Making College “Worth It” – Season 1, Episode 3

In a 2021 survey of recent U.S. college graduates, conducted by the Elon Poll and the Center for Engaged Learning, 94% of participants indicated that writing was somewhat or very important to their day-to-day lives, but only 80% had developed effective writing skills during college. College students and the people who support them need to attend to the writing students are doing in college and how those writing experiences prepare them for lifelong and lifewide writing. We visit with our guests about how students make connections among their spheres of writing as they write for college courses, co-curricular activities, internships, work, civic or community activities, and self-motivated purposes.

View a transcript of this episode.

Meet Our Guests

D. Alexis Hart, Professor of English and Director of Writing at Allegheny College, is the co-author of Writing Programs, Veterans Studies, and the Post-9/11 University: A Field Guide and editor of How to Start an Undergraduate Research Journal and ePortfolios@edu: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and Everything In-Between. As Director of Writing, she is responsible for training and supervising the peer writing consultants in Allegheny’s Center for Student Success and for leading faculty development related to the teaching of writing across the curriculum.

Ashley J. Holmes is Associate Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Georgia State University. Her book Public Pedagogy in Composition Studies (2016) was published with the CCCC/NCTE Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series, and her articles have recently appeared in The International Journal of Students as Partners and Composition Forum. Her current book-length project, Learning on Location, explores place-based pedagogies through writing, walking/movement, and civic engagement. Holmes serves as Managing Co-Editor of Composition Forum.

Íde O’Sullivan is a Senior Educational Developer at the Centre for Transformative Learning at the University of Limerick (UL), where she is Curriculum Development Support Lead, steering the development of a curriculum development framework for the University. Íde teaches curriculum design and leads three scholarship modules on the Graduate Diploma in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship in Higher Education.

Yogesh Sinha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ohio University. He has served in a variety of positions (Professor and Associate Professor of English) within the higher and tertiary education sector in India and the MENA region. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in cultural studies, literature, linguistics, and professional communication.

Kathleen Blake Yancey, Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and Distinguished Research Professor Emerita at Florida State University, has served as President of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), and President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA). In 1994 she co-founded the journal Assessing Writing and co-edited it for seven years, and from 2010-2014, she served as editor of College Composition and Communication. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of 16 scholarly books and authored over 100 articles and book chapters.

Episode Credits

This episode is co-hosted by Jessie L. Moore, Director of Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning, and Nolan Schultheis, a first-year student at Elon University, studying Psychology with an interest in law. Making College “Worth It” is produced by Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning.

Episode art was created by Jennie Goforth, managing editor for the Center for Engaged Learning, and Nolan Schultheis, the Center’s undergraduate Podcast Producer.

Funky Percussions is by Denys Kyshchuk (@audiocoffeemusic) – https://www.audiocoffee.net/. Soft Beat is by ComaStudio.

Learn More about Research Featured in this Episode

Read our guests’ open access publications:

• Yancey, Kathleen Blake, D. Alexis Hart, Ashley J. Holmes, Anna V. Knutson, Íde O’Sullivan, and Yogesh Sinha. 2022. “‘There is a Lot of Overlap’: Tracing Writing Development Across Spheres of Writing.” In Writing Beyond the University: Preparing Lifelong Learners for Lifewide Writing, edited by Julia Bleakney, Jessie L. Moore, and Paula Rosinski, 74-90. Elon, NC: Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. https://doi.org/10.36284/celelon.oa5.
• Holmes, Ashley J, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Íde O’Sullivan, D. Alexis Hart, and Yogesh Sinha. 2022. “Lifewide Writing across the Curriculum: Valuing Students’ Multiple Writing Lives Beyond the University.” The WAC Journal 33: 32-61. https://doi.org/10.37514/WAC-J.2022.33.1.02.