Bill Wolff's Composing Spaces

I’m very happy to announce that I have received a rare awarding of an Honorable Mention in Rowan University’s Junior Faculty Innovative Teaching Award competition. This is especially gratifying because judges are Rowan colleagues who have received the award in past years.

Award specifics:

Eligibility
Junior faculty includes those tenure-track faculty members who have not received tenure by July 30, 2010. (Those whose tenure officially begins September 1, 2010 are not eligible.) [This was my last year of eligibility--hopefully!!]

Criteria
The criteria for selection include:

• Innovative teaching methodologies, practices or approaches (content delivery, student involvement, pedagogical approaches, etc.)
• Demonstrated understanding of the impact this teaching has on students. That is, provide evidence of impact the innovative teaching has on students

“Innovative teaching” may involve a particular unit, procedure, course design, use of technology, etc.

Application Process
Applicants are required to submit the application form (see below) and a description of no more than a 1500-word of the innovative teaching practice that:

• Discusses context for the teaching methodology and its implementation
• Explains why this technique is innovative
• Analyzes its impact on students

Supplemental documents (classroom materials, student responses, relevant scholarly literature, etc.) may also be included beyond the 1500-word limit.

My application (which you can read in full [.pdf]) asked the committee to consider my spring 2009, fall 2009, and spring 2010 sections of Writing, Research, & Technology (WRT), a required undergraduate course for Writing Arts majors. These sections challenged students to rethink traditional conceptions and metaphors of writing by asking them to complete innovative, disciplinarily significant, pragmatic, and theoretically-informed work in three topic areas: video composition, remix, and video oral history. One of the real innovative characteristics of the course is how I have incorporated the Flip video camera.

In awarding me Honorable Mention, the committee wrote that they

especially appreciated your awareness of the changes in the writing field and your using the Writing, Research and Technology classroom to highlight these shifts. Clearly, your students understand what the rhetorical demands are for a writer in today’s multimodal work environment because of their exposure to creating videos using Flip [video cameras]. And your students are already experiencing the success of such innovative work by being published and receiving so much interest for their creations on the Internet.

It’s always nice to get such recognition, especially as I begin composing the packet I’ll be submitting in September for tenure and January for promotion.