Getting Started with WI
Whether this is your first time teaching a course designed as “writing intensive” (WI) or you’re just looking for some new ideas for how to approach your course, we hope that you find a lot of useful ideas in this set of resources we’ve curated. As we note on our “New to WI” page, “intensive” is a bit of misnomer: as a teacher, you are not expected to overwhelm students with overly-long writing assignments necessarily. Intensity in this context is about focus and intention.
Writing intensive courses are spaces where students should get practice writing as a way of communicating effectively in the discipline or major the course represents. For some disciplines, that will be multiple shorter essays that engage with primary resources as data — this is often the approach that faculty in journalism take, as well as lab courses in the natural sciences where students report on their own experiments. For other disciplines, this might mean synthesizing significant secondary research into longer researched papers or reports. In yet other disciplines, where students need to communicate with public (non-academic) audiences, students might be asked to translate secondary research into public-facing documents, brochures, pamplets, and social media posts.
The genres that the students write is not the point of Writing Intensive: the processes that students go through to get there is what matters. Those processes and the knowledge that students develop about their writing practices are all represented in the five University Writing Outcomes that ECU faculty developed for the program. In teaching a WI course, you are committing to supporting students’ writing development, to creating space in your course for them to draft and revise based on feedback from others (e.g., peers, teachers, the writing center), and to reflect on/analyze how their own writing develops.
In creating this set of resources, we asked ourselves, “What do faculty need to know to be effective when teaching a WI course?” These materials will walk you through key ideas about teaching writing as you think through your course design, imagine what students will do with/in their writing, and consider your role in responding to/evaluating their writing.
If you have questions about any of these resources or you would like support for something not covered here, please reach out to the Univeristy Writing Program staff.