Resources for Student Participation in Faculty-led Research

This proposal recommends that we strengthen support for undergraduate research at Mills. It specifically highlights one area where we currently have little institutional support: Resources for student participation in faculty-led research.

Importance of Undergraduate Research: The benefits of undergraduate research are numerous. Undergraduate research fosters an active participation in the pursuit of knowledge. It deepens students’ understanding of a discipline, allows them to develop skills central to that discipline, and promotes creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking.

It fosters close mentoring relationships between faculty and students, and allows for opportunities to build self-esteem and leadership skills, develop professionalism, work as a collaborative team with others, and clarify career goals. Studies have shown that introducing students to undergraduate research early on and for an extended period of time aids in the retention and performance of undergraduate students, increases the likelihood that students will pursue careers in these areas, and may especially benefit underrerepresented minorities in the sciences.

Today, it is increasingly common for graduate and professional programs to require incoming students to have some undergraduate research experience outside of the classroom, and many fields increasingly expect research experience with a faculty member or in an established research setting.
Involvement in faculty-led research has many special benefits. Students gain experience working in real laboratories and professional settings, and thus they have an opportunity to develop more advanced skills in their discipline. A faculty member may spend many weeks and even many months training and supervising a student, and because most of our programs are strictly undergraduate, our students are in a unique opportunity to play a central role in faculty-led research compared to those at large research institutions (where graduate students take on these roles). With advanced training and supervision, undergraduate students at Mills often gain experience and accomplish skills that are at the graduate level, and such projects are more likely to yield opportunities for publishing and presenting research at professional conferences. This is a definite advantage for undergraduate students at Mills and is one of the qualities that makes us unique.
Faculty-led projects are often larger and students may come together across disciplines and majors to work collaboratively and gain perspectives from these other disciplines. Students are likely to be at different academic levels, and, thus serve as role models with each other. This is not only educational, but can build a sense of community for students. Because faculty-led projects are extensive and usually have a longer duration than student projects, they allow for a longer protracted research experience for students. Work on faculty-led projects fosters independent work as well as teamwork, and can still provide opportunities for students to develop smaller independent projects. For example, in some cases, students may have opportunities to attach independent projects to the larger project. In other instances, students may be able to take on a portion of the faculty-led project and develop this as an independent project.

Faculty also benefit from undergraduate involvement in their research and in some disciplines, student involvement may even be essential, as in the sciences, where a research team is necessary to complete a research project. Faculty also benefit from student ideas, creativity, and energy in their research. Thus, providing resources for student participation in faculty-led research not only benefits students, but also benefits faculty. It is a win-win situation.

Current Status: Currently, we have inadequate support for faculty-led research at Mills. The Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) helps support small undergraduate research projects (and even these funds are limited). The Faculty Development fund is terribly insufficient and in many instances, award amounts are too little to support student participation, especially when the cost of the research project itself takes up (or exceeds) the funds awarded. Much faculty research takes place in the summer when faculty have more time to devote to research and projects and labs can operate on a regular or full-time basis. Many students must financially support themselves in the summer or need to move home to locations outside the Bay Area for living support. We have very limited summer research support at Mills, and a summer research program that would involve student stipends and summer housing would allow more students to be able to take advantage of research opportunities and ensure continuity (i.e., less disruptive turnover) of student involvement in faculty-led research. Such a program would also be more equitable for students, since it is often the more financially disadvantaged students who must to choose a paid job over a research experience in order to support themselves.

To support faculty-led research, we also need more support for the infrastructure of existing labs and equipment, computers, and research supplies, and physical space dedicated that is dedicated to this. Mentoring students in faculty-led research requires a very large time commitment and is often the equivalent of teaching an additional course, so support for faculty is important and essential. I believe that much of this mentoring takes place on Fridays and may reflect a greater amount of curricular activity on Fridays at Mills than is actually apparent on the books.

Expand the Mills Public Radio Program

Proposal 

The Mills' public radio program is unique in American undergraduate education; students love it and cannot get it anywhere else. It is an excellent vehicle for connecting with Oakland and for garnering national visibility for Mills. In its first 6 years the program has been recognized with state and national awards. This is a proposal to build on its success.

Status Quo 

An introductory class is offered in the fall semester. This class has been compared to a boot camp: students learn by doing, doing things they have never done in academic career (attending a city council meeting, cold calling to interview someone, doing primary research, etc.). They learn the principals of public interest reporting, an organic method of community reporting, how to write lean and clear prose, and how to produce a radio story.

An intermediate course is offered in the spring semester. This class does graduate level work. Each class has a focus; past examples have been schools, redevelopment, returning veterans, and the recession. The class as editorial team fans out in part of Oakland and to document what is happening in an on-going blog, as they research radio stories that create a portrait of a place and help people understand a larger issue.

The program has collaborated with CUSP at the school of education, anthropology and sociology.

Because so many students want to continue with this work, the program creates opportunities to work on individual documentary projects, internships at KALW and other skill building opportunities. About 100 students have taken the classes over the past six years. One, Sarah Gonzales, won the extremely competitive Kroc Fellowship at NPR in 2010. She and others have gone on to work in public radio.

What We Could Be Doing 

An expanded program might include:

1. A Series of six broadcast lectures—high profile women in leadership, recorded for broadcast and distributed nationally through the Public Radio Exchange. Such a program might partner with organizations like the Commonwealth Club.
2. Create new class creative non-fiction for live story-telling in which students would come to the class with a story that could be turned into a live, multi-media presentation. The actual performance could become a Mills version of a “underground” event like pop up magazine.
3. Create advanced documentary course
4. Provide summer intensive reporting seminar
5. Create documentary unit that is producing work for national outlets such as NPR, Snap Judgment , This American Life, Radio Ambulante , etc. 

Resources Needed

To begin to move in the directions described above would require a single producer/reporter to expand the curriculum, produce the broadcast series and live events and handle the technical production. Including expenses for the current program the budget for the entire program would be about $100k annually.

Benefits and Possibilities

This program could involve 30-40 students per year and would provide opportunity for students to follow a cumulative curriculum over 2 or 3 years. A summer program might expand this further. The current program serves about 12 students per year. The program would strengthen the existing journalism minor and it resonates with programs in inter-media art and the social sciences. It could be a cornerstone component of a revived communications major.

The products of the program have a unique opportunity to expose the Mills name to a national audience. The various networks mentioned above are all already in place and are hungry for the kind of material Mills students could produce. The program would be a double-edged contribution to community outreach: students would be involved in community-based public interest journalism and the results of their work would be publicly visible and accessible.

This represents an opportunity to create a destination program as it is unlike anything offered to American undergraduates.

See Also 

• Sandhya Dirks(Mills alumna) “How Mills Public Radio Changed My Life” 
• "Mills College Students Win Documentary Awards From American Women in Radio and Television" 
• "Northern California Society of Professional Journalists Honors Students"  

Some Recent Stories by Mills Alums 

• "Vote While You Shop: 'Pop-Up' Poll Sites Sweep Iowa" by Sandhya Dirks October 24, 2012 
• "13th Grade: Why More Florida Students Than Ever Struggle With Math" by Sarah Gonzales December 10, 2012 

Outreach Programs to Boost Reputation and Enrollment

Colleges are often represented through their athletic department. However another way to represent the College is through a solid "outreach program" in the arts, sciences and humanities. This type of program targets high schools and/or other colleges as a tool for recruitment.

Examples

An outreach can take many forms and it can be organized departmentally or through a division. For example, the Dance Department went to Berkeley High, the Crowden School, Santa Rosa University and Hayward College and presented a "lecture demonstration," which is basically a mini concert with a presentation done by one Faculty member. It can include a discussion about artistic processes, a period of questions and answers, presentation of the curriculum and sometimes have activities that will involve students’ participation.

Science departments could develop a small repertoire of "road shows" that would be of interest to high schools in the Bay Area (or beyond). Social science departments, likewise, could offer talks and demonstrations. In both cases, some research would be necessary to determine just what topics and genres would work for different audiences and would play on the strengths of our faculty and students.

The Leverage

The Admission office also goes to various conferences and presentations and makes school visits, but sending faculty and students directly to schools and showing the actual work we do in person with some of our students can establish strong connections and enrich the visited school even as it benefits us visibility. Even if the students in these various schools do not end up applying to Mills, they might attend an event on campus, talk about Mills with parents or friends or simply take with them a positive Mills experience.

To make these “outreach programs” truly beneficial for the College, they would probably need to be organized in an "officially" with a vision behind them.  For example, they might be grouped by theme or by division. They would also need to be coordinated with the Admission Office; if the event takes place in high schools, someone from the undergraduate program should participate. If it’s another college, someone from the graduate admission should accompany the group etc.

What It Would Take

Transportation should also be considered as a part of the infrastructure necessary to make something like this work.  The PE department is able to go "on the road" because it does have its own vans.  A program like this would probably need to have a similar resource on hand to make it work.  And we would have to figure out how to fit this into our already busy schedules; no small thing, but do-able.

Having someone with vision and some modest resources in charge of such an “outreach program” could produce something that is a great recruitment tool as well as helping to spread the education and culture that Mills has to offer.

See Also: "Capitalize on Public Performance/Lecture Spaces"

Examples at Other Schools

"Fruitville Elementary Joins New College Archaeology Day"
Faculty and students host a Saturday event to introduce K12 students to "public archaeology" on the New College of Florida campus.

Community Based Curriculum

Why don't we see if we couldn't focus (at least part of) the undergrad curriculum more on community based learning (service learning) and collaborative research projects with local governments, companies or non-profits.  If we built up the Center for Urban Schools Partnerships (CUSP) as the core of such an effort and then used resources associated with that to really make it worthwhile for departments and programs to partner with it we could start making our location in Oakland a very visible asset rather than a liability that we subtly hide behind pictures of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge in our brochures.  Packaged right, it would be VERY desirable to incoming students.  People who speak to potential students at admissions events will tell you they always perk up when one talks about working with nonprofits and city government.  It's a perfect vehicle for making education practical and "real" while at the same time maintaining its intellectual rigor.

One could imagine creating a framework that defined different kinds of community collaboration, some appropriate for beginning students, some appropriate for students just beginning their training in, say, research methods, and some appropriate for advanced students with specialized skills.  Instructors could connect their courses with such a framework without having to re-invent things on their own.  With enough such activity it would be cost-effective to have some staff to coordinate activity and to have space dedicated to the partnership center.

Getting this off the ground would not be as heavy lifting as one might think since so many pieces are already in place and we have some experience with past projects in this vein.

Eventually, graduate and professional students might be organized along the lines of what law schools and policy schools often call "clinics" -- mini-consultancies based at the school and supervised by professors or professors of practice (or clinical professors) and providing services to community members or community based organizations.  The most obvious connections here would be PPOL and MBA and ED but one can imagine a role for arts graduate students as well.

An important part of such an initiative is to build enough of an infrastructure that the whole thing does not just depend on a few faculty members' dedication.  The resource flows and the benefits to students have to be positive enough that it is a good idea apart from the fact that it is a worthy idea.

Student Chair

This is a proposal for a high leverage, "brand-building," student-centered point of excellence.

What if each year a department were able to reserve one adjunct slot for what we would call "the student chair." Each fall senior majors would work with the department head or senior seminar instructor to fashion a proposal for a course to be taught in their final spring semester at Mills. The faculty in the department would then recruit a "Mills Prize Teaching Fellow" to develop and teach the course. The whole operation would be stamped with the Mills "brand" – student involvement in the process, freedom for the instructor to explore areas that cross boundaries, a chance to teach motivated students in a special academic environment. For our majors it would be an advanced topical seminar in an area beyond what our faculty could offer.

In conjunction with the course the department might offer a public lecture or film series that would showcase the topic and the fact of the student chair seminar for non-seniors. In addition to this being a great academic experience for our students, we anticipate it becoming a sought after position that focuses attention on Mills as a place that people really want to teach. We would expect that we'd pay a small premium over the usual adjunct salary to recognize that this "slot" is a special one.

If each department in a division instituted this, we could have an awesome series of events highlighting these seminars and trumpeting the prize teaching fellows. Some of them would already have tenure track jobs lined up, but for others this could be a nice bit of career building -- both teaching at a liberal arts college and being involved in the life of the department and perhaps even being mentored a bit as a teacher.

For our own students it could be a tradition to which early alumnae donations are tied. Alumnae majors could be informed each year about what this year's student chair course was. As we move into more uses of technology, course materials might be available via open-course-ware or perhaps lectures or some such might be put on line.

Mills Center for Women and Politics

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More Undergraduate Research (especially, but not only, in sciences)

Background

For the last decade or two their has been an increasing emphasis on research experiences for undergraduates, especially early experiences like projects in interdisciplinary labs.  It may well be something high school students ask about: will I have opportunity to participate in research at this school.

Status Quo

Actually, we aren't doing badly for early research experiences in the natural sciences.  But at present it's unsystematic: a "program" that is dependent on individual faculty members figuring out how to make it work.  And, it remains an uncompensated form of teaching.

In addition to the opportunities we CAN offer on-campus, we encourage them to go off campus for research, but that isn't exactly sustainable if enrollments keep increasing, and, insofar as sometimes funding follows students, it's giving away potential resources.

Capacities

At the moment, in the natural sciences, the limitation on research opportunities is largely a function of the number of research-active faculty (funding would be a limitation if the program grew considerably).In chemistry, for example, we have three people who are research active, and each could manage, say, two summer students. So at most we can host six summer students, or less than half of the declared chemistry majors.

A Scalable Plan

A first step would be to identify impediments to maximizing summer research capacity with existing faculty.  Perhaps next we look at resource constraints that limit number of interns per faculty member (noted above as 2 in chemistry, for example).  

A next step might be to develop some proposals (either by discipline or across several) and investigate funding for something along the lines of the REU programs at other institutions (the ones we send our students to).

It might also make sense to focus on infrastructure and on developing parallel programs in the social sciences and perhaps even the humanities.  Ultimately this could evolve into summer employment for faculty (both tenure track and non-tenure track), fuller facility utilization, a way for students to fit in credit hours without taking 5 courses, and be a boon to retention.

Minor in Women, Leadership and Social Change

This is a proposal to create a minor in "Women, Leadership and Social Change" as an expansion and institutionalization of the Institute for Civic Leadership at Mills.

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Women in the ((Hard) Social) Sciences Initiative

Background

The last decade or so has seen a fantastic push for increasing women's participation in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.  The same time period has seem a sharp shift in the prominence of the more quantitative social sciences.  Network science, big data, game theory, cognitive neuro-social science are just a few of the exciting areas that constitute the "where the action is" in the social sciences.

These subfields are also the ones in which women are most radically unrepresented.  One thing this translates into is fantastic opportunities for Mills women we could train to work in these areas.  Another thing is the chance for Mills women to have a real impact on the direction of these fields.

Although the effort to increase women's participation in the STEM fields is laudable in every way, it is arguable that more women in chemistry won't radically change the things chemists study.  By contrast, one COULD speculate that in the social sciences more women practicing in these cutting edge fields might have a significant impact on the kinds of problems we study as well as the methods we use to study them.

Proposal

Establish a program for the promotion of women's participation in the "hard" social sciences.  The program might be a track that cut across the existing social science majors with a few special seminars, a group of faculty advising the students, and a few new courses (including the "Mathematical Social Sciences" course Ryan piloted a few years back).  We'd have a budget for bringing to campus women and men social scientists doing the latest and coolest thing on the cutting edge.  We'd exploit Mills excellence in teaching mathematics to build a cohort of mathematically adept social science majors.  We'd build bridges to the interdisciplinary computer science masters program (see this post) to have our students connecting there.  One aspect of the program would build on "learn to code" efforts going on internationally.  We would make connections with tech firms in Silicon Valley that have branched out into social science work (Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc.).  We would make connections with emerging efforts at the GSB that would resonate with this.

Coursework

• Calculus, linear algebra, and probability/statistics
• Introduction to mathematical social science
• Introduction to economics
• Advanced introduction to social science
• Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
• Geographic Information Systems
• Learning to code
• Discrete math
• Agent models in the Social Sciences
• Introductory probability, econometrics
• Network analysis
• Modeling and simulation

Building the Pipeline

Graduate programs in these areas are keenly aware at the underrepresentation of women in their ranks.  Those of us in contact with practitioners at research universities will work to cultivate relationships in which Mills is the supplier of just the candidates they are looking for.  During the first several years of the program we will specifically strategize on the sorts of placements we want to make happen.

Implement More Robust Statistics Course Offerings

Statistics is one of the most useful of all mathematical disciplines. It finds applications in such diverse domains as actuarial science, agriculture, astronomy, biology, business, chemistry, computer science, economics, education, environmental science, geology, government, insurance, law, linguistics, marketing, medicine, physics, political science, psychology, public health, public opinion surveying, and sociology. In fact, almost areas of serious research make extensive use of statistics, and this use becomes more widespread every year.

Most major universities and liberal arts colleges offer substantial programs in statistics. It is on lists of the 15 Most Valuable College Majors.  Mills offers entry-level statistics courses based on high school mathematics in two departments, Economics and Psychology, and a calculus-based introductory probability and statistics course in the Mathematics Program that is taught every two or three years. But it offers no courses beyond these entry level courses. This poses a serious obstacle to having a first-rate science program. So the second thing I would like to propose is that Mills offer a richer program of probability courses that build on the existing entry level courses. Again, this would require additional FTE.

Background Information

Colleges Offering Statistics Major I
Colleges Offering Statistics Major II
UC Berkeley Statistics Major FAQ

Faculty Driven Trans-Disciplinary Major Pilots

Idea

What if small groups of faculty design, and get approval for "college" majors to be offered for a few years on a pilot basis.  The menu on offer would vary from year to year as lessons were learned and interests evolved.  For something similar, see the programs at Evergreen College.

Introduction 

Like many liberal arts colleges, Mills allows students to “design their own majors.” These institutions also, from time to time, consider curriculum changes including the creation of new majors and (much less frequently) the elimination of existing majors. When the two processes are contrasted, interesting differences emerge. The former leaves the inventiveness in the hands of sophomores, the latter in the hands of distracted committees, status quo bias, and turf battles. The products of the former, even if an excellent idea, are rarely repeated. The latter, even if a bad idea, are rarely repealed. The list of contrasts could go on, but the bottom line does not require it: our processes for curricular innovation leave a lot to be desired.

The future of women’s education depends on changing this. The pace of change in world of higher education is such that offering an education that is just as good as and just the same as except for women only is not likely a sustainable. If we continue to be guided by our 19th and 20th century educational legacy, we stand to produce graduates less and less well prepared for 21st century lives. This will reduce the attractiveness to new students and reduce the success of graduates and, in turn, reduce the level at which they can support the college.

Women’s colleges like Mills, if they are to serve women who will lead change in the coming decades must themselves be able to lead change in what it means to be an institution of higher education. One piece of this is to re-think what it means to “major” in something.

Majoring in the 21st Century 

What should students at women's colleges major in? For a long time we have tried to change women’s position in the social division of labor by getting more women to major in subjects that had tended to be dominated by men. In some fields, like medicine, this project has been quite successful (The Lancet 2009); in others, like computer science, quite disappointing (Stross 2008).

These efforts, while laudable, are, ironically, not very future oriented. The academic paths we encourage our students to follow in pursuit of breaking barriers and ceilings are on maps designed to solve the problems of a previous century. The time has come to think about training leaders not in terms of the legacy of disciplinary boundaries and social problems of the 20th century, but rather for the problems and opportunities that lie ahead.

In other words, what they should major in in the 21st century is the 21st century.

What would this mean? Even without crystal balls, we can guess that the leaders of tomorrow, in technology, arts, and politics, are going to be boundary spanners, most likely not the "interdisciplinarians" that we have talked ineffectively about for the last few decades, but rather "transdisciplinarians" whose tool kits ignore boundaries and who possess the ability to collaborate with colleagues with alien skill sets.

It won't do to reprise previous efforts at top down, monolithic, a priori curriculum reform. We need to eschew the old approach of appointing committees and voting up or down wishy-washy consensus plans based on what we wish we had studied in college. In its place we need an infrastructure that will facilitate faculty experimentation and curricular reconfiguration in ways that do not depend on university committees, decanal decrees or foundation grants. In effect, we need to import some of the virtues of “startup culture” into the academy.

We should explore how women's colleges can reinvent themselves not to prepare women for traditionally male occupations but for a world that is not yet here and to do this in ways that other institutions will want to emulate. It will focus on ways to build an innovation infrastructure that encourages, facilitates and rewards faculty for engaging actively in this process.

A Preliminary Vision 

What if small groups of faculty design, and get approval for "college" majors in consideration of

1. existing intellectual and pedagogical resources, 
2. an analysis of future problems and challenges in American and world society, 
3. an assessment of the opportunity structure in the graduate school and employment markets (to optimally match “novel” majors with career paths likely to be open to them). 

Faculty would commit to a given sequence of courses and advising students for a set number of years. Faculty would then be in the position of “selling” the program to entering students; if there were no student interest, there’d be no program. Similarly, faculty and students would evaluate such programs on an ongoing basis, making changes or even eliminating the programs as indicated. Programs that are particularly successful could be institutionalized in majors “on the books” if desired.

We expect that novel programs like this will prove attractive to excellent students and to outside funders currently desperate to find student oriented new ideas. The institutionalization, not of particular "majors," but of this process, can lead to a general institutional nimbleness that is rarely seen in organizations like liberal arts colleges.

Opportunity

Amid the litany of problems facing women’s liberal arts colleges like Mills lies opportunity. Contrary to the position some have taken, the project of educating women can be called a success without saying that it is over. According to the National Center for Education Statistics women will continue to earn about 60% of the bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. each year – over one million per year – during the next decade (National Center for Education Statistics 2010). This is not a small market. But to enroll these students women's colleges need to take the lead transitioning from "just as good as but different" to “different and better.”

Colleges like Mills tend to be small, under-resourced, and have relatively low rates of staff turnover, all factors that make innovation challenging. These same factors can make it possible to create an environment in which small experiments can flourish. We should attempt to take advantage of these characteristics and this demographic trend to expand our impact on society.

Works Cited 

1. National Center for Education Statistics. 2010. “Degrees Conferred by Degree-granting Institutions, by Level of Degree and Sex of Student: Selected Years, 1869-70 Through 2019-20.” http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_279.asp. 
2. ———. “Digest of Education Statistics, 2007.” 
3. Institute of Education Sciences. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_258.asp. 
4. Ryan, Dan. 2012. “Majoring in the 21st Century.” http://majoring21.blogspot.com/. 
5. Stross, Randall. 2008. “What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?” The New York Times, November 16, sec. Business. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html. 
6. The Lancet. 2009. “Women in Medicine—a Future Assured.” The Lancet 373 (9680) (June): 1997. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61088-6..

PLEA as Interdisciplinary Social Science

Political, Legal, and Economic Analysis (PLEA) has been a standout major at Mills for decades.  Of late, though, many of us feel it is something of an orphan with lots of potential.  It has historically had lots of majors and even though it has few analogs at other schools or in the minds of high school students or counselors it ranks high in terms of what attracts prospective students to Mills.

What is PLEA and What Could It Be?

Around the world the boundaries between the various social science disciplines are being crossed, broken, and re-defined.  Very few interesting or important real world problems respect the 19th and 20th century disciplinary lines along which we organize undergraduate education in the social sciences.

Our PLEA major offers a fantastic opportunity build into the curriculum a new and cutting edge approach to trans-disciplinary social science without completely tearing up our existing structure.  Our various disciplines address the four major forms of social organization that dominate the modern world: markets, networks, organizations, and voting and the related activities of law, legislation, collective action.

At present PLEA serves, perhaps primarily, as a pre-law surrogate.  To a lesser extent it functions for some students as a pre-MBA or pre-IR program.

Among the potentials here are for it to serve as the integrative program in the social sciences.  It can gather, in one room, so to speak, students who might go on to joint degrees in law and the social sciences.  Complement rather than competitor to PPOL and the other social science majors.  The pedagogical territory on which faculty across the social sciences meet.  It could help to lead us into a sort of three or four sector social science trajectory where we locate a core of sociology, government, economics, and government (with philosophy and history and women/gender studies in the picture around these) and a cluster of graduate school destinations above these and then careers beyond that.  It might look something like this:

A Framework for Disciplinary Writing Across the Major Standards

This is a very preliminary thinking through of how one might construct a developmental framework for writing skills standards across four years of a major. If several disciplines thought this through we could then identify common pieces and align these with writing instruction in composition classes, writing center, lower division courses, and upper division courses within a major. The standards articulated here are particular to sociology/anthropology but many elements are probably more general.
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