January 30, 2020
Last semester (Fall 2019), I was given the opportunity to continue working with Dr. Spearman (Sport Management) as well as to work with Dr. Yang (Pharmacy). In both collaborations, I encouraged students to reach out to me for guidance on the writing assignments that I developed with the professors. Fortunately, through this new accessibility, I have been able to encourage students to see that their experiences outside the classroom are valuable inside the classroom as I supported them throughout their writing process. It has been refreshing to not only remind faculty collaborators that students’ diverse communities matter, but to also be able to share this principle with the students who are directly affected by the pedagogical choices we make.
In my previous blog post about my experience collaborating with Dr. Spearman in his Managerial Aspects of Sport Management course, I expressed how I had the opportunity to use my position as a student to encourage my partner to consider the importance of student-centered assignments when developing his syllabus. This semester I have been able to give this same encouragement to students as I visited the classroom twice and exchanged emails with many students. In reaching out to me, students were able to receive some clarity on the writing assignments and given the chance to submit multiple drafts as I gave them feedback. This was important to me because I know--through personal experience and from the complaints of my peers--that students are sometimes uncomfortable asking their professors for help. Even when professors make themselves available, students still feel anxious about attending office hours and asking for help. Sometimes this is due to a fear of sharing their work and other times it’s from a fear of looking incapable of figuring it out on their own. This often results in students reaching out to a friend in class or managing their way through the assignment individually. My role as a student collaborator allowed them to reach out to a fellow student--which is often less intimidating.
For my collaboration with Dr. Yang, we worked together to implement an extra-credit writing assignment in her Anatomy and Physiology 2 course, which is primarily exam-centered. Students studying pharmacy take exams more often than they work on writing so the goal for this assignment was to them read up-to-date research and then translate that knowledge into a conversation with a patient. The assignment was not meant to be a research paper, but a practical application of the information they learned after completing the literature review. Why is this important? Well for one, as practicing pharmacists students will need to be able to effectively communicate with patients. And, in a meeting with Dr. Yang, she explained to me that when writing grant proposals she has to be able to explain her research to an audience that is not always familiar with her field. Therefore, this assignment was meant to encourage writing in the STEM field, introduce students to a professional community, and engage with a writing style unfamiliar to their academic community. Much like my collaboration with Dr. Spearman, I was accessible to students who wanted assistance with completing the assignment and clarification on the prompt. This did not only happen via email, but two students even came to the space Writing Across Communities shares with the University Writing Center to receive in-person help. After talking with me, these same two students proceeded to help one another and work together to improve their assignments. In this partnership, I have experienced collaboration between UWC and faculty, UWC and student, and student and student.
From my collaboration with Dr. Spearman, I am left considering how academic and professional communities can be bridged through the development of applicable writing assignments. Students expressed that these assignments taught them more about the sport management field than any exam has/could. Dr. Spearman and I will be continuing our research collaboration throughout the Spring 2020 semester in preparation for Student Research Month. At the end of my collaboration with Dr. Yang, I am left thinking about the student-to-student interaction that can result from presenting writing as a collaborative process. My goal as a UWC is to disseminate and disrupt--to inspire students to take on the principles WAC stands on and embody them in their various communities, and that can be made possible in student collaboration.
Cheyenne Ross, SJU '20