WAC at Lehman
Our program at Lehman is grounded in research from WAC’s long history but tailored to meet the particular interests and needs of our faculty and students. Faculty development workshops extend the rich scholarly material available in the writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines movements by making use of the resources uniquely available at Lehman.
The heart of our program is the year-long WAC Faculty Writing Development Program.
We also offer shorter workshops and institutes, including a college-wide
faculty development workshops and institutes for faculty teaching, Freshman Year
Initiative, Writing
Intensive (WI), and General
Education courses, a spring seminar on WAC and the Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning (SOTL), and the Writing Fellows
Program.
Through its year-long seminars and shorter institutes, WAC
promotes the following set of ideas:
- Writing both enables and reveals students’ intellectual growth;
- Faculty who use writing consistently in their courses can identify where students need additional support in order to succeed;
- Active learning through writing and/or collaborative work engages students more directly in course material;
- Working on lessons and assignments with colleagues (and reviewing samples of student products) encourages the development and sharing of effective teaching techniques;
- Heterogeneous groups of newer and more experienced faculty, as well as full-time and adjunct, help to create a culture of continuous improvement in teaching.
In addition to focusing on strategies for teaching with writing in a diverse array of disciplines and professional programs, WAC workshops also explore how faculty’s intellectual and pedagogical goals inform their thinking about key questions of our time. Such questions include how can we effectively integrate technology into active pedagogy? How is writing influenced by our multi-lingual context? What can the urban environment of our college contribute to traditional views of disciplinary knowledge? How can we continue to promote academic excellence while also broadening out access to underserved student populations?
