Program Training & Professional Development

Marquette's FYE program offered a number of professional development opportunities for its graduate student and non-tenure track writing faculty, including:

• The Writing Innovation Symposium, an annual event hosted at Marquette University was created and initially sponsored collaboratively by FYE, the Social Innovation Program, and the University Libraries. 
• Summer Curriculum Work Groups for GTAs and NTT teachers, where educators would gather in order to collectively create content and brainstorm workarounds to curricular challenges faced by instructors and/or students (compensated by the Center for Teaching and Learning). 
• A 2-week New Teaching Assistant orientation (required and compensated by the graduate school for graduate teaching assistants; optional but not compensated for NTT teachers during an anomalous semester where there was a large cohort, ~10, due to unanticipated high enrollments). 
• Weekly teaching practicum required of all graduate teaching assistants in FYE and open to anyone in the program. 
• Mentoring for GTAs.
• Opportunities for graduate students to serve as Assistant WPAs. 
• A "Table of Contents," which was a collated and curated collection of readings used in the ENG 1101 course designed to help instructors find readings that were in conversation with each other—as scholarly conversations were a key theme of the course.
• The McCabe Teaching Award for master's and doctoral students who taught in FYE, sponsored by the English Department (within which FYE was located). For consideration, applicants were required to create Wix sites. 
• External funding for professional travel. 
• Programmatically embedded opportunities to collaborate with the library, including embedded library support within FYE and access to faculty consultations as well as class sessions via the Digital Scholarship Lab. 

The inaugural Writing Innovation Symposium was held in January 2018 and was the collaborative brainchild of Jenn Fishman (Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year English), Elizabeth Gibes (Coordinator for the Digital Scholarship Lab), and Kelsey Otero (Associate Director of Social Innovation). 

The Symposium's website articulates its history and purpose thusly: "From the start, this regional event has brought together writing educators from across the country who wish to share concrete, innovative ideas about writing education, including classroom pedagogy, curriculum development, assessment, co- and extra-curricular programming, and related research." 

The symposium provides an annual opportunity for all teachers of writing on Marquette's campus to be able to attend a conference that is highly interactive and that brings together a national body of teachers and scholars in writing studies without having to leave campus. Even with the best kinds of funding opportunities, conference travel can be difficult for myriad reasons (e.g., caretaking responsibilities); thus, bringing the conference to campus, to the writing program, is a brilliant way of engaging a program's instructors in a professional community of thinkers, researchers, teachers, and innovators beyond campus as well as providing them with the opportunity to be able to present on and share their own innovative work. 

Additionally, as the program's archive page shows, during the time that FYE was operating, the Symposium provided an important opportunity for graduate WPAs to engage in service to the field by participating on the Symposium's steering committee. 

In awareness that a common curriculum across multiply positioned and differently experienced instructors is difficult (if not impossible) to implement and sustain, and of the potential of common curricula to stabilize and go static, Jenn Fishman sought opportunities to bring together GTAs and NTT instructors so that they could collectively work on the curriculum every summer. Participation in Summer Curriculum Work Groups was voluntary but compensated with a modest stipend provided by the Center for Teaching and Learning.

The summer groups provided a space for those involved in teaching the FYE curriculum to be able to provide feedback, to be able to review and process student feedback, and to be able to actively collaborate on curricular revisions and innovations. For example, groups were tasked with problem posing, asking questions such as, "So how do we get accessibility into the classroom," and then with problem-solving, including making recommendations for curricular revisions as well as creating student and instructor resources. A more global outcome of the groups was that participants felt their concerns, ideas, expertise, and pedagogy were valued and felt ownership over the FYE curriculum, particularly in the early stages of the curriculum revisions that led to the digital poster and remix assignments. 

In addition to a weekly practicum for graduate teaching assistants, FYE also offered a 2-week teaching assistant orientation (TAO) for all graduate teaching assistants, adjuncts, and visiting assistant professors. While the TAO had some expected components, such as a broad course overview of the schedule and learning outcomes, introduction to the theory informing the curriculum and pedagogical approach, as well as some attention to the Jesuit rhetorical tradition providing the foundation for the common core writing courses, Marquette's TAO was also designed to build a supportive community of teacher-scholars and included more hands-on work, meaning participants received much more than a syllabus and functional/technical training during orientation. 

For example, participants were asked to engage in personal and reflective writing, responding to the questions (1) What experiences/resources do you bring with you?, (2) How do you see yourself as a teacher, student, and writer?, and (3) Who else are you; how else do you account for yourself?

As a more formal aspect of professionalization, participants were asked to to develop resumes, and there were more informal welcome-to-the-program activities planned as well. Additionally, a major component of the orientation was mentoring and micro-teaching. As Jesse Wilkes Haynes put it, "mostly micro teaching and practicing and working through it together." Experienced instructors and graduate students would join the orientation, observing micro-teaching demonstrations from folks encountering the curriculum for the first time and offering affirmative as well as motivatingly critical feedback. As Wilkes Haynes described it, "It wasn't like a, 'You did this wrong, and you did this wrong, and you did this wrong.' It was more like a, 'Hey, I like how you did this.' Or, 'Hey, have you considered what this might mean?'"

Below, find direct links to professional development materials used for this particular institution. Note, you can also find all professional development materials for all institutions in the resource repository by clicking here.