Amanda Doxtater and Olivia Noble Gunn (Scandinavian Studies) collaboratively redesigned SCAND 335: Scandinavian Children’s Literature, reimagining it as Literature, Film, and the Nordic Child. Drawing on their shared expertise in film, gender studies, and Scandinavian cultural history, they broadened the course to explore how childhood and youth are imagined, constructed, and politicized across literary and visual media. Through their collaboration in the fellowship, they designed a course that centers writing as a method of inquiry in which students engage in sustained, iterative writing to develop nuanced interpretations and make meaningful connections across texts, contexts, and cultural histories. Amanda and Olivia developed an integrated approach that uses writing to support deep engagement with core course concepts including historical contextualization, cultural norms, translation, and the construction of childhood. Assignments encourage students to interpret across media, analyze both word and image, and explore genre through writing tasks like adaptations, memoirs, and fairy tales. 

Chrystel Oloukoï (Geography) and Morgan Vickers (Law, Societies & Justice) joined the Writing@UW Fellowship to collaboratively rethink how students engage in complex, interdisciplinary writing projects. Chrystel teaches Dark Ecologies, which draws on film, theory, and environmental humanities, while Morgan teaches Reparations: Race, Recognition, and Remediation, a course rooted in legal studies and historical inquiry. Both courses grapple with questions of justice, history, and form; and both faculty members sought to reimagine final assignments to better support critical thinking, rhetorical flexibility, and meaningful synthesis. Chrystel developed a sequence of low-stakes assignments to support students in crafting a final curatorial essay that analyzes film sequences alongside critical theory texts. The emphasis is on helping students identify relationships across media and develop compelling arguments that draw from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Morgan redesigned the course's assignment structure to help students develop grounded, action-oriented proposals for how reparations—or broader forms of social repair—might be implemented. The revised assignment opens possibilities for public engagement, such as presenting their recommendations to local groups like the Seattle/King County African American Reparations Committee. 

Sirine Maalej and Eli Patten (Mechanical Engineering) investigated how students learn and apply technical communication skills across the Mechanical Engineering (ME) curriculum. Their project centers on two writing-intensive courses: ME 354: Mechanics of Materials Laboratory and ME 493: Introduction to Capstone Design. These courses bookend the major, and Sirine and Eli saw an opportunity to bring more coherence to how writing is taught across them, ensuring that students are supported in building discipline-specific communication skills that evolve meaningfully throughout the mechanical engineering program. Sirine and Eli sought to align the courses’ writing objectives and revise key assignments to better support students’ development. 

In response to student feedback about assignment overlap across nursing courses, Jasmine Kaneshiro and Sydney Record (Nursing) redesigned final projects and scaffolding assignments in NURS 412: Healthcare Systems and NURS 452: Care Coordination and Transition Management. Their goal was to ensure that each course built upon the other while remaining distinct, giving students the opportunity to deepen their understanding of nursing systems, policy, and practice. Drawing on threshold concepts and Bloom’s Taxonomy, they developed assignments that prompted students to engage with policy, advocacy, and patient care across contexts. The redesigned coursework supported students in demonstrating learning through active engagement and interdisciplinary communication rather than hypothetical or repetitive projects. 

Melike Yucel-Koc and Mehari Worku (Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures) redesigned MELC 101: Gateway to the Middle East as a writing-intensive course that uses writing as a tool for critical thinking, interdisciplinarity, and inclusion. Through their participation in the Writing@UW Fellowship, they developed scaffolded assignments that supported students in producing and consuming knowledge about the Middle East and Horn of Africa. Their project centered writing as a method for recognizing multiple narratives, connecting across geographic and cultural boundaries, and complicating dominant understandings of the region. In place of conventional assignments and rubric-based assessments, they explored formats like Pressbooks, oral histories, and infographics to offer students more meaningful ways to engage with course content and develop their voices as writers and thinkers. 

Annie Searcy (Music History) joined the Writing Fellowship in order to update the assignments for MUHST 212, a writing course about 19th- and 20th-century classical music for majors. In the past, the final project for the course was a research paper in which students were asked to make an argument about a piece of music and related primary sources, all of which were pre-selected for them. She found that the papers, though often well put together, lacked creativity, and very few of the students seemed excited about them in our meetings. She wanted to revise the projects to bring a sense of discovery and creativity into the process, to help students understand both how and why music historians do their work. 

Emily Levesque's (Astronomy) project focuses on reworking the course structure of ASTR 482 ("Scientific Writing", a course for upper-level astronomy majors) to help students approach writing as a scientific process and tool, using weekly assignments and focus areas that contribute to the core class project of writing a scientific research paper. By employing techniques that are familiar to students conducting long-term research projects, they'll develop the crucial scientific skills of communication, clarity, and compelling writing. 

Janine Slaker's (Communication) course was co-developed with Anissa Tanweer at the e-Science Institute at UW. The course, themed "Cradle to Grave," aims to sensitize students to the pervasive nature of datafication in daily life. A pivotal aspect of this course is to emphasize how data is constructed and interpreted within specific contexts. Thus, the writing activities in the class and the students' final project underscores the reliance on qualitative/textual interpretations and the critical role of language in shaping our understanding of datafication in the everyday. In the course's first half, students critically examine datafication through various genres and reflective writing exercises, highlighting the significance of considering one's positionality in understanding data's meanings and uses. The second half builds on these insights, as students create a public scholarship zine to demystify (or open the “black box”) of a topic of their choosing. This zine aims to reveal the critical role of interpretation in datafication practices, and features elements such as annotated examples from students' earlier works that illustrate how their reflections and genre-based writings inform their chosen topics/approach. The metaphor of opening the “black box" attempts to encapsulate the objective of crafting a project that engages in critical thinking about dominant assumptions of datafication and helps guide students towards work that can expand participation of datafication use to those most impacted by it. 

After years of limiting student writing assignments to traditional analytic prose, in spring 2021, Laura Chrisman (English) decided to broaden the scope of their activity. To do this she began working with Joan Fiset, a published writer, experienced teacher of writing and literature, and Bard associate, who assisted her 2021 instruction of the English 213-level W course, Modern and Postmodern Lit by introducing students, and herself to right-brain writing strategies. This allowed her to explore, in teaching and learning, the roles that imagination, sensation, and emotion play in making meaning of literary texts. Right-brain writing exercises in this class considerably advanced students’ literary insight and also expanded their tools for self-understanding through expressive writing.   

Lucas Meza's (Mechanical Engineering) project overhauled the core writing assignments in ME 354 (Mechanical Behavior of Materials) from formulaic mechanical test reports to assignments that force students to think critically about material properties via open-ended design prompts. This consisted of a progressive set of assignments where students explore a design challenge (e.g. lightweighting an aircraft, repairing or replacing failing infrastructure, creating durable medical implants, etc.) by writing a series of papers exploring sound engineering approaches to their chosen problem. 

Yen-Chu Weng (Program on the Environment) developed more in-depth guidance to enhance engagement with a "weekly intellectual journals" assignment in ENVIR 430: Environmental Issues in East Asia. She found students struggling with the weekly intellectual journals assignment. The goal of this assignment is for students to write a critical appraisal of each week’s assigned readings, including the one overarching theme that weaved through this week’s readings and student’s thoughts and reactions, in around 400-500 words. In her revision, she included more hands-on guidance and instructions on the weekly intellectual journals, including: (1) in-class discussion time about the assignment, (2) a writer’s memo asking students to keep track of their ideas and what they learned from each week’s journal, and (3) sharing of exemplary work with students and in-class peer review.