Success in the Course Inclusion Process: Guidelines from the General Education Writing-Intensive Committee

Course Submission Process

1. The WI committee is offering a pre-vetting service. Faculty may submit their courses for comments before they are ready for the official vetting process. Pre-vetting should take place before the course leaves your department, but after it has gone through at least a program curriculum committee. Courses for pre-vetting may be sent, electronically, to hestrem@emich.edu . Generally, we try to have feedback back to faculty within 7-10 days. Faculty can then decide whether to revise and resubmit for prevetting, or whether to proceed with the official vetting process. As a committee, we’re particularly interested in serving as interested, outside readers and helping all of us articulate the writing processes and products of our discipline to each other and to our students. Our feedback is offered in that spirit.
2. When courses are ready for vetting, please obtain the department head’s signature and the dean’s signature, and then forward the course to Bill Miller. We prefer this to be electronic, but some people are having trouble with the signatures. If you are sending a paper copy for vetting, please send an electronic copy to Bill Miller in addition to the paper copy. He will pass the electronic copy on to the Vetting Subcommittee.

There are three categories of courses that may be vetted:

a. Existing courses configured to meet the Writing-Intensive outcomes should be submitted to the office of Bill Miller who will forward them to the Writing-Intensive Subcommittee.

b. Existing courses with changes sufficient to require putting them through the college input systems (e.g., Title, Description, Prerequisite, or Credit changes) should be submitted to the office of Bill Miller who will put them through the expedited review process and forward them to the Writing-Intensive Subcommittee.

c. New courses must go through the originating college input system before being forwarded to the Writing-Intensive Subcommittee and other colleges (vetting will be carried out simultaneously with review by the other colleges).

Below is important advice to follow when preparing a course for designation as a Writing-Intensive course.

• Know the place of Writing-Intensive courses. The Writing-Intensive portion of the general education curriculum reform is especially exciting as it extends a kind of experience for all upper-level students at EMU, but one that is grounded within their respective disciplines. It will be helpful to review the brief explanations of the Writing-Intensive portion of the curriculum in the overview.

• Develop a persuasive explanation for why your course merits the Writing-Intensive designation.
While we are all experienced faculty who are interested in and engaged with writing instruction within our disciplines, we are clearly outsiders to your particular area. The WI outcomes are general enough to be adapted to any discipline; a clear rationale (both for us and for students) helps us envision your course within your particular area. Additionally, it may help students understand the rationale for this particular course within your discipline.

• Explain how you will meet the Writing-Intensive outcomes in your course. For each outcome in the Writing-Intensive category, provide an explanation of how your course meets that outcome. In short, describe what you will do in the course to address each outcome. Your explanations should be detailed enough to allow the Writing-Intensive Subcommittee to understand what your course will provide your students, by way of content and activities, to enable them to meet that particular outcome. We recommend the use of examples to help us to understand your course.

• Determine how you will evaluate student mastery of the General Education outcomes. In #7, part B of the inclusion form, you should indicate the methods of evaluation that you will use in the course by describing what students will actually be doing in your courses: “students will…(e.g., write, perform, take an exam, analyze, review, etc.).” The purpose of the assessments should also be explained in terms of the Writing-Intensive outcomes. Again, we recommend the use of specific examples to help us to understand your methods of evaluation. The discussion of assessment should also explain in general terms the criteria that will be used by the instructor in assessing student proficiency in the outcomes.

• Incorporate the Writing-Intensive rationale into the course syllabus. The syllabus should state that the course is a Writing-Intensive course and succinctly explain why and how it meets the WI outcomes. To do so, the rationale statement given in #6 of the inclusion form should be included in the syllabus. The syllabus must also clearly reflect the outcomes and methods of assessment detailed in #7: the course description, objectives, assignments and content must be consistent with the outcomes and methods in the proposal. The syllabus should also provide clear list of topics to be covered and activities to be assigned. Please note that although all Writing-Intensive outcomes must be incorporated into the syllabus, the course can include outcomes and content in addition to those specifically related to the WI outcomes.