Dr. Jennifer Campbell
University Writing Program
Anderson Academic Commons 381B
University of Denver
jennifer.campbell@du.edu
303-871-7698

3 December 2018

Dear Reviewers and Administrators,

I submit this letter and electronic portfolio to apply for promotion to Teaching Professor. I joined DU’s faculty in 2006 as a founding member of the University Writing Program. Since then, I have made consistent, positive contributions in teaching, service, and research. I have earned strong annual reviews, with merit increases every year and a number of bonuses. I was selected to serve as the first Assistant Director for First-Year Writing from 2012–2015. Since then, I have diversified my service and scholarship. Faculty in the Writing Program are evaluated based on the division of labor in our appointments—60% teaching, 30% service, 10% scholarship—and how our work meets a selection of specific criteria for each category.  I believe my contributions from 2014 – 2018 fully meet or exceed expectations and demonstrate my ongoing passion for this work.

Preparing my promotion portfolio has been a valuable opportunity to reflect on my 12 years at DU and 20 years teaching college writing. Looking over my career, themes emerge around growth and adaptation, nurturing and tending, cultivating relationships, and a consistent desire “to be of use”—calling to mind the Marge Piercy poem that nicely captures my philosophy and how my academic work resembles gardening or throwing clay. My teaching, service, and scholarship favor the practical and I have committed myself fully to the success of my students, the program, and the university through pragmatic, hands-on activity in several areas. We have high expectations and limited time, so I’ve learned to develop courses and projects that meet multiple goals at once. In my home garden, I use companion planting; certain vegetables benefit from being planted next to certain others, making both more productive. Similarly, you will see a lot of cross-pollination and overlap between my teaching, service, and scholarship. I have adapted my work in all three areas in response to changing needs in my classes, in the program, and in the world around us. I’ve applied new concepts and activities gained through ongoing professional development and conversations with colleagues across categories as well. The DU Writing Program offers fertile soil for this kind of synthesis. My promotion portfolio presents my teaching, service, and scholarship separately, in more detail, and organized by evaluation criteria. Here, I would like to trace a couple of clusters of activity that illustrate how different aspects of my work have informed one another in the last four years.

One thing that has become increasingly important to me over the years is a commitment to fostering positive approaches to writing and promoting student well-being. In the spring of 2013, WRIT 1733 student Amanda Pennington asked if she could consider people with mental illnesses a subculture because she really wanted to study stigma and treatment. I adjusted the assignments to make it work and she ran with it; I still use her IMRAD report as an example for other students. The following year, Amanda continued her research into mental health and co-founded MIND, a student organization devoted to these issues. She worked with the Health and Counseling Center to coordinate DU’s first Mental Health Week and invited me to serve on a panel of students and faculty managing mental illness in academia. I spoke about how writing can help people deal with symptoms and solve problems. Amanda also conducted interviews with students and faculty to create a video for the event, and I agreed to participate. The edited video is part of the Discover DU orientation course for all new students, and I’m pleased to be part of this initiative.  At the close of Mental Health Week in spring 2014, Amanda emailed, “Thank you for doing this--you’ve been very inspiring to me through this whole process, and your encouragement during WRIT 1733 and beyond has been critical to making all of this happen. Your participation in this will continue to make a world of difference in our university’s perceptions of mental health!” I have continued to participate in mental health and wellness events sponsored by student groups and the Faculty Senate, and I do what I can to encourage more sustainable and mindful practices for students and colleagues alike.

After conducting  more research and comparing notes with FSEM and WRIT faculty about increasing mental illness among college students, I decided to redesign my WRIT xx33 classes to teach research writing about topics related to mental health and “The Pursuit of Happiness.” This is a rich field of study that employs text-based, qualitative, and quantitative methods and allows students plenty of room for choice and work that can improve their lives. As I designed the course, I was obviously focused first on meeting course goals, but I also considered how I could best meet those goals while employing principles of positive psychology to promote positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. I describe how a specific interview project does this in my 2016 Composition Forum article “Talking about Happiness: Supporting Mental Health through Interview Research." I shared a different unit from the course as part of an AEPL conference panel that I also chaired: “Beyond Writing Anxiety: Supporting Student Well-being in Research Writing Classes.” Conveniently, Richard Colby visited my WRIT 1133 class on an important day for this unit and described in his observation letter how I layered content and research skills. A comparison of WRIT 1133 syllabi from 2018 and 2014 demonstrates how I have continued to refine the course design and materials: presenting the class and content from the start in positive terms that emphasize students’ engagement, agency, and benefit; tweaking content and arrangement based on student feedback; and completely revising my approach to assessment as a way to reduce stress and foster a more positive learning and writing environment.

Based on the success of these approaches in WRIT 1133, I have applied several to WRIT 1122 as well. Beyond the positive effects on attitudes toward writing, cultivating these environments and relationships can be an important part of the first-year or transfer experience. As I became more involved in FSEM design and assessment, the FSEM/ASEM ePortfolio Initiative, and research on different student populations, I learned that studies support my philosophy and several of our field’s common pedagogical practices. For example, positive relationships with professors who 1) care about the student, 2) get them excited about learning, and 3) encourage them to pursue their goals and dreams are three of the “Big Six Experiences Linked to Preparedness for Life Outside of College.” These are the same relationships that improve retention and, more importantly, students’ overall well-being and ability to succeed. My student-centered course designs and ethic of care support high expectations and a focus on improvement. While students consistently mention one-on-one attention and caring in my course evaluations, in recent classes, I have also seen higher ratings for intellectual challenge and how the course enhances writing and critical thinking skills. My work also addresses several AACU High Impact Practices, such as first-year seminars, writing-intensive classes, collaborative work, undergraduate research, and ePortfolios.

Curiosity about diverse students’ relationship to the writing sequence and orientation to DU prompted another branch of inquiry and practice. When I was Assistant Director, I realized that the portfolios for our annual assessment had been sampled only from ‘on-track’ sections. We had little idea of how students were performing in and experiencing ‘off-track’ classes beyond the anecdotal, but we knew they consisted of transfer students, international students, students who had failed before, and those who are ahead of the game—all of whom need support of different kinds. April Chapman-Ludwig had taught many off-track sections and shared my interest in researching these sections and students. In 2015, we were awarded a Faculty Research Fund Grant for $2,610 to support mixed-method research about student and faculty experiences with off-track classes. We participated in the Qualitative Research Forum of the Conference on College Composition and Communication to share and develop our plans. We conducted interviews and focus groups, conducted surveys for two years, and hired colleagues to score on- and off-track portfolios for comparison. I presented quantitative findings at the Writing Futures Symposium in 2017, and our work served as a springboard for Chapman-Ludwig and Rob Gilmor’s current transfer class pilot and grant-funded research, for which I will be conducting interviews and focus groups.

I have also already applied some findings to my course designs. Although our off-track research data was drawn from WRIT 1133 classes, I applied insights to WRIT 1122 as well. For example, to better accommodate diverse students, I added more flexibility in assignments to allow them to meet their rhetorical goals using the most appropriate genre and medium. An assessment system focused on research and writing challenges and improvement allows me to meet both struggling international students and advanced native writers where they are and set goals based on zones of proximal development. At the same time, in keeping with universal design principles, I think about how policies and approaches that particularly help underserved populations are likely to be helpful to all students and will certainly do no harm. For example, our off-track research revealed that many students who didn’t go through the ‘normal’ Discoveries orientation wanted more help navigating DU and building community, so I added an assignment for my fall 2018 WRIT 1122 sections that required each student to learn how to do something at DU or an ‘adulting’ skill that all students need and then write an instructional blog article to teach their classmates. This assignment meets multiple goals, as students hone clear and engaging expository writing and source integration skills while meeting personal needs and helping others in their learning community. Throughout WRIT xx22, I have woven together rhetorical theories, genres, and purposes to cover a lot of ground through integrated units. Building on the classical tradition, we discuss ethos, logos, and pathos and employ these appeals in epideictic, forensic, and deliberative rhetoric. These concepts coincide with personal, professional, academic, and civic writing in multiple genres for specific audiences. Theories, genres, and fields of rhetorical activity reinforce one another as we consistently return to the students’ own needs and goals, in our classes and beyond.

My promotion portfolio demonstrates my care in designing practical assignments as part of well-structured classes that meet the needs of a program I have nurtured from the start; how I make the most of resources by blending teaching, service, and scholarship in almost everything I do; and my commitment to the mission of the program and university. I believe in what I do, and I hope to continue this work at DU until I retire. I truly appreciate your time and care in reviewing my dossier, and I hope you will agree that my efforts meet all criteria for promotion to Teaching Professor.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Campbell