In Spring 2011, I began composing a petition to designate our department’s CM213 as a “Research Writing” course, submitted to Tom Hemmeter in July. The success of that petition has given our majors  more flexibility in their scheduling and more direct preparation for the kinds of research they will do in their capstone projects. The designation also allowed our department to take a more active role in defining what “research” and “writing” mean for our majors, and we have already begun to see its influence on our seniors’ capstone projects.
The petition is available in PDF format here.