Join us in welcoming Elizabeth Wardle, distinguished professor and director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at the Miami University of Ohio, for a brown-bag talk at noon and then formal talk at 4 pm on Thursday, Nov. 9.
Deep Change Around Writing and Learning: Reclaiming Our Public Mission
Higher education is at a tipping point, as we face continuing decreases in funding, ballooning student debt, negative public perception about the value of a college education, and attacks on academic freedom. A strong rhetorical education is particularly important for a thriving democracy, yet the attacks on higher education put such an education at risk. The need for the field of Rhetoric and Writing to engage in outward-facing work has never been greater, yet our professional organizations are doing little if any of this work. This talk will provide a lens for thinking about the current landscape and interrogating our field’s shift over the past decade to doing less external advocacy work, and will ask the audience to consider our collective responsibility to use our field’s knowledge for the public good.
Elizabeth Wardle is the Roger and Joyce Howe Distinguished Professor of Written Communication and Director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University. She was previously the Chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. She studies transfer of writing-related knowledge, effective writing program design, and how to support curricular innovation at a systemic level. Her most recent books are Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices: Innovating Teaching Across Disciplines and Writing Expertise: A Research-Based Approach to Writing and Learning Across Disciplines. Her first-year writing textbook, Writing about Writing, recently published its 5th edition.
The Howe Center is composed of a multidisciplinary group of faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students who support the learning and teaching of writing at Miami University and nationwide, coordinated through the Howe Writing Center and the Writing Across the Curriculum program.