Anne Gere - Developing Writers in Higher Education: A Longitudinal Study

Page ii

Edited by Anne Ruggles Gere

University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor

Page iv Copyright 2019 by Anne Ruggles Gere

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Published in the United States of America by the

University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-472-13124-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-472-03738-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-472-12481-7 (e-book)

https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10079890

This project was made possible in part through the University of Michigans Humanities Collaboratory and its Book Unbound project grant.

Cover art iStock/from 2015

Page v For John W. Sweetland

Anne Ruggles Gere

Emily Wilson and Justine Post

Benjamin Keating

Lizzie Hutton and Gail Gibson

Ryan McCarty

Laura L. Aull

Zak Lancaster

Anna V. Knutson

Naomi Silver

Sarah Swofford

Anne Ruggles Gere

Anne Ruggles Gere

Digital resources for this book are available on our Fulcrum platform at https://www.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10079890

When I became director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing in 2008, I knew I wanted to undertake a longitudinal study of student writers, but I had no idea that it would take nearly a decade, call upon multiple resources, and involve dozens of collaborators. Grants from the University of Michigans Center for Research on Learning and Teaching and Instructional Support Services supported the earliest stages of this study. Thanks to resources from the Deans Scholarship provided by the School of Education, funds from the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, and, especially, the endowment of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing, a succession of graduate student research assistants helped to move this project from concept to reality.

Tim Green and Laura Aull helped to launch the essay-based Directed Self-Placement that provided a common baseline for all students. Anne Porter led an investigation of writerly efficacy; Christie Toth drew on resources from the Institute for Social Research to draft and refine our survey; Sarah Swofford and Lizzie Hutton developed the coding system for interviews; Ben Keating found and used the aptly named Site Sucker app to preserve the contents of students electronic portfolios; Anna Knutson wrangled coded interviews into searchable form; Ryan McCarty dove deep into students electronic portfolios and archived writing to create cases for analysis; Emily Wilson organized and tabulated data for our digital resources; and Naitnaphit Limlamai coordinated our final push into publication.

A number of other graduate students augmented this small platoon of contributors. Michael Brown, Elizabeth Mann, and Alon Yakter made statistical sense of our survey data. Sheerah Cole, Merideth Garcia, Gail Gibson, Jonathon Harris, Michelle Kwok, Chris Parsons, Molly Parsons, Melody Pugh, Emily Rainey, Aubrey Schiavone, Nicole Wilson, and Crystal VanKooten conducted interviews. Ann Burke, Merideth Garcia, Gail Gibson, James Hammond, Jonathon Harris, Stephanie Moody, Amanda Presswood, Lavelle Ridley, Aubrey Schiavone, Bonnie Tucker, Nicole Wilson, and Crystal VanKooten helped code transcripts of interviews. Page xii Jathan Day, Michael Hoffman, Adrienne Raw, and Ruth Li assisted with the development of digital materials.

Throughout the coming and going of graduate students my most constant and valued collaborator was Naomi Silver, Associate Director of Sweetland. Thinking with her about virtually every aspect of this project, benefiting from her scrupulous attention to my prose, and learning from her deep knowledge of multimedia writing made this study both more effective and more fun. Naomis leadership in developing the curriculum for Sweetlands Minor in Writing, her innovative approaches to teaching multimedia writing, and her enormous contributions to Sweetlands Digital Rhetoric Collaborative created the context that made this study possible. As I step away from directing Sweetland, one of the things Ill miss most is working daily with Naomi.

A grant from the University of Michigans Humanities Collaboratory for the Book Unbound project gave digital life to this study. Originally this was to have been solely a print book project, but joining forces with colleagues Charles Watkinson, Director of the University of Michigan Press; Nicola Terrenato, a professor of classical archaeology; and Matthew Solomon, a professor of screen arts and cultures, led to a successful proposal that united our study of writing with one focused on the excavation of Gabii, a city that neighbored and rivaled Rome in the first millennium BC, and another on Orson Welles planned but unmade film version of Heart of Darkness. Sharing ideas across disciplines as each of our projects prepared to mount scholarship and data on the Fulcrum platform emboldened many ideas, which took actual form thanks to the interventions of Kentaro Toyama, a professor in the school of information; Jeremy Morse and his colleagues in the publishing technologies group; Kevin Rennells, production editor; and Mary Francis, editorial director the Michigan publishing. These colleagues, along with very helpful anonymous reviewers and my stalwart writing group colleaguesAnne Curzan, Mary Schleppegrell, and Meg Sweeneyhelped move this project to new levels of complexity and accessibility.

Of course none of this would have been possible without the generous cooperation of the students who participated in this study. Their willingness to complete lengthy surveys, participate in interviews, and regularly share their writing with us provided the materials on which this study is based. They opened windows into their learning and taught us a great deal about what writing development can mean. I cannot thank them all by name here, but their contributions are visible on every page of this book.

The authors of the chapters included in this collection shared my goal of making every contribution closely linked to all the others so that readers could experience Page xiii it in more holistic terms. This meant close readings and discussions of one anothers drafts, not just once, but multiple times. Across two summers and much of an academic year we met regularly, sometimes virtually and sometimes face to face, but always to share perceptions and make suggestions on one anothers writing. I am deeply grateful to Emily, Justine, Ben, Lizzie, Gail, Ryan, Laura, Zak, Anna, Naomi, and Sarah for the many hours they invested in building bridges across chapters.