broad. I look forward to its focusing throughout the next several months.

Sampler

During the past week I've attended, presented at, participated in, or facilitated two conferences and three faculty development workshops, on topics ranging from pure mathematics (group theory and graph theory) to the pedagogy of writing and advising first-year students who are brand new to a liberal arts university. I've written dozens of pages of notes, collected several handouts, worksheets, resource lists, and sets of slides. I've talked with, listened to, or sent e-mails to dozens of colleagues. In between doing all of the above I've been spending most of my time reading up on the history and philosophy of science and its teaching and on the role played by gender in mathematics achievement.

Below I've collected a number of quotes, factoids, observations, and questions dealing with all that I've been doing for the past week or so. Every one of these items deserves further follow-up; maybe I'll get around to addressing some of them over the summer, maybe not. I just want to get them out there for now.

1. Contextualization (and resocialization) of science. First, more from Thomas S. Kuhn's The structure of scientific revolutions (pp. 136-137), on the apparent linearity and cumulative nature of science and the related transmission of scientific knowledge:

Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist's sense of his [sic, here and following] discipline's history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is on that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement solution of the texts' paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. No wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative.

My question: does it have to be this way?

My answer: no. But an elaboration of that answer will have to wait for now. I have a good deal more to say in reflecting on the social constructivist point of view of science, first (or at least first explicitly) elaborated in Kuhn's work, as in the following passage (p. 42):

Though there are obviously rules to which all practitioners of a scientific specialty adhere at a given time, those rules may not by themselves specify all that the practice of those specialists has in common. Normal science is a highly determined activity, but it need not be entirely determined by rules. That is why, at the start of this essay, I introduced shared paradigms rather than shared rules, assumptions, and points of view as the source of coherence for normal research traditions.

The nature of the rules to which specialists adhere is fluid and dynamic, susceptible to the exigencies of the day-to-day applications of those rules. Rules, as applied, evolve, and they evolve in accordance with their usefulness as judged by practitioners of the specialized discipline concerned with those rules. More than anything else reading Kuhn makes me aware of the need to be more intentional about including opportunities for my students to explore, discover, interpret, investigate, and describe the concepts we consider in any given class; they must be made, to the greatest extent possible, to feel like they as much authors of scientific discovery as I am. (Particular attention to the role of youth and neophycy in scientific "advancement" is critical as well.)

2. Invention versus discovery. I've often asked my Calc I students to think about the difference (if there is one) between invention and discovery when they take part in the Newton v. Leibniz project. Kuhn will serve as an excellent source for those students interested in learning more about the distinction between the two notions: pp. 51-53 contain a discussion of this distinction, highlighting invention as the adjustment that goes on in a paradigm's conception of science in the wake of a discovery: one may be the first to objectively observe a physical phenomenon, say, but until the significance of that phenomenon is understood and elaborated, and the discovery's relevance is described, one cannot be said to have invented a thing. In a sense invention is the recognition of the importance and relevance of a discovery via its incorporation into the normal scientific tradition that operates within a given scientific paradigm.

What might students have to say about this?

3. Revision (in writing) as revolution. The parallels between Kuhn's portrayal of scientific revolution (especially as it compares to political revolution) and revision of one's writing as a process are too great to be ignored: revision occurs concomitantly with the recognition of the inadequacy of what one's written to account fully for one's perception of the subject of the writing. That is, revision is undertaken in response to a perceived discrepancy between the author's intent and the author's ideas as communicated expressly on the page. Compare (p. 91): "In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way."

To continue the parallel between these "revolutions" would force us ultimately to recognize what students of writing are often loath to admit (and what teachers of writing already know very well): writing is a social process, as much, if not more so, than is scientific discovery.

I should note that in the following pages in Kuhn's text (pp. 92 ff.) he most clearly articulates the role of social forces in shaping scientific revolutions. When competing paradigms come up against one another, adherents to one or the other must be prepared to argue in favor of their particular paradigm.

4. Portfolios (again). Enough about Kuhn (for now, at least). Let's get to some observations on the International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference, the first two days of which I was able to attend at the end of last week.

In talking with my colleague Nero (currently at the University of Hawai'i, Hilo) I found myself suddenly able to articulate, far more clearly than I've ever been able to before, what exactly a portfolio means of assessment might look like in a mathematics course. One or two communication outcomes would join one or two affective or metacognitive outcomes, and these would join two or three content-centered outcomes as a basis for the course's assessment. (I already generate such outcomes for all of my courses.)

Throughout the semester the students would be given a variety of assignments, successful completion of each of which would demonstrate achievement at one or more of the outcomes on the list described above. These assignments could include more traditional problem sets (though likely not sets of problems pulled from a textbook), written components of projects I already assign (like Newton v. Leibniz, Confectionary Conundrum, etc.), reflection or response papers in which students explore their personal and emotional engagement with mathematics, and so forth.

Students will have a chance to perform unlimited revision on many of these assignments, so that if a student isn't happy with a given iteration of a given assignment, she can revise her work to improve upon it. (As regular readers know, I'm still working on adjusting my revision policies.)

In the last week or so of the semester the students will be asked to select four or five assignments from among those completed during the semester to represent their mastery of as many of the course learning outcomes as possible. They will then write a brief (no more than five or six pages) paper in which they articulate explicitly the role served by each of the assignments they have chosen to include in the portfolio: why include this piece? Mastery of which outcome does it purport to demonstrate?

I'd like to recruit one or more of my colleagues to help me assess completed portfolios the first time around; there ought to be some sort of validation process.

Thoughts?

5. Intentionalize, intentionalize, intentionalize! This coming summer's REU students will receive yet more intentional instruction in writing than any previous year has received. At least two of my College of Charleston colleagues will be coming up to help impart their wisdom on rhetoric and composition. I'll be giving the students more models of professional writing than they've been exposed to in the past. And, most notably, I will obey the exhortation of the four presenters from Virginia Commonwealth University and place more emphasis on the "middle" stage of student research writing.

What do I mean by this? Much like the faculty at VCU (as described by the four presenters mentioned above), I find I've been very intentional about helping my REU students find sources at the outset of their research program, and I've been very intentional about helping them through draft after draft of their week-to-week research reports once those reports have assumed a certain level of coherence. But, like the aforementioned faculty, I've been somewhat remiss in offering the students explicit instruction in the middle stages of the process: how does one evaluate sources? How does one compare them? How does one decide on the relevance of a particular source to one's own researches?

I've decided that I'm going to require the REU students to follow their initial literature searches (which most of them do) with the construction of an annotated bibliography in which they highlight the important contributions of each source, summarize the relevance of each source to their own work, and prioritize the source, ranking it alongside the other sources they've found in terms of its strength of contribution, its clarity, and its relevance to their particular research project.

Will this make more work for the students? You bet it will. But since I'm only going to be asking the students to produce a draft of their report every other (rather than every) week, I feel it's a fair amount of work to ask of them.

It occurred to me this morning, in sitting in on a faculty development workshop focused on our LSIC courses, that the same sort of exercise should be required of students in our MATH 480 course in order that that course warrant its Information Literacy Intensive designation. Just two years ago I suggested that the department begin requiring students in MATH 480 to produce an expository paper; this suggestion met with almost no resistance. I hope this new suggestion will go over equally well.

6. Other thoughts for the REU. What else will I be asking this year's students to do? Nothing excessive, I believe. It seems to me that I should require the following of the program's participants:

History and context. Every draft (not just the last) of every student paper this summer will be required to have a section describing the history and context of the topic the student is investigating. This section, like the rest of the paper, may be rather sparse and tentative at first, but like the rest of the paper it will become more full and flourishing as the summer goes on. I believe it's important, though, that from the very onset of the program the students become accustomed to contextualizing their work and establishing its place in the field.

Visuals. One of the VCU folks mentioned above presented a metaphorical means of constructing an annotated bibliography and literature review, comparing the process of finding, evaluating, prioritizing, and applying sources to planning a conference, at which participants must be placed at various tables, grouped in various sessions, and so forth, according to interests, purposes, and points of view. The most striking aspect of this presentation to me was the insistence on a visual representation: the presenter required her students to come up with a visual means of portraying their evidence. I am going to start requiring each REU student to include at least one visual representation of her or his work in the bi-weekly presentations they'll be delivering. That visual may be the same from week to week, but if the visual remains unchanged I will ask the student to justify her or his reason for retaining the same visual. This, I hope, will encourage students to reflect upon the way in which they are representing their work through nonverbal means; this reflection could lead to further discovery and, of course, refinement of the visual rhetoric the students use in describing their work.

Elevator talks. Even the strongest undergraduate research students have trouble articulating their work clearly and concisely. I'm going to begin asking every student to open her or his presentation with a no-more-than-one-minute "elevator" version of the presentation. What is the main focus or question of your research? What method or methods are you using to try to study that focus or answer that question? How does your work fit in with others' work on the same topic? I hope this additional intentionality will help students develop the ability to communicate their work in the hurly-burly world of conferences and cocktail parties.

7. QEP. As many of my colleagues in the Southeast part of the country know, QEP stands for "Quality Enhancement Plan," and is the means by which the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS, the accreditation agency for an enormous number of institutions of higher learning in the Southeast) asks the colleges and universities it oversees to plan and implement institution-wide changes to enhance student learning.

I'll have a lot more to say about this in the coming weeks, months, and, if all goes well, years, but I'll simply say now that I am more committed than ever before to making writing the focus of UNC Asheville's QEP. I will do all that I can to lobby for this position.

8. Inkshedding. Perhaps the most delightful thing I took away from this past Wednesday's workshop on writing instruction of ESL students (ably facilitated by my colleagues Hannah and Tabitha of UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State University, respectively...thank you both so much for coming out!) is a new form of low-stakes writing to which I'd not before been exposed. "Inkshedding" is much like a collaborative form of freewriting. As they would be in a freewrite, participants (in groups of three or four) are asked to write on a given topic for a set amount of time (three minutes, say) or until they have written all they would like to on the topic at hand. When finished, each participant places his writing in the center of the circle and waits for someone else to do the same. The papers are then exchanged, and each person reads what the other has written and then responds in writing on the first writer's paper. Once done responding, the second person places the paper in the center again and takes another. And so on. In theory, the process could continue endlessly, readers writing in response to others' responses to their own responses, and so forth.

Beyond its obvious pedagogical usefulness, I think this would be a fantastic way to construct collaborative poems, or at least generate ideas and images for rich poems or other pieces of fiction. I'm eager to find a few folks who are willing to try this out. If you're game, let me know!

9. Gender matters. I'm currently reading a book that I picked up (in the simply marvelous bookstore Caveat Emptor) in Bloomington, the site of the IWAC conference last week, Mathematics and gender, edited by Elizabeth Fennema and Gilah C. Leder (1990, New York: Teachers College Press). This collection purports to analyze the different ways in which gender influences math performance, success in math coursework, and affective responses to mathematics and its study. Unsurprisingly, men and women differ with regard to their experience with math, and factors such as confidence, perception of utility, sex-role congruency (the "math is for men" stereotype), fear of success, and attribution of performance to one or another cause (effort, ability, or outside forces such as sheer luck) all strongly, and differently by gender, affect an individual's mathematical understanding and performance.

I've yet to read much in this book that's given me reason to adjust the way in which I teach math, aside, perhaps, from Lindsay A. Tartre's study (Chapter 3, "Spatial skills, gender, and mathematics") suggesting that in women there is a far stronger correlation between spatial skills and mathematical performance. Might I do well to place particular emphasis on visual representations of problems when working one-on-one with a female student? I already attempt to adapt my explanations to whatever mode it is in which I know a given student most clearly understands mathematical ideas.

It's something to think about. I may have more to say about this book as I get into the later chapters, which deal with the role of the teacher and the classroom dynamic in assisting or impeding students' mathematical understanding.

That's enough for now. I realize that this is one of the longest posts I've written in a long time. Believe me, I've tried to keep it short! I hope to be able to elaborate on one or more of the above issues in later posts, especially as I begin to implement some of the proposed changes to my REU and to my regular courses.

To be, as ever, continued!