Andy Rudin was drawn to WAC’s faculty learning community (FLC) on writing-enriched teaching and learning by the opportunities he saw with shortcomings in student project management writing. He was unsure that he could teach students critical writing skills, and while he could foster learning curiosity in the classroom, he couldn’t require students to be intrinsically motivated. In the FLC, Andy learned that he can help students with these foundational writing abilities– which are crucial for IT practitioners.
Andy Rudin has forty years as an IT professional in project management, and now teaches IT 343 (IT Project Management) and IT 492/3 (Capstone Projects in IT Project Management) as an adjunct faculty member in the College of Engineering. The Spring 22 Faculty Learning Community (FLC) escalated his sense that writing is critical to IT professionals’ work: “The discipline is just saturated with the communication – from funding requests to scope statements to post-activity reviews – so it’s not a stretch to say that writing is absolutely core to everything that we do in IT,” he reflects.
“I’m an IT practitioner who happens to write, not a writer who happens to be involved in information technology.”
One of the things he really appreciated about the FLC’s focus on writing-enriched course design is how it situates writing within IT. If you are one of the many instructors who struggle to design a course to cover content and incorporate writing, Andy recommends the FLC:
“This type of development for a faculty person or for a faculty member is mission critical for any writing-intensive course…it centers the Faculty Member on outcomes that result from effective communications…and I think that is a key. “
By beginning with the desired outcomes of the course, Andy and others were able to design a course that helps students progress towards attaining the requisite communication skills. Paired with his increased awareness of promoting effective writing in IT, Andy was able to design a course to meet the WI outcomes.
“Unlike previous teaching engagements I’ve had, [the FLC] takes writing in a pragmatic direction that embeds the skills and the knowledge necessary for effective writing and effective communications throughout the entire course. ”
In the FLC, he gained a sense of how to coach students to write compellingly as IT professionals. With his understanding that writing is central to the discipline, he revised his course to better align outcomes with assignments and feedback:
“now virtually every lecture has components of communication and managing communication, along with figuring out how to express oneself. In particular, classroom discussions analyze what’s effective about a particular communication, what’s ineffective, and how it might be improved. And that analytical rigor is brought into every conversation, every case, every situation, and then it can now be embedded in the writing assignments as well. ”
Andy can continue to revise his course by applying his sense that writing is what IT practitioners do—he can teach students to write professionally as he embeds writing into the course content.