Please come to this day-long showcase of research posters designed and presented by students from more than 25 English department writing courses. Drop in any time to encourage these ambitious students and to show support for this new venue to celebrate undergraduate researchers.

Spring Showcase

• Monday, June 3rd
• Viking Union room 565

Schedule

• English 101 poster presentations: 8:30am – 3:50pm (rotating every 80 minutes)
• English 302 poster presentations: 4pm-5pm

A Poster Showcase for the Humanities?

In recent years, writing courses in the English department have moved away from teaching only traditional humanities genres like the essay. Instead, students are learning to write across a range of genres and media, including research proposals, podcasts, research posters, and websites. Not only does this diversity better prepare our students for a wide range of writing-related jobs outside the university, it also teaches them to be adaptable writers able to work with current technologies.

English 101

The Showcase will feature students from 25 sections of English 101, “Writing your Way Through WWU,” who will be presenting over 300 large-scale research posters. These posters present students’ original research about some aspect of reading, writing, or communication they experience in their lives. For instance, many explore the influences social media platforms have on their communication skills, or on the way they form lasting friendships with others. Other projects examine the ways various documents communicate–how advertising motivates certain actions, or how restaurant menus coax dinners to pick more expensive dishes. All of the posters present original primary research, including quantitative survey data and qualitative interview or ethnography data. Not only will students demonstrate how they ask complex questions about how people read, write, and communicate in the world, they will document the careful research methods they used to answer those questions.

English 302

The Showcase will also feature students from English 302, “Technical and Professional Writing.” These posters will examine a set of technical documents that have been highly important to culture and society. Some examples might include the Hippocratic Oath, the Magna Carta, or the Americans with Disabilities Act. The research presented in these posters will demonstrate how these technical documents provided frameworks for long-lasting change, often establishing traditions we still live with today. Understanding these documents as pieces of writing allows us all to appreciate the power language can have in the world.

What to look forward to…

We hope this brief preview has you excited to come participate in our Poster Showcase. These students are eager to share their research with a live audience, and to learn in the way only face-to-face discussion can allow. We hope you can make it.