January Mini-Term 2025
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Fall 2024
Empowering Critical Engagement: Integrating AI and PowerNotes for Smarter Reading and Writing: A Workshop on PowerNotes and AI in the Classroom
November 16, 2024 | 9:00 am – 3:30 pm | Strong Hall B1
Are you concerned about students generating textual output without making their own choices as thinkers and writers? Are you interested in approaches to using generative AI that assist rather than replace reading, research, and writing processes? Join us for a workshop on November 16 to learn how to bring more accountability and transparency into your classroom with PowerNotes, a powerful tool designed to support critical engagement with reading and writing.
See more details on this page
“Teaching with Writing” Faculty Workshop Series
In the FALL 2024 semester, the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center will host two opportunities for interactive workshops each month, one in-person and one via Zoom. Professorial, Lecturer, and GTA faculty from any department across the university are invited to participate in our Fall 2024 “Teaching with Writing” Workshop Series! Details below. Click here to Register.
“Beyond the Red Pen: Best Practices for Responding to Student Writing” (Nov. 21 or 25)
Are you tired of spending hours upon hours grading every detail of your students’ work? Does it seem like the feedback you’re giving students never seems to improve their work? In this session, instructors will learn strategies to more thoughtfully and efficiently respond to student writing, whether it’s short homework assignments, lab reports, or large research projects. Click here to register! (NOTE: Zoom date moved to November 25th!)
“Human Writers, AI World: Writing Assignments for Critical AI Literacy” (Dec. 17 or 18)
Your Fall grades are in, but are you ready to start thinking about AI in your Spring courses?
Whatever your course policy is related to AI, we exist in a world where its use is already ubiquitous across a variety of workplaces and industries. Do you wish students thought more critically about AI before they use it for writing assignments, or are you frustrated that students don’t seem concerned about its impact on the world?
Even while many of us remain understandably skeptical of AI, college writing assignments offer a unique opportunity for us to prepare our students to navigate this new terrain. In this session, we will explore strategies for navigating AI through the use of human-centered writing assignment design and critical AI literacy. Click here to register!
Fall 2024 PowerNotes and AI Pilot
Introduction to PowerNotes Zoom Session | 2-3pm on August 15, 2024
Interested in joining the Fall 2024 PowerNotes AI Pilot? Click Here for Details
Do you assign your students to read digitally available texts for one or more of your course projects? To help your students engage with their readings more actively and critically–a practice current research tells us is waning–try using PowerNotes’s basic and AI features in your course. Read the details on this page and express your interest in joining the Pilot using this form: tiny.utk.edu/PN-AI-Pilot-FA24. There is a $200 stipend for up to 20 participating instructors.
Past Workshops & Events
Recurring Workshops & Events
We regularly partner with the Graduate School to provide workshops for graduate students. See the Graduate and Professional Student Professional Development page.
In collaboration with the UT Libraries, we co-host a “Writing Blitz,” a paper-writing marathon, around mid-term each semester. At this event, research librarians and writing tutors are on hand from late afternoon to midnight to assist students through the process of working on a paper in any subject.
Look for announcements on UTK’s Events Calendar each semester.
SUMMER 2024
Maintaining Momentum: Writing-Focused Sessions for Thesis & Dissertation Writers
A series of two-day sessions across the summer designed to help graduate students who are actively writing their thesis or dissertation to better navigate the writing process and meet their goals and deadlines.
See this page for more information.
Summer Writing Academies, July 8-12, 2024
This July, we are offering a week of “Summer Writing Academies” — engaging, creative, and fun sessions with hands-on writing activities — for for rising 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-grade high students from Knox County Schools.
See this page for more information and the application link.
SPRING 2024
Thoughtful Teaching with AI: A Craft Workshop for Busy Instructors
Do you want to help students engage critically with GenAI in your courses? Join us in a two-part hands-on Zoom workshop, co-hosted by Teaching and Learning Innovation, Digital Learning, the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center, and the Office of Innovative Technologies (OIT). In the first part of the workshop, we will review GenAI capabilities, examine ethical concerns, and sample a few AI-focused assignments, before giving you time to start crafting an activity or assignment for your own course. In the second part, you will have the opportunity to share your in-progress course activities with colleagues for review and feedback. By the end of the two-part workshop, you will have created a new assignment or class activity designed to cultivate critical AI literacy and advance student learning outcomes for students your courses. The workshop is open to UT faculty, staff, and graduate students. We are offering two options to accommodate Monday/Wednesday and Tuesday/Thursday schedules:
Option 1: Part 1 on Tuesday 4/16 and Part 2 on Thursday 4/18, 10:00 – 11:30am, via Zoom
Option 2: Part 1 on Wednesday 4/17 and Part 2 on Friday 4/19, 10:30am – Noon, via Zoom
Interested in more events, resources, and opportunities related to AI? Click here to visit the Teaching with Generative Artificial Intelligence at UTK SharePoint hub (UTK login required), which has links to campus resources from TLI, the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center, Digital Learning, the UTK Libraries, and more!
Graduate Student Workshop: Preparing Materials for the Academic Job Market
How to prepare cover letters, CVs, teaching philosophy statements, and other materials for academic job applications.
Monday, April 1, 2024, 2:00-300 pm
Join via Zoom: tiny.utk.edu/jobmaterials
Presented as part of Graduate and Professional Student Appreciation Week (GPSAW) 2024, tiny.utk.edu/gpsaw
WINTER MINI-TERM 2024
Faculty are invited to apply for one or two seminars designed to assist them with integrating AI use into one or more of their writing assignments in any discipline.
See this page about the “Integrating AI into Writing Assignments” seminars. Deadline to apply is January 2, 2024.
FALL 2023 & SPRING 2024
AI & Writing Pedagogy Faculty Learning Community
Are you interested in integrating AI into writing assignments in one or more of your courses?
You’re invited to join a Faculty Learning Community for instructors across all disciplines who wish to better understand how to navigate the use of generative AI (GENAI) in classes in which they assign writing. We will engage in collaborative work together to:
- explore attitudes toward the integration of GENAI tools into our teaching,
- discuss ways to facilitate students’ development of AI literacy,
- discuss emerging strategies for ways to integrate GENAI with written assignments of any type,
- discuss how these strategies may work or are working in our classes, and
- engage in hands-on practice with GENAI resources.
We’ll get started in late October and then will meet once a month after that–in November and April.
See this page for more information and the plan for each of the sessions.
Special Workshops & Events
In Summer 2020 we offered a series of Zoom workshops to assist faculty in all departments with the process of (re)designing classes to include online and hybrid instruction. The focus was on best practices and methods for becoming more efficient and effective in responding online to student writing:
- Best Practices for Responding to Student Writers
- Commenting on Drafts with Online Tools: Using PowerNotes
- Helping Students Respond to Each Other: Effective Peer Review
In Spring 2020, we hosted a workshop on “Helping Students Write Their Way into Disciplinary Knowledge: Principles of Smart Teaching,” which featured guest speaker Elizabeth Wardle from Miami University, Ohio, and was designed for faculty in any discipline who assign writing in their courses. We explored research-based principles of learning, focusing on types of knowledge, the role of prior knowledge, and feedback and practice. Participants drafted a “learning principles pledge” to apply to their own course and assignment designs.
Wardle also delivered a lecture, “Honoring Learning in Liminal Spaces: Helping Student Writers in the Humanities,” in which she described the “threshold concepts” framework and what it tells us about the liminal nature of deep learning. She gave an overview a case of a student writing and learning across a humanities major and discussed principles for designing courses and programs that encourage deep learning.
On October 11, 2019, we hosted a dedication ceremony to re-name our Center in honor of our major donor, Judith Anderson Herbert. Read more about Mrs. Herbert and some of the ways she and her husband Jim are helping to support UT writers.
Supporting Graduate Students as Writers: A Lecture and Workshop was a workshop designed for faculty who serve as chairs or advisors to graduate students in any discipline, including international graduate students whose first or strongest language is not English. Michelle Cox from Cornell University shared a framework resources for working with graduate writers. Contact us at writingcenter@utk.edu for access to the resources Professor Cox shared.
In Fall 2019 we hosted a faculty seminar, Exploring Best Practices in Writing Instruction: Investigating Practices, Values, and Beliefs about Writing in Your Discipline