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HCWE Announces 2023 Howe Award Recipients

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Each spring semester, the Howe Center for Writing Excellence presents the Roger and Joyce Howe Award for Excellence in Disciplinary Writing Instruction. This award recognizes individual faculty members and teams of faculty who have made significant and continuous efforts toward innovation in writing instruction within their disciplines. These individuals are known for providing opportunities to develop and support writing and writing instruction in their coursework and program development across time.

This year’s recipients are as follows:

Individual Award

Elizabeth Hoover, Teaching Professor, Music

Nominated by: Mandy Olejnik

Dr. Elizabeth Hoover richly deserves this award for her innovations and consistent efforts to support the teaching and learning of writing not only in her own undergraduate and graduate courses but across the courses in her department and in the wider university through her work in the Office of Liberal Education. She began her efforts to innovate with writing as a Howe Faculty Writing Fellow in Spring 2019 and continued her work through a year-long Howe Faculty Learning Community focused on innovating graduate support structures for writing. She has innovated, assessed and revised her department’s 2-course Advanced Writing sequence, resulting in a portfolio, one of AAC&U’s “high-impact practices.” She also conducted extensive research with the alumni of her department’s MA program in order to entirely revise it. Through the Office of Liberal Education, she invented and implemented the Miami Plan Innovation Lab, helping cross-disciplinary teams completely reimagine what is possible in high-impact courses. The awards committee noted that she apparently works “tirelessly” across disciplinary and divisional lines to promote the role of writing throughout the University.

Elizabeth Hoover, on right, with Elizabeth Wardle (center) and Mandy Olejnik (left) from the HCWE.
Elizabeth Hoover, on right, with Elizabeth Wardle (center) and Mandy Olejnik (left) from the HCWE.

 

“Elizabeth Hoover’s efforts have led to innovations in writing instruction not only in her own courses and programs but also across Miami. In the Howe Center, we often see and celebrate Howe Faculty Writing Fellows innovating writing instruction in their courses, but it’s especially worth celebrating when they move beyond their own individual courses to think more systematically about their programs in the ways that Hoover has done. It has been my immense pleasure to work with her for a number of years and be able to see the impact of her curricular revisions around learning and writing. Her efforts have innovated writing instruction not only in her own courses but across music and the wider university.” --Mandy Olejnik, Assistant Director, Howe Writing Across the Curriculum

Team Award

Department of TCE and Educational Psychology

Nazan Bautista, Condit Professor

Jane Lance, Assistant Clinical Professor

Jennifer Mysona, Senior Lecturer

Meghan Phadke, Assistant Professor

Nominated by: Rena Perez

Bautista, Lance, Mysona, and Phadke build on the work undertaken by previous cohorts of TCE faculty members who, over the course several years, have worked to entirely redesign their departmental goals, mission statement, curricula, and assignments. This team sought to re-imagine the key assessment their department utilizes. They determined that their department’s previous key assessment did not embody their shared values or effectively measure their student’s enactment of threshold concepts across time. Together, this team researched the AAC&U high-impact practice of cumulative eportfolios that TCE students could create and revise across time. They piloted an eportfolios for the undergraduate Primary Education (Grades PK-5) Program. This entailed designing reflective assignments to help students draw connections between their courses, building training for students at various points in the semester, designing a rubric, and doing collaborative assessments of student work. They generously shared what they learned with other teams engaged in eportfolio piloting this spring. Their work not only enacts best practices for assessing learning and writing, but also provides an important model for other departments and programs at Miami. 

The winners of the 2023 Team Howe Award and HCWE staff, from left to right: Elizabeth Wardle, Meghan Phadke, Jane Lance, Jennifer Mysona, and Nazan Bautista.
The winners of the 2023 Team Howe Award and HCWE director, Elizabeth Wardle, from left to right: Elizabeth Wardle, Meghan Phadke, Jane Lance, Jennifer Mysona, and Nazan Bautista.

 

“Their efforts and success with ePortfolios continue to inspire other faculty at Miami, exemplifying the meaningful work for student learning that can be accomplished through ePortfolios as assessment tools as well as through writing-related faculty learning communities.” --Rena Perez, Howe Graduate Assistant Director, Writing Across the Curriculum

Individuals who receive this award earn $1,000 in professional development funds, while teams of three or more faculty members receive $3,000 in professional development funds to split between them.

Congratulations to this year’s recipients, and we look forward to seeing their further contributions to innovating writing and writing instruction within their disciplines!