Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP)
The QEP is a component of the accreditation process that reflects and affirms the Commission on Colleges focus on student learning. The inclusion of the QEP has transformed the accreditation process into an ongoing activity rather than an episodic event. Additionally, it provides UNF with an opportunity to undertake a robust and targeted approach to improving the education of our students.
Writing Around the Curriculum
The University of North Florida chose Writing Around the Curriculum for its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) to encourage student and faculty engagement with a fundamental skill for student success (i.e., writing). This plan responds to the assessment and perceptions of writing from students and faculty, serves the university’s mission to graduate prepared student-citizens, and builds on and around to enrich a vital skill for all students’ writing. Building from existing programs that support writing, UNF’s Writing Program & Center provides a series of models to customize writing systems for disciplines, such as targeted faculty development, scaffolded expansion of peer and faculty support, and a commitment to celebrating student success in writing. Simultaneously, UNF’s Writing Program & Center will revise its first-year writing and general education writing sequence.
Why Writing Around the Curriculum?
Whereas traditional Writing Across the Curriculum approaches focus on classroom-based writing, UNF’s Writing Around the Curriculum approach embraces all the spaces where students and faculty write. This shift from “across” to “around” is one UNF believes can help the greatest number of its community members inasmuch as an around-approach recognizes the multiplicity and variety of student and faculty writing development opportunities—opportunities that are not limited to curricular locations but those outside of, tangential to, and, to the point, around where students and faculty work. This is all to say that students and faculty alike experience writing both in and outside the classroom, so Writing Around the Curriculum takes advantage of the many opportunities to engage students and faculty about writing where else they are around campus: at Market Days, in study halls, in the library, in office hours, online.
To these ends, the QEP has identified four chief actions to pursue:
Action 1: Developing a university-wide conversation and advisory group to inform and sustain the QEP initiative
Action 2: Revise UNF academic integrity code to clarify definition of plagiarism and academic misconduct policies and offer citation/source support to faculty and students.
Action 3: Revise first-year general education writing sequence to address QEP SLOs.
Action 4: Support selected programs of study in embedding writing in their curriculum
Have Questions?
Interested in learning more? Please contact Linda Howell, Director, Writing Program & Center.