Abstract:
Writing Intensive (WI) courses depend on student engagement and continuous responses to
student work. The sudden move to online learning in the face of COVID-19 presented
profound challenges to this model. This is unsurprising since it is widely accepted that globally
the quality of learning, particularly the acquisition of deep literacy, declined significantly
throughout the pandemic (OECD, 2021; Garfinkle, 2020). This paper draws on the reflections of
three course teams in different disciplines and follows the method pioneered by John Bean and
Barbara Walvoord in the evaluation of writing programmes (Bean, et al., 2005). It mines iterative
and comparative teacher team reflections but does not seek to provide quantitative data on
‘proof of impact’. From the evidence of these three courses, it is suggested that student
learning and problem solving can be enhanced through the explicit teaching of the types of
reasoning required, in these cases analogic, empathetic, and inferential. The argument is
located within wider international arguments on the crisis of deep literacy and the work of The
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development on developing literacy skills in a
digital world (OECD, 2021).
