Author: Elizabeth Gillooly

4-VA was designed to encourage partnerships and resource sharing to advance higher education in Virginia. Bringing together researchers and thought leaders from around the commonwealth to work in concert has been key to the success of the program since its launch in 2010.

One area of higher education which has lacked comprehensive study is the pedagogy of public writing.  Public writing is generally defined as writing that is intended for a general audience with the goal of informing, persuading, or creating change. While courses in this focus have increased in number and scope, they have received relatively little support and scaffolding. Consequently, when Michelle LaFrance’s proposal The Virginia Community and Public Writing Collaborative was received by 4-VA@Mason, it won approval.  LaFrance, who focuses on Writing and Rhetoric in George Mason’s English Department, saw the need to connect faculty and students in this growing educational community to pool knowledge and address opportunities for professional development and student success.

LaFrance explains, “Classes in community literacy, community writing, and public writing have all seen an emergence amongst Virginia-based writing studies researchers in the last five years.”  However, LaFrance recognized that few formalized lines of communication existed between the faculty who design, develop, and carry out research and deliver curricula at different institutions.  Working in silos, she reasoned, was no way to advance the implementation of successful writing programs at this level.

Thanks to 4-VA, LaFrance brought together Sweta Baniya and Sherri Craig at VT, Jen Almjeld at JMU, David Coogan at VCU; and Steve Parks and Kate Stevenson at UVA to begin the work of collecting information and developing relationships.  LaFrance then hired Emily Sok, a PhD student in Mason’s Writing and Rhetoric department, to coordinate the project and assist with the planning of the collaborative’s efforts and the creation of the website.

LaFrance also involved four Mason PhD candidates in Writing and Rhetoric as volunteers in the program: Tyler Martinez, Kelby Martinez, Kerry Smith, and Rosemary Pinney.

Fast forward one year from the grant award… Today, a variety of strategic outreach and communication efforts have come to fruition… The Virginia Community and Public Writing Collaborative has:

• Constructed an archive of shared online resources,
• Built a website (https://vacommunitywriting.org/) to foster the growing community,
• Established a conversation to implement both formal and informal mentoring mechanisms,
• Developed stronger relationships with off-campus communities and stakeholders and,
• Created an email list of Virginia faculty and graduate students to carry on collaborative work.

The researchers began by looking closer at the widespread and wide-ranging growth of public writing programs in the state:  At George Mason, ENGH 302: Advanced Composition, a required course for all undergraduate majors, includes a public writing assignment.  Within VT’s Center for Rhetoric in Society, a community and corporate writing project explored how to better serve local nonprofits via workshops about writing email, mission statements, and other storytelling.  At JMU, WRTG 486: Writing in the Community is offered, as well as WRTG 484: Writing for Nonprofits, which teaches writing as a tool for socio-political engagement in local communities. In doing so, many JMU faculty members have developed partnerships with local public schools, hospitals, refugee resettlement agencies, public history programs, and other community agencies. At UVA, faculty and students created a “Community Writing Collective,” that includes partnerships with local nonprofit and civic organizations and seeks to make visible opportunities in teaching, studying, and understanding writing in community contexts.

The team facilitated several video-based meetings to discuss the shared goals, needs, and interests of those carrying out community writing and community literacy research and curriculum development in Virginia. These meetings allowed members of the collaborative to discuss shared research interests, identify additional funding sources, highlight ongoing research undertakings, and consider the mentoring needs of graduate students.   Additionally, they reviewed potential opportunities for the team at the national Conference on Community Writing — which nine of the team members subsequently attended.

Next, they funded a speaker series for faculty and graduate students which featured scholars of community writing including Aja Martinez, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Ada Hubrig, and Jo Hsu.

The work continues. Recently, the team hosted Annabel Park, a nationally recognized community organizer, documentary filmmaker, and founder of The Coffee Party, as well as author Ryan Skinell.

Although much has already been accomplished, LaFrance sees an expanded future for the work.  She envisions building on the groundswell of interest by establishing a research and pedagogical collaborative of faculty and graduate students from public universities and faculty at two-year colleges in Virginia, targeting emerging issues for the writing and rhetoric program.

“It was truly terrific to support graduate students and faculty with this grant—these achievements are important and energizing, as well as a key part of professional development,” says LaFrance.  “Through this, we have shared information about the projects, partnerships, campus initiatives, and strategies for community engagement that have been our most successful undertakings within the state.”

Assistant Professor Levi Van Sant’s work in George Mason’s School of Integrative Studies focuses on environmental (in)justice surrounding food, agriculture, and land use. Previously, Van Sant has analyzed how land ownership affects the ways that racial and class dynamics of the past are reproduced in the present, focusing on the coastal United States South.  More recently, however, he was interested in the ramifications of land ownership closer to home — in “the backyard” of two 4-VA partner universities, George Mason and James Madison.

Van Sant wanted to apply an existing model which suggests that higher rates of absentee and corporate-owned timberland in rural Alabama are associated with lower quality-of-life indicators such as income and education.  It has also been observed that large landowners hold disproportionate political and economic power in rural communities.

Van Sant wanted to examine land use and ownership in the Shenandoah Valley and Middlesex County in Virginia. He also saw an opportunity to provide students at both schools a chance to hone their analytical skills — as a first reading of land use and ownership records often only tell part of the story.  He wanted the students to research the differences in data management between municipalities, recognize the difficulties in accessing information in rural counties, and understand how land ownership has repercussions for low-income and minoritized communities.

Van Sant applied for and received a 4-VA@Mason grant for this research and set his team to work. Jeremy Campbell, the Associate Director for Strategic Engagement at George Mason’s Institute for a Sustainable Earth; and Case Watkins, Assistant Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at James Madison agreed to volunteer their time to help coordinate the project.

The project centered on two partnerships with communities for whom patterns of land use and ownership are crucially important: small farmers in the Shenandoah Valley, which was overseen by Watkins, and the Indigenous Tribal Nations of the Middle Peninsula Region, which was facilitated by Campbell.

“We produced a large database of land ownership records for the two study regions in rural Virginia. From this database we created a series of maps that represent trends in land ownership across both study regions. We also compiled a set of maps to contextualize and present this work. The datasets and maps are significant resources for further analysis,” noted Van Sant. “This grant provided invaluable support for further developing our research methods; creating a solid dataset for on-going research; and, most importantly, building analysis and tools for future community engagement.”

Several students were involved with the project. George Mason graduate student Tyler Grant received funding for his work handling Geographic Information System analysis and data organization. Undergraduate students Yonna Angeles, Erin MacMonigle, and Jacquelyn Batchelor received funding as mapping assistants, as well as Tamar Gorgadze, who acted as a research assistant.

At JMU, three students also worked on the project — Gina Bigo analyzed land ownership trends, Madelynn Warren looked at county land use, and Ally Windham considered the historical overview and analysis.

Although algorithms can make online searches faster and easier, they can also be fraught with dangerous biases. Research has shown that image search engines can exhibit discrimination against females or people of color, and bias is also found in online searches in employment recruiting and the healthcare field.

While efforts have been made to unveil and tackle fairness and bias glitches in search and recommendation systems, two key issues have been largely overlooked: Existing research treats different types of bias in isolation, resulting in specialized methods that are difficult to generalize; and, they focus on bias in the static environment leaving the dynamic nature of the search and recommendation process unexplored.

Ziwei Zhu, Assistant Professor in George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, wanted to demystify the underlying correlation of different types of bias and develop new multi-task and graph learning algorithms to support fair and unbiased searches and recommendations.  Using this information, he wanted to create and release open-source software on this subject for the research community, significantly advancing trustworthiness of AI techniques. Finally, Zhu was intent on ensuring the debias system would be sustained long term.

Zhu enlisted the help of 4-VA partner Dawei Zhou in Virginia Tech’s Department of Computer Science.  Together, they responded to the 4-VA call for proposals, and, “Towards Consolidated and Dynamic Debiasing for Online Search and Recommendation” was approved for funding.

Joining the effort at George Mason was graduate student Jinhao Pan, who handled algorithm implementation and paper writing.  Pan was supported by a team of Zhu’s student researchers (pictured below).The group began by developing an end-to-end adaptive local learning framework to provide recommendations to both mainstream and niche users.

Zhu sees the audience as other researchers focusing on fair and unbiased recommendations and searches, or practitioners — software developers and AI engineers — in the industry who want to improve the fairness and trust of their systems. To that end, Zhu’s group created a boosting-based framework designed to decrease a broad spectrum of biases. This framework employs a series of sub-models, each tailored for different users and item subgroups.

The results were impressive, with experiments demonstrating superior debiasing capabilities against state-of-the-art methods across four model bias types.

However, Zhu knew that their new framework for recognizing and removing biases would only be effective if implemented.  To that end, the group made the algorithm implementation open source through various options — https://github.com/JP-25/end-To-end-Adaptive-Local-Leanring-TALL- and https://github.com/JP-25/CFBoost.

They also presented and published Combating Heterogeneous Model Biases in Recommendations via Boosting at the Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. End-to-End Adaptive Local Learning for Alleviating Mainstream Bias in Collaborative Filtering was also presented and published at the European Conference on Information Retrieval.

In addition to the framework developed, the project increased collaboration between George Mason and Virginia Tech through coursework.  The new algorithms have been integrated into materials of Mason’s undergraduate and graduate level Data Mining courses CS584 and CS484.

Zhu has used the outcome of this project as the foundation for a proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science and Engineering Core program.

Concludes Zhu, “This 4-VA grant helped me set up some computational resources so that I can conduct further research and supported travel to academic conferences to disseminate our research and learn from others.  We believe this provided the groundwork for some very important first steps in this field.”