Todd Ruecker Publishes Article in College Composition and Communication

Todd Ruecker published an article in the September 2014 issue of the flagship composition journal, College Composition and Communication.  The article is titled, "Here They Do This, There They Do That: Latinas/ Latinos Writing across Institutions," and focuses on how writing instruction was shaped across a high school, community college, and university by a variety of internal and external forces such as standardized testing pressures, resource disparities, and individual instructors.  The article is part of a two-part special issue titled Locations of Writing.

Tiffany and Andrew Bourelle Publish New On-line Resource

Tiffany Bourelle and Andrew Bourelle have published a webtext article in the digital peer-reviewed journal Kairos: Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. The article addresses how to develop a successful multimodal curriculum in a fully online classroom, providing instructors with advice on creating instructional tools.
http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/19.1/praxis/robertson-et-al/index.html

Todd Ruecker Publishes Article in TESOL Quarterly

Todd Ruecker published a short article, "Exploring the Linguistic and Institutional Contexts of Writing Instruction in TESOL,” in the June 2014 issue of TESOL Quarterly, the top journal in the field of TESOL.  He co-authored this piece with Shawna Shapiro from Middlebury College, Erik N. Johnson from Arizona State University, and Christine M. Tardy from the University of Arizona.  It is based on a globally distributed survey of 456 TESOL members about the way writing is shaped by their particular teaching context.

Michelle Kells' article will be published in The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals

Michelle Hall Kells' article for the Journal of Community Literacy.: "What's Writing Got to Do With It?: Citizen Wisdom, Civil Rights Activism" has been awarded the Best of Rhetoric/Comp Independent Journals for 2013. The "phronesis" of Vicente Ximenes as a civil rights activist was the inspiration for this article, as well as the "Citizen Scholar" WAC Workshops facilitated by Dr. Kells this spring here at UNM.

Cris Elder Selected as UNM Teaching Fellow

Dr. Cristyn L. Elder has been selected by UNM's Center for Teaching Excellence as one of eight faculty from across the disciplines to be a UNM Teaching Fellow during the 2014-15 Academic Year. Fellows will investigate carefully-defined teaching challenges by examining the latest research on teaching and learning in one's discipline, design a teaching innovation, and collect and evaluate evidence of student learning. Dr. Elder aims to work with faculty outside the English Department in an effort to increase undergraduate student success in designated "killer courses" (i.e., those with high fail rates). Specifically, Dr. Elder will be working with faculty in designing and implementing scaffolded class activities and writing assignments that align with disciplinary course content in an effort to help students successfully address course goals and learning outcomes while developing their writing skills. Dr. Elder's overall research question is the following: Does an increased focus on writing as it relates to course content improve students’ success rate in the course?

Professor Ruecker Receives Research Grant

Todd Ruecker has received a grant from the UNM Research Allocations Committee in the amount of $5,437 to fund his project titled "Linguistic Minority Students and Literacy Education in Rural and Small Town High Schools."  The grant will support Professor Ruecker's work this fall focused on literacy education in small town high schools and how it supports linguistically diverse students' transitions to college.

Stretching for Student Success

In Sunday's Albuquerque Journal, an opinion piece, titled "Rethinking Remedial Education Is Essential to Student Success," describes two curricular initiatives within the Core Writing Program that may eliminate "remediation" courses for first year writing that do not carry college credit. As Dr. Mark Peceny, Dean of UNM's College of Arts and Sciences, writes, 

"Our 'Stretch' program extends the work of the first semester writing course over two semesters, accompanied by overall assistance in the transition to college. In a trial run last summer, 100 percent of the students completed the first semester of work. In our equally successful 'Studio' program, students began typical first semester writing immediately and were supported with an extra one-credit-hour course that provided additional assistance in college-level writing. UNM is now prepared to extend these opportunities to all main campus students in the 2014-2015 academic year."

You can read the complete article here: 

http://www.abqjournal.com/353726/opinion/rethinking-remedial-education-is-essential-to-student-success.html

Natasha Jones honored by Conference on College Composition and Communication

Dr. Natasha Jones won two awards from the Conference on College Composition and Communication! Her dissertation won the 2014 CCCC Outstanding Dissertation in Technical Communication. In addition, her article won the 2014 CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award in the category of Best Article Reporting Qualitative or Quantitative Research in Technical or Scientific Communication (as lead author). 

 

Congratulations, Natasha!

Lindsey Ives to be Professor at Embry-Riddle

Lindsey Ives has accepted an offer for an Assistant Professor position in Composition and Second Language Writing at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, FL.

 

Congratulations, Lindsey!

Monica Kowal publishes on Service Learning

Monica Kowal wrote a chapter on service-learning pedagogy that has been accepted for the 2014 volume of the Advances in Service-Learning Research series.  The volume’s title is Service-Learning Pedagogy: How Does It Measure UP?, edited by Virginia M. Jagla, Andrew Furco & Jean R. Strait.

Faculty and Graduate Student Appearances for March 2013

   American Association for Applied Linguistics, Dallas, TX. March 16-19, 2013.
Pisarn Bee Chamcharatsri. “Expressing emotions through writing in Thai and English.”
J. V. Jeffery and P. K. Matsuda. “Examining conceptions of voice: An analysis of writing teachers’ constructs and processes.”

   Conference on College Composition and Communication, Las Vegas, NV. March 13-16, 2013.
Andrew Bourelle and Tiffany Bourelle. “Digital Environments, Public Writing, and Student Needs: Using Instructional Assistants to Facilitate Learning in Online Classes.”
Genesea Carter. “You Want Me to Write What? Encouraging Working-Class Student Voices through Discourse Analysis.”
Pisarn Bee Chamcharatsri. “Expressing emotions through narrative: Second language writing perspectives.”
Bethany Davila. “What's Identity Got to Do With It?: Instructors' Talk About Writing and Identity.”
Cristyn Elder. “WPA-GO: A Model for the CWPA Diversity Project?”
Brian Hendrickson. “A Public Affair: The Intermediate Expository Writing Course as Community Writing Center Practicum.”
Mellisa Huffman. “Getting on the Same Page: Using an Ethnolinguistically-Informed Heuristic Within Collaborative Writing Situations.”
Lindsey Ives. Panel Participant. “’Basic’ Writers, ‘Multilingual’ Writers, and ‘Mainstream’ Writers: the Contested Terms of Transitional Writing from the Student Perspective.”
J. V. Jeffery. “Rethinking secondary-postsecondary writing transitions in a time of Common Core Standards: What FYC instructors need to know about new high school writing standards.”
Anna V. Knutson. “Digital Bridges: Negotiating Metacognition in a Digital Lanscape.”
Charles Paine. Panel Participant. “The CWPA Diversity Project.”
Todd Ruecker. Panel Participant. “The Public Work Ahead of WPAs: Developing Effective Programs for Linguistically Diverse Students and Multilingual Writers in Transition: Improving Cross-Institutional Agreements and Collaborations.”

   TESOL International Convention & English Language Expo. Dallas, TX. March 22, 2013.
Cristyn Elder. “Implementing the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing with Multilingual Writers.”
J. V. Jeffery and P. K. Matsuda.”Voice in secondary and postsecondary rubrics.”

   Medieval Association of the Pacific. University of San Diego. March 21-23, 2013.
Megan Abrahamson. “Sir Gary-Stu”: Le Morte D’Arthur as Malory’s Self-Insert Fan-Fiction.”
Justin Brock. “A Dual Remedy for the Chaos of Babel: Examining John Trevisa’s Dialogue Between a Lord and a Clerk On Translation and Late Medieval English Vernacular Culture.”
Justin Brock. Session Chair. Medieval Manuscript Studies.
Emilee Howland-Davis. “Morgan le Fey: Sister, Savior, Sorceress.”
Anita Obermeier. “Henry II’s and Cunegund’s Sanctity: Chastity or Disability?”
Anita Obermeier. Session Chair. Saints and Mystics.
Anita Obermeier presided over the entire conference as president of MAP.
Doaa Omran. “The Correspondences of Princess Wallāda bint al-Mustakfī: a Medieval Harlot, Muse and Poet.”

Cristyn Elder, Dan Cryer, Beth Davila, Lindsey Ives, and Charles Paine. “Creating and Assessing Locally-Responsive Student Learning Outcomes.” New Mexico Higher Education Assessment and Retention Conference, Albuquerque, NM. March 1, 2013.

Natasha Jones. “Re-imagining Technical Communication as Activism.” Association for Teachers of Technical Writing, Las Vegas, NV. March 13, 2012.

Dan Cryer wins Susan Deese-Roberts TA of the year award

It's no surprise that university awards for teaching always go to TAs in the English Department. We simply have the brightest, most experienced, committed, pedagogically sophisticated TAs on campus. Many congratulations to Dan Cryer for winning the OSET TA award this year. Congratulations to all the TAs who were nominated: we know how excellent you are. gail

Genesea Carter to teach Rhetoric and Composition at University of Wisconsin

Genesea Carter will be taking a tenure track job at the University of Wisconsin-Stout where she will be teaching rhetoric and composition courses.

Dr. Stacey Kikendall to be Asst. Professor at Park University

Congratulations to Dr. Stacey Kikendall. After having four campus visits and two job offers, she has decided to take a position as Assistant Professor at the Park University English Department, teaching composition, introduction to literature, world literature, British lit surveys and nineteenth-century British literature. Park University is an independent private university located in Kansas City, Missouri. Its main campus, where Stacey will be teaching, has about 4,000 undergraduate students. We know Dr. Kikendall will be a wonderful faculty member.     -- Gail Houston, Chair

Composition Across Cultures

Discussion and tutoring for non-native speakers of English

Thursday, Nov 19 2:00 - 3:00

SUB Luminaria

All non-native speakers of English enrolled in composition classes (101, 102, 219, 220) are invited to:

• Discuss your classroom experience with other non-native speakers of English
• Get help on papers from experienced English composition instructors
• Eat FREE SNACKS!

In order to better serve non-native speakers in composition classes, the English department's Office of Core Writing wants to know more about your experiences writing and taking classes in English.

In return for your valuable input, our instructor volunteers will help you to revise a paper for your composition class.

We hope to see you there!