Workshops
Workshops and Events - Fall 2023
Please check the modality of each workshop, as some are offered solely via Zoom or solely in-person while some are offered in each modality on separate days.
Welcome Back Drop-In Hours
Please drop by the HCWE during the first week of classes to learn about our services. A member of our team will be available to share fall events and offer support for your teaching and writing. We will also be partnering with the HWC to welcome both students and faculty back. Everyone who drops by will get some HCWE swag!
When: Monday, August 28, 9-12 or Tuesday, August 29, 12-3
Where: HCWE, King Library
No RSVP necessary; drop by any time during these hours.
ePortfolios as High-Impact Practice: Overview and Q&A with ePortfolio Pilot Faculty
With Elizabeth Wardle, Will Chesher, and Guest Faculty
ePortfolios are AAUP high-impact practices for student learning, encouraging reflection of student learning across time. Learn more about this ePortfolios and how you might be able to implement them in your own courses and programs. The session will include an overview by HCWE staff and examples from faculty who have implemented ePortfolios in their own courses and programs.
- When: Thursday, September 28 from 1:15—2:35pm (on Zoom) or Friday, September 29 from 1:15—2:35pm (in-person).
- Where: King Library Room 133 (The HCWE) and Zoom.
Unpacking a Writing Assignment: Making Expectations Visible
With Elizabeth Wardle and Rena Perez
In order to complete writing assignments successfully, students need four types of knowledge: subject matter knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, genre knowledge, and process knowledge. This workshop draws on scholar Anne Beaufort’s (2007) work to invite participants to unpack one of their major writing assignments and consider how they can revise the assignment scaffolding to make these various types of knowledge visible and accessible to students. Participants will leave with a revised major assignment and a new lens for assignment design.
- When: Wednesday, October 11 from 10:05—11:25am (in-person).
- Where: King Library Room 133 (The HCWE).
Teaching with AI: Pedagogy, Approaches and Examples
With Mandy Olejnik, Rena Perez, and HCWE AI Working Group Participants
Following last year’s workshops and working groups centered on innovating with AI, this session shares classroom pedagogy, approaches, and examples generated by Miami faculty..
- When: Friday, October 20 from 1:15—2:35pm (on Zoom).
- Where: Zoom.
Working Lunches: Writing to Our Publics
With Will Chesher, Emma Boddy, and Special Guests
In this series of working lunches, we will work collaboratively to learn more about how to share our expertise beyond the walls of the academy. These workshops will focus on public-facing genres like op-eds, writing to elected officials, and using digital platforms like social media. These working lunches are open to undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. Food will be provided.
Part 1: Op-Eds, including genre conventions, purposes, and where to submit.
Part 2: writing to elected officials (local, state, and national representatives), through both letters and hearing testimony.
Part 3: writing on digital platforms to engage in advocacy work.
- When: Dates to be determined
- Part 1: TBD
- Part 2: TBD
- Part 3: TBD
- Where: King 110
Innovative Course Design for SI & DEI Courses: Designing for Learning
Co-sponsored by OLE, HCWE, and CTE
With Mandy Olejnik (HCWE) and Leighton Peterson (OLE)
This special 3-part workshop series invites pairs of faculty to innovate Miami Plan course design, and focuses on the ways writing can be used to both promote and assess learning and how it can be scaffolded throughout a course. Faculty pairs will attend 3 sessions throughout the semester to work on their Miami plan courses and innovative pedagogy. Attending all 3 sessions and completing the requirements will receive $200 in professional development funds.
The workshop will be facilitated in-person in King 133 (HCWE classroom) on the following dates/times:
- Part 1: Wednesday, August 30, 2:50-4:10pm
- Part 2: Wednesday, September 6, 2:50-4:10pm
- Part 3: Wednesday, September 13, 2:50-4:10pm
Supporting Graduate Learning through Writing: A Certificate Program
With Mandy Olejnik and Rena Perez
Are you teaching a graduate course this fall? Are you mentoring graduate student writers on thesis or dissertation projects? We invite you to participate in a special 5-part series dedicated to supporting graduate student writers in your courses, and to helping you reexamine your writing assignments and writing structures in your graduate programs.. Based on our previous series, this 5-week certificate program is designed to support tenure-line and TCPL graduate faculty members who want to include writing for meaningful learning in their graduate courses. “Writing” in this certificate program is broadly understood to include all forms of communication, including not only extended formal prose but all communication including charts, graphs, slides, and presentations. Writing contexts can be primarily course-based and/or longer-form graduate writing like master’s projects or doctoral dissertations.
Completion of this program can be used to document efforts to improve teaching for the purposes of annual evaluation and P&T dossiers. Participants will receive a Certificate of Completion, as well as a $200 professional development stipend for attending all five sessions and completing the activities and required reading (to be provided).
We previously offered this certificate series for all faculty working with students across all levels and are now offering a version especially for graduate faculty.
The series is limited to 15 attendees, so RSVP now!
The workshop will be facilitated in-person in King 133 (HCWE classroom) on the following dates/times:
- Part 1: Wednesday, September 20, 2:50-4:10pm
- Part 2: Wednesday, September 27, 2:50-4:10pm
- Part 3: Wednesday, October 4, 2:50-4:10pm
- Part 4: Wednesday, October 18, 2:50-4:10pm
- Part 5: Wednesday, November 1, 2:50-4:10pm
Participants must attend all 5 events and complete required readings and work between sessions to earn the certificate and $200 in professional development funds.
Explore more development opportunities from our partners, eLearning and the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE).
Past Workshops & Events - J-Term and Spring 2023
Telling Your Story: Crafting the Dossier Narrative as an Underrepresented Faculty Member
with Elizabeth Wardle, Darrel Davis (Educational Psychology), Jay Smart (Psychology), Amber Franklin (Speech Pathology and Audiology), Sherrill Sellers (Family Science and Social Work), Madelyn Detloff (English and GIC), Naaborle Sackeyfio (GIC), Yvette Harris (Psychology)
This interactive workshop and writing session will invite underrepresented faculty to engage in a variety of activities around the narrative of the dossier, and the special challenges that narrative presents for faculty members who are underrepresented in their departments and programs. The workshop will provide a safe space to engage in community with others facing similar challenges, walk through a series of activities to help faculty members externalize and shape a narrative about their work, and receive confidential feedback from others who are not in an evaluative or supervisory role.
Faculty-Led Writing Hours
Led by: Howe Faculty Writing Fellows, Joyce Fernandes (BIO) Jennifer Quinn(PSY), Scott Sander (TCE). Contact Joyce Fernandes with questions.
Want to jumpstart your writing flow alongside faculty during J-term? Faculty- led writing hours is an ideal space to do so! Set aside a day, three days, or drop in for any duration of time. Snacks, coffee, and writing solidarity will be provided. You can participate in-person or via Zoom.
Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI Writing Systems: How Do We Adapt?
With Heidi McKee and James Porter
Professors Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter teach professional writing/communication courses in the Departments of English and Emerging Technology in Business & Design. Their most recent collaborative research focuses on human-machine teaming and the rhetoric and ethics of AI-based writing systems, an inquiry that began with their co-authored 2017 book, Professional Communication and Network Interaction: A Rhetorical and Ethical Approach (Routledge). Their most recent work examines "Team Roles and Rhetorical Intelligence in Human-Machine Writing" published in the Proceedings for the 2022 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference.
This workshop will engage faculty in the exploration of issues and questions that arise with the use of AI writing technologies in teaching and learning. The facilitators will begin the workshop with a presentation that will demonstrate some AI-based writing systems (especially the new ChatGPT) and share some current research about AI writing, including work the facilitators have done on human-AI collaboration. The workshop will then provide an opportunity for participants to test out some of these systems using their own writing prompts and will engage participants in discussion of some key questions, such as: What ethical and pedagogical concerns arise with the use of AI by students? What is an acceptable level of AI assistance (and does the answer depend on the course and/or disciplinary context)? Should we “AI-proof” writing assignments? How should we revise/update our policies on plagiarism and academic integrity to account for these systems? And, finally, how might AI help us and our students in meeting course outcomes?
ChatGPT: An Opportunity to Reflect on What You Most Value in Your Courses
with John Warner (author of the Just Visiting blog on Inside Higher Ed, which has recently hosted a number of columns about AI and writing; also author of Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities and The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing)
ChatGPT is yet another tool to be aware of but not afraid of. It presents you with an opportunity to reflect on your values as a teacher and how your assignments enact those values. In this workshop you will be asked to explore the values you have for your discipline and your course and then consider what you value in your assignments. If you want students to learn to think in your discipline, what are the implications for your writing assignment design? What is the purpose of what you assign? The workshop will remind us that ChatGPT is not writing, it is a pattern-matching, syntax-generating machine. ChatGPT does not understand truth or evaluate for accuracy. If you understand the patterns it enacts and consider what you are asking for in your assignments, you can design assignments that encourage creativity, learning, and communication in the service of becoming an educated person. This workshop will encourage you to keep your focus on teaching and learning, which are Miami values.
Purpose, Transparency, and Assignment Design: Strategies for Teaching with Writing in the Age of AI
with Anna Mills, City College of San Francisco
Given newly accessible language models like ChatGPT that can generate passable text, should we rethink our writing assignments? What can we do to prevent learning loss due to misuse of these tools? Students still need practice forming their own sentences and paragraphs to help them think through the material. This interactive talk will offer strategies to encourage continued organic out-of-class writing. First, we can emphasize the purpose of assigning writing, highlighting the value of writing as a practice that helps us think and learn. Second, we can communicate explicit policies on AI writing assistance. Third, we can establish the expectation that AI-generated text may be identifiable by rapidly evolving software. Fourth, we can modify writing prompts so that text generators can’t complete them well, at least not without effort from a skilled user. Finally, we can begin to incorporate critical AI literacy into our classes, teaching students to recognize the mistakes and shortcomings of AI text in our disciplines. Some will want to use text generators as part of creative pedagogical experiments, but we must keep front and center students’ awareness of and confidence in their own thinking and writing. In this workshop, we will discuss some sample policies, revised writing prompts, and exercises that teach AI literacy.
Two-Part Series: Joining an Academic Conversation as a Graduate Student (Co-Sponsored with the Graduate School)
with Rena Perez and Will Chesher
In this 2-part workshop series, we will discuss how we join academic conversations as graduate students. This includes addressing possible sites of trouble like identifying genre expectations, ethically integrating sources in our writing, and discussing how we critically read as scholars. Please plan to attend both sessions.
Part 1 will review the importance of situating citation as joining an academic conversation and discuss how we continue to learn to read, synthesize, integrate, and cite as academics and writers. Part 2 will include participants bringing a current work in progress to the session. In small groups, we will consider these possible sites of trouble in our work and discuss processes, resources, and tools to address these challenges.
Facilitating Peer Response in Online Courses (Co-sponsored with Miami Online)
with Rena Perez and Will Chesher
In this workshop, participants will first learn about best practices and principles of facilitating peer response in their online synchronous or asynchronous courses. This includes identifying different methods and types of peer response, and even the use of platforms like Eli Review to guide students through the process. Participants will then create a peer response plan to incorporate in their classes.
Unpacking a Writing Assignment: Making Expectations Visible
With Elizabeth Wardle and Rena Perez
In order to complete writing assignments successfully, students need four types of knowledge: subject matter knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, genre knowledge, and process knowledge. This workshop draws on scholar Anne Beaufort’s (2007) work to invite participants to unpack one of their major writing assignments and consider how they can revise the assignment scaffolding to make these various types of knowledge visible and accessible to students. Participants will leave with a revised major assignment and a new lens for assignment design.
AI Tools in Our Classrooms: Creating Syllabus Statements and Academic Integrity Policies Interactive Workshop
With Mandy Olejnik, Rena Perez, and Brenda Quaye
As previous HCWE workshops this semester have demonstrated, AI tools (including ChatGPT and the newly-unveiled GPT-4) are entering our classrooms and our students’ educational experiences. What does that mean for syllabi and policy, especially for statements and policies that limit what support students can receive? How much is too much support from a language generator tool? How could and should students disclose help they received from such tools? What syllabus statements and program policies can help clarify what we mean by “academic integrity,” as well as invite productive discussion and exploration of tools that will now be ubiquitous?
In this interactive workshop, participants will put to use what they have learned about AI/ChatGPT so far this semester in order to draft, share, and modify policy and integrity statements. They will draw from example resources and statements shared during the session to create their own, collaborate with colleagues, and leave with a draft and plan for implementation.
What is Writing For in the Age of AI? An Interactive Working Day for Ohio Teachers
Sponsored by the Roger & Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence, the Ohio College Teaching Consortium, and the Ohio Writing Project.
This interactive working day is open to all teachers across Ohio, both K-12 and postsecondary, at all institution types.
Schedule:
- 8:45 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.: Guest speakers will give short talks on pressing ideas around AI and other related technologies and their implications for teaching.
- 10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.: Participants will work with others in small groups to develop policies, rethink writing assignments, consider how AI can inform their own writing and teaching, and/or engage in future-casting about next developments in AI tools.
- 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.: A panel of teachers and students will share how they are currently using AI across K-16 spaces.
Numerous resources will be shared throughout the day in "sharecase" booths. Participants will leave with ideas and materials that they can incorporate into their teaching immediately, and with connections across institutions for future collaborations.