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Penny Hirsch
Professor of Instruction and Associate Director,

The Writing Program
Lecturer, MEAS Administration

PhD, Northwestern University

Kresge Hall, 2-210
Phone: 847-491-4969
Fax: 847-491-4840
phirsch@northwestern.edu

Penny Hirsch, Associate Director of the Writing Program, teaches courses in expository writing, essay writing, and engineering communication and serves as a freshman advisor in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her current freshman seminar—“Reading and Writing Stories from the Margin”-- grew largely out of her volunteer work with formerly incarcerated women.

In the engineering school, Hirsch co-directs Engineering Design and Communication (EDC), the Writing Program's cross-disciplinary course that she helped to develop, which is required for all first year engineering students. As a Faculty Fellow in the Segal Design Institute, she also helped develop and team-teaches Engineering Design Portfolio and Presentation, a course that integrates communication instruction into design and is required for students pursuing the Certificate in Design. For seven years, Hirsch was project leader for communication in the National Science Foundation-sponsored VaNTH (Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-Harvard/MIT) consortium in biomedical engineering. Hirsch's research focuses on how people learn to write, assessment of learning, how technology is changing the nature of writing, and communication in teams.

At Northwestern, Hirsch has served as master and fellow at the Women's Residential College and was the first member of the lecturer faculty to be recognized for excellence in teaching as a Charles Deering McCormick University Distinguished Lecturer. In other professional activities, she is a partner in her own consulting firm, Communication Partners, where she has designed and run communication workshops for hundreds of professionals in law, medicine, healthcare, real estate management, and engineering. She also reviews articles for the Journal of Business Communication (JBC), the Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC), the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE), and the International Journal of Engineering Education (IJEE).

Hirsch’s other interests include Shakespeare (the focus of her doctoral study and previous teaching), opera, skiing, hiking, and travel.

Her recent presentations and publications include the following:

• Hirsch, P. “Writing in Context: An ‘Integrated’ Approach to Writing Instruction at One Research University,” Invited presentation. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), July 22, 2008.

• Hirsch, P., and McKenna, A. “Using Reflection to Promote Teamwork in Engineering Design Education,” International Journal of Engineering Education. 24 (377-385), 2008.

• Linsenmeier, R., Bourgeois, M., Alley, J., Klein, S., and Hirsch, P. “A Unique Research Experience in Bioengineering Education for Undergraduates in the VaNTH REU.” Proceedings, American Society for Engineering Education, June 2008. 

• Hirsch, P., and Paretti, M. “The Role of the Communication Specialist,” Invited presentation, Cambridge-MIT Institute Workshop on Project-Centered Learning, Cambridge, MA, March 2008.

• Hirsch, P., Cline, J., Yalvac, B., Carmichael, K., and Anderson, J. “Teaching Science Writing in a Research University: Students’ Experiences vs. Faculty Expectations,” American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL, April 12, 2007.

• Yalvac, B., Smith, H.D., Troy, J.,B. Hirsch, P.L. “Promoting Advanced Writing Skills in an Upper-Level Engineering Class,” Journal of Engineering Education, 96 (April 2007), 117-124.

• Yalvac, B. Smith, H. D., Hirsch, P.L., Birol, G.  “Teaching Writing in a Laboratory-Based Engineering Course with a ‘How People Learn’ Framework.” In Developing Student Expertise and Community: Lessons from How People Learn. Ed. T. Petrosino, T. Martin, & V. Svihla, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, ed. M. Svinicki and R. Rice, No. 108, Winter 2006, pp. 59 – 73.

• Ben-David Kolikant, Y., Gatchell, D., Hirsch, P.L., Linsenmeier, R. “A Cognitive-apprenticeship-Inspired Instructional Approach for Teaching Scientific Writing and Reading,” Journal of College Science Teaching, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, Nov/Dec 2006, pp. 20-25.

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