Capstone Committee

April 2011

University Writing and Research Conference

Fall 2011

The Nomination Procedure and Timeline:

Contact the students you wish to nominate. By Friday, May 20th, let our committee know which of your students have accepted the nomination (send that email to ). The information in that email should include the following information for each presenter:

  1. The student’s name
  2. The title of the student’s project
  3. The student’s email address
  4. A one-sentence (or otherwise brief) description of the particular strength(s) of this project.
  5. A one-sentence (or otherwise brief) description of a strength in this student’s writing/research process.

Suggested Criteria for Nominating Students:

Please nominate students engaged in work that you see as an ideal model for future UW20 students. You might select students for reasons including, but not limited to…

  • the particularly intensive or unusual nature of their research (work in archives, ethnographic research, etc)
  • the innovative nature of their line of argument
  • a particularly successful use of “method” or framework sources to develop their analysis
  • the particularly sophisticated way of situating the sources they’re using.

In addition to selecting your students’ best work, please also remember the following two criteria:

  • The student should feel comfortable with public speaking. Is this someone who will be able to engage thoughtfully and clearly with questions about their writing and research process, as well as their topic?
  • Is this a student who is willing to continue working on this project? Students won’t simply be reading the papers they’ve already written; instead, they’ll be preparing an oral presentation that focuses on the overall arc of their research project, as well as their writing and research process. They’ll thus need to be ready to spend some time preparing for their presentation.

NOTE: The nominees may come from any of your UW20 sections. Thus, if you had one section with three outstanding projects, you could have all of your nominees come from that one section (rather than spreading them out evenly between your sections).

What Work Is Involved for Faculty Who Participate?

Capstone Committee will sift through the nominations, set up the conference schedule, and organize the conference itself. We will, however, need participating faculty to do three things:

  1. Nominate your spring 2011 students to present at the conference and report those nominations to the Capstone Committee by Friday, May 20th.
  2. Meet in the fall with the presenters you nominated to provide them with guidance as they prepare their presentations.
  3. Cancel classes on the day of the student writing conference and require your students to attend one of the 50-minute sessions. Capstone will provide you with materials that you might use to prepare your students to be audience members, but it will be up to you to decide whether you wish to incorporate that material into your class time.

Supporting Materials, Provided by Capstone!

In the fall, our committee will be providing you with a series of templates, tips, and suggestions to facilitate your involvement in the conference. You are by no means required to use any of these supporting documents, but we’ll be providing them in the hopes that they’ll be useful to at least some of the participating faculty. Below is a sampling of the kinds of support we’ll be providing:

  • A template for nominating students to present at the conference
  • A set of presentation tips to help students think about how to shape their presentations.
  • A list of suggestions for how you might incorporate the conference into your classes. For instance, we’ll provide a handout on the “Art of Asking Questions” to help prepare your fall students to be active participants during the discussion portion of the panels.