Across the Disciplines

This article explores academic and industry perspectives on the use of dialect, slang, and historical language in screenwriting. It offers a chronological overview of major screenwriting manuals’ treatment of dialect and slang (or lack thereof) 1946-2020. It then presents survey data of 53 currently-practicing screenwriters’ views on working with dialect and historical language in scripts, as well as their sense of possible changes in the industry regarding attitudes towards diverse voice representation on the page. It concludes with examples from a teaching sequence that illustrates strategies for writing with dialect, researching it, and ethically considering its usage in scripts. Situating this work as an important intervention in historical English language studies as well as writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines, the article advocates for a focus on teaching concrete, actionable steps that align academic practices with industry norms. It also encourages students to critically engage with those practices and norms.

Designing then implementing ePortfolios as a High Impact Practice (HIP) (Watson et al., 2016) across an academic program in kinesiology presents many opportunities and challenges. The authors document their six-year journey and ensuing lessons along the way, as they strive to uncover and enact best practices for department-wide implementation. After a first attempt implementing the ePortfolio when they realized their efforts fell short, this faculty team immersed themselves in comprehensive professional development and worked together with students to recast how each knew and understood an ePortfolio. To achieve the newly crafted outcomes of an ePortfolio project, the authors found that promoting student voice and choice is essential to fostering student engagement and inclusivity. Informed by findings of a mixed methods study, the faculty team hopes to provide a meaningful perspective that supports faculty exploration within ePortfolios and offer guidance to be sure students are partners in this journey.

This essay explores how students' misconceptions about writing might be transformed into accurate threshold concepts of writing through disciplinary writing experiences. Through an activity analysis of a geology major and students' writing in that program, I demonstrate that these students' conceptions of writing changed through their legitimate peripheral participation in geological activity. Students' learning in the major situated writing within the activity of professional geological communities, and they recognized both how writing constructs and circulates knowledge within their discipline and their need for writing to enable participation in those communities. Their example suggests that WID programs attend to conceptual change and legitimate peripheral participation as essential mechanisms for creating transformative writing experiences that enable student learning.