16 The Praxis of Innovation

in Writing Programs

Andy Frazee and Rebecca E. Burnett

Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract: This chapter describes ways our Georgia Tech

Writing and Communication Program fosters innovation and
argues that any writing, writing-across-the-curriculum, or
English-across-the-curriculum program can nurture similar
innovation appropriate for their local institutions and commu-
nities. We argue that faculty members who practice innovation
transform themselves as well as their environment, benefiting
students and, often, their community partners. We begin by
presenting background information about our program; we
then argue that our two-part programmatic mission—one part
focusing largely on our responsibility to faculty and another
part on our responsibility to students—creates a space for inno-
vation. We then discuss five characteristics of faculty-centered
professional development: professional culture, working condi-
tions, expertise, long-term careers, and an exploratory mindset.
The penultimate section discusses five characteristics of teach-
ing and learning: rhetoric, process, multimodality, collaboration,
and assessment. The chapter concludes by posing questions for
other programs considering ways to stimulate innovation.
Keywords: educational innovation, writing programs, profes-
sional development, teaching and learning, rhetoric
In Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program, we value innova-
tion. Our students innovate in their work in our first-year composition, busi-
ness and technical communication, and research classes. Our faculty innovate
in their teaching, scholarship, service, and professional development. And our
program innovates in the ways our curriculum, pedagogies, and professional
development adapt to a changing world. Innovation is important because it
provides intellectual excitement and practical value and because it is often
transferable “across different disciplinary areas, time periods, and cultures”
(Tierney & Lanford, 2016, p. 1), the very thing we want our students to do
with their learning and our faculty to do with their scholarship and pedagogy.
What does this innovation look like? On a typical day, in our com-
position courses, students might build optical toys—kaleidoscopes or zoe-

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/INT-B.2021.1220.2.16 293

Frazee and Burnett

tropes—to understand media archaeology or develop graphic novels that

address mental health issues for community clients. In our upper-level
business and technical communication courses, students might create suites
of workplace artifacts (e.g., memoranda of understanding (MOUs), white
papers, websites, or podcasts). In creating these workplace artifacts, students
might be involved with a community-based project to help a neighborhood
reduce problems with easy access to healthy food for local residents. Or stu-
dents might be involved with a campus-based project to create and design
poetry machines to be used in public spaces across campus. In hallways and
offices, faculty members discuss classroom activities, their aggressive schol-
arly agendas, and their service and outreach work. Faculty members plan
events with speakers such as the University of California-Berkeley linguist
who invented Klingon or the Cisco co-founder who supports Jane Austen
scholarship. Or they plan curricular innovations—like a Wikipedia Edit-
a-Thon—or write grant proposals to be submitted to government agencies.
And beyond their classrooms and programmatic work, they prepare for a
diverse array of careers, from tenure-track faculty members to user experi-
ence analysts at tech companies.
In the following case, we describe ways our program fosters innova-
tion and argue that any writing, writing-across-the-curriculum, or En-
glish-across-the-curriculum program can nurture similar innovation appro-
priate for their local institutions and communities. We begin by presenting
background information about our program; we then make our argument
about the ways our two-part programmatic mission creates a space for inno-
vation. Then we discuss five characteristics of faculty-centered professional
development: professional culture, working conditions, expertise, long-term
careers, and an exploratory mindset. In our penultimate section, we discuss
five characteristics of teaching and learning: rhetoric, process, multimodality,
collaboration, and assessment. We conclude by posing questions for other
programs considering ways to stimulate innovation.

Background
Our Writing and Communication Program (WCP) serves 5,000-6,000 un-
dergraduates in approximately 250 class sections per year in courses including
learning support, first-year multimodal composition, multimodal business
and technical communication, and proposal and thesis writing. WCP has
40 faculty (36 limited-term Brittain Postdoctoral Fellows and four lecturers
and/or visiting lecturers, all with Ph.D.s) and a robust leadership team that
encourages innovation.

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Faculty design courses to address our programmatic outcomes—some set

by the State of Georgia Board of Regents and the rest determined by our
program. Our outcomes are consistent, our standards are high, our criteria for
assessing student work are common across all courses, and faculty determine
their course themes based on disciplinary expertise. Our WCP faculty arrive
with strong disciplinary knowledge and teaching experience, and they look
forward to expanding their pedagogical repertoire.
We encourage faculty to use campus and community resources, which
help students understand that multimodal communication extends beyond
the classroom. The following are representative examples of our first-year
multimodal composition projects:
• Course theme: social justice. Students read U.S. Representative John
Lewis’ (2013) graphic novel March and then hosted Representative
Lewis for a Q&A session before creating their own comics.
• Course theme: 18th-19th century literature. Students participated in a
workshop in the institute’s Paper Museum, learning about broadsides
(public announcements common in the period) by making rag paper
and learning about changes in literacy practices as they prepared to
create their own public broadsides.
• Course theme: environmental activism. Students met with representa-
tives from a local nature preserve, who brought area animals (including
opossums, falcons, owls, and snakes) whose habitats are stressed by
encroaching urban infrastructure.
• Course theme: Shakespeare. Students partnered with a class of incar-
cerated men studying the same plays, each group reading and respond-
ing to the other’s critical essays.
Creating projects such as these requires a professional and pedagogical
culture of innovation—one that recognizes and uses local resources and that
encourages pushing disciplinary boundaries.

Creating a Space for Innovation

In defining innovation, we agree with Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Kitalong,
and Dickie Selfe (2004) that “to innovate means to introduce a new idea or
to reintroduce an old idea, perhaps in a new way or context” and that “an
innovative approach is one that introduces, rearticulates, or creatively juxta-
poses theories or practices, especially those not currently or commonly used
within” a particular context (p. 5). Building on this definition’s emphasis on
ideas and context, we see innovation as rhetorical, attending and adapting

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to particular rhetorical situations, each with its own exigencies, affordances,

technologies, and available means of persuasion. For us, potentially innovative
situations include (but are not limited to) the classroom; the program, unit,
or institution; the discipline; and the local and global communities—as well
as the myriad micro-situations that constitute these, such as individual dis-
cussions with students, committee meetings, hallway chats with other faculty,
and conferences. We support the view that faculty members who innovate
transform themselves as well as their environment, benefiting students and,
often, their community partners (see Boden, 2019).
Figure 16.1 illustrates that our faculty begin with commonly accepted means
of persuasion—that is, knowledge of core elements for teaching writing, such
as rhetorical situation, process, and conventional genre. They begin with what
they know—their disciplinary body of knowledge and their familiarity with
the foundations of rhetoric and process. As they move through our program,
they learn about additional means of persuasion—what for them become ped-
agogical and curricular innovations, expanding their knowledge and experi-
ence. We encourage and support their curiosity about ways to take advantage
of our culture, expectations, and resources. Their curiosity fuels innovation
that, as Figure 16.1 shows, moves beyond the boundaries of their entry-level
status quo to include attention to multimodality and digital pedagogy.

Figure 16.1. Expanding the available means of persuasion

in the writing and communication curriculum.

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We create a space for innovation through our two-part mission (Figure

16.2), with one part focusing largely on our responsibility to faculty and an-
other part on our responsibility to students. The two parts of our mission
support each other synergistically to encourage innovation.
Programmatically, we cultivate and model the interaction between the
two parts of our mission to encourage our faculty to push the boundaries of
their thinking and doing, prompting them to test, explore, and investigate
alternatives. We want faculty to be confident and brave about recognizing
the means available to them and taking risks in trying those means. In our
program, we are not just preparing students to be global leaders; we are also
preparing and supporting our faculty who will themselves be leaders.

Figure 16.2. Two-part mission of our Writing and Communication Program.

Faculty-Centered Professional Development

As indicated in our mission statement, our program emphasizes faculty-cen-
tered professional development in order to equip, permit, and encourage faculty
to innovate. This development is grounded in five areas: professional culture,
academic working conditions, existing and emerging expertise, long-term ca-
reers, and exploratory mindset. Within each section below, we discuss pro-
fessional development practices. While many could certainly benefit from
funding, they primarily require time, effort, and a long-term commitment to
creating a supportive professional culture. That these actions do not necessari-
ly require extensive funding is important; it means that they are adaptable and
usable in a broad number of institutions that have limited financial resources.

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The following extended examples illustrate ways two faculty members

developed over their time in our program. These examples highlight ways
in which professional development opportunities and teaching and learning
opportunities work together to spark innovation.
In the first example, a faculty member expanded her perspective about
her career path, shifting from a tenure-track academic career to an industry
career. The faculty member (a Brittain Fellow with a Ph.D. in media studies)
used her experience and expertise along with opportunities and support avail-
able in our program to secure a position as a user experience (UX) researcher,
first for a national company dealing with data analysis and later with a com-
pany engaged in market research. Despite success in teaching and publishing,
the faculty member decided she did not want to continue as an academic.
She explored new career paths, developed new competencies, and rebranded
herself in language familiar to the corporate workplace:
• The Brittain Fellow met with WCP leadership to discuss resources
about using her Ph.D. experience and expertise for careers outside the
academy. She received assurance that seeking an alternative career was
a responsible decision and then engaged in conversations during pro-
fessional development meetings to explore career alternatives.
• WCP leadership supported the Brittain Fellow in considering ways to
re-label her skills; for example, her educator role as “classroom facili-
tator” who manages 15 teams in three classes, working on 15 different
projects, is akin to the workplace role of “project manager” responsible
for personnel, schedule, task assignment, resource allocation, problem
resolution, assessment, and so on.
• The Brittain Fellow applied for workplace internships and training
sessions that coordinated with her teaching and other professional re-
sponsibilities and attended workplace meetups with UX professionals
to increase her network.
• WCP leadership and the Brittain Fellow coordinated a plan to of-
fer digital materials, individual consultations, and small-group career
transition workshops for other Brittain Fellows.
In the second example, a faculty member used her experience, expertise,
and opportunities available in our program to secure a tenure-track assistant
professor of technical communication position at a public university in the
eastern United States. The faculty member (a Brittain Fellow with a Ph.D.
in technical communication) took advantage of programmatic opportunities
to reinforce her existing professional competencies and to develop new ones:
• The Brittain Fellow had the opportunity to design and teach linked

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courses, one connecting an upper-level technical communication

course with a first-year multimodal composition course and another
connecting upper-level technical communication courses with up-
per-level computer science courses.
• The Brittain Fellow had the opportunity to coordinate WCP’s linked
technical communication–computer science capstone courses, leading
orientation and new faculty development. As coordinator, she collab-
orated with faculty in revising the curriculum for this course sequence.
• WCP leadership facilitated a part-time consulting position for the
Brittain Fellow with the university’s Office of Information Technolo-
gy to work on campus-wide technical documents, videos, and a web-
site introducing a new learning management system.
• The Brittain Fellow generated conventional academic work—serving
as a principal researcher on a project funded by a national professional
organization, creating a podcast to highlight her research, co-author-
ing articles for peer-reviewed journals, and presenting and co-present-
ing at national conferences.
As these opportunities show, our program is committed to supporting fac-
ulty in a professional culture—with positive working conditions, targeted de-
velopment of teaching and scholarly expertise, long-term career guidance, and
an exploratory, creative approach to work. These opportunities, in combination
with the teaching and learning practices discussed below, enable faculty to in-
novate in their teaching, research, service, community outreach, and careers.

Development of Professional Culture

For us, developing a professional culture involves developing the professional
identities of individual faculty as well as the collective identity of our pro-
grammatic community. Creating and maintaining a professional culture pro-
vides a basis for faculty development and collegial support for innovation. For
innovation to be possible, faculty should understand the status quo and the
leading edge in the disciplines in which they are teaching and creating; they
should understand the nature of institutional, programmatic, and community
cultures; and they should feel acknowledged and accepted by the local com-
munity as having expert knowledge and experience. Attending to profession-
al identity results in discernible benefits:
• Faculty who are respected, supported, and recognized feel more confi-
dent in their ability to innovate pedagogically.
• Faculty who are knowledgeable about institutional processes and poli-

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tics are better able to function within the institution and use its resources
to aid student learning and their own professional development.
• Faculty who are a part of a community have a range of people and
resources to turn to when developing new pedagogical opportunities
or facing pedagogical challenges.
• Faculty who have opportunities for curriculum development, policy
development, programmatic assessment, and other forms of program-
matic decision-making are more likely to be motivated to innovate in
their classrooms and to build curriculum/programs.
The ways teachers feel about and identify themselves are critical to their pro-
fessional success. These benefits are supported by “psychological processes . . .
involved in the development of a teacher identity: a sense of appreciation, a sense
of connectedness, a sense of competence, a sense of commitment, and imagining
a future career trajectory” (van Lankveld et al., 2017, p. 325). Our program’s atten-
tion to professional culture reinforces these research-based conclusions.

Development of Academic Working Conditions

Experience has taught us that faculty input about the conditions in which
they work is foundational to supporting faculty, student, and programmatic
innovation. This input includes topics such as the design of classrooms, the
availability of office space and technology, and equitable pay and benefits.
This input ensures that faculty expertise in teaching and research is reflected
in the educational environment and that faculty have input in selecting the
resources they need to teach, research, and innovate. Attending to working
conditions—and involving faculty in efforts to improve their working condi-
tions—results in discernible benefits:
• Faculty who are well-supported with adequate space, technology, and
other material conditions are likely to be more creative and innovative
in their pedagogy.
• Faculty often know about successful teaching practices that can influ-
ence the design of learning environments and resources.
• Faculty can design courses that make innovative use of spaces and re-
sources.
• Faculty are aware—through transparent, formative evaluation and
feedback—of areas for growth and experimentation in their teaching.
Access to and support for digital technology is one aspect of working
conditions we prioritize. While writing and communication can be taught
with traditional technologies (e.g., paper and pencils), global communities

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and workplaces expect college graduates to demonstrate competence in using

digital technology. Likewise, colleges and universities in the US increasingly
expect faculty to use and teach digital technology. Samantha Adams Becker
and her colleagues (2018) summarize trends, challenges, and developments
in educational technology that “are likely to impact teaching, learning, and
creative inquiry in higher education” (p. 2). One of the long-term trends they
identify is “advancing cultures of innovation” (p. 2). We agree with Becker
and her colleagues that organizations need to “remove barriers that limit
the development of new ideas” (p. 8). For us, that means making sure that
faculty have access to and training in digital technology and that they have
good working conditions (e.g., safe, clean, and well-equipped workspaces and
classrooms; reasonable workloads and class sizes; adequate compensation; and
access to professional and pedagogical resources). Good working conditions
also include encouragement and support for engaging in innovative activities.

Development of Existing and Emerging Expertise

We value and support both faculty members’ previous experience and their
existing disciplinary expertise in a range of areas (e.g., digital humanities,
multimodal composition, rhetoric, business and technical communication).
We also support their emerging expertise and provide mentorship and career
guidance. For example, we provide opportunities for them to innovate at the
intersection of scholarship and teaching. Encouraging faculty to extend their
own interests and expertise results in discernible benefits:
• Faculty members have intellectual interests that provide a rich site for
innovation, pushing them to see the synergy between their scholarship
and their pedagogy.
• Faculty members develop expertise that enables them to create cours-
es that push students to think and communicate about complex con-
cepts and difficult questions and to pose innovative solutions to world
problems.
• Faculty members’ broad, interdisciplinary perspectives (especially at a
STEM university) reinforce their credibility as scholars and their au-
thority in the classroom.
• Faculty members have expertise as writers, speakers, designers, and
collaborators that enables them to create innovative strategies in a va-
riety of modes and media.
In thinking about expertise, we agree with Elizabeth Wardle and J. Blake
Scott’s (2015) argument about the necessity for faculty to have (following Col-

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lins and Evans, 2007) at least “interactional expertise.” This form of expertise
engages disciplinary knowledge and conversations related to teaching writing
courses—even as those faculty may not have a degree, or even coursework,
within the relevant domains (e.g., rhetoric and composition, technical com-
munication, writing center studies). Finally, we believe in the importance of
supporting faculty in developing expertise outside of either their disciplinary
expertise or their pedagogical expertise—expertise that, as we discuss in the
next section, supports their long-term career plans.

Development of Long-Term Careers

We believe in supporting faculty members in their search for stable, fair, long-
term employment, even in the face of a job market in the United States that has
more qualified professionals than available positions. This approach reinforc-
es foundational practices of developing a professional culture and productive
working conditions. It also supports faculty members in using their intellectual
curiosity to expand their interests and expertise in order to innovate. Support-
ing faculty in their long-term career plans results in discernible benefits:
• Faculty members create a professional narrative that explains the ways
in which their divergent and varied interests signal an innovative ca-
reer path.
• Faculty members identify aspects of their graduate training that apply
to a broad array of professional possibilities in and outside the academy.
• Faculty members see their long-term career trajectory as one that en-
ables them to be change agents—that is, disciplinary innovators who
influence the direction not only of students but also of disciplines, or-
ganizations, and institutions.
• Faculty members are encouraged to learn new technologies and other
skills applicable to a range of career paths.
Long-term career development for faculty members involves attention both
to scholarship and to pedagogy. We believe a number of strategies identified by
Laura F. Huenneke and her colleagues (2017) as ways to increase research capac-
ity of faculty members throughout their careers apply equally well to long-term
career development. We have found that four of the strategies they described
are especially fruitful: ongoing attention to professional development and ca-
reer planning, involving faculty in programmatic and institutional culture and
operations, facilitating opportunities through partnerships or collaborations
with other units, and providing early support for their workable innovations
(particularly in teaching, scholarship, service, and professional development).

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Development of an Exploratory Mindset

We encourage exploration, experimentation, and creativity in thinking about
teaching, scholarship, service, community and professional involvement, and
professional development. We emphasize bravery, taking risks, and a growth
mindset. Following from D. E. Berlyne’s classic studies (1950, 1960, 1966), we
consider an exploratory mindset as based on curiosity and the search for nov-
elty. An exploratory mindset aligns strongly with a rhetorical understanding
of innovation as leveraging novel means of persuasion within complex situa-
tions—like the classroom or the academic job market. Supporting faculty in
developing an exploratory mindset results in discernible benefits:
• Faculty members work in a culture of exploration, experimentation,
and creativity that acknowledges and supports innovation (e.g., awards
for innovative pedagogy, newsletter stories about innovative research
or service).
• Faculty members work in a culture that provides a safety net for ex-
perimentation.
• Faculty members are provided with peer and programmatic examples
on which to build.
• Faculty members are provided resources for experimentation (e.g., pro-
fessional encouragement, maker spaces, and networking suggestions).
An exploratory mindset encourages educators to update their competen-
cies and strategies as well as re-think their pedagogical paradigms so they
can envision policy changes, design transnational frameworks, tackle digital
revolutions, and engage in self-assessment—all as part of their transformative
powers (Caena & Redecker, 2019). In our program, an exploratory mindset
forms the basis for pedagogical innovation as faculty experiment with new
modes of teaching and learning.

Teaching and Learning for Students.

As our professional development mission equips and supports faculty for in-
novation, our student-centered teaching and learning mission provides the
concepts, tools, and practices that instantiate innovation in the classroom and
elsewhere. Scholars investigating innovation are clear that diversity, intrinsic
motivation, and autonomy “almost invariably impact innovation in a positive
manner” (Tierney & Lanford, 2016, p. 23). We encourage these factors so fac-
ulty can innovate through rhetoric, process, multimodality, collaboration, and
assessment—the core concepts of our teaching and learning mission.

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The following extended example about the Ivan Allen Digital Archive
highlights ways in which professional development opportunities as well as
teaching and learning opportunities work together to spark innovation. Our
institution’s cultural history features social justice, environmental sustainabil-
ity, and urban development appropriate for our work with this archive.
• As part of a university grant, some of our faculty helped digitize the
Ivan Allen Digital Archive, a collection of mayoral documents from
the period Ivan Allen Jr. was mayor of the city of Atlanta (1962 to
1970), an extraordinarily contentious period of racial tension and urban
development in the United States.
• As part of another university grant, some of our faculty used the Ivan
Allen Digital Archive to develop innovative assignments for under-
graduate classes, applicable to many course themes (from social justice
to urban transit, from architecture to sports, from unemployment to
white flight) and available to all our program’s faculty.
• Our students can work with documents in the Ivan Allen Digital Ar-
chive (including letters, memos, city committee reports, photos, and
newspaper articles), creating multimodal projects about issues related
to social justice, environmental sustainability, and urban development.
Students use archival materials from the city where they are studying
to connect them to current issues.
• The students’ innovative archival projects have been featured at public
exhibitions on campus; photos and videos of their work have been
featured on our program’s website and on social media.
• As part of their scholarly productivity, our faculty use their pedagog-
ical experiences to prepare and deliver professional conference pre-
sentations and to write articles for publication. The presentations and
publications draw attention to historical documents with current so-
ciopolitical concerns.
As this extended example shows, we are committed to professional prac-
tices that enable faculty to approach teaching and learning—addressed in our
program via rhetoric, process, multimodality, collaboration, and assessment—
in innovative ways.

Rhetoric
All writing programs need a strong, explicit theoretical grounding; it is part
of what makes the knowledge generalizable to other situations and part of
what differentiates the art and the craft of writing. For us, that grounding is

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rhetoric. Students attend to available means of persuasion, discovering unex-

pected perspectives as rhetorical elements—context, audience, purpose, role,
argument, organization, design, visuals, and conventions of language and im-
ages—work together in new ways. Asking questions about new means of per-
suasion provokes critical thinking, helping students to gain an understand-
ing of social and cultural texts and contexts in ways that support productive
communication and interaction.
In our program, the classic elements of rhetoric form the structure that
enables innovative thinking, melding traditional logic and appeals with new
technologies. Students use rhetoric as the basis for their work, creating logos
in arguments, attending to ethos in the context, adapting pathos for the audi-
ence. In doing so, they select and organize persuasive evidence, consider the
affordances of various modes and media, develop an appealing and usable
design, and respect professional conventions and style in language and imag-
es. Students in a first-year multimodal composition class, for example, used
rhetoric to analyze the expectations of an audience wanting to learn about the
passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As part of their work, students visited
the nearby Center for Civil and Human Rights to gain further contextual
background. They then designed a website to explain the historical event,
mining a historical archive for pithy examples (in this case, the Ivan Allen
Digital Archive).

Process
Programmatically, we expect faculty to help students broaden their under-
standing of ways to draft and revise their artifacts, since learning productive
processes is as important as creating products. Students learn that processes
for communication—for example, creating, planning, drafting, designing, re-
hearsing, revising, presenting, publishing, and disseminating—are recursive,
not linear. They also learn that processes are seldom isolated and individual
but, instead, take place in environments that involve interacting with others
(both in face-to-face and in virtual interaction) at every stage of the process.
We also encourage a nuanced perspective about reflection, an essential part
of our process(es). Because reflection is not an intuitive behavior for students,
our faculty teach it, model it, provide a rationale for it, and build in time to
do it regularly (expecting students to reflect on one or more aspects of each
assignment during and immediately following the assignment), not just at
the end of the course.
In our program, process provides the how to of innovation, emphasizing
translation, transformation, and transference. These three processes receive

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special attention because they are critical in academic, community, and work-
place communication (Burnett & Cooper, 2019):
• Translation. Adapting information for new audiences (e.g., translating
an argument from an academic essay to a public blog post, translating
information in a medical journal to a mass market newspaper, and
translating an aerospace engineering drawing for non-experts watch-
ing CNN)
• Transformation. Changing and reshaping ideas or information—for
example, changing genre (print to web), scale (thumbnail to poster),
medium (live demo to video), mode (written to oral), scope (instruction
manual to tip sheet), or color palette (four-color to black and white)
• Transference. Applying communication strategies from one context or
situation to another (e.g., transferring appropriate use of metaphors
from academic to workplace situations)

Multimodality
Multimodality informs all the examples of innovative student, faculty, and
programmatic work we have discussed in this chapter. We call our curriculum
WOVEN, for communication in written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonver-
bal modes. The WOVEN components work synergistically, though faculty
may choose to emphasize one mode over another from project to project.
The emphasis depends on the rhetorical situation and the affordances of the
modes and media. We support the principles presented in “On Multimodali-
ty: A Manifesto” (Wysocki et al., 2019). We agree that while students need to
develop technological competence, they also need to analyze media critically,
recognize the “inseparable natures of thinking, acting, making, and doing”
(Wysocki et al., 2019, p. 19), and respond to the affordances of technologies.
Our multimodal emphasis enables students to see that what they are learning
in their classrooms connects to the world around them. They are encouraged
to innovate—to translate, transform, and transfer—in ways that respond to
their developing needs to present arguments to public audiences so that their
work has power and influence.

Collaboration
While the initial purpose of a collaboration may not be innovative, collab-
oration increases the likelihood of generating multiple means of address-
ing a problem—and the multiple means increase the likelihood that the
resulting solution will be innovative. This attention to innovation matters

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because “organizations are increasingly relying upon the diverse perspec-

tives and expertise of teams to produce novel, innovative solutions” (Thay-
er et al., 2018, p. 363). The same benefits occur in the classroom, giving
students alternative ways to approach assignments. So what do students
need to learn about collaboration in order for it to serve as a means to
innovation? Researchers note that strong collaborations require both cog-
nitive and social strategies (Thayer et al., 2018). Even though our students
have been engaged in collaborative work since kindergarten, few of them
have specific skills and strategies for engaging in productive collaboration,
so WCP faculty explicitly teach collaborative strategies. These strategies
include attention to factors such as cultural context, models in interaction,
leadership, team demographics, equitable contributions, time manage-
ment, and conflict resolution.

Assessment and Evaluation

What we have elsewhere called our “ecology of assessment” (Burnett et
al., 2014) includes five categories of formative assessment and summative
evaluation: self-assessment, peer assessment, instructor assessment, client
assessment, and, finally, programmatic assessment (based on analysis of re-
flective portfolios). Particularly important is that we use the same criteria,
regardless of the categories of assessment or evaluation. For example, the
questions faculty teach students to ask themselves about argument or de-
sign in their self-assessments are much the same questions the program
asks of itself.
How do we use the same categories and criteria for all formative assess-
ment and summative evaluation? Two specific tools are particularly import-
ant: First, our programmatic feedback chart provides rhetorical categories and
assessment criteria unconnected to grades and, instead, connected to feed-
back. The categories and criteria in the feedback chart are used for all kinds
of formative assessment and summative evaluation, modifiable for particular
assignments and projects. Second, our programmatic assessment is based on
faculty review of selected cumulative reflective portfolios, applying the same
criteria used for all formative assessment and summative evaluation across the
program. Assessment provides students, faculty, and the program with ways
to identify processes and concepts that are successful and those that need
work. In addition, assessment helps faculty, students, and the program iden-
tify processes and concepts that are innovative—that is, what is new to their
own processes and products, what risks they have taken, and what strategies
they can carry with them.

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Conclusion
This case study explains ways our faculty are empowered and supported to use
rhetoric, process, multimodality, collaboration, and assessment to create new
learning experiences for and with students—innovative courses and assign-
ments, like those discussed in our introduction. Moreover, as the interplay
between our program’s professional development and teaching/learning mis-
sions evolves, faculty model (and students practice) innovation as a constant,
critical adaptation to the changing world. The result of this interplay is a
culture in which instances of innovation are common, for faculty, students,
and the program administrators alike. As with all case studies, though, the
generalizability of the culture we describe is, at best, limited. The innovations
in our program at Georgia Tech have emerged for a number of reasons tied to
our local situation, not the least of which is that our institution is consistently
funded, its culture rewards and expects innovation, the leadership strongly
advocates for faculty development and curricular rigor and innovation, and
our program has been lucky in finding allies in administration who believe in
creating stable, secure positions for non-tenure-track and contingent faculty.
At the same time, we believe that our argument about the need for writing
programs to innovate is generalizable and is something for all writing pro-
gram administrators to consider.
What innovation looks like—the problems and opportunities it responds
to, the experiments it inspires, and the solutions it prompts—is necessari-
ly different in different situations. We do not argue that a multimodal cur-
riculum or robust technological infrastructure, for example, is required for
innovation in writing programs or that innovation is defined by its disrup-
tive nature. Ultimately, innovation in writing and communication programs
occurs one step at a time over the long term. As programs consider ways to
encourage innovation, they should consider the following questions:
Goals
• What are the goals of the program? How do these goals serve the
educational mission of the program and institution? How do these
goals advance teaching and learning for students and/or professional
development for faculty?
• How does innovation fit into the goals of the program? How does
innovation serve the educational mission of the program and institu-
tion? How does innovation advance teaching and learning for students
and/or professional development for faculty?
• In what ways can the program lay the foundations for innovation,

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 The Praxis of Innovation in Writing Programs

through curriculum development, improved working conditions, new

faculty development efforts, or otherwise?
Arguments
• What are the available means of persuasion?
• How can available resources, technologies, concepts, or allies be inte-
grated?
• What relationships can be built? What arguments can be made?
Collaboration
• How can collaboration with faculty, staff, and students be used in con-
sidering and implementing innovation?
• How can collaboration be used with community partners?
Support
• What small steps can be taken, even in the absence of funding? For
example, what changes can be made related to programmatic pro-
cesses, access to information, or the involvement of various stake-
holders?
• How can the program strengthen the agency of faculty to explore, ex-
periment, and create? How can the program provide methods of for-
mative evaluation and feedback that support faculty innovation?
More broadly, we hope that writing program, writing-across-the-curric-
ulum, and English-across-the-curriculum administrators and faculty see the
urgent necessity for innovating within programs, institutions, and disciplines.
We hope to innovate not for the sake of originality, disruption, or public re-
lations. We hope to innovate not just to adapt to the various “new normals,”
from the precarization of working conditions to the ubiquity of social media.
Ultimately, we hope to innovate in order to prompt and support ways of
thinking and communicating about the world as it changes and, hopefully, to
help it change for the better.

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