Educational Innovation
Reimagining Undergraduate Writing Instruction Through Problem-Based and Project-Based Learning
In 2017 CEC introduced social-constructivist educational approaches to the teaching and learning of writing at the Singapore Management University (SMU). We use both Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and Project-Based Learning (PjBL) in our modules such as Writing and Reasoning (WR), and Professional Writing (PW).
Since the introduction of these approaches, students have shown significantly increased engagement and overall satisfaction with both course and instructor quality across our modules, but WR has seen the most growth in these metrics.
Reimagining writing education has been a three-fold approach:
- using PBL to teach writing,
- constant alignment of problems and projects to keep both content and process relevant and valuable to our student,
- introducing a Spiral Curriculum to align all of CEC’s education. The Spiral Curriculum imparts key writing concepts, reiterating them in more challenging and complex ways across modules, workshops, and blended-learning.
This integrated and evolutionary approach continues to engage and educate our students during their time at SMU.