In 2020, Elon became one of ten institutions in the inaugural cohort of the American Council on Education (ACE) inclusive learning community called the  (LSL), with an institutional focus on mentoring for learner success. One of their first goals was to develop a common definition of mentoring relationships, since a review of the core resources showed that there is not one accepted definition. They concluded that “a constellation model in which students have multiple meaningful relationships, including mentoring relationships, with peers, staff, and faculty, among others who provide multifaceted support and guidance, acknowledges the complex realities of developmental relationships and the continuum along which mentoring occurs.”

were written by three Elon faculty and experienced mentors: Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, Cynthia Fair, and Caroline Ketcham. The posts make the argument that “mentoring is not (just) have a cup of coffee,” but instead, “mentoring must be situated in a larger sociocultural context and can only be understood holistically and longitudinally, rather than as a snapshot of a meaningful moment.”

, Vandermaas-Peeler, Fair and Ketcham each share a story of a challenging, yet ultimately rewarding, mentoring experience.

Vandermaas-Peeler said, “A common thread throughout is that mentoring is meaningful, time-consuming and intensive, and there are always low points to navigate and overcome, and successes and achievements to celebrate.”

The from interviews with over 115 faculty, staff, and students about their mentoring relationships. An overarching theme that emerged was that while many students had stories of wonderful mentors who changed their lives for the better, there were many instances of challenges and tough conversations as well. Excellent mentors must balance challenge and support, which can be time-consuming, hard work.

One study participant said, “I think a consistent thread has been seeing in me potential that I didn’t know was there, holding me to a higher standard than I thought I was capable of, always kind of pushing me to take—whether it was my research or my writing or scholarship—to the next level, and again, in ways I didn’t imagine I could.”

The , by Moore and Vandermaas-Peeler, explores the varied functions that mentors can serve over the course of a student’s education. Different mentors might support a student in very different ways. Some mentors might be assigned to a student, others are intentionally sought out by the student and some mentoring relationships develop informally over time.

Moore and Vandermaas-Peeler conclude that colleges must “foster multiple pathways for mentoring, rather than pursuing a one-size-fits-some model. University mentoring initiatives should invest in fostering and helping students develop strategies for identifying multiple meaningful relationships that could evolve into mentoring relationships and that address aspects of their developmental support needs within a .”

More can be read about the research happening at Elon on mentoring, including the complete ACE report, on the Mentoring at Elon website. Also look out for forthcoming work from the three-year, multi-institutional , which kicks off this summer.

CEL intern Carissa Pallander contributed to this article.

Professor of Exercise Science Caroline Ketcham chose the timely topic of high-impact practices (HIPs) for neurodiverse and physically disabled student populations. The topic is related to her disciplinary research, which focuses on movement neuroscience. She serves as co-chair of the Elon BrainCARE Research Institute, and was recently awarded Elon’s 2023 Distinguished Scholar Award.

Ketcham has wrote many blog posts posing difficult but important questions about ableism in academia. In her post, “,” she asks, “Should we consider that rigor for our students and our course goals might, and should, look different? Is our continued traditional definition of rigor ableist?”

She encourages us to consider instead: “It isn’t about how much [students] can read, absorb and synthesize, but it is about how they can reflect on the material and apply it to their now and their next.”

Ketcham discusses Universal Design for Learning in , as well as . In she provides ideas for instructors to help students from varying backgrounds, abilities, and experiences be successful in the classroom.

Many of her blog posts address the unique barriers and challenges that disabled students face when participating in high-impact practices. She has posts discussing , and . Much has been written on the excellent benefits for students who participate in high-impact practices, but Ketcham explores the barriers some students face and discusses how we can better facilitate the participation of all students.

Ketcham is a committed teacher-mentor-scholar who has mentored over 60 �þ��� research students, and this interest has led to research on high-quality mentoring and co-mentoring.

As CEL Scholar, she has extended her research to consider . She acknowledges the importance of identity representation among mentors, but she also discusses training for mentors so that they can work better with students different from themselves. She writes, “There is ample evidence that we connect with people who are like us—but how does this translate to how we structure mentoring and who gets mentored in our institutions? How does this translate to who has access to and participates in HIPs, which are often quality mentored experiences?”

You can see a . Although her CEL Scholar appointment has ended, CEL will continue to explore this topic with Ketcham’s leadership.

During a two-year appointment, CEL Scholars develop expertise in a specific aspect of engaged learning and create resources on that topic to be shared through CEL’s website and in other scholarly venues. The CEL Scholar position is an opportunity for an Elon faculty member to develop and deepen a professional development trajectory that includes scholarly activity on a high-impact practice or other engaged learning topics. .

CEL intern Caroline Bunder ’23 contributed to this article.

Chapter authors include �þ��� faculty members Li Li, Heather Lindenman, Travis Maynard and Amanda Sturgill.

“Writing Beyond the University” is part of CEL’s and can be for free. The collection introduces higher education faculty, staff and administrators to research on how all members of a campus community can prepare learners to be effective writers beyond the university, in personal, professional, and civic contexts.

“Writing Beyond the University” examines the importance of writing in higher education for lifelong and lifewide learning. The book shares research on writing in a variety of co-curricular spaces, such as student life, employment, career services, and internships. This edited collection bridges writing across courses, disciplines, and professions using research from multi-institutional studies conducted by participants in the 2019-2021 .

Professor of Student Engagement in Higher Education, Institute for Academic Development at the University of Edinburgh Catherine Bovill said, “Expanding on previous writing transfer research, this important new book demonstrates the power of connecting writing that takes place inside and outside the university. The editors and authors provide us with diverse research, experience, and insights from around the world to help us to envisage possible and desirable writing practices.

“We are encouraged to value the writing students do outside the university, which can be built upon to inform their university writing. Importantly, this book also provides evidence and impetus for university colleagues to ensure that we embed the best writing approaches and resources to enable students to maximize the benefits of writerly practices for their future lives and careers,” Bovill added.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section, “Adaptability and Learning to Write as a Lifelong Process,” operates as an introduction to the experiences that students will likely go through in relation to writing during and after graduation. These first three chapters examine how writers draw on and adapt what they have already learned in order to apply it in different ways.

Section two, “Supporting the Writing and Writing Experiences of Lifelong Learners,” builds on the information from section one and applies it to writing across a variety of lifestyles and professions. This section includes seven chapters that outline ways writers adapt their writing strategies for new contexts.

The third section, “Facilitating Writers’ Ongoing Self Agency and Networked Learning,” closes out the book with take-aways that provide a framework for assignments that prepare students for the versatility of writing across a lifetime. The content in these last three chapters explores writers’ ongoing self-agency as they take what they learned from college into the next stage of their lives.

Readers can access for free.

The Center for Engaged Learning Open Access Book Series features both authored books and edited collections that contain concise peer-reviewed information on research-informed learning practices. The series offers an alternative publishing option for high-quality engaged learning books that align with the Center’s mission, goals, and initiatives.

Love them or hate them, group projects are a huge part of many college courses. Many instructors assign them, sometimes out of necessity to facilitate in-depth projects in large classes and sometimes in an effort to teach students important collaboration skills. Any collaborative project is going to bring with it a lot of complexity and many questions for instructors to resolve: how to assign groups, how to guide students as they work together, how to assess the projects.

Elon Associate Professor and Center for Engaged Learning Scholar David Buck is taking a close look at the evidence for the impact of collaborative projects and the recommendations for how to implement them well. Collaborative assignments and projects are one of the identified by higher education researchers as experiences that contribute to positive outcomes for college students. Buck teaches a research methods course in psychology, in which he created a semester-long group research project for the class. It was a large project, and both because of the scope and because scientific research is often the product of collaboration it made sense for it to be a group project.

“Anyone who’s been a student who’s worked on group projects has had the experience of them not going well,” Buck says. “And I know that can be incredibly frustrating, and that frustration could, in some cases, be counterproductive for learning.”

For his , Buck is taking a deep dive into the literature of collaborative assignments to identify best practices. And what he’s finding is that the evidence is not as conclusive as we might assume that collaborative projects support learning. “A lot of the research I’ve seen is focused on comparing the products produced by groups of students with those produced by individual students, and I think we need to be cautious about what we infer from those comparisons,” Buck says.

The research is clear that when five people work together, their final product is likely going to be better than if one person completed it. But does that mean that the students — all the students — actually learned more? Evaluating student learning and perceptions of learning is complex, and we still have plenty to investigate about how students learn through group projects.

When asked to briefly share his best tips for instructors doing group projects, he addressed two issues: �þ��� for collaboration and group selection. A key learning outcome for a collaborative project should be learning to collaborate!

“A big part of the impact of these projects is on �þ��� people how to collaborate, so if you have a group that’s not going smoothly, that’s still not necessarily a problem—because that will happen in life, and as long as students are learning to navigate the conflict effectively, that’s a good thing,” Buck says.

However, as instructors, we need to understand our role in making this happen. In the same way that you wouldn’t sit a student in front of a piano for the first time and just say, “play, and I’ll grade your performance,” you shouldn’t put students in a group and just say “collaborate.”  To fulfill a project’s potential to help students learn to collaborate, you must prepare them, provide guidance, and discuss strategies that might help them work together effectively. In other words, collaboration needs to be part of the curriculum.

His other advice is to think carefully about how groups are assembled. It can be a difficult balancing act to provide students some choice while still making sure that you’re not “creating scenarios reminiscent of being picked last for dodgeball.” His current preferred method is to ask students if they have peers they’d like to work with (or NOT work with), but also assign groups according to logistics (usually scheduling for availability for group meetings). You can read much more in-depth discussion of these two issues, as well as many other aspects of collaborative projects, on .

This SoTL research is a natural extension of Buck’s disciplinary research: as a social psychologist, Buck studies how people interact with others and their environment, “and how people collaborate and how groups work is very much a part of what my field does.”

He appreciates how the CEL Scholar position provides him with time and space to explore the intersection of his discipline and �þ��� and learning. “Doing SoTL is very aligned with Elon’s teacher-scholar-mentor model, the merging of �þ��� and scholarship,” Buck says. “Because evidence-based pedagogy is such a big part of my �þ��� philosophy, doing this type of research is an important aspect of �þ��� development for me.”

During a two-year appointment, CEL Scholars develop expertise in a specific aspect of engaged learning and create resources on that topic to be shared through CEL’s website and in other scholarly venues. The CEL Scholar position is an opportunity for an Elon faculty member to develop and deepen a professional development trajectory that includes scholarly activity on a high-impact practice or other engaged learning topics. Learn more about the .

A study abroad journey in a wheelchair. A successful collaborative project for a student with autism. An accessible ePortfolio created by a student with a visual impairment.

Many of the most prized educational practices and experiences are going to present real challenges to neurodiverse and physically disabled students. Center for Engaged Learning Scholar Caroline Ketcham is researching what these barriers and challenges are, and how we can better facilitate the participation of all students in high-impact practices.

Higher education researchers have identified — experiences like study abroad and mentored �þ��� research that, when done well, produce powerful positive outcomes for college students. There has been extensive research on the educational benefits for students who participate in them, but very little research on how to support disabled populations in these experiences. Ketcham is working to understand and share the perspectives of this population, so we can identify different pathways to our high-impact practices and broaden the experiences our students can be involved in.

If the challenges to a student’s participation in a high-impact practice are too great, the costs may outweigh the benefits. “We have pedestaled certain high impact practices, and I’m not sure they are appropriate for all students,” Ketcham says. “We need authentic conversations. … Finances are not the only barrier for many students. And we need to normalize that that’s okay.”

She is investigating many questions: How do we make our �þ��� practices more inclusive of all students? How do we ensure that neurodiverse and physically disabled students are brought to our campus, thrive in our classrooms, and share their valuable perspectives in our school? How do we make high-impact experiences work for these students? What other opportunities can we provide that would generate the same outcomes but be more feasible? You can check out her , and stay tuned as she continues to write about her project through next year.

Ketcham is a professor of exercise science and chair of the Department of Exercise Science, and her disciplinary research focuses on movement neuroscience. Her SoTL project on high-impact practices for disabled students was a perfect fit to complement her research. She appreciates how her experiences first as a , then as a , and now as a are giving her an opportunity to participate in multidisciplinary and international research. Ketcham explains that this type of research helps us to generalize findings across contexts. We may know what works here in our classrooms, but these SoTL projects allow us to think about “how we can impact the field of higher education. We need to have a variety of multidisciplinary viewpoints and evidence from different campus contexts for that.”

During a two-year appointment, CEL Scholars develop expertise in a specific aspect of engaged learning and create resources on that topic to be shared through CEL’s website and in other scholarly venues. The CEL Scholar position is an opportunity for an Elon faculty member to develop and deepen a professional development trajectory that includes scholarly activity on a high-impact practice or other engaged learning topics. Learn more about the .

The experiences of college-age Muslims in North Carolina, the shifting religious landscapes in South India, Jewish responses to white nationalist movements, the religious experiences of North Carolina’s African refugees — these are just some of the topics investigated by recent Elon Multifaith Scholars.

The goal of the Multifaith Scholars program is “to produce global citizens poised to address religious diversity in productive and creative ways in their chosen career fields and participate with knowledge and self-awareness in civic contexts.” Each Multifaith Scholar undertakes a closely mentored, two-year research project on a topic around religion and society, and they’re encouraged to complement this research with experiential learning opportunities such as study away and community-based learning in diverse local and global contexts.

Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Multifaith Scholars program Amy Allocco is working with the Center for Research on Global Engagement (CRGE) to study how this type of mentored �þ��� research in global contexts connects to professional skills and competencies that are vital to students’ careers. The student scholars come from many different majors (not just religious studies), and they’ve gone on to pursue a wide variety of careers and graduate programs.

“These students are going on to be lawyers, diplomats, policymakers, medical professionals — they’re going on to do a range of things — and they’re bringing these essential competencies with them.,” Allocco says.

Allocco’s research is providing evidence that what students are learning as Multifaith Scholars is helping them gain skills, adopt attitudes, and develop strategies that are allowing them to thrive in their careers. The research “demonstrates in an evidence-based way that these competencies matter,” she says. “That they connect to careers, that they make students desirable to employers. That they make them better global citizens as they go into a range of careers.”

As institutions of higher education are increasingly pressured to defend the value of a liberal arts education and as they constantly assess and refine their curricula to prepare students for a rapidly changing world and job market, Allocco says that “it’s pressing that we ask these questions, and demonstrate how our disciplines directly connect to the ‘real world.’” Her research draws on assessment data from student reflections, an annual tracking of learning outcomes, semi-annual assessments of mentors and mentoring practices, and an external assessment of the program “to indicate how this developmental, blended approach that offers instrumental and psychosocial supports and takes account of student identities can produce knowledgeable, high-achieving multifaith leaders with valuable professional skills.”

More about this research will soon be available in her forthcoming article titled “Negotiating the Applied/Theoretical Dilemma at the Intersection of Interreligious Studies and Global Citizenship,” to be published in the Journal of Interreligious Studies.

As she has collected data on the Multifaith Scholars program and engaged in the scholarship of �þ��� and learning to document the outcomes she sees in these students, she appreciates how the project has given her a way “to argue for the social impact and social justice potential of learning about diverse religious traditions in a way that is not detached from other concerns but rather tells an engaging and compelling story about, frankly, making the world a better place.” �þ��� has exceptionally strong multifaith curricular and co-curricular initiatives, and the Multifaith Scholars program is a national model for helping students to become interculturally agile global citizens.

Each year, Elon’s Center for Research on Global Engagement provides grants to support high-quality research designed to strengthen Elon’s commitment to diversity and global engagement. Learn more about CRGE’s funding opportunities.

If you think about a pivotal moment in your education, you probably don’t remember reading a textbook or listening to a lecture. Often the educational experiences that have the most impact are those that take you out of the classroom in some way or involve you in an extended, in-depth project on a topic you care about.

Associate Professor of Communication Design Phillip Motley is studying what defines these “immersive learning” practices — what characteristics make these pedagogies immersive and why are they beneficial?

Motley is working with the Center for Engaged Learning as their , and during his two-year term he is asking questions about what pedagogies are immersive, what are the defining characteristics of immersive learning, what are the benefits and affordances of these pedagogies, and what support do instructors need to do them well. He’s working with six collaborators in the U.S., Canada and Australia to interview faculty members and instructors to get their perspectives on immersive learning.

Based on these interviews and an in-depth literature search, Motley has come up with a working list of the defining characteristics of immersive learning: degree of focus, time on task, situated learning, amount of agency and autonomy, and continuity of learning (read more about these characteristics in ).

There are many types of educational experiences that have the potential to be immersive: study abroad, service learning, internships, work-integrated learning, winter terms or other types of block schedules, and mentored research projects, among others. Some types of immersive learning are specific to various disciplines, for example clinical rotations for medical students. Many high impact practices have strong immersive qualities.

Motley argues that immersive learning provides students a rare opportunity (in their very busy lives) to focus deeply on one thing, to engage authentically with real-world problems, to care about something beyond their own lives as students. Motley has taught many service-learning courses and says, “interesting things happen when you get students far enough away from the classroom and the campus that they start to act less like students. Grades become more of a background concern when they’re engaging in something real. The drive is now to do well for the partner, rather than for the self.”

While many immersive learning experiences take students out of the classroom, they don’t have to — this has been one of the surprises of Motley’s research. Through faculty interviews, he learned about several innovative �þ��� practices that immerse learners within the classroom.

One example was provided by Elon Professor of Spanish Nina Namaste, who asks students in a gender studies course to suspend their disbelief and imagine (for the entire semester) that the class isn’t part of the hegemonic patriarchy; classroom structures allow students to practice differently distributed power systems. Another interviewee told of a simulated medical training in which students worked with such lifelike dummies that they can get seriously upset when the poor dummy doesn’t make it. Both of these examples show that immersive learning can be a state of mind, a mental journey for the student rather than a physical one.

Motley has been doing SoTL and higher education research for many years. “SoTL has been the most fun when it’s been collaborative,” he says. “So even though I never thought I would have six collaborators around the world, it’s a lot of fun doing it with them and getting their perspectives.”

His collaborators on this project include: Beth Archer-Kuhn, University of Calgary; Catharine Dishke, Thompson Rivers University; Jennifer Dobbs-Oates, Purdue University; Michelle Eady, University of Wollongong; Janel Seeley, University of Wyoming; and Rosemary Tyrrell, University of California-Riverside.

He loves that his SoTL research allows him to supplement his disciplinary research with something new and different, allowing him to explore his curiosity about how students learn best and to meet researchers from all different disciplines. “I’m a person that needs variety, and SoTL scratches that itch,” he says.

Motley also appreciates that the has enabled him to tackle a larger SoTL project, a project that has at times felt like a “wild goose chase or detective work.” It’s given him the time and support he needs to ask broad questions and investigate new ideas as they come along.

During a two-year appointment, CEL Scholars develop expertise in a specific aspect of engaged learning and create resources on that topic to be shared through CEL’s web site and in other scholarly venues. The CEL Scholar position is an opportunity for an Elon faculty member to develop and deepen a professional development trajectory that includes scholarly activity on a high-impact practice or other engaged learning topic. Learn more about the .

The chance to study abroad has long been a hallmark of an Elon education, and nearly 85 percent of students participate in an international or domestic study-away experience. These programs help prepare students to be effective in a complex and interconnected world.

But three Elon faculty members — Sandy Marshall, Vanessa Drew-Branch and Danielle Lake — are exploring how students might experience similar types of engaged, global learning without the need to travel. Global travel is expensive, increasingly environmentally unsustainable, and at times logistically challenging (for example, during a global pandemic). These faculty members are asking: How can students discover that sense of global interconnectedness in their own community? How can local engagement also be global?

“There’s a lot of diversity here in our own communities and work to be done here,” Lake says.

Marshall, Drew-Branch and Lake are �þ��� courses in Human Service Studies and Geography and are partnering with local organizations to engage students in place-based storytelling projects. �þ��� have worked with two community partners, the and the , to capture oral histories both of individuals in the community and of the organizations themselves. �þ��� then work with community storytellers and partner organizations to transform the oral history interviews into short digital stories about people and places in the community.

“By working with community storytellers to co-produce these digital stories, students are not merely learning about local history, but are entering into a relationship with the local community and helping to create space for these narratives,” Marshall says.

In partnership with Shineece Sellars and Bobbi Ruffin, faculty have created the Power and Place Collaborative, a new initiative designed to support collaborative and sustainable projects. They hope that the collaborative will enable more members of the on-campus and surrounding community to work together across courses and departments so that projects can have long-term continuity.

�þ��� are gaining valuable skills through these experiences, and the faculty members see these courses as a way to ensure that students are giving back to the community. “Through these partnerships, we receive a lot of practice and interactions that build our students’ skills, but I wanted the relationships to be more reciprocal,” Drew-Branch says.

She recalls that when she first arrived at Elon, her students talked about the “Elon bubble,” a barrier they felt existed between Alamance County and the campus community. She wanted to bridge this gap, maintaining academic focus but also making sure students are giving as much to the broader community as they are receiving.

To assess the impact of these experiences, the researchers are using the to measure students’ attitudes and perceptions of the value of these courses. They will then be able to compare their students’ outcomes to other global engagement programs and assess how these local experiences compare to global engagement gained through study abroad. They are also aiming to make the study longitudinal by checking back in with students in subsequent years.

Many studies like these only capture students’ attitudes and competencies right at the end of the experience, in the moment. But often it’s only with time that students can really appreciate and articulate the impact of an experience like this. They will have a clearer idea of whether the skills they gained were useful in their professional and civic lives and have a better understanding of how the course changed their global mindset.

Marshall, Drew-Branch and Lake appreciate how this SoTL project is allowing them to validate the educational impact of local engagement as intercultural learning. There has long been a lot of emphasis on travel as the best way to facilitate intercultural learning. Making this topic the subject of research gives them the chance to collaborate, to work together to measure and assess how students can grow as global citizens here at home.

““I see SoTL as a way of aligning your �þ���, research and service,” Lake says. “It can improve the quality of your �þ��� — as you’re engaged in designing these courses that you want to know are valuable to students. It can also be a form of service as we learn from the research we’re doing and can share it out with others.”

Drew-Branch likens her work to a quilt, with �þ���, research (including SoTL), and service being “all different quilt squares, which when we stitch them together make one beautiful fabric.”

This project is supported by a faculty research grant from Elon’s Center for Research on Global Engagement (CRGE). Each year, these grants support high-quality research designed to strengthen Elon’s commitment to diversity and global engagement. Learn more about CRGE’s funding opportunities.

Software developers the world over have adopted Scrum, an agile project management framework that breaks complex projects down into bite-size chunks that team members collaboratively “sprint” to complete. The process empowers team members to take ownership over projects and make quick decisions about how best to complete the work. Associate Professor of Computer Science Shannon Duvall wondered whether she could adapt these ideas to pedagogy. She worked with two other professors of computer science, Duke Hutchings and Scott Spurlock, to transform their traditional �þ��� methods into something they call “Scrumage.”

In a Scrumage classroom, the students get to decide how they want to learn the course content and how class time is used. The professor offers choices: a lecture, readings or videos on new material, working through problems together, discussion of case studies, etc. The day before class, the professor asks students to tell them what they want (and need) to do in class the next day — and that becomes the agenda for class. Once all the students’ requests are done during the class session, then students have free work time, which gives the instructors a valuable opportunity to float around and check in with students to answer questions.

Spurlock explains that students will look through their assignments, figure out what they still need to learn, and ask for help on it. “It’s more like they’re pulling and less like I’m pushing, so I can talk about the same thing I would have talked about anyway, but they’re asking me to do it,” he says.

All three agree that this characteristic is the key to why the pedagogy works so well, and it’s similar to why Scrum works in the industry. Duvall says that students think like software developers. “I don’t need a manager to tell me what to do — let me do what I know I need to do,” she says.

�þ��� are more active and engaged during class time, listening intently and asking good questions, she says.

Duvall, Hutchings and Spurlock worked with the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL) to figure out how it would all work. They had many questions: Would the benefits of Scrum translate to the classroom? Would this approach help students learn the course material better? Would it be manageable for the instructors? How could they assess student learning and attitudes?

They experimented with the Scrumage technique in three introductory programming classes and were able to make comparisons with multiple sections of the same course that were being taught in a more traditional way. They administered two surveys: one of student attitudes toward learning and another standard metric for measuring learning in programming courses to assess their mastery of the content.

What they found was that students did master the content better in the Scrumage sections, and this improvement was most apparent and important for those students who may have struggled in a traditional programming class. A student who might have failed or needed to withdraw from the course was able to hang on throughout the semester. Duvall, Hutchings and Spurlock attribute this to the more marked finding of their research: students in the Scrumage classes had a profoundly different attitude toward the class. These students felt to a much higher degree that even though the course was difficult, if they put in the effort then they would be able to succeed. They felt more ownership over their own learning, and this agency translated to more reflection about (and then action on) what they needed to do to succeed in the course.

Scrumage has now been adopted in multiple courses, and Duvall, Hutchings and Spurlock have done workshops that have led to the pedagogy being adopted in other disciplines and at other universities. Many instructors might be worried that the method might not be manageable for them, but all three professors agree that it’s been enjoyable to teach this way.

“It’s not nearly as terrifying as it seems like it would be — it sounds like it would just be chaos as you get hit with all these requests, and you never know what you’re going to teach,” Spurlock says. “But it’s actually a lot of fun.”

They found that Scrumage really changed the dynamic in the classroom and improves both student engagement and the relationship between professor and student. “I love having that feeling in the classroom that we’re colleagues and we’re all pushing toward the same goal,” Duvall says.

Hutchings, who chairs the computer science program at Elon, emphasizes how this SoTL project fits in with the strong emphasis on educational research within the discipline. Computer science is viewed as a challenging subject to learn, and so there is a substantial amount of research done to figure out how to teach it better. Duvall appreciates how a SoTL project can give you evidence that how you’re �þ��� is effective and makes a difference in students’ success.

“The nice thing about doing a structured CATL project was having time and support,” she says. “You don’t have to feel like a SoTL expert from the start, you can get help as you go along.”

If you’re interested in Scrumage, please contact Shannon Duvall, Duke Hutchings or Scott Spurlock. They would love to talk to you about it!

This project was supported by the CATL Scholars Program, which fosters innovative and scholarly �þ��� and learning. Echoing the Elon Teacher-Scholar statement, the CATL Scholars program is designed so that participants both engage deeply with the shared goals of our academic community and develop “the unique gifts” that each individual Scholar possesses.

Do you journal? Post to Instagram or Facebook to share about your life and make connections with others? Have you written a toast for a friend’s wedding? Regardless of the form it takes, we all do this type of writing — writing that is not obligatory, not for work or school. Writing Studies scholars call it “self-sponsored writing,” and very little research has been done on it. Assistant Professor of English Heather Lindenman is part of a team working to change that.

Lindenman is part of the , which is facilitating multi-institutional research on preparing students for the many types of writing they will do outside their coursework and after they graduate and enter the working world. Lindenman and her colleagues want to understand more about self-sponsored writing: What are people writing? What purposes does this writing serve, both for the individual and the larger world?

To find out, Lindenman’s research team surveyed over 700 people about their self-sponsored writing. In analyzing responses, they’ve found that the vast majority of people are engaging in multiple types of this kind of writing. Nearly everyone writes for the following purposes:

• To engage with others, which includes the writing people do to maintain relationships, build friendships, and connect with others;
• To establish identity, which takes many forms such as journaling, giving a speech, or writing in a publication about yourself; and
• To remember, document, and honor, which includes any type of writing that creates a record of past events.

The research team also did follow-up interviews to get more in-depth information about participants’ self-sponsored writing. Participants shared three samples of their own writing and discussed it with the researchers. These reflections allowed Lindenman and her team to dig deeper into questions about how this type of writing interacts with people’s identity and the relationship between self-sponsored writing and obligatory writing. It also provided rich examples of how writing is a pervasive and important part of people’s lives.

“When people are left to their own devices, they’re using writing to negotiate life in really meaningful ways,” Lindenman says.

For example, one participant told of how they use writing as an integral part of their recovery from substance abuse, and another spoke about writing a eulogy for a loved one. Even that long text chain with your mom or best friend that’s sitting in your phone right now — at first glance it seems unimportant, but in reality that kind of writing is an incredibly valuable way for us to manage emotions, maintain connections, and express ourselves.

Lindenman appreciates how CEL’s research seminar on Writing Beyond the University has allowed Writing Studies researchers to broaden ideas about what should be studied when we study writing. (Although other CEL teams are multi-disciplinary, Lindenman’s team members all represent the same field.) While it’s important to teach people to write for academic and work-life purposes, the role of writing in a person’s life actually encompasses much more.

“This project was about expanding a discipline’s boundaries,” she says. “The premise of this research is that writing can and should be studied from a wider lens, and it can encourage us to think more broadly and capaciously about the types of writing we can learn from.”

She also notes that without the deep collaboration with her seminar teammates, this research would not have been possible.“The reason this has been such a cool project is the people I’ve been able to work with,” Lindenman says. “None of us came into this project with the idea to study what we studied. But in combining our ideas and pushing each other, through a lot of hours of sitting in a room together and hanging out and having lunch and getting to know each other, we eventually came up with an idea that was better than anything any of us started with.”

The other members of her seminar team are Dana Driscoll from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Andrea Efthymiou from Hofstra University, Matthew Pavesich from Georgetown University and Jen Reid from Marquette University.

Through its research seminars, the Center for Engaged Learning (CEL) facilitates multi-institutional research on engaged learning topics. Participants from institutions around the world collaborate over three years, producing scholarship that shapes research and practice globally.