For nearly three years, Lisa Swan has brought her expertise in curriculum and instruction, composition pedagogy, and equity, to her role as the PWR1 Coordinator. Before and during her current role, she taught classes in first-year composition, English literature, children’s literature, and English teaching methods. As she embarks upon her last year in the role, she shares with Emily Polk some of her most memorable highlights and lessons learned–from coordinating the Boothe Prize, to organizing library workshops, to meeting one-on-one with instructors– she has been an inspiring source of expertise and support.
Emily Polk: Can you share with us some of the things you're most proud of so far in your role as PWR1 Coordinator?
Lisa Swan: The Coordinator role has been a lot of fun. I love getting to work with our colleagues so closely. This year we hired some new instructors, so I've been working with them, one-on-one, and getting to support them in their classroom, as they onboard to the PWR experience.
Emily Polk: And what does that support look like?
Lisa Swan: I've met with the new folks once a week. We have a weekly debrief and talk about how things have been going, what they're planning for the next week. We address any challenges that might be coming up. I learn, I think, as much as they do. They're telling me the neat things they're doing from their former experiences, or disciplines or backgrounds. And then I'm like:” Oh, that's such a good idea, I should think about doing that!”
Emily Polk: Can you share a memorable story of working with an instructor?
Lisa Swan: There are these really collaborative conversations that go all quarter. I also have folks email me to say “hey, I discovered this AI tool, have you used it in your classroom?” So I sat down with an instructor this week, and we were looking at a tool called Research Rabbit, which is an AI tool that takes the citation trails and maps them into networks. What you can do is you can put your whole TiC, your whole RBA up there, and then see all of the sources that maybe aren't part of the papers that you've pulled yet. But see all the connections to them. I think it's a rich, robust tool for research.
Emily Polk: Can you share how you see AI changing or informing our PWR1 classes?
Lisa Swan: My stance on AI is AI is going to be a tool. One of the findings of the Study of Writing is, many students use their parents as their editors, their revision coaches. That's beautiful. But what if your mom doesn't speak English?… I'm not opposed to using AI in my class in the sense that I do want my students to think about the tool, but I offer it as an option, not a requirement. Areas that I think are really productive. It's pretty good at generating a bunch of research topics. It's pretty good at indicating at least one real scholar in that field. It does make them up as well, but if you're using [it as] a starting place of who you might look for– great. I think it can also be interesting for tone. I think [instructors] 'have been trained in this very stiff academic writing. I'll see what it does, and then play with it. If it adds some phrasing that I think is interesting, I'll try to integrate it into my writing, like course descriptions.
Emily Polk: Do you spend a lot of time training instructors to be aware of both the limitations of these tools and their affordances?
Lisa Swan: I view myself as just [a teacher]: Here's what I'm doing in my class, and maybe some things I say are kind of relevant to you in your class. I don't view myself as a mentor per se, especially for established instructors. I feel it’s a collaboration. I'm always happy to share materials that I've been creating or [my] approaches. But I want instructors to take that and make it their own in terms of what they want to do and [I] recognize that it might not be right for your class. Maybe that tool doesn't feel appropriate, or there's not enough time.
Emily Polk: Can you share a little bit more about your own disciplinary expertise and background? How is it informing your current role as PWR1 Coordinator?
Lisa Swan: My focus is on writing instruction. I studied education, but composition specifically at the college level and focused on questions of equity. How can we pedagogically make our practices as inclusive, supportive, and culturally relevant as possible? I did that through studying writing conferences. That's what I focused my dissertation on. I had also worked at a center for teaching and learning, working with faculty members across campus to integrate active learning into their classrooms. So, thinking about ways we could punctuate lectures with small moments of active learning. That was really rewarding work, but very difficult.
Emily Polk: I'm curious about what you found in your research on student conferencing and how you've brought that to conferencing in PWR.
Lisa Swan: My study looked at how the student experiences conferences. I had a small case study of about 7 students and I found that students who felt more comfortable speaking to an instructor got more out of the conferences. So now I try to explain to students what's going to happen [during conferences] and to their draft beforehand. I'll explain: I generally get on to Google Docs the morning of your conference. I'll make some comments in the margins and then we'll talk about your ideas and things that I notice. [Conferences are a great opportunity to ask questions of me, and then, at the end of the conference, we'll write up the end comment of what you want to do. What's your revision plan? How do you want to move forward? I try to really lay out what the process is like.
Emily Polk: Can you speak more about your inspiring reading pedagogy work?
Lisa Swan: Tesla Schaeffer and I conducted a reading study during Covid, which was not planned, but we got the IRB approval so we went for it. We collected students' reflections on their reading practices in our classes and have written a manuscript that's going to be going out shortly–hopefully to Pedagogy–about mining reading, which is a way of reading for conversation, reading for research. We found a gap in the literature where reading wasn't really conceptualized as something you would teach in a research project, which is interesting if you think about it, because the only way to do research is to read it.
Emily Polk: That's wonderful. Can you tell me how you found your way to Stanford?
Lisa Swan: I was at the University of Maryland College Park in their school of Ed. and I was applying to any school that had composition jobs, more focused on the lecture level. Specifically, I thought I'd go back to community colleges, given my focus on equity. I taught at Northern Virginia Community College for a couple of years as an adjunct. But then, Stanford happened, and my entire family is on the West Coast. Everybody's in Portland. So this felt really nice.
Emily Polk: How would you describe some of the highlights for you, of working in PWR in general and in your position as the PWR1 Coordinator?
Lisa Swan: The community is one of the best parts. I feel like leaving Stanford would be almost impossible. Given some of the deep friendships I've created here, and the colleagues that I collaborate with like my office mate Valerie. She’s one of my dearest friends, and has been such a wonderful support, and a mentor, especially since becoming a parent and a mom. We joke that our office is Coordinators’ Corner.
Emily Polk: I love hearing this. Okay, keep going.
Lisa Swan: I think PWR taught me about revision. I mean, I knew about revision for my own practices, but how we focus on helping students grow and develop through feedback and revision has been incredibly powerful. One of the most common things that [students] will write on the board at the end of the quarter is writing is revision or writing as a way to think. But they also think writing is really hard work, which it is. I think they come away [from class] proud. I've become a better feedbacker. I've become a better listener, you name it all around.
Emily Polk: I'm interested in how you understand the relationship between the personal and our identities as teachers in the classroom. How much of the personal do you bring in, and how much do you feel comfortable sharing?
Lisa Swan: I like to acknowledge I'm a whole person to my students. I mean being a teacher is my identity, right? I think I ended up in education for a reason, and part of that was that I'm a teacher fundamentally first and foremost. So you know, my students know that I have a daughter and a dog, and I've recently taken to putting poetry I love on the break slide from Instagram.
Emily Polk: Can we have a rundown of your week? What is a week like in the day of a PWR1 Coordinator?
Lisa Swan: The PWR1 Coordinator is in charge of several administrative processes. The largest and most complex one is the Boothe Prize which is very laborious in terms of coordinating all of the judging. You're working with many different folks. Shay Brawn does the publication. Lisa Ramee does all of the setting up the folders for the judging. You're working with the first and final judging panel. The other process the Coordinator handles is the library workshops. That's helping all the PWR instructors schedule their library workshop, working with new instructors on what a library workshop looks like, and then working with the librarians around how to deliver an effective library workshop. And then this year has been really focused on the Study of Writing. I've been working with Marvin, Adam, and Christine around our website and our web presence helping to articulate more clearly the PWR requirement.
Emily Polk: Because this is your first time in the Coordinator’s Corner is there anything else you want to make sure that our community knows about you?
Lisa Swan: I'm deeply invested in the practice of teaching. How do we take theory and research? I love reading research and understanding [scholarship]. What does this mean for my classroom? What does this mean for Stanford? I think sometimes students think that writing is simultaneously the hardest thing and the easiest thing. I want them to recognize that there is better writing that meets the rhetorical situation in more interesting and unique ways, and that they know that they can [write].
