Program Training & Professional Development

The English Composition courses, which are required of all degree-seeking students at SLCC, make up the majority of the course offerings of the English Department (now the Department of English, Linguistics, & Writing Studies). However, there is no person with the job title "Writing Program Administrator." Instead, the work of overseeing these courses is split between an Associate Dean who handles personnel matters such as hiring and representing the department on college committees, and two Department Coordinators who are responsible for supporting the many adjunct faculty who are part of the program, offering professional development opportunities, and overseeing assessment.

Many of the materials used within the composition courses, including very detailed notes and plans for instructors, have been created and shared by the Department Coordinators. Additionally, numerous faculty members create materials that are shared through Canvas and/or made part of Open Educational Resources (OER) for the composition courses' educators and students.

The Department Coordinators provide beginning-of-semester workshops to prepare faculty to teach the courses, and then they also hold workshops throughout the semester on a variety of different topics, such as responding to student writing or threshold concepts. These workshops are largely attended by adjunct faculty, though, who are paid hourly for attending the workshops while full-time faculty are not.

The sections below highlight 3 unique aspects of how SLCC's English Department trained and supported educators to teach digital writing within their composition courses.

The English Department makes course materials (e.g., sample syllabi, assignment sheets, lesson plans, schedules) available to all full time and adjunct faculty teaching composition courses through various means such as Canvas shells for each course and a Google Drive folder. One especially significant resource is the Open English @ SLCC Instructor Guide, which focuses on the two most commonly offered composition courses: ENG 1010 and 2010. The guide begins with the program’s central assumptions about first-year writing, the program outcomes, and an explanation of how they’ve designed their composition courses around threshold concepts that are meant to help students transfer knowledge about writing beyond each individual course. This section also includes a bibliography of scholarship about threshold concepts and knowledge transfer. The guide then provides primary information about ENG 1010 and 2010 (i.e., course description, student learning outcomes, and instructional units and assignments).

In addition to primary details about each course, the guide provides numerous links to materials that will support faculty teaching ENG 1010 and 2010. For instance, there are sample syllabi and schedules, and numerous assignment sheets for each major assignment, as well as examples of student work. For some of the course units, there are sample letters faculty can use or adapt and give to students, and for ENG 2010, there is an infographic that provides a course overview. There are also links to additional OERs that students or faculty might find useful.

To meet their composition requirement, students can choose to take an online version of ENG 1010 and/or 2010, and these online offerings are referred to as “Online Plus” (e.g., English 2010 Online Plus). Beyond just offering students the option to take a FYW class online, the Online Plus Program has been built in such a way to offer part- time and full-time faculty unique professional development opportunities, in part because the course is set up to facilitate collaborative teaching and curriculum development. 

The teaching of ENG 1010 and 2010 Online Plus is collaborative because while there is an instructor of record for each section who emails students and corresponds with them in Canvas and who grades assignments, the students are also required to attend weekly writing-center-style consultations with any of the Online Plus faculty or writing fellows (students who have formerly taken ENG 1010 Online Plus and who applied and were accepted, and then went through training). The weekly consultations are either individual or in small groups, depending on what the specific task is, and depending on what the teacher or the fellow chooses. Not only does this model offer students and faculty flexibility for meeting times, but it also allows Online Plus faculty to observe and discuss what’s happening in colleagues’ classes.

Another unique aspect of Online Plus is that the part-time and full-time faculty who teach the courses share the responsibility of developing the curriculum. Both ENG 1010 and 2010 Online Plus have an Instructional Team, composed of both full-time and part-time faculty, that meets on a weekly basis. As one of the developers of ENG 2010 Online Plus, Lisa Bickmore, explained to us, even though the full-time faculty were responsible for the initial design of the course, part-time faculty become co-creators because the Instructional Team meets weekly to talk about what’s happening in the course, and they keep notes all semester long about what should be changed in the future. Bickmore notes that because of this, the Online Plus program gets the benefit of part-time faculty members’ expertise, wisdom, and experience.

One place mentioned by nearly every single person we talked with at SLCC was the Publication Center, which is a space where one can, as the center’s website conveys, “make digital publications, like video essays, multimodal compositions, comics; print publications, like broadsides and pamphlets; bind books–with various bindings; make handbuilt book forms; and more.” Within the center, students and faculty have access to “a perfect binder, document trimmer, coil binder, saddle-stitch binder, various printers, and an etching press, as well as a suite of iMacs with Adobe and other design software.” The Publication Center is located at SLCC's Redwood Campus and, conveniently for the English educators and students on that campus, in the same building as the English Department. 

Several faculty mentioned that they take students into the Publication Center to support their work on a digital assignment. The support the center offers in-person ranges from workshops about how to use a particular digital program to the materials and guidance to produce digital projects (e.g., to print and bind a book, to print a comic strip or infographic). Additionally, the Publication Center offers numerous digital resources that ENG 1010 and 2010 faculty and students can use to support their work creating books, audio, video, infographics, broadsides, posters, websites, and other digital texts. These resources range from a screencast a faculty member created that explains how composing with audio is a rhetorical act, to templates for zines, to external tutorials for using specific programs such as iMovie or Canva, to the Web Writing Style Guide and information about accessibility standards.

Lastly, and not insignificantly, in addition to the materials in the center and the workshops and digital resources, the Publication Center offers a hub of energy and creativity that excites the educators we spoke with.

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.