Writing Steam: Composition, Stem, and a New Humanities

This edited collection positions writing at the center of interdisciplinary higher education, and explores how writing instruction, writing scholarship, and writing program administration bring STEM and the humanities together in meaningful, creative, and beneficial ways.

Writing professionals are at the forefront of a cross-pollination between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and the arts and humanities. In their work as educators, scholars, and administrators, they collaborate with colleagues in engineering, scientific, technical, and health disciplines, offer new degree programs that allow students to bring the humanities to bear on design experiments, and build an academic culture that promotes a vision of the humanities in the twenty-first century, as well as a vision of technology that is decidedly human. This collection surveys and promotes that work through chapters focused on writing instruction, writing scholarship, and writing program administration, covering topics that include data-driven writing courses, public science communication, non-traditional college students, creative writing, gamification, skills transfer, and Writing Across the Curriculum programs.

Writing STEAM will be essential reading for scholars, instructors, and administrators in writing studies, rhetoric and composition, STEM, and a variety of interdisciplinary programs; it will aid in teacher training for both humanities and STEM courses focused on writing and communication.

Vivian Kao is assistant professor of composition and coordinator of the first-year writing program at Lawrence Technological University. Her research interests include the teaching and learning of humanities and composition at STEM universities, literature/film adaptation, postcolonial studies, and the Victorian novel. Her monograph, Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel, was published in 2020, and her work has appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Composition Forum, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research, and various literature journals.

Julia E. Kiernan is an assistant professor of communications at Lawrence Technological University. Her research and teaching are intimately linked, and regularly examine the shifting impacts of pedagogical and curricular design in the digital humanities, translingual and transnational writing, environmental sciences, and medical humanities. Julia’s favored research methodology is active research, which focuses on the impacts of listening, reflection, and feedback throughout learning processes. Her work has appeared in a number of peer-reviewed edited collections as well as the journals Composition Forum, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Communication and Language at Work, Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies, and Composition Studies.