By Kerri Martin
The First-Year Writing Committee is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2021 Excellence in First-Year Writing Teaching Award: Sarah Brown! Now in its third year, the student-nominated award honors faculty for excellence in teaching WRD 102(x), 103(x), or 104(x). The committee received over 75 nominations from FYW students applauding their many excellent instructors who provided supportive feedback on writing and gave students a sense of community during a challenging academic year, and we want to express our gratitude and appreciation for the tremendous work of all our faculty. We know that many faculty members, who have relied on Sarah for help in navigating the new instructional modalities thrust upon us in a pandemic, will agree with the student who expressed feeling “extremely grateful to have such a supportive teacher in trying times.”
In their nominations for Sarah, students credited her supportive, individualized feedback with boosting their confidence as writers, described her reliable, consistent encouragement during uncertain times, and articulated clear plans to transfer newfound ideas about writing into a broad set of majors. One student explained that, “Professor Brown’s feedback is a large part of the confidence I now have as a writer” while another credited Sarah with fostering “the confidence needed to expose our art and our stories with the world.”
Students were also impressed with Sarah’s careful balance of helping them reach programmatic writing goals while also encouraging “unique and personal forms of expression.” To achieve this balance, Sarah gives students the freedom to choose their assignment topics so they feel invested in their work. “I try to emphasize that they’re likely writing about something that many, many people before them have written about,” Sarah explains, “but the most important element of their piece is that it’s theirs: every writer brings a ‘secret sauce’ that can’t be replicated, that no one else has.”
In addition to teaching FYW and Chicago Quarter courses, Sarah serves as the Assistant Director of Faculty Development as well as the Assistant Director of Instructional Technology and Program Development for the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. An alumna of the WRD MA program, Sarah integrates disciplinary knowledge with instructional design principles, starting with learning outcomes and using backward design to build courses and create assignments that align with those outcomes. “This approach results in a certain amount of rigidity in my courses,” Sarah acknowledged, adding, “I often find myself envying colleagues who have a bit more flexibility and flow throughout the quarter. But, I’m a structuralist, so if my courses feel like they were created from very detailed blueprints, that’s because they were!” Sarah also credits her “fabulous FYW colleagues” with helping her “learn to value the process of writing just as much as the product,” an orientation that she wishes she had adopted “from the get-go.”
Sarah hopes that students completing her courses will add some new instruments to their writing tool belts and recognize their strengths as writers and communicators so they can continue building on those strengths through future classes. Students who nominated Sarah affirmed those hopes, with one expressing the belief that “writing is essential no matter what major one pursues,” and many describing specific plans to apply what they’ve learned about writing in both academic and professional contexts.