How it started

The first Institute for Teaching with Writing took place during the 2020-2021 winter break. A series of four virtual two-hour workshops, it brought together fourteen faculty and two graduate students from fields as diverse as nursing, education, philosophy, international relations, and sociology to talk about how to incorporate more writing into their courses. Motivated by a collective love of language and desire to support the development of student writing skills, participants designed and workshopped formal and informal writing assignments, engaged in discussions about multimodal writing assignments, and heard about successful writing assignments from a panel of faculty from History, the College of Business, and Psychology. The Institute included a keynote talk by Brad Hughes, emeritus Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Institute was supported by the Department of Rhetoric, the Obermann Center and the UI Center for Teaching.