Documenting a Culture of Writing at Mason
WAC’s mission focuses on fostering Mason’s culture of writing, but in order to do that, we must first ask: what is Mason’s culture of writing? And how do students and faculty experience this culture?
The WAC program conducts regular research into Mason’s culture of writing to better understand how writing-integrated teaching and learning occurs at Mason through the experiences of faculty and students. Along with our assessment initiatives, these efforts inform our curriculum planning and faculty development initiatives.
Some reports related to these efforts are listed below.
Writing@Mason: Looking Beyond the WI
Beginning in 2019, WAC has been collaborating with cross-campus partners, particularly Mason’s Composition program, to better understand the broader culture of writing at Mason. This project has primarily sought to understand the experiences of Mason’s students with writing. We are currently analyzing interviews conducted with seniors about their writing experiences and the pathways that they have followed toward graduation.
The ReV Project: A Review of Mason’s WI Courses
Since 2015, WAC has been conducting an intensive review of teaching and learning to write with a specific focus on Mason’s writing-intensive courses. The reports below draw on some of the data that we have collected so far and capture some of the experiences and contexts in which faculty and students engage.
- “Will Write … But for Whom: An Analysis of WI Faculty’s Consideration of Audience in Assignment Design and Pedagogy”
- “What Are They Writing? A Study of the Genres Assigned in Writing-Intensive Courses”
- “What Are They Reading? A Study of the Kinds of Reading Assigned in Writing-Intensive Courses”
- “The Prevalence of Low Stakes Writing in Writing Intensive Courses”
- “Technology Access and Use in Writing Intensive Courses”
- “Faculty Perceptions on the Major Constraints in Teaching a Writing-Intensive Course“
- “A Review of Faculty-Librarian Collaborations in Writing Intensive Courses”