Elizabeth Wardle is the Roger and Joyce Howe Distinguished Professor of Written Communication and the Director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University (OH), where she takes primary responsibility for faculty development initiatives. She was previously department chair and director of writing programs at the University of Central Florida. Her primary professional goal is to work with colleagues across the university to promote deep change around teaching and learning. She has collaboratively designed and implemented curricular innovation programs such as the Howe Faculty Writing Fellows Program (2017-present), the Miami Writing Institute (2021-present), the Leading Change Institute (2020-21), and Pathways to Expertise (2013-14).
With 22 Miami faculty members from across the disciplines, she co-authored Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices: Innovating Teaching Across the Disciplines (2022), which provides a heuristic for empowering teams of faculty to make deep change around teaching and learning. Her forthcoming co-authored book, Writing Expertise: A Research-Based Approach to Writing and Learning Across Disciplines, provides a working method for disciplinarity faculty to re-imagine their teaching for equity, access, and deep learning.
Her other books include Writing about Writing (now in its fifth edition); Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies; Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity; and (re)Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, and Rhetoric. She has also published over 30 articles and chapters in the top journals of her field.
She is the winner of Miami’s University Distinguished Scholar Award (2019-20) and the University of Central Florida’s Teaching Incentive Program and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning awards (2012). Under her leadership, the Howe Center for Writing Excellence was awarded a Conference on College Composition and Communication Writing Program Certificate of Excellence (2021-22) (as was the First-Year Writing Program at the University of Central Florida in 2013), and the Howe Writing Across the Curriculum Program was awarded the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum’s Exemplary Enduring WAC Program Award (2022). Her published work has been recognized through the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Outstanding Scholarship Award (2022) and Outstanding Contribution to the Discipline Award (2016), as well as the National Council of Teachers of English Best Article of the Year in Teaching of Technical and Scientific Communication (2005).
She speaks and gives workshops regularly around the country on program design, threshold concepts, transfer, first-year writing, and writing across the curriculum.