Embracing the "Foggy Place" of Theatre History: The Chautauqua/Colloquia Model of Public Scholarship as Performance

In her December 2013 Slate polemic “The End of the College Essay: An Essay,” Rebecca Schuman calls for the end of assigning and grading papers in required courses. Since “the baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma” and “students (and their parents) view college as professional training,” professors should “declare unconditional defeat” and abandon the dated notion that writing essays is a necessary part of a decent undergraduate education.1 As a theatre historian with training in rhetoric and composition, I have incorporated numerous student-centered writing strategies in theatre history, literature, and theory courses, but ultimately I have taken a similar stance when discussing departmental curricula with my colleagues: I question the value of traditional (that is, reader-oriented and paper-based) research/writing assignments within the major

Students, Faculty and Sustainable WPA Work

In lieu of an abstract, here is the chapter\u27s first paragraph: Despite several cycles of reforms spanning the last fifteen years, we three composition colleagues were unable to achieve widespread student engagement in our required one-semester writing course. At California State University, Chico, the WPA oversees faculty development and program assessment for a first-year writing program that serves 2700 students each year with over 100 sections of first-year writing. Several different WPAs experienced fatigue as they undertook challenging and often unproductive work: resisting an outdated California State policy on the aims and goals for General Education, including what constitutes appropriate aims for writing courses; revising notions of student writing that are too tied to the “modes” and views of information literacy that end in exercises rather than in the activity of scholarship; developing and delivering assessments whose findings frequently conflict with budgetary, ideological, or departmental constraints; and promoting the complex underlying assumptions of our work despite widespread and reductive beliefs about the writing capabilities of first year students

Creating a Culture of Assessment to Elevate Students’ Voices

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the University of San Diego’s department of Student Activities and Involvement (SAI) could strengthen its assessment practices and execute consistent data-driven decision making. The following question guided my research: How can I promote a culture of assessment so that SAI’s programs and advising are directly informed by a more thorough data collection process that elevates students’ voices? Building on the work of assessment scholars, this study serves as a model for assessing student affairs assessment. By critically evaluating SAI’s existing assessment culture, administering assessments to understand departmental needs, and offering training in best practices for assessment, I enhanced collaboration between SAI’s student affairs professionals and produced recommendations to promote ongoing improvement. Ultimately, this study led to the creation of new assessment tools, training, and resources to sustain an equity-minded culture of assessment that elevates students’ voices and responds to students’ needs

A System for Automatic English Text Expansion

This work was supported in part by the Mineco, Spain, under Grant TEC2016-76465-C2-2-R, in part by the Xunta de Galicia, Spain, under Grant GRC-2018/53 and Grant ED341D R2016/012, and in part by the University of Vigo Travel Grant to visit the CLAN Research Group, University of Aberdeen, U.K.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A system for automatic English text expansion

We present an automatic text expansion system to generate English sentences, which performs automatic Natural Language Generation (NLG) by combining linguistic rules with statistical approaches. Here, “automatic” means that the system can generate coherent and correct sentences from a minimum set of words. From its inception, the design is modular and adaptable to other languages. This adaptability is one of its greatest advantages. For English, we have created the highly precise aLexiE lexicon with wide coverage, which represents a contribution on its own. We have evaluated the resulting NLG library in an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) proof of concept, both directly (by regenerating corpus sentences) and manually (from annotations) using a popular corpus in the NLG field. We performed a second analysis by comparing the quality of text expansion in English to Spanish, using an ad-hoc Spanish-English parallel corpus. The system might also be applied to other domains such as report and news generation.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad | Ref. TEC2016-76465-C2-2-RXunta de Galicia | Ref. GRC-2018/53Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED341D R2016/012University of Aberdee