Projection of Budgetary Requirements

for Establishing GWAR Courses in the Disciplines

Committee on Written English Proficiency

April, 2008

Class Size

GWAR courses should be limited to 20 students. In a recently completed review, former Dean of Undergraduate Studies Bob Cherny estimates that, given courses already being offered in various departments at or near the 20-student limit, we should be able to accommodate 47% of our students with minimal additional resources. The other 53% of junior-level students (2950 students, who will need approximately 148 sections at 20/section over a full year), will require more than minimal additional resources. But we have the resources currently being devoted to ENG 414: 110 sections over the course of this academic year (including summer). This leaves 38 new sections (under 20 per semester) to be funded in other ways. Furthermore, we anticipate that, in many departments, the GWAR course will not be a new course but will instead be an existing course that will be modified to meet the GWAR criteria. Those courses are currently staffed, albeit with larger enrollments than the maximum for a GWAR course. Thus, some, perhaps all, of the remaining 38 sections may be staffed from the FTEF currently assigned to those courses. Depending on a department-by-department analysis that will be possible only when departments make decisions about which course will meet the GWAR requirement, it may be possible that no additional resources are required or even that there may be a small net saving of resources.

Students Who Need Additional Help

Inevitably, some students will need more help than can be offered in a disciplinary WID course. We envision that faculty, who have been trained through workshops as part of the WID process, will 1) identify such students at the beginning of the semester through a diagnostic piece of writing; 2) inform students that they need more help than the WID instructor can offer; and 3) direct the student to sign up for an additional elective course, to seek support at the LAC or other tutoring facility, or to make contact with the CMS program to find an appropriate non-native speaker course. Given that this will happen at the very beginning of a semester, we will need to be able to keep a small number of CMS sections open for as long as two weeks; only experience will tell us how many sections we will need each semester.

To make a very rough estimate, at every JEPET reading, somewhere between 6-8% of the essays are forwarded to a trained ESL reader, and ultimately a number of the students who wrote those essays are contacted to ask them to make an appointment with a coordinator about placement into the CMS program – this winds up to be somewhere between 2-4% of the students taking a given JEPET (e.g. 27 of the 761 students who took the January 08 JEPET). One or two additional sections of CMS courses might be needed each semester to accommodate these students with severe ESL problems, but those students are already being accommodated at this point through the JEPET process, so no additional resources will be needed in that area.

Beyond this, we will also have a number of native speakers who need a course in addition to the WID course; this would be an elective composition course (perhaps similar to ENG 414) to which students would be referred by their WID course instructor. We imagine there might be several sections of such a course each semester.

We intend to disseminate outreach information about the new WID program to both individual transfer students and counselors at our community college feeder schools so that students will be informed of the requirements ahead of time and those with special needs will have the opportunity, should they choose to do so, to contact the CMS program or sign up for an elective course before enrolling in their WID course; they may also choose to do so concurrently.

Faculty Development

Resources will be needed for workshops in January and in summer for which faculty members are paid for their time. These would be, perhaps, week-long workshops addressing WAC/WID – assignment development, how to address writing issues in the course, and so on.

Faculty members have also said they need assistance - perhaps assigned time - for course development. They also talked about faculty learning circles, and other kinds of support, which could occur during the semester. As above, many departments will not need release time for course development, since they have a pre-existing course that will either work as-is or with minimal retooling.

Successful WID programs across the country make use of faculty associates, similar to those currently funded by the CTFD, and we will develop such a group of experts. Such associates, ideally from departments across campus, would be able to develop their understanding of writing-in-the-disciplines, to model effective teaching for other faculty, and to be primary ambassadors for WAC/WID in its early stages. In recruiting these associates, we will consider the resources we have in terms of those across campus who are already teaching writing courses of various kinds.

Tutors/Tutoring

Over a third of the sixty faculty who responded to a writing prompt at the January 2008 Writing Colloquium said that tutoring is “crucial” and that tutorial services must be a “major partner” in developing GWAR courses. The Writing Task Force Report, Fall 2005, also recognized the role that tutoring would necessarily play in SF State’s WAC Program: “Highly-visible, well-staffed support services for writing are critical…[but] are not intended to be a substitute for the substantive writing instruction and tasks that need to take place in the discipline-based courses that fulfill university requirements.”

In order to accommodate the expected demand for academic writing support for both students and teachers, the writing Task Force also noted that current services at the Learning Assistance Center (LAC), the Community Access and Retention Center (CARP), the English Tutoring Center (ETC), and potentially other departmental tutoring offerings would need to be expanded. Currently, the LAC, for example, with a staff of 42 student tutors of which 27 are reading/writing tutors, with 12 new tutors this semester, registers nearly 1,200 students and holds over 2,250 tutoring sessions each semester in reading and writing for courses across disciplines. SF State’s WAC Program will require resources to hire and provide training for a significant number of additional tutors beyond those currently on staff at the LAC, CARP, and the ETC.

In order to ensure a WAC tutoring program that is stable and effective, tutors need to be appropriately recruited, hired, and educated in best practices of tutoring, effective communication strategies, and working with SF State’s diverse population of students and learners. Currently, the LAC offers a two-unit course, AU 697, “Tutoring Across Disciplines,” for all new tutors at the center. This course could be one central vehicle for ongoing education for tutors based in departments and/or attached to GWAR courses. Most vital to this effort are resources for faculty time: to teach the seminars and to provide supervision, follow-up, and ongoing training. An increase in faculty time is especially important considering that currently the director is the only full time person and that faculty appointments have not kept pace with the increases in student use of services.

In the future, AU 697 could potentially be expanded into a three-unit course bearing elective credit and would thus be attractive to grad students in English or in teacher-preparation programs such as TESOL. This being said, it seems advantageous for the class to remain open to a mix of graduate and undergraduate students who could be recruited from GWAR and other courses in the disciplines. Although the goal would be to try to pair tutors who have specific content knowledge in their discipline with appropriate GWAR courses, situations arise when tutors from other disciplines can be effective when properly trained. The LAC is currently involved in pilot projects with HED 431 and BIO 716 instructors and course material and is developing approaches and models for providing support for tutors who work with pairs and groups of students in varied disciplinary contexts.

An anticipated additional resource issue will be space. As current tutoring programs expand and become involved in a broader WAC effort, additional space will also be needed to house and support the tutor education program and to build a campus community of tutors around a central space.

Mary Soliday has suggested that professors in writing classes in the disciplines often welcome student-led workshops that model writing pedagogy and that cover such topics as annotating readings. CARP has developed a series of such workshops, including a focus on timed writing practice as well as on research writing skills, such as using and citing sources. These workshops could be adapted and developed specifically for the GWAR and/or other WID classes.

A Continuation of JEPET/414 (on a smaller scale until the GWAR is completely implemented)

Until new GWAR courses are fully implemented, we will have a transitional period in which we will still have to offer JEPET and ENG 414 on a limited basis. This should not have any resource implications, however, because 1) JEPET is self-supporting, and 2) the 414’s will be offered because courses are not yet available (and therefore not being paid for) in a particular major. And since the majority of students will pass JEPET, fewer 414’s will be required than would the GWAR course(s).

Resource Center

Ideally, the WAC/WID program will have a resource center, containing articles, books, collected assignments, and so on. This could be either an actual place (affiliated with CTFD, perhaps?) with printed materials or an online resource center. In either case, we will need faculty and staff time to assemble and maintain the resources, and a budget for books, journals, and other materials.

Library Resources

In many cases, the WAC/WID courses will offer a natural integration of research skills and information competence with writing. For those WAC/WID courses that integrate information competence, students would be able to fulfill the Basic Information Competence Requirement through their WAC/WID course work instead of as a separate stand-along requirement. Library faculty would be involved in providing instructional sessions for WAC/WID courses, offering faculty development workshops on information

competence, and working one-on-one with faculty in developing assignments that apply information competence skills. The library currently offers these services; focusing library faculty efforts on WAC/WID courses that systematically reach all upper division students may or may not result in an increased workload. However, if work with the WAC/WID courses results in a net addition to existing library faculty services to other upper division and graduate courses, the Library would need additional resources

for librarian lecturer time, either to provide library services to the WAC/WID program directly, or to contribute in other library programs, allowing more time for tenure-track and tenured library faculty to work with the WAC/WID program. Development of information competence tutorial modules that could be embedded in WAC/WID iLearn environments will require additional work by web and graphic design staff.

WAC in GE Courses

In the ideal WAC/WID program, writing is infused throughout the curriculum at all levels, not concentrated in writing-in-the-disciplines courses in the majors. Some SF State faculty in the disciplines have expressed concern about whether students will be prepared for a GWAR course at the junior level, especially given the general underpreparation of SF State students and the uncertainty of the preparation of transfers. The preparation of our students will be greatly enhanced if they are asked to write both informally and formally in a wide range of courses in the lower division, not just in their two or three composition courses. We would like to prepare faculty across campus, especially those who teach general education and lower division courses in the majors, to use writing to enhance learning in their courses, to hold students to the same expectations that they are held to in composition courses, and so on. This will require another kind of faculty development, assistance in creating assignments, and so on. These workshops would be ongoing throughout the year, and could conceivably be a part of the orientation of new faculty to the expectations of our university.