when writing teachers collaborate with faculty from other fields

The Beginning

Recently, I had the chance to collaborate with a faculty member from a STEM field. He has his students write a report at the end of the semester and asked me to present the assignment to him. He had worked with a couple other faculty from my department in the past year, but asked me to step in in part because they were overloaded and he and I were working with some of the same students.

I think highly of this STEM faculty member. We are both relatively recent hires, and he strikes me as someone who doesn't just teach and go home, but works on ways to improve the college in order to better serve students. Plus, I definitely appreciate that he incorporates writing into his STEM class!

I was nervous about working with him, though, just because that is my normal state. I wasn't sure if I was qualified to do the job. After all, I've never written a report in his subject area. In fact, when I studied his subject as an 18-year-old, I barely passed--and honestly, should have failed!

After meeting with him though, I felt I had to do it. He seemed to assume that I would and, knowing my propensity to avoid new challenges, I think it was a good thing.

The First Meeting

When meeting him to talk about the assignment, I was struck by how insecure he seemed to be about writing. He showed me a document on scientific writing that one of my English colleagues had presented to his students last year, but said he wasn't tied to it. I got the sense that he was letting the English faculty be in charge.

My goal, however, was to get a sense of the assignment and where I could help. I asked things like, "So do you want the students to do this?" And he would say, "Well, I don't know. You're the writing person." It wasn't in an off-putting way; I just really got the impression that he felt unsure about how to talk about writing and his expectations with his students. And, as a result, he wanted to put it all on me. I, on the other hand, felt that he must know what he wants; he's just not sure about how to put it in "writing" terms.

Eventually, I asked him if he had a model report to share with me. He also shared the previous semester's rubric with me.

NOTE: I don't believe this faculty member is a native speaker of English. I'm not sure how much that influences his comfort talking about writing. I can see that discomfort coming from being in a STEM field as well as from being a non-native speaker.

The Prep 

The STEM faculty member and I ended up meeting one more time. I decided to revise his rubric to communicate more effectively with students the expectations of the assignment and how they would be graded. As I did this, working with the model report, I had a lot of questions like:

• Do you like how these students did their introduction?
• Will all students need to define terms as the model report does or does it depend on their topic?
• How do you feel about section headings?
• When you say "Organization" on the rubric, does that mean as long as it's organized in a way that is easy to read?

These were some of the things we discussed at our second meeting. My goal at the second meeting was basically to make sure we were on the same page and that he was okay with my revisions. 

I decided to have his students read the model report and rubric in preparation for my presentation. I sent an email asking them to:

1. pay attention in particular to how the model report did or did not meet the criteria on the rubric, and
2. bring any questions the model report and rubric raised for them about what they were being asked to do in the report.

The Presentation

I ended up presenting to the class for about 30 minutes on a day that their regular instructor wasn't around. This happened partially due to our schedules. In the future, though, I definitely want both of us to be there to present the assignment, primarily so that we can both field questions. I found that there were a lot of questions that I couldn't answer (e.g. How long should our report be?). Basically, if the STEM faculty and I had not talked about it, I didn't know. I also found myself many times saying, "Your instructor told me..." and that seemed strange. Why was I in the position of being an interpreter or go-between?

I also realized that the STEM faculty expected me to virtually 100% introduce the assignment to his students. I walked in and asked what they already knew about the assignment. I expected that he would've introduced it and that my role was simply to provide more detail about the expectations and grading. I realized that next time, creating an assignment sheet would be helpful. 

Another rather awkward element of the presentation was that I increasingly got a sense that students did not like their STEM field instructor. Their comments got to the point that I couldn't ignore them, so in order to address them, I told them that, while I don't know their instructor from the perspective of a student, I respect him as a colleague and told them a bit about why. 

The Takeaway

For writing instructors:

• Expect that subject area instructors may be insecure about their writing ability.
• Find out explicitly what the subject area instructor plans to share with students about the writing assignment and what s/he expects you to do.
• Think about what you do for a writing assignment in your own class and whether/how that would translate to the subject area. It may also be beneficial to share documents (e.g. assignment sheets, rubrics, presentation slides) from your own class with subject area instructors to see if they feel similar documents would be helpful for their students.

For subject area instructors working with writing instructors:

• It's your class! While you may not be an expert at teaching writing, you've done more writing in your field than writing instructors have. You know more than we do about what writing in your field should look like. We can better help you if you can communicate some of this to us. 
• You can help writing instructors by provide as much information as possible about what you want. If you have an example (whether student or professional), that's great. If you have a target audience in mind, that's great. If you have a rubric you've previously used, that's great.