Faculty Development and a Graduate Course for Pre-Service and In-Service Faculty: Finding and Enacting a Professional Identity in Basic Writing

This essay considers the critical need for pre-service and in-service basic writing faculty to define and enact a professional identity, specifically within the context of faculty development and graduate course settings. The essay describes a graduate course in teaching basic writing offered primarily online with four in-person weekend workshops. As a result, the course has faculty development implications. Key features of the class are professional mentoring through participation in the Council on Basic Writing discussion list, which offers visibility for students as emerging basic writing professionals; creation of Composition Frequently Asked Questions wiki material on basic writing, which serves as a kind of intermediary “publication”; and encouragement to present at conferences and submit manuscripts. The essay also explores the issue of faculty development generally for emerging and current basic writing professionals who are often working as contingent faculty and asks how a professional identity can be developed given these realities

Creating a Statement of Guidelines and Goals for Boise State University’s Basic Writing Course: Content and Development

This essay describes a statement of guidelines and goals developed for Boise State University’s (BSU) basic writing course. The essay includes an account of local conditions at BSU, a copy of the statement itself with commentary on its seven competencies, a description of how the document was developed through a collaborative process, and the effects of that development

Starting Out or Starting Over: A Guide for Writing

Janice\u27s dorm is the two-family house she shares with her husband, parents, and three children. Bill\u27s idea of homework is his full-time carpentry business. And the last time Joe was in a classroom, he was meeting with his daughter\u27s high-school teacher. These are the new students on college campuses: returning adults and younger students who have jobs, families, or both. Starting Out or Starting Over is the first basic writing text created specifically to suit their needs. The text incorporates many features that mature students can relate to: interviews, journal entries, and sample student essays that speak specifically to new students; emphasis on writing complete and personally significant essays right from the start; acknowledgment of special concerns that adults who have not written papers in a while might have, such as writer\u27s block and anxiety; and a unique presentation of grammar guidelines, instead of rules. This book makes starting out or starting over not only less intimidating, but downright inviting.https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/fac_books/1231/thumbnail.jp

Vision and Revision: A Reader for Writers

Vision and Revision is a multicultural, cross-generational reader which addresses the needs of nontraditional students: returning adults and younger students with adult responsibilities. Diverse selections, including essays, excerpts, articles, oral histories, letters, poems, short stories, and student-authored selections are organized thematically around such adult issues as returning to school, relationships and parenting, and work and recreation. Grounded in reader-response literacy theory, this text encourages students to read and respond actively and critically. Pre- and postreading journal entries and suggested writing projects prompt students to write personal, creative responses and analytical expository papers. Vision and Revision can be used as a companion volume to the author\u27s rhetoric Starting Out or Starting Over: A Guide for Writing.https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/fac_books/1217/thumbnail.jp

Creating a Statement of Guidelines and Goals for Boise State University\u27s Basic Writing Course: Content and Development

During the 2000-01 academic year, Karen Uehling and five adjunct colleagues at Boise State University collaborated in composing a Statement of Goals and Guidelines for their institution\u27s basic writing course. In this selection, Uehling documents the process of creating the statement and includes the final product that evolved from this process. The statement features a description of local conditions for teaching basic writing at BSU as well as minimum course requirements, course competencies, and suggestions for teachers. Uehling\u27s selection responds to the question What is basic writing? based on the immediate circumstances of her home institution. At the same time, the Statement of Guidelines and Goals demonstrates the strong confluence of pedagogy, theory, and classroom practice in basic writing as a discipline

A Credited Support Course: Corequisite Writing Course at Boise State University

In 1981, when I began teaching at Boise State University, the institution still filled the community college function, the teaching load was heavy (five or even six courses per term), and preparing students for first year writing was the goal of basic writing. I felt immersion in a full, rich writing and reading experience, not primarily grammar review, was essential. I entered Boise State with experience teaching at a small college in western North Carolina where I first encountered Mina Shaughnessy; I admired how she took basic writing seriously. After four years in North Carolina, in 1980-81, I participated in a year-long National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) seminar titled “Literature and Literacy,” led by W. Ross Winterowd of the University of Southern California. During the seminar we read 1970s writing and reading theory, both conceived of as process, and worked to connect writing with reading. We read thinkers like James Britton, Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow on writing; and Louise Rosenblatt, Frank Smith, and Norman Holland on reading; and others who studied and wrote about full texts, response, revision, and writing and reading as mirror image acts. Thus, when I came to Boise State, I was excited to try these ideas

A University-Community College Collaborative Project to Create Co-Requisite Offerings and Reduce Remediation

This essay describes a year-long, grant-funded, cross-institutional collaborative project between Boise State University and the College of Western Idaho, a community college. The goal of the project was to institute an Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) model for first-year and basic writing, in response to a state mandate to embrace Complete College Idaho, a form of Complete College America. The essay depicts the institutional context of each college and analyzes the challenges and benefits of the new model at each institution. The authors consider the differing roles of full-time and contingent faculty at the two institutions and the challenge of defining reasonable grant work requirements, given the varied teaching, research, and service expectations of instructors. The piece also considers the complex reasons Idaho students may not finish higher education and the extent to which the goals of Complete College Idaho could be met by instituting an accelerated model

Input files and the results of the molecular clock analysis (PhyloBayes & FastDate) of the 5,284 taxa data set

There are three sub-directories: PhyloBayes_input, PhyloBayes_output and FastDate_analysis. The whole analysis started with PhyloBayes. The PhyloBayes input files are the following. fb_align_*.phy: 10 alignments, containing 543 taxa after randomly deleted the ~90% of the tips from the 5284taxa dataset. fb_calib_*.cal: 10 files, containing species pairs which define the constrains on the MRCA. fb_tree_*.tre: 10 phylogenies, containing 543 taxa after randomly deleted the ~90% of the tips from the 5284taxa dataset. PhyloBayes analyses were run using the 10% subsampled dataset, a birth-death prior on divergence times, an uncorrelated gamma multiplier relaxed clock model and a CAT-poisson substitution model with a gamma distribution on the rate across sites. A uniformly distributed prior was applied to fossil calibration times. All analyses were run until convergence, typically 15,000 cycles. Convergence of chains was assessed by visually inspecting the likelihood values of the trees and the tree height parameter. We sampled every tree from the posterior and after discarding the first 7,000 samples as burn-in we summarized the posterior estimates using the readdiv function of PhyloBayes. The results can be found in the PhyloBayes_output directory. The directory FastDate_anaysis contains the input files. calib_final_tree_*_.cal: 10 files, containing species pairs which define the constrains on the MRCA. FastDate was run on the complete trees (5,284 species) with the node ages constrained to the values of the 95% highest posterior densities of the ages inferred by PhyloBayes. tree_original_*.tree2: 10 phylogenies, containing 5284 taxa. These trees came from the 5284taxa ML analysis. FastDate analyses were run with time discretized into 1,000 intervals and the ratio of sampled extant individuals set to 0.14. The output files are the followings. fastdate_kronogram_*.tree: 10 chronograms inferred by FastDate analysis. transform_to_ultrametric_script.R: An R script which transforms trees to ultrametric. Because rounding issues, a negligible length was added to some of the tips to achieve ultrametric trees. fastdate_kronogram_*.tree2: 10 chronograms used in further analysis