When I started my internship for the Center for Democratic Deliberation this fall, I was mostly excited about how this experience would help me in the future. For me, as for hundreds of Penn State students and university students across the country, senior fall meant one thing: graduate school applications. I was up to my knees in applying to Rhetoric and Communication PhD programs across the country. With aspirations to study rhetoric and performance studies and apply this research to investigating new ways of teaching language–from composition to speech and literature–I knew that evaluating and changing courses would someday fall under my list of job responsibilities.

Therefore, I was incredibly happy to be accepted into an internship in which I would be helping Dr. Debra Hawhee and Dr. Veena Raman conduct their evaluation of a brand new course: CAS/ENGL 137H, Rhetoric and Civic Life. The yearlong course is now required for Schreyer Honors College freshmen and aspiring Paterno Fellows, and it focuses on teaching oral, written, visual, and digital communication. Replacing the two previously required speaking and writing courses (CAS 100H and ENGL 30), this is the first year the new, combined sequence is being offered.

It was my job to help collect information to analyze just how well this new class was working.  I administered surveys to current CAS/ENGL 137 students and recorded their speeches as research artifacts. I analyzed the syllabi of the courses that had been replaced, examining them for elements of digital writing and the types of technologies previously required in the classes. I entered both our survey data and the data collected from the forerunner courses into a statistics program and was able to compare the questionnaires used for each.
 
However, I was only a very small part of this process that had, as I found out, been years in the making. I was able to talk with Dr. Hawhee and Dr. Raman about far more than the part of the project I was lucky enough to work on, and I began to understand how the idea had first come about, the long and difficult process that had been involved in actually implementing the change, and their hopes for eventually spreading this kind of change throughout other classes. Though the change happened for many reasons, one of the most important was that instructors wanted to make the material specifically relevant to rhetoric and communication in the twenty-first century, meaning that ways of communicating technologically play a larger role in the new courses.

My experience in this internship was ideal in that it gave me both a macro and micro perspective on the complicated process of course revision.  Through discussions with my two overseeing professors, I was able to understand all of the different elements of attempting to change a course from a larger point-of-view.  Simultaneously, through the work I was doing in administering surveys, collecting information, and entering data, I was also directly participating in the process of evaluation. Because the course is a yearlong sequence, we are only halfway through collecting the data from this pilot year, and our last surveys will occur at the end of this spring, at which point Dr. Hawhee, Dr. Raman, and the other faculty members involved in this process will have over two years’ worth of comprehensive data to analyze and compare in order to see how effective the changes have been.
 
As I hoped, this internship taught me a lot about how course modification happens at an institutional level in a way that will be very useful to me as a future professor. However, it also taught me something very important that applies to me right now that I wasn’t expecting. As students, we only really get to see where any given course is at the present time–its name and description on the syllabus in front of us–but by being given a glimpse into the way courses are changed and evaluated, I began to look at my schedule, especially the required courses such as this one, much differently. I experienced firsthand how much thought and care goes into the process of changing a course, how many dedicated people are behind it, and how much research and data collection is required. The team in charge of evaluating the new course came up with an extremely inclusive set of surveys that both asked students about their writing and speaking skills and about the course itself. As a hands-on part of administering and recording these surveys, I was able to understand just how much weight they are given. The goal of the surveys was not to annoy or bother students; rather, it was truly to listen to them. I feel luckier than ever to be a student here at Penn State and in the College of the Liberal Arts now that I have a better understanding of just how much work, thought, attention, and care goes into designing the courses I take.