MW.1 CONNECT-ing Realities: From Initial Conversations on Common Outcomes for First-Year English to an Annual Composition Conference

Now in its fourth year, the CONNECT Writing Group of Southeastern Massachusetts is a partnership among Bridgewater State College, Bristol Community College, Cape Cod Community College, Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Massasoit Community College, and the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.  Its original goals included clarifying and articulating learning outcomes for college-level writing and the criteria used for evaluation.  In this workshop, designed for full-time faculty, adjunct faculty, department chairs, and Writing Program Administrators, CONNECT members will guide participants through the development of a rubric, facilitate an essay norming session, work on conference planning, and conduct a hands-on web design workshop and discuss their next project.

Speaker 1 will present a summary of the emergence of the CONNECT Writing Group, starting with a single email in the spring of 2004, inviting English faculty from five colleges at three levels of public higher education to join together in an effort to build bridges of communication. Beginning with the first meeting of the group in the summer of 2004, the energy emanating from this convergence has continued to grow, resulting in fundamental agreements concerning desirable outcomes for first-year writing, a series of presentations at regional and national conferences, and the establishment of the annual CONNECT Composition Conference, which began in 2005.

Speaker 2 - We’ve all been there—writing scholars assembled to forge a common text, be it a course description, learning outcomes, you name it. These endeavors are the stuff of legendary dysfunction. Now, try it with a state college, state university, and three community colleges, with the charge of agreeing upon what determines good student writing for all of our first-year writers, and you have what could have been an assured disaster, but has resulted in a national best practice of collaborative writing. This dynamic and multifaceted process for creating standard writing outcomes and a rubric will be replicated as a functional take-away method of demonstrable success for anyone vested in articulating with others what is valued for all students experiencing writing at the college level.

Speaker 3 - It is often difficult enough to get two instructors to agree on students’ essays, let alone a hundred from five different colleges.  In this hands-on segment of the workshop, the speaker will guide participants through the process of both small-group and large-group essay norming.  Using the common outcomes identified in the previous segment of this workshop and sample essays, group members will find ways to collaborate—at the departmental level and institutional level—in order to come to a consensus about what constitutes effective college writing.  

Speaker 4 - In today’s world of “everyone who’s anyone has a website,” this speaker will lead a hands-on workshop as participants gather ideas of audience and content and produce a web page for their own model of an online resource. The speaker will guide participants through Front Page, where they will create their own (very rough) website, see the potential for their own sites and learn how to gather their own material.  Participants will leave with an outline and rough-draft of an online resource guide—perhaps, ready to launch during their own writing conference.

Speaker 5 - This workshop element focuses on leveraging institutional connections through an annual, cross-institutional writing conference.  After a brief description of the mechanisms CONNECT uses in developing its conference, workshop participants will be invited to experience this process in groups by brainstorming the outlines of a conference program.  They will be asked to consider their expected audiences of full-time and part-time faculty, to identify potential fruitful conference themes, and to brainstorm additional synergies they can invoke in their conferences—by extending invitations to faculty and administrators beyond their own institutions, by providing for cross-institutional dialogues, by judicious use of publishers’ support, and by making tie-ins at the conference to other elements of their own programs.