Keynote Speaker Dr. John Bean, Seattle University

"Faculty-Friendly Problem-Based Writing Assignments to Enhance Students’ Growth as Disciplinary Thinkers"

This interactive keynote presentation has two goals: (1) to show how short, problem-based writing assignments can accelerate students’ growth from novice to expert within a disciplinary field and (2) to show how assessment can be a faculty-friendly process that leads to productive talk about curriculum and assignment design.   Drawing on assignment examples and assessment stories from a variety of disciplines, this presentation will show how short writing assignments focused on authentic disciplinary problems can promote critical thinking and deepen students’ engagement with course concepts.  Short assignments can also be scaffolded to build knowledge and skills needed for a longer paper at the end a course or for “expert insider prose” at the end of the curriculum.  Thinking about scaffolded assignments within a course or curriculum—facilitated by faculty-owned assessment—can support more robust student learning.

Biography

John C. Bean is a professor of English at Seattle University, where he holds the title of “Consulting Professor of Writing and Assessment.”  He has an undergraduate degree from Stanford (1965) and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington (1972).  He is the author of Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2^nd edition (Jossey-Bass, 2011).  He is also the co-author of three widely-used composition textbooks—Writing Arguments, The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing, and Reading Rhetorically.  He has published numerous articles on writing and writing-across-the-curriculum as well as on literary subjects including Shakespeare and Spenser.   His current research interests focus on pedagogical strategies for teaching undergraduate research including quantitative literacy, disciplinary methods of inquiry and argument, and the problem of “transfer of learning” as students move through and across a curriculum.  A concomitant research interest is the development of institutional assessment strategies that promote productive faculty conversations about teaching and learning.  In 2001, he presented a keynote address at the first annual conference of the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands and has recently returned from the University of Bielfeld where he led workshops for faculty at German universities on incorporating writing assignments into disciplinary subjects. In 2009, he and his wife Rosalie (Kit) Bean conducted  workshops on critical thinking for BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and in 2012 for Ashesi University in Ghana.    In 2010 his article “Messy Problems and Lay Audiences:  Teaching Critical Thinking within the Finance Curriculum” (co-authored with colleagues from finance and economics) won the 2009 McGraw-Hill – Magna Publications Award for the year’s best “scholarly work on teaching and learning.”