Our Department Commitment

The Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures (WRAC) employs award-winning, world-class faculty with a proven history and ongoing commitment to excellence. That commitment certainly extends to our teaching, with our focus on student engagement, high-impact teaching practices, and effective mentoring across programs. Our First-Year Writing engages students in acts of inquiry, discovery, and communication and supports students for the writing they will do at MSU and beyond. Our undergraduate majors (P2W and XA) help students develop skills to create, design, and write to enhance communities, develop technologies, and innovate in industry. Our graduate program prepares the teachers, scholars, and researchers who will lead our disciplines and our institutions.

Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the context of our work with each other, and with students. Regardless of changes in the delivery of teaching, we remain anchored to our goal of providing MSU students with an exceptional experience in their WRAC classes. 

We’ve been hard at work preparing for the 2020-2021 academic year, and what we can do to ensure that exceptional experience. What’s been going on behind the scenes at WRAC:

• Researching: As faculty in a program focused on writing and rhetoric, we have a long history of researching and writing about online pedagogy. Most recently, Casey McArdle, assistant professor and Director of Undergraduate Programs, co-authored Personal, Accessible, Responsive, Strategic: Resources and Strategies for Online Writing Instructors (2019). Associate Professor Kristin Arola co-authored Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects, a text about and for writing for online spaces, now in its third edition.

  Other faculty members—including associate professor Natasha Jones and professors Liza Potts, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, and Jacqueline Rhodes—research how people write and communicate in digital spaces, exploring issues of race and social justice, social media and crisis communication, networking and collaboration, and more.

• Many of our other faculty research pedagogy more broadly in order to help us approach all instruction (FYW, P2W, XA, and graduate seminars) in innovative, purposeful, and effective ways.
  

• Preparing: WRAC has offered hybrid and online courses for more than a decade, and as a community, we share our knowledge, know-how, and resources with one another. Over the summer, faculty member Sarah Gibbons offered a series of well-attended workshops that focused on prepping and delivering quality online courses. Those workshops will continue throughout the school year as we hone our practice. Topics so far have included:
  • ensuring that all course materials are captioned, transcripted, and accessible for learners with a range of technological tools, access, bandwidth, etc.
  • ensuring that all course materials are captioned, transcripted, and accessible for learners with a range of physical and neurological abilities
  • engaging lively interaction between students and between instructors and students
  • streamlining drafting, feedback, and revision processes so students get ample feedback on their writing
  • creating clear pathways through course materials, so that students can easily access all the required materials for their writing course

• Planning: We’ve been working with MSU’s set of university-level resources, including long-standing teaching support materials, like #iteachMSU Commons (https://iteach.msu.edu/) and materials that have more recently been developed, like Keep Teaching MSU (https://remote.msu.edu/teaching/).
   
  We’ve also developed materials for WRAC faculty to best be able to address student questions related to online courses in the fall, and to direct students to resources and support both in our department and at the university. 
   
  Finally, WRAC faculty have also participated in university-offered online teaching training, including the Summer Online Instructional Readiness for Educational Excellence (SOIREE) program and the ASynchronous Program for Instructional REadiness (ASPIRE) program.