What is your program's FY writing philosophy?
Key words: writing about writing movement; ethnographic research; literacy practices
Donna: Our first-year writing program integrates sequenced writing and reading assignments that require students to make connections between their experience as students and scholarly and popular texts reporting on student experience, with the end result being substantive ethnographic writing projects.
Tabetha: My program approaches the teaching of freshman writing using the writing-about-writing strategy in which students study the discipline of writing studies. Students read, write, and learn (in various genres) about how professional writers talk about, study, and approach writing in ENG 1301, and then in ENG 1302 apply what they’ve learned and study reading and writing in context. These courses are reading and writing intensive because we believe that reading and writing are perfected with practice and go hand-in-hand. Classes are student-centered and there are plenty of opportunities for revision, one-on-one meetings with instructors, and learning with and from peers. The program culminates in a Celebration of Student Writing where ENG 1302 students display results from their semester-long ethnographic research project.
What is your teaching philosophy?
Donna: My teaching philosophy holds that all of my classes are humanities classes—fy writing to graduate-level courses—and, as such, every course requires critical thinking, reading, and writing connecting to big issues, with all students treated as intellectuals with something valuable to contribute and to teach me.
[I think when this question is asked, people want to hear specific things like “rigorous,” “student-centered,” “reading-intensive,” “writing intensive,” etc.]
Tabetha: My teaching is guided by a few philosophies: students can best learn to write when they think and feel like writers, students are full of experiences and ideas worthy of contributing to arguments, and writing is a mode through which writers both make arguments and ask questions.
Tabetha: My teaching is guided by a few philosophies: students can best learn to write when they think and feel like writers, students are full of experiences and ideas worthy of contributing to arguments, and writing is a mode through which writers both make arguments and ask questions.
What was your dissertation focus?
Mary: For me, this might be answered at this stage: I am interested in pairing whiteness studies with historical fiction to examine ideological assumptions.
Also, if you are unsure then make it up. It is perfectly fine to say that you are torn between two interests (which means you need to have two areas to mention). This kind of structure allows an opening for the listener to give their advice or share their experiences in deciding – point is it keeps the conversation going instead of coming to a dead halt after “I am not sure” or “I don’t know.”
Donna: My dissertation argued that the liberatory rhetoric employed by contemporary basic writing textbooks and scholars (even those from and on the left) is problematic and can be seen as having much in common with the rhetoric surrounding the education of emancipated slaves following the US Civil War.
Tabetha: For my dissertation project, I conducted an ethnographic research study of the literacy practices of an Amish community in southeast Ohio
What are your current research interests?
Mary: The person asking you this might want to see that you are interested in a range of topics (you don’t want to come across as the one-trick pony). When I was asked this last year at the EGAD conference by speaker Jerrold Hirsh, we had nothing really in common with initial interests, but then I mentioned that I had also recently started exploring disability studies. That caught his attention – I had no idea that was one of his secondary fields. Our conversation led him to attending my paper presentation and staying afterwards to talk more about where I could publish my ideas. The moral here: it is good to have other interests because you never know what someone might be interested in or connected to.
Donna: Tentatively titled Placing Ourselves: Memoir and the Psychogeographic Turn, my project focuses on place and displacement in life writing, with psychogeography as the lens to sharpen this focus.
Tabetha: I’ve published on writing program pedagogy and administration, writing center pedagogy, popular culture, and literacy studies. Right now I’m working on a project that looks at how literacy has been represented by and for the United States Supreme Court in cases dealing with literacy tests required for voting. I argue that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 created a significant shift in how U.s. Supreme Court justices talk and write about literacy. After the VRA of 1965, members of the court began to see literacy much like scholars like Brandt and Stuckey who see literacy as a potentially oppressive and even violent force.
Other questions you might want to have handy answers for:
How do you like it at TAMU-Commerce? (They want to see that you won’t trash your program.)
What are you reading for fun right now?
