WI+RE (Writing Instruction + Research Education)

In 2015, I collaborated with Renee Romero on a series of short YouTube videos covering essential research skills for UCLA students. They were pedagogically effective and personally relatable in ways that library-produced instructional materials rarely are. The success of this pilot led us to ask a bigger question: what if learners led the whole design process?

WI+RE (Writing Instruction + Research Education) grew from that question. Renee and I co-founded the program at UCLA Library in 2016, building a paid student employment model where undergraduate and graduate student designers were the creative engine: developing their ideas into working tutorials and instructional workshops embedded directly into the curriculum. Our role as library staff was to seed the vision, build the infrastructure, develop the partnerships, and then support student designers through their creative process.

The WI+RE Way, our collaboratively authored design manifesto, captures what we were reaching for: learner-led design, anti-perfectionism, accessible design at every stage, student creators speaking in their own authentic voices. It was published in the Journal of New Librarianship in 2020, co-authored with student designers and full-time staff. The publication, with student designers as first authors, formalized WI+RE’s shared belief that learner-led design means learners truly lead, in every phase of the creative process.

That same spirit shows up in each of the team’s 80+ open educational resources. A tutorial on contacting instructors over email, practical and specific, became one of our most shared resources on social media, passed between students and faculty who recognized something their syllabi had never covered. Wheel of Sources, which helps students differentiate primary and secondary sources across disciplines, met a longstanding pedagogical need in a novel interactive game format. Getting Started with Research at UCLA won an ARLies award for Best Reflection of Diversity at the ARL Film Festival, because the team had made intentional choices about whose voices and whose work appeared on screen. Each project was different and each one was a representation of the team’s shared values.

In addition to making instructional materials, WI+RE also invested in measuring their impact. A 2017 assessment conducted by UCLA’s Center for Educational Assessment evaluated WI+RE’s Cornerstone Research Workshops and online modules across hundreds of student participants. Before attending the workshop on developing research topics, roughly 38% of students reported low confidence in their abilities to develop their own topics. After the workshop, that number dropped to zero. The same pattern held across workshops on citation practices, research planning, and research process management. Faculty who integrated WI+RE modules into their courses described students arriving at library sessions better prepared, asking more sophisticated questions, and finding more substantive sources. One instructor put it plainly: once she got more systematic about using the modules, she saw their impact in the quality of questions her students were able to formulate.

By the time I left UCLA in 2021, WI+RE had logged 9,000+ workshop completions, 376,000+ YouTube views, and 431,000+ website page views. Multiple modules received 5-star reviews on MERLOT and acceptance to ACRL’s PRIMO database of peer-reviewed instructional materials. Investing heavily in community building and campus partnerships made that scale possible. Deep relationships with the Writing Program, the Undergraduate Research Centers, and the GE Clusters meant WI+RE modules were embedded in high-enrollment courses across disciplines and fully integrated into the curriculum. Janet Goins, Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Research Center for Sciences, brought WI+RE into her work specifically to reach STEM students who often assumed the library had nothing relevant for them. Her partnership produced navigational videos for the newly launched Undergraduate Research Portal, which reached over 4,000 users in its first months, and a customized Research Paper Planner for the Undergraduate Science Journal designed to help potential authors prepare stronger submissions.

The metrics I think about most, though, describe the student designers themselves. Jen Pierre, who built research and writing tutorials with WI+RE as an graduate student, went on to a UX and Human-Computer Interaction research role at Google Stadia. She credits the hands-on design and instructional work with making her a competitive candidate: her interviewers were impressed, she said, by the concrete project work and its demonstrable impact. Caitlin Meyer, who designed tutorials including an Introduction to Zotero module, landed a Research and Education Librarian role at Yale Medical Library. Her WI+RE portfolio got her the job; and, she noted, expanded the scope of what Yale was even looking for in the position. Taylor Harper described what she carried away as a way of working: collaboratively, with clear communication, holding her own perspective without losing sight of everyone else’s. WI+RE’s model was built on the premise that good work changes the people who make it.

The technical work ran underneath all of it, and made it legible. The WI+RE site was built on Jekyll with structured content collections that linked each student designer’s profile to the modules they created, the awards those modules received, and the publications they contributed to. That architecture was an intentional choice, aligned with WI+RE’s values. It made student authorship and student contribution visible in ways a conventional library website wouldn’t have. I built and maintained it while also co-designing modules, developing the design process and training curriculum, running design jams, and doing community outreach. Some of what I did is documented in the assessment reports and the modules themselves. I hope that more of it lives in the careers of former WI+RE designers who are now in graduate programs, research libraries, education, and creative roles across the country.

WI+RE always had two kinds of impact running in parallel: what the resources did for students who used them, and what the design work did for students who made them. The program was built on the premise that those two things were inseparable. The modules were good because the designers cared about the people who would use them, and the designers grew because the work was genuinely theirs.