Professor Keri Mathis receives 2019 Summer Course (Re)Design Award

Writing professor Keri Mathis was one of eight recipients of the 2019 Summer Course (Re)Design Award, a joint program from the Teaching and Learning Collaborative (TLC) and the Provost’s Office. The program assists faculty who wish to develop new courses (or redesign already existing courses) that pursue creative and evidence-based approaches to teaching and learning at Wake Forest.

Mathis plans to design a Writing 111 course titled “What’s (y)our story?” — a theme that will focus on the importance of narrative as a means for inquiry and knowledge-making in a range of personal and disciplinary contexts. To this end, the course will highlight  students’ personal stories and community members’ stories through a digital storytelling campaign modeled after Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York. Students will also find narratives at work within disciplines or professions they aspire to enter to learn how narrative is often used in argumentation.

Over the summer, Mathis and the other recipients will meet regularly with TLC and each other to collaborate on their course (re)designs, sharing findings and exploring “pedagogical and scholarly challenges,” and they will implement their new courses in the 2019-2020 academic year. Grant recipients will also present on their experience at TechXploration or another TLC teaching and learning event for the campus community.