Meet Jen Birch

Professor,
Anthropology Department

When did you start teaching in the WIP?

I have been teaching in the WIP since 2018.

What WIP courses are you teaching/have you taught?

The WIP courses I have taught include ANTH 4250 Cultural Resource Management and ANTH 4230 Archaeological Theory, although I tend to employ WIP principles across all of my courses.

Why did you join the WIP?

The first WIP class I taught was Cultural Resource Management. In this field, practitioners need to engage with a range of non-specialist stakeholders. I thought that WIP principles and practice were good ways to teach students about writing in a range of professional contexts, including interacting with government officials, contractors, descendant communities, and the publica at large.

What have you learned from your experiences as WIP faculty? About teaching? About writing? About your students?

My experience as WIP faculty has taught me to embrace a range of different kinds of writing in my courses. Students can use writing to enhance learning through discovery, retrieval, quick takes on a topic or problem, or polishing a set of ideas through revision and editing.

What is your WIP teaching philosophy?

My teaching philosophy in general is based on creating learning environments whereby students feel welcome, supported, and in which their own passions and interests have room to grow. This translates into WIP classes by offering students lots of different kinds of writing opportunities in which they can experiment, build confidence, and develop their critical and creative abilities. 

How do you put that philosophy into practice in the classroom?

My classes utilize a lot of low-stakes and scaffolded writing assignments. I have enjoyed combining WIP pedagogy with lessons learned from a faculty learning community on high-impact practices. This means creating course-long research projects that involve creating learning communities in the classroom whereby students bring together scaffolded pieces of writing they produce as individuals into collaborative settings.

What are your biggest challenges you face as a WIP teacher/in your WIP courses?

I think my biggest challenge is finding the time to provide substantive feedback on student writing. Working with WIP TAs is wonderful but I often feel like I am short-changing the students on 1:1 time with or feedback from me as the instructor. 

How do you address those challenges?

This semester, I am dividing up providing feedback on three scaffolded components of a major research project with my WIP TA at a 1:2 ratio so that all students will get feedback from me on one component and feedback from my TA on the other two. I am hoping this also brings my TA and I into more meaningful dialogue about how students are doing and what feedback to provide the group as a whole.

What do you hope students take away from your WIP courses? How do students benefit from the writing-intensive nature of your course?

I hope that students leave my class with greater confidence in their abilities as writers and that future employers recognize those skills in their post-graduate careers. If all goes according to plan, the students should benefit as their professional trajectories unfold.

Why is it important that students write in your class?

Written communication in its many forms is a skill students can carry forward in all of their personal and professional interactions.