Writing in Biology Retrospective

I first started teaching Writing in Biology in 2002 when several senior faculty retired and the Department was having difficulty finding new instructors to cycle in. In Biology, the course was considered a "short straw" assignment and was taught by a mix of tenure-system and non-tenure-system faculty. I saw potential to have students do projects and write about them and volunteered for the assignment.

Every major at the University is required to offer a junior-year course on Writing in that discipline. The Faculty Senate approved the plan in 1982.

Each department, school or college, in consultation with writing specialists, will determine what kinds of writing competence its majors need.

I don't know if this ever happened in Biology. Two of the retiring faculty gave me their course materials. In consultation with materials from the Writing Program, I developed a version of the class and began teaching it. The course has evolved in small ways since then, but structurally is still largely the same as when I first taught it.

In part, I used the course as a testbed for new technologies: I used wikis early on, then migrated to Drupal with revisions, and most recently have used Google Docs. I even put up an instance of Moodle and used that for one semester, long before the campus adopted Moodle as a learning-management system.

At first, the deliverable for the final project was a manuscript, like the others. But after the chair balked at purchasing a poster printer in response to a new faculty member who wanted one, I made a persuasive pitch that my volunteering to teach the class freed up sufficient funds to justify the purchase so I could use it to have students print posters.

When they shortened the semester by a week, I dropped one of the projects. I used to have students to do a mini "observation project" during the first two weeks of the semester. I really liked the project as it provided a microcosm of what completing one the projects took.

Over the years, I've added a variety of in-class and pre-class activities primarily in response to recognizing specific deficits that students tend to come into the course with: transforming narrative to exposition, writing figure legends, etc.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to write a series off posts to describe the goals of the class and how I try to create an environment for students to achieve those goals.