In addition to the required contract renewal documents, I'd like to share a project I've been working on and explain its relevance to rank advancement.
This past year, I've worked with Professor Eric Schockman and one of his graduate students, Andrea Flores, on redesigning the website for Eric's charity, Global Hunger Foundation. In the spirit of entrepreneurship that Woodbury values, I seek to work on projects with an explciit real-world exigency that can help me connect theory and practice within my field of professional writing and technical communication. Last year, Eric showed me his charity's website and I could tell it was in need of a drastic redesign. Not only did it look dated, but I noticed there were some security concerns with it as well. Together, he, Andrea, and I migrated the website to Wordpress, redesigned the site, and updated the various accounts connected to the site (i.e., PayPal). I also have helped him blog on the site so that the website stays timely and active. This took about 50 hours to do, but it was well worth it for a couple of reasons. For one, I could help out a good charity that does excellent work. And second, it allowed me to get real-world experience dealing with a client (Eric's charity), developing effective workflows, and practicing my web design, coding, and WordPress skills.
Why is this relevant to rank advancement here at Woodbury? There are several reasons. "Digital Composition," "Web Authoring," and "Professional Blogging and Social Media" are all courses that are part of the new Professional Writing Degree. Professional Writing involves not just alphabetic writing in genres such as business and technical reports, epublishing, online journalism, etc., but also involves numerous software and technological platforms that students need to be familiar with. This project allowed me to refamiliarize myself with various platforms so that I can be a more effective teacher. Second, I've noticed how much Woodbury students value real-world experience. While many faculty in architecture, business, and film straddle both higher education and private practice, it's rarer for those in the liberal arts and social sciences to bring such pracitcle experience to the classroom. This is actually a noted problem in many academic disciplines, and one that professional writing and technical communication seeks to remedy. This experience has given me the opportunity to share some experience with my students first-hand, and it has encouraged me to continue down this path of freelancing because I see the value it can bring to the classroom for students.
I would like for the Personnel Committee to also consider my work on this project for rank advancement.