Professors Tim McCormack and Kim Liao received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the Vertical Writing Program Project “Improving Transfer Student Writing Success with Upper Division Rhetoric-Based Writing Courses.” This two-year humanities initiative will expand and assess the outcomes of curricular offerings in rhetoric-based writing for transfer students.
This Vertical Writing Program, rooted in the humanities, expands upon an initial pilot involving four upper-division Writing in the Disciplines courses. These courses, created by faculty teams spanning various disciplines, aim to establish an upper-division writing program and enhance student learning outcomes.
The development of this upper-division writing program, grounded in rhetoric, encompasses curriculum design, faculty development, outcomes assessment, and a case study focusing on transfer students' capacity to write in progressively intricate contexts post-completion of these courses. The implementation of a coherent and standardized curriculum in disciplinary writing addresses the challenges posed by COVID-19 learning loss, particularly its impact on academic literacy development, thereby enhancing the potential for academic and career success among transfer students.
Tim McCormack will serve as NEH co-project director and co-lead the project leadership team. He directs the Vertical Writing Program and is the Deputy Chair of English and the Writing and Rhetoric Minor Coordinator. Under his direction, the First-Year Writing Program earned the Certificate of Excellence from the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 2013, the most prestigious national award a writing program can earn. McCormack was awarded the John Jay Teaching Excellence Prize in 2020 and has served on the College-wide Assessment Committee, the Board of the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the English Major Revision Committee. He was the co-founder of the CUNY Writing Discipline Council.
McCormack has written on issues of language, student literacy, assessment, and writing program administration for The Journal of Basic Writing, English Education, Composition Forum, Journal of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and The Teachers College Record and has presented at Cs, WPA, and MLA, among other conferences. McCormack has taught developmental writing, freshman composition, business writing, journalism, creative nonfiction, literature, and graduate courses in Criminal Justice Research at John Jay and Teaching College English at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Kim Liao will serve as the NEH co-project director. She co-directs Writing Across the Curriculum and has been leading the Writing in the Disciplines initiative since the Fall of 2022. The recipient of a $13,000 CUNY curricular grant for the Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI) entitled “Decolonizing the John Jay English Major,” she is a Lecturer in the Writing Program of the English Department and wrote and developed the WID Technical Writing course for computer science, applied math, and other STEM majors, which she originated as its first professor.
She is the author of the forthcoming hybrid memoir from Rowman & Littlefield, Where Every Ghost Has a Name: A Memoir of Taiwanese Independence (September 2024), and a recent chapter in Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies. Her creative, journalistic, and critical writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Guardian, Electric Literature, Catapult, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Salon, The Millions, River Teeth, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Fringe, and others
