Every student earning a Bachelor’s degree will need to have passed at least 2 Writing Enriched (WE) courses to graduate. Therefore, every Bachelor’s-granting department will need to ensure they have 2 WE courses within each of their majors.
To be certified as Writing Enriched, a course needs to meet several requirements. There is flexibility regarding exactly how each requirement can be met; if you are submitting a course that does not follow the requirements below, the WE committee asks for clear explanations for why the course should be certified despite not meeting the requirements.
If you have questions about how your program might be able to meet these requirements, you can contact the WE Committee chair or your college/school’s WE Committee representative.
Both of the WE courses chosen for certification need to be existing core courses within departmental majors (exceptions considered on case-by-case basis). This will ensure that all students will earn their WE graduation requirement without adding complexity to their course schedule or block their progress toward graduation. Do not create new courses to meet the WE requirement. Instead, think about how your existing core courses could include a more comprehensive writing component. In addition, these core courses should be at least 2, preferably 3 or more, credits (again, exceptions are considered on case-by-case basis).
Though the strong preference is two, at least one WE course must be an upper-division course (3000-level or higher) to ensure that students are learning to write in their discipline throughout their education. If your program already has an “intro to the major” course that explicitly teaches disciplinary writing, it could be a good choice for WE designation, even if it is a lower-division course. However, these lower-division courses must be at the 2000-level. As with the other requirements, the Committee is flexible if there are very good pedagogical reasons for why a 1000-level course would be the best choice for WE certification. The WE application asks for explanations for why your lower-division course will function well as a writing enriched course.
The primary goal of the Writing Enriched requirement is to ensure that all bachelor’s degree-seeking students at UVU learn the writing conventions and genres of their disciplines and professions so they are better prepared to do the writing necessary in their chosen careers. Therefore, every WE certified course must teach disciplinary/professional writing that are relevant to students’ majors and future workplaces.
In addition, writing in these “apprenticeship genres,”[1] genres that are similar to the genres written by full members of the field, provides students with an opportunity to take up and practice a disciplinary identity and develop ways of knowing and behaving associated with membership in discipline. Disciplinary and professional genres also lead students to place more value on the writing activities because the writing seems more relevant, in comparison to more obvious “classroom genres,” such as fill-in-the-blank reports, reading summaries, and tests. As the experts in writing these genres, faculty must be the primary source of instruction for how to effectively write in a way that displays disciplinary identity and ways of knowing.
[1] Carter, Michael, Ferzli, Miriam, & Wiebe, Eric N. Writing to learn by learning to write. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 21(3), pp. 278-pp. 302. doi: 101177/1050651907300466
Every WE certified course must include at least one high-stakes writing assignment. High-stakes writing involves formal writing products that are carefully assessed and make up an important part of the overall course grade. High-stakes writing assignments should also represent the genres and expectations of writing that are important within students’ disciplines. Each department should carefully consider the kinds of writing that will be most important for students to develop. It's important to note, here, that high-stakes does not automatically mean that the final products have to be long or be strictly academic in nature. Each discipline needs to determine the most important genres for their students.
The high-stakes writing assignments need to involve a revision process through which students can practice and develop the disciplinary writing conventions they need to learn. Revision involves the writing process of drafting, responding, revising, and resubmitting.
Faculty will need provide formative feedback on student drafts. As the disciplinary content and conventions experts, faculty must provide this direct feedback to students. Feedback from peers, TAs, the Writing Center, or other tutors should be seen as additional feedback. Students will then need to be provided with adequate time to revise their writing based on the feedback they receive before submitting their work for summative grading.
Developing comfort with writing requires continual practice, to the extent that writing becomes a normalized practice for students. However, this can be difficult to achieve through high-stakes writing only. Therefore, each WE certified course needs to include low-stakes writing assignments. Low-stakes writing activities are informal, quick writing tasks. They may be given credit/points for completion or might even be ungraded, but they are not intensely assessed. This type of writing can take a wide range of forms and can be used for a wide range of purposes. Therefore, low-stakes writing activities provide students with low-risk space within which they can process information and develop plans for their high-stakes assignments.
Low-stakes writing activities are also great spaces for you to respond to students' ideas, determine their level of understanding regarding a difficult concept, check what they remember from previous class sessions, and more, all without having to spend a lot of time grading. For guidance about the what, why, and how regarding low-stakes writing, see "What is Writing to Learn?" and "What is Writing to Engage?" from the WAC Clearinghouse. You can also see "Low-Stakes Writing," which provides a brief explanation of low-stakes writing and some ideas for what kinds of low-stakes writing you might ask students to do and some tips for making low-stakes writing work effectively in the classroom.
These requirements are purposefully broad because writing functions differently in every discipline. Therefore, each department is encouraged to make decisions that make the most sense for students, faculty, and existing courses.
For guidance regarding how to meet the above requirements, please see the resources page, which includes readings and information about our Writing Pedagogy Workshops.
