Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices: Innovating Teaching Across Disciplines

Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices demonstrates that it is possible for groups of faculty members to change teaching and learning in radical ways across their programs, despite the current emphasis on efficiency and accountability. Relating the experiences of faculty from disciplines as diverse as art history, economics, psychology, and philosophy, this book offers a theory- and research-based heuristic for helping faculty transform their courses and programs, as well as practical examples of the heuristic in action.
 
The authors draw on the threshold concepts framework, research in writing studies, and theories of learning, leadership, and change to deftly explore why faculty are often stymied in their efforts to design meaningful curricula for deep learning and how carefully scaffolded professional development for faculty teams can help make such change possible. This book is a powerful demonstration of how faculty members can be empowered when professional development leaders draw on a range of scholarship that is not typically connected.
 
In today’s climate, courses, programs, and institutions are often assessed by and rewarded for proxy metrics that have little to do with learning, with grave consequences for students. The stakes have never been higher, particularly for public higher education. Faculty members need opportunities to work together using their own expertise and to enact meaningful learning opportunities for students. Professional developers have an important role to play in such change efforts.
 
WAC scholars and practitioners, leaders of professional development and centers for teaching excellence, program administrators and curriculum committees from all disciplines, and faculty innovators from many fields will find not only hope but also a blueprint for action in Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices.
 
Contributors: Juan Carlos Albarrán, José Amador, Annie Dell'Aria, Kate de Medeiros, Keith Fennen, Jordan A. Fenton, Carrie E. Hall, Elena Jackson Albarrán, Erik N. Jensen, Vrinda Kalia, Janice Kinghorn, Jennifer Kinney, Sheri Leafgren, Elaine Maimon, Elaine Miller, Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., Jennifer J. Quinn, Barbara J. Rose, Scott Sander, Brian D. Schultz, Ling Shao, L. James Smart, Pepper Stetler
 

Angela Glotfelter is assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and was formerly graduate assistant director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University. Her work on how content creators respond to algorithms has appeared in Computers and Composition.
 
Caitlin Martin is assistant professor of composition at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and was formerly graduate assistant director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University. Her work has appeared in Peitho and Making Space: Writing Instruction, Infrastructures, and Multiliteracies.
 
Mandy Olejnik is the assistant director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University, where she supports faculty and graduate students in their teaching of writing. Her work has appeared in Composition Studies and Transformative Works and Cultures.
 
Ann Updike was the associate director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University from 2013 until her retirement in 2021. There she supported faculty and graduate students as part of the Writing Across the Curriculum program. Her work has appeared in Diverse Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Writing Across the Curriculum.
 
Elizabeth Wardle is the Roger and Joyce Howe Distinguished Professor of Written Communication and director of the RHowe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University. She previously directed writing programs at the University of Dayton and the University of Central Florida. Her scholarship focuses on the teaching and learning of writing in various contexts, from first-year composition to writing in the disciplines. She is coeditor of Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies; (Re)Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy;Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity; and Writing about Writing.