1. Working Title: WRITING ACROSS BORDERS: Building University-Wide Vertical
Writing Initiatives for Student Success
2. Rationale & University Need: The ability to write well is not only crucial to students’
academic success and deep learning, but to their success after graduation. If you look at any survey
of employers, or graduate and professional school personnel, you will see, near or at the top of the
list, the necessity of being able to communicate effectively in a variety of media and genres and
for a variety of audiences and purposes. Not only do students need knowledge of how to write for
academic purposes, but they also need the rhetorical flexibility to analyze and engage successfully
in the myriad writing tasks they will face in their future workplaces and lives. Rhetorical flexibility
will help us foster a generation of writers who will write effectively in their disciplines and
respective professional genres and write about their innovations and insights for a range of nonprofessional and/or popular audiences, including the diverse memberships of funding agencies.
Most universities provide students with a required set of writing courses in their first year, but one
or two writing courses are not sufficient to prepare students to face the writing demands of their
remaining education, those they will face in graduate/professional schools and in their careers. It
is even harder to rely on first year writing courses to help our students build a solid foundation
when almost half of UTRGV students take these courses for dual or AP/IB credit while still in
high school. The most robust models of writing instruction in higher education require more than
a “one (or two) and done” approach. To ensure our students’ success we need institution-wide
commitment to develop, strengthen, and support a sustainable culture of writing and writing
instruction across all colleges and throughout our students’ educational pathways.
In alignment with the UTRGV QEP priority theme of learning support, the following proposal
outlines the potential design and benefits of coordinated University Writing Program (UWP)
initiatives that would support national workplace demands for expert communicators and
UTRGV’s own vision and values related to writing and language. According to the National
Association of Colleges and Employers, written communication is one of the “requisite
competencies” for making a “successful transition into the workplace.” Successful employees need
to be able to “articulate thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively in written and oral forms to
persons inside and outside of the organization.” UTRGV’s strategic planning calls for us to
“cultivate and enhance the diverse, multicultural, and linguistic assets of our university and the
Rio Grande Valley” (Proposed Values of Diversity, Access, and Inclusion). We can do both by
strategically developing a coordinated approach to teaching writing at UTRGV, creating a plan
that infuses writing both horizontally and vertically through UTRGV’s curricula and discourse
communities.
The scope of a university-wide writing program would seek to establish impactful writing
initiatives across the university, touching all students, drawing on the expertise of faculty in each
college, and developing new and sustainable expertise in different UTRGV teaching populations.
One such initiative would be the development of writing-intensive courses across the majors,
which George Kuh (2008) cites as one of several “high impact practices that educational research
suggests increase rates of student retention and student engagement.” We’ve all likely had the
experience that we can’t really say we know something until we can articulate it in our terms for
ourselves or others. Faculty across the disciplines have long drawn on such knowledge and used
writing as a means of helping students engage more deeply with course content, resulting in
increased student understanding of the material alongside increased self-efficacy.
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While UTRGV boasts impressive first year retention rates (80% for last year’s freshmen), we see
significant drops in retention each subsequent year. According to recent data, only 66% of students
returned to UTRGV for their third year, and that number drops precipitously as only 58.6%
returned for their fourth year. With student progress as a priority, and because we receive more
funding for upper level courses, it is increasingly important that we retain students in those later
years. We also have a credit completion problem. Students attempt more credits than they earn,
which is both demoralizing and financially devastating. For the 2015 entering freshmen cohort
who began taking twelve or more hours, 82% attempted 25-49 hours during their first year, but
only 54% of those students actually earned 25-49 credits during that year. We don’t know (and
can’t control) all the reasons why students may have dropped or failed so many courses, but we do
have a responsibility to do everything we can to help them succeed in a class on their first attempt.
While not the only factor impacting retention or pass/drop rates, we believe that a sustained and
committed approach to incorporating more writing into our students’ education will have positive
effects on students’ academic success. We know from our Developmental Education
Demonstration Project (THECB funded, 2010-2012) research on our developmental writing
students that scaffolded writing sequences and increased in-class writing and feedback increase
assignment completion, attendance, and course pass rates. We contend that when students
experience the kind of deep learning that incorporation of writing into the curriculum enables, they
will be more likely to remain engaged with their studies and pass their classes.
3. Expected Outcomes/Impact on Student Learning & Learning Environments: By
coordinating our approach to writing and writing instruction through this university-wide
initiative, we expect to see an increase in students’ abilities to transfer what they learn about
rhetoric and writing in their first year - to new writing situations in their subsequent classes in their
majors. To capture that development, we will explore the use of student writing portfolios
throughout their undergraduate years. We could align and assess these portfolios according to
critical rhetorical concepts like audience-awareness (what we call a threshold writing concept that
is necessary for continued development); the learning outcomes of majors; and
professional/workplace genre expectations. Regular portfolio updates and sample submissions,
along with writing prompts, would allow us to measure how the culture of writing and transfer
develops over the course of the multiyear QEP, measuring rhetorical sophistication, synthetic
source integration, quantity and types of writing, and even adaptation of messages to different
forms. To that end, we suggest the following student learning outcomes to support what we would
develop as a larger assessment of student, disciplinary unit, and university level outcomes.
1. Students will increase the amount, frequency, and range of types of writing they do,
including generation of ideas, synthesis, reflection, and revision based on feedback from
peers and faculty experts.
2. Students will be able to transfer specific knowledge of audience, purpose, and form and the
rhetorical choices demanded by effective writing from general education contexts to their
upper level courses in their major discipline.
3. Students will “become more proficient as they write across a wide range of rhetorical
situations, genres, purposes, and discourse communities” in their disciplines (Statement of
WAC Principles and Practices, 2014), including biliterate contexts.
4. Students will be able to write about ideas in their disciplines for both experts in their fields
and non-experts, drawing on the rich resources of their language backgrounds in
rhetorically effective ways.
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The “Statement on WAC Principles and Practices” enumerates typical goals for university-wide
writing programs, most notably to “create a campus culture that supports writing,” a “community
of faculty around teaching and student writing,” and a commitment to “sustain the writing of
students across their academic careers.” To achieve the campus-wide goals and student learning
outcomes above, we must create, with our faculty partners, a parallel set of learning outcomes (and
reward structures) that will support faculty in better integrating writing knowledge and writing
instruction in their curricula, as well as increase our capacity to offer high quality and more
frequent peer-based writing support that is sustainable.
4. Strategies & Actions to be Implemented: A crucial element of our vision for a universitywide writing initiative is a commitment to offer opportunities for students to continue to develop
their writing abilities throughout their entire education. They need to be asked to write often, in a
variety of genres, and for a variety of purposes and audiences, and to ensure their continued
growth; they need to receive regular, substantive feedback on their writing from as many expert
sources as possible. While the foundation of students’ writing education begins in the first year
when students are afforded the opportunity to learn about critical threshold concepts in writing and
how to effectively enact the rhetorical choices that impactful writers must make, the focus of this
QEP will shift our attention to helping students transfer that foundational knowledge about writing
studies to new situations in other classes and eventually to their careers. Transfer of writing
knowledge from one situation to another is never guaranteed, but intentional teaching for transfer
is required to ensure that students can apply what they’ve learned and make that learning (and
potential for further adaptability) stick. This QEP will allow us to test and adjust transfer strategies
throughout the course of the project, studying interventions at benchmarks along a student’s
pathway and adjusting them to increase writing quality and rhetorical flexibility.
To help us build a strong campus culture of writing and ensure our students’ success on the learning
outcomes outlined in the previous section, we propose five central strategies enacted over a fiveyear period. This initial plan will need to be revisited as we learn more about the campus writing
culture at UTRGV and get wider faculty, staff, and student input on needed activities. This built
in rhetorical flexibility and responsiveness of our QEP design is integrated below in the Reflecting
on Writing Across Borders Series, which will be dedicated to getting ongoing feedback from
faculty, staff, and students on what’s working and what we’d like to do differently. We explain the
five strategies below, followed by our five-year plan to implement and assess them.
1. Faculty Professional Development. Annual Faculty Strategy. The most important strategy we
will pursue is a professional development series focusing on strengthening faculty expertise in the
following areas––designing meaningful writing projects, scaffolding assignments to encourage
revision and student engagement, aligning writing with existing course outcomes, incorporating
low-stakes writing-to-learn activities into existing curricula, and giving meaningful feedback to
students on their writing (without getting overwhelmed by the workload). Threaded through these
workshops will be discussions of how to bring our students’ rich language resources to bear in
their development as biliterate, bicultural, and bilingual graduates, as well as opportunities to
discuss how to strategically develop curricula (at the course and major level) to explicitly teach
students how to write for experts in their discipline, as well as for wider public audiences and
purposes.
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We will offer workshops for all faculty to attend each year, along with a yearlong cohort model
where recruited faculty will attend a series of workshops culminating with a certificate that could
be included as part of the annual review, reappointment, and promotion process. These cohorts
would receive a one-semester stipend to develop expertise in writing and writing instruction, which
would be applied to designing signature writing projects or redesigning full courses to more
intentionally incorporate writing throughout the curriculum. Peers and expert faculty fellows
would provide feedback and faculty would pilot the project/course redesign the following
semester. During that semester, the cohort would meet to discuss strengths, areas for development,
and revisions necessary for future success. This model is based on one used by the National
Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment and provides a significant amount of support for
faculty.
As a related event, we will host a QEP Writing Across Borders Conference. With a broad Writing
Across the Borders theme, we will invite a range of regional, national, and international writing
experts with disciplinary expertise outside writing studies to add depth and breadth to our local
community’s writing culture. The conference will allow us to showcase the work our faculty and
students are doing as a result of the professional development series.
2. Vertical Writing Initiatives. Long-Term Institutional Strategy. Many universities have
initiatives that require students to take writing-intensive courses across the curriculum, particularly
at the upper level. We will pursue this idea, including development of flags for courses aimed at
biliteracy. By working with different departmental faculty on their university and professional
writing goals for students, we will develop criteria for a university writing-intensive course
development and flag system. Through syllabi and assignment review, and course observation, we
will flag signature-writing classes for students. Students could earn certificates by accumulating
courses at each degree level. Students in degrees with little to no electives could still earn the
distinction of earning degrees with a writing emphasis.
More specific writing certificates and minors are a fruitful site for development. Writing &
Language Studies (WLS) faculty are designing an undergraduate minor for students who want
preparation for writing in the professions, and this minor could include courses developed
interdepartmentally, like a Bilingual Writing in the Medical Professions minor. WLS will also
design shorter writing certificates targeted to specific career goals identified by partner faculty,
with some of this work already emerging in areas like Occupational Therapy and Business.
Because we place such a high value on the resources of our students’ language backgrounds, we
would pursue vertical writing initiatives, highlighting our institutional commitment to
bilingualism, which differentiates UTRGV from other institutions, and strengthens our students’
postgraduate options.
3. Writing Center & Peer Writing Support. Ongoing Peer-to-Peer Strategy. The Writing
Center’s main role is to provide high quality tutoring for students working on course writing
projects. We will increase the amount of Writing Center tutors from the current 16, increasing the
range of disciplinary writing expertise available for students in all majors. We will recruit faculty
with disciplinary writing expertise to spend time as Writing Center consultants, contributing to
tutor professional development and working with students.
We will partner with the Writing Center and the Library to train Undergraduate Writing
Ambassadors, representing all academic units, to help peers with writing, research, and
information literacy. These students will provide direct support to students as embedded tutors in
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classes, as mobile tutors in “pop up” locations across our campuses, and as circulating peer experts,
available to answer any writing or research questions students might have.
4. Celebration of Student Writing. Annual Campus Strategy. To raise the profile of writing on
campus, we will host a yearly celebration of student writing that foregrounds the impact of revision
and highlights the types of effective projects emerging from Strategies 1 & 2. Creating an awards
system with categories could tie the celebration to our shared outcomes for effective and
compelling writing. It might be possible to tie the Celebration to the Conference described in
Strategy 1 and increase networking and mentoring opportunities for participants and campus
visitors.
5. Reflecting on Writing Across Borders Series. Ongoing Reflective QEP Strategy. We believe
that it’s important to build in a campus-wide discussion of the QEP that prompts reflection and
revision. Led by an advisory board and key QEP strategy leaders, the reflective discussion would
consider yearly data and discuss how the QEP strategies are developing each year, what lessons
we’re learning along the way, and what strategies need to be tweaked or added.
Year 1
 Create a profile of the existing culture of writing at UTRGV by 1) collecting samples of
student writing, writing project guidelines/prompts, and course syllabi; and 2) conducting
surveys, focus groups, and interviews with faculty and students about their experiences
with writing and writing instruction.
 Assess suitability of TK20 for the eportfolio tool
 Form an advisory group of key university partners, as well as community stakeholders.
 Hire faculty fellows and develop the workshop series based on what’s learned in bullet 1.
 Recruit Faculty Cohort #1 and hire additional Writing Center and peer writing support
 Hold Writing Across Borders series: Topics include possible institutional learning
outcomes and initiatives faculty would like to pursue to develop student writing expertise
and credentials (possible flag system, a variety of certificates, etc.)
Years 2-5




Offer the workshop series for a distinct Faculty Cohort each year
Host yearly Writing Across Borders Conference and Celebration of Student Writing
Hold Writing Across Borders series: Topics responsive to faculty and student needs
Work on development of specific vertical writing initiatives that have strong faculty
support (flags, certificates, etc.)
 Conduct assessment yearly
5. Student Cohort: This QEP aims to have broad impact with the goal of facilitating
undergraduate students’ writing knowledge and ability across as many majors as possible. Our
hypothesis is that this initiative, alongside other student success initiatives currently underway,
will help UTRGV move the needle on retaining more upper level students and helping them stick
with and perform better in their courses.
6. Measurement/Assessment:

Surveys, interviews, and focus groups of students, faculty, and administrators to
investigate the existing writing ecologies at UTRGV.
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


Portfolio assessment of VALUE rubrics to track progress in student writing ability
through faculty assessment of student writing portfolios (comparison with core
Communication assessment data) (Target: 75% of students will score at the capstone level
as graduating seniors and a 10% increase in amount of disciplinary specific writing).
Use National Survey of Student Engagement data, including responses to an additional set
of questions designed for the Writing Consortium (Target: Increase the number of writingintensive courses offered for students by 5% a year. Students will also indicate they have
more opportunities to write in a variety of genres for a variety of purposes and audiences
in their undergraduate education. We will see an increase of 10% in the amount of writing
they are asked to do for their classes.)
Track student retention and credit completion data (compare students who take 3 or more
writing-intensive courses to students who do not) (Target: Increase student retention of
affected students by 5%. Decrease student D/F/W rates in writing-intensive courses by
20% over 5 years).
7. Resources: It is a key premise of this QEP that students’ writing education is the responsibility
of all faculty and UTRGV has a strong group of faculty with graduate preparation, scholarship, and
research agendas in writing studies, many of whom have specific expertise in writing across the
curriculum, writing in the disciplines, and professional writing. They are willing and eager to
collaborate with faculty across the disciplines to learn more about how writing works in their fields
and how we can all incorporate more writing opportunities and instruction into our students’
educations. They, along with qualified and interested faculty across all colleges, will continue to
build the expertise needed to provide high quality professional development in partnership with the
Center for Teaching Excellence
Other Partners. Writing Center; Office of Accreditation and Assessment; Center for Teaching
Excellence; B3 Institute; University Library; All interested departments; Faculty across UTRGV
with existing or interest in developing expertise in how to teach writing in the disciplines
Proposed Budget
Needed Resource
Cost per year
# Years
Total Cost
QEP Leadership
$10,000 stipend + 2 course buyouts
($15,000) = $25,000
5
$125,000
Faculty Fellows (10)
$4,000 per fellow = $40,000
5
$200,000
Faculty Cohort Stipends
$1,000 per faculty member x 25 =
$25,000
4
$100,000
Graduate Students
(research & assessment)
$10,000 per GA x 2 = $20,000
5
$100,000
Peer Writing Support
(double current #s))
$100,000
5
$500,000
Symposium & Celebration
of Student Writing
$15,000
4
$60,000
Operating (incl. money for
food for events) & Travel
$25,000
5
$125,000
Totals
$250,000
$1,210,000
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