UW-La Crosse
Professor of English and First-Year Writing Program Coordinator
Wisconsin Teaching Fellow, 2012-13
I can still remember the coffee shop I was working in as I carefully crafted my application for the WTFS Program. I was desperate for Bill Cerbin, Carnegie Scholar and director of UWL’s Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning, to be impressed with my work. In addition to making a case for my project on feedback, I expounded upon my passion for teaching, my love of learning, and how in an ideal world these two activities created my favorite kind of engaged classroom. In my 2011 “Statement of Interest,” I commented that
Like many young academics, I was drawn to the profession largely out of admiration for my undergraduate professors and a love of reading and writing. To my knowledge, this was the heart of an academic life; I never gave much thought to teaching. However, it turns out that teaching, in the end, would be my motivation to enter the academy.
This is still true today. What I thought would be my life’s work—reading and writing—are really ancillary to the true mission: teaching. As a writing program administrator (WPA) and a writing teacher, I’m wholly preoccupied with teaching, including my work in mentoring other teachers and my own identity as a teacher. Later in the same “Statement of Interest” I continue my reflection on teaching:
I feel compelled to share this history in order to convey how absolutely serious and committed I am to teaching. It’s what I most love to do and the source of most of my anxiety in my professional life. This anxiety, even as a much younger teacher, pushed [me] to find communities of others who similarly obsess about writing pedagogy. Perhaps, then, it’s no surprise that I am a Writing Program Administrator (WPA) and what time I am not spending in the classroom is spent with other teachers—theorizing, observing, and measuring the work writing instructors do in order to continually improve our practices and to ensure that we are not just bodies in classrooms, rather that we are facilitators of education and that we think about student learning, always, first.
As I reread these various components of my WTFS application, I’m surprised by my honesty and my certainty about my purpose. Of course, this was before tenure and promotion files, before a pandemic, and before the current challenges facing higher education. I’m reminded of Joan Didion’s reflection on previous versions of herself in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” As she considers these other versions, she comments that “[. . .] we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. [. . .] We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” And, of course, it’s not as if I’ve forgotten this version of myself, it’s only that, well, things have gotten more complicated. I’m grateful for this opportunity to revisit this version of me—she’s pretty likable and I could use a little of her energy and courage. And, ultimately, she’s right. Teaching is what keeps me here, keeps me interested, and keeps me wanting to understand how to do it better.
Now for the really important stuff. My SoTL research, supported by the WTFS Program in the early days, has sustained my joy in scholarship and in teaching. I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed the ongoing recursivity of studying how teaching and learning works. I’m still amazed at how these pursuits continue to (re)energize and (re)invigorate the classroom for me. And while in 2011 I admired and desperately wanted to join the ranks of other WTFS-ers, I honestly had no idea what I was in for. How could I have known what a profound effect Cyndi Kernahan and Aeron Haynie (program co-facilitators) would have on my future at UWL or that I would make lifelong colleagues and friends in the process as well?
The project I started for the WTFS focused on feedback and was the result of years of frustration with not understanding how students were taking up my feedback on their writing and/or if they were applying it to future writing projects. As a writing instructor and a WPA, feedback is the subject of endless conversations about labor, pedagogy, and student learning. It is a subject that has preoccupied the field of writing studies in the scholarly contexts of revision, the writing process, and rhetorical genre studies. My early-days SoTL project was an attempt to address a gap in the scholarship on the use of embedded verbal feedback versus more traditional in-text or summative feedback on student writing. My hope was that I might be able to learn a bit about how students use feedback and that I might also learn a bit more about myself and my feedback habits. While I ultimately decided not to pursue this initial project on feedback, the training I received on using quantitative and qualitative research methods were invaluable. My confidence as an early-career researcher was boosted immeasurably and set me up for the SoTL projects to follow. Even more importantly, the training I received during my year with the WTFS piqued an interest in learning more about research methods in the classroom and in viewing my classroom as a legitimate site of research.
After the 2012-2013 academic year and my time with the WTFS came to an end, I decided to apply to the Dartmouth Summer Seminar for Writing Research. Without hesitation, both the WTFS and the Dartmouth experiences filled a gap that I didn’t really know existed in my graduate education. As a result, I have become an evangelist for undergraduate research on my campus and in the writing and rhetoric emphasis of our English major. On the heels of these experiences, I made a hard pitch in my department for a junior-level course in writing research methodologies for our writing and rhetoric emphasis majors. Fortunately, I was successful and this course, in an interesting twist, is now the class I wish I had had as an undergraduate (or even graduate!) student.
However, amid these curricular revisions, my own SoTL work took a backseat. In a way, I think it was just waiting for the right time to resurface. In 2016, UWL joined the American Association of State Colleges and Universities program “Re-imagining the First Year” (RFY), a grant-supported national project targeting “low income, first generation, and students of color,” for whom the first year of college can make a significant difference in their retention and success. UWL’s participation in RFY coincided with plans for revising our First-Year Writing Program (FYWP) and offered me and two other colleagues the opportunity to pilot the mainstreaming of a small number of students from a non-credit bearing basic-writing course to a credit-bearing, corequisite support course. Because of my training in SoTL, I immediately saw this pilot as an opportunity for a SoTL project. The results of this pilot course are still being felt in our FYWP today, and it led to my first SoTL publication in 2019 in the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
This was only just the beginning though. After the RFY project, I decided to return to my scholarship on feedback. This time I reconceived my project as a project on failure and feedback. Using a mixed-methods approached, I designed a research project that sought to better understand how and why faculty provide feedback on student writing and what role student failure (in supported and low-stakes ways) might play in this process. This project resulted in a chapter in Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What it Means to Fail (2020).
At the same time, I was also working on a different SoTL project with colleagues from my WTFS cohort (Katia Levintova, Val Barske, and Val Pilmaier). We suspected that while SoTL was increasingly accepted as legitimate research on our campuses, it still carried some baggage—namely, that the work was still often considered less valuable than other forms of research and that this appraisal of SoTL work likely fell along gender lines. To test these assumptions, we created a multi-institutional study analyzing professional and workplace expectations attached to SoTL while also taking a hard look at potential gender differences in scholars doing SoTL research. As a result of this SoTL project, we discovered that “women are more aware of the field of SoTL, more active in SoTL, view it as a legitimate form of scholarship, and observe other women participating in it.” Additionally, we argue that “it is incumbent upon our institutions, who benefit from the labor of women, to amplify and promote the value of their labor, including SoTL work.” The result of this project was a chapter in the edited collection, Academic Labor Beyond the College Classroom: Working for Our Values (2019). We also shared the results of our study at the Women’s Studies Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Without a doubt, at the heart SoTL work is a teaching and research mindset. It’s about opportunity and curiosity, but it’s also about treating the thing we love so much with the time and attention it justly deserves. The WTFS Program is the genesis of so much of what I’m still exploring in my classes and in our FYWP. In fact, we’ve just finished revising (again!) the same course we revised back in 2016 for the RFY project. And, as before, we’re using SoTL as our guide as we gather and analyze data for both a presentation at a national conference and a journal article submission. No other part of my research agenda has been as fruitful and pleasurable as my SoTL work and I can’t imagine that ever changing. I hope that in 10 years, when I’m yet another version of myself, I return to this reflection and still feel that nagging sense of purpose and the itch to know more about these very hard, but very worthwhile things we do in the classroom.
Biography:
Darci Thoune is professor of English and First-Year Writing Program Coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse where she teaches first-year writing and a range of upper-level writing courses in the writing and rhetoric emphasis of the English major. She has published in several edited collections and in various composition and rhetoric journals, including Composition Studies, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Across the Disciplines, WPA: Writing Program Administration, College English, and Community Literacy Journal. She also works in the field of fat studies and has edited a special edition of Fat Studies: An International Journal and has a chapter in The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies.
Selected SoTL Publications and Presentations:
Journal Articles
Heaser, Sara and Darci L. Thoune. (2020). “Designing a Corequisite First-Year Writing Course with Student Retention in Mind.” Composition Studies 48.2. 105–115. https://compositionstudiesjournal.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/heaser-thoune.pdf
Crank, Virginia, Sara Heaser, and Darci L. Thoune. (2019). “Re-Imagining the First Year as Catalyst for First-Year Writing Program Curricular Change.” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.14434/josotl.v19i1.26780
Book Chapters
Thoune, Darci L. (2020) “Failure Potential: Using Failure as Feedback.” Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What it Means to Fail. Eds. Laura Micciche and Allison Carr. Peter Lang Press.
Barske, Valerie, Katia Levintova, Valerie Murrenus Pilmaier, and Darci L. Thoune. (2019). “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Gendered Division of Labor on Our Campuses: Implications and Recommendations for Personnel Decisions.” Academic Labor beyond the Classroom: Working for our Values, Eds. Holly Hassell and Kirsti Cole. Routledge.
Workshops
Thoune, D., Heaser, S., Crank. V. “‘Just’ Feedback.” Writing Innovation Symposium. Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, 30-31 Jan. 2020.
Crank, V., Heaser, S., Thoune, D. Marquette Writing Innovation Symposium, “Integrating ‘Re-imagining the First-year’ Principles to Innovate First-year Writing Program Curriculum,” Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI. 2 February 2018.
Conference Presentations
Heaser, S., Thoune, D., Crank, V. “Wrestling the Stack: Alternative Approaches for Responding to Student Writing.” OPID Spring Conference on Teaching and Learning, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. 12 April, 2019.
Barske, V., Levintova, K., Murrenus Pilmaier, V, and Thoune, D. “SoTL and Gendered Division of Labor on Our Campuses: A Case for More Equity and Change in Professional Values.” Women’s and Gender Studies Conference and 4W Summit on Women, Gender, and Wellbeing. University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. 13 April, 2019.
Thoune, Darci L. “Using ‘Re-Imagining the First Year’ to Innovate First-Year Writing Program Curriculum.” Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference, Sacramento, CA. 27 July 2018.
Thoune, Darci L. “Failure as Feedback: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Feedback Across the Disciplines,” Conference on College Composition and Communication, Portland, OR. 17 March 2017.
Heaser, S., Crank, V., Thoune, D. “Roundtable: First-Year and Basic Writing: Multiple Measures Placement and Co-Requisite Course Development,” UW System Conference on Teaching and Learning, University of Wisconsin System, La Crosse, WI. 20 April 2017.