Gateway Scholars Program Keeps Paying Dividends for Participants

Gateway Scholar, Anne Williams

INDIANAPOLIS – For Anne Williams, the Gateway Scholars Program at IUPUI is like a blue chip stock: it just keeps paying dividends.

When Williams was invited to participate in the inaugural session of the Gateway Scholars Program, she jumped at the chance. The opportunity to complete an electronic textbook project for W132, a Gateway course, she had begun the previous summer was too good to let it pass by.

There was, however, one question uppermost in her mind.

“Would they ever get us out of the library basement?”

The Gateway Scholars Program was created to support invited course coordinators and other Gateway instructors in their efforts to find new ways to improve teaching and learning in introductory courses with large enrollments.

Each scholar receives a $5,000 stipend for their participation in the program’s Summer Institute and a year-long faculty learning community. The Faculty Learning Community (FLC) for Gateway Scholars enables the conversation and work begun in the Summer Institute to continue throughout the academic year. The FLC focuses on discussions regarding the implementation of new teaching strategies as well as how scholars can bring new ideas about pedagogy to the attention of other Gateway instructors.

Williams, a senior lecturer in the Indiana University School of Liberal Art’s Department of English who has taught full-time at IUPUI since 1985, said just being asked to participate in the program was a reward in itself.

“When you’re invited to be in a program like this there is a sense of being singled out, that somebody is paying attention to what you’re doing,” she said. “It says to faculty who teach Gateway courses that someone is paying attention to the fact that you’re doing this work. For the administration to say that it believes what you’re doing is important is a morale booster.”

Before coming to IUPUI, Williams had taught six years as a high school journalism teacher at Lawrence Central High School in Indianapolis and had served as advisor of the school’s weekly newspaper. Faced with the demanding task of producing a weekly newspaper and raising small children, Williams left Lawrence Central, finished her master’s and began teaching composition part-time at IUPUI.

When a departmental review showed there were 100 individuals teaching composition part-time, a decision was made to reduce that number by hiring six of the teachers full-time, including Williams.

Williams served as an administrator in the writing program for years, but decided two years ago she wanted to focus more on teaching. She continued her administrative role for W132, Elementary Composition II, and started teaching a new honors class, Writing for Popular and Professional Publications.

When it comes to writing, Williams has done more than teach. She has written two yet-to-be published novels.

One novel, set in the 1920s and 30s on a Spanish sheep ranch in Colorado and on the Navajo reservation has been rejected time and again by agents, Williams said. But a small publishing company in Baltimore is still looking at it.

She took a year off from IUPUI to research material and conduct interviews for the book, having had her imagination captured by a story she heard while visiting her daughter in Colorado about an old Spanish sheep rancher who, while herding sheep as a child, found Spanish gold. During her year’s leave, she worked at the Durango Herald in Durango, Colo.,

“I love the book, but I’m not sure if it will ever be published,” she said. She has since completed a second novel.

While Williams was eager to participate in the Gateway Scholars program, she couldn’t help but wonder whether she was destined to spend a good chunk of another summer in the basement of University Library as she had the previous summer.

She had participated that summer in another Office for Professional Development program, Jumpstart. That program enabled her to work in the basement of the library on the electronic textbook for W132, a course in which about nearly 1,000 students will enroll next year.

“We never had a good textbook,” Williams said. “We decided we would like to do an electronic textbook, something we could update easily and really reflect our course, which is an introduction to research and argumentation.”

“With support from a remarkable team of people from the Center for Teaching and Learning and members of the W132 faculty, my colleague in English, Sharon Henricksen and I, created a textbook geared specifically to IUPUI,” she said. Students can practice skills, access IUPUI library resources, and access teaching materials from the IUPUI Writing Center and other universities. And, to add a little local color, all the materials that provide examples of the processes students will undertake and the documents they will produce concern a local and always-current topic: Parking! “Student evaluations record high satisfaction rates with the resource.”

As it turned out, Williams need not have been concerned spending another summer in the confines of the library.

We went all over campus,” she laughed.

Williams and the other Gateway Scholars not only visited with other faculty members but visited the new apartment style housing which was just opening on campus, learning about who would live there and what kind of programs would be available for students who lived there. They visited campus neighbors, including the Eiteljorg Museum and the George Washington Community School.

As the group traveled about the campus, the solution for a problem she had struggled with concerning the honors course she taught presented itself.

The purpose of that course is to give students near graduation an opportunity to transfer the writing skills they have honed in an academic forum to tasks common to writers in the "real world," Williams said.

“The hard thing about that writing class is to have really good, accessible subject matter for students to write about,” she said. “If they are moving into primary research, they need to do some reporting and it is hard to get people to talk to them.”

It’s also helpful if the students are writing about the same subject, she continued. “If you have all 15 students writing about something different, it’s hard for them to edit each other’s material and provide peer responses, because they don’t know enough about the subject.”

“The Gateway Scholars field trips to George Washington Community School and to new campus housing units in the summer of 2004 reminded me that IUPUI has lots of fodder for a writer's mill--and that access to faculty and administrative sources comes much more easily than access to people outside the university.”

In the spring 2005 semester, her students worked on writing projects related to George Washington Community School, observing classes and community meetings, and interviewing teachers, students, parents, and administrators as they produced "real world" writing intended for publication. “During the fall 2005 semester, my students in that class worked with a University College-based publication, Indiana Insight, writing feature stories based on interviews with IUPUI alumni. Without the creative people in the Office of Professional Development who reminded us that we should know more about our campus and community, my students would not be having these highly-productive experiences.”

“I don’t know when I would have realized that my students should focus on IUPUI topics without the guidance of the Gateway Scholars staff who broadened my horizons by showing us what is happening on campus,” she said.

During the Summer Institute, there were presentations on pedagogy, how changing demographics impact Gateway classes, research related to teaching techniques and learning styles, and presentations from other faculty who had implemented successful teaching projects.

During the remainder of the year-long program, the Gateway Scholars kept in touch, talking about issues in their classes.

“The Gateway Scholars program turned out to be a very good experience, Williams said. “Frankly, it was even more helpful than I thought it might be.”