This year we have 39 Special Lecturers and 3 AP/Lecturers (Sherry Wynn Perdue, Shaun Moore, and Cathy Cheal).Two of our Special Lecturers have gone on to full time work: Bethany Shepherd joined the faculty at Albion as an Assistant Professor of English, and Natasha Gavroski was hired as Director of College Writing at Baker College.
We now have an official WPA (Lori Ostergaard) and a newly-hired Associatea WPA (David Hammontree). They will be helping me to review the teaching portfolios submitted last May and meeting with those instructors to discuss outcomes. We'll also be assisting those up for review this year with their teaching portfolios. Last year, 20 SLs were up for renewal. This year, only 8 are up for renewal, and 5 of the 8 submitted dossiers for the 4/4 SL positions, so they will have very little to do.
Thirteen Special Lecturers have been chosen as what we're currently calling 4/4 SLs: Marilyn Borner, Matthew Burkett, Ben Bennett-Carpenter, LaWanda Dickens, (Anne) Colleen Doyle, Suzanne Drapeau, Christina Fontana, John Freeman, Laura Gabrion, Christina Hall, Amanda Laudig, Rebecca Rivard, and Cathy Rorai. They will be on campus four days per week, hold mobile office hours in areas frequented by students (the information commons, the OC, the dining hall), commit to special projects such as Festival of Writers, Writing Excellence, and other activities sponsored by CSA, explore pedagogically-appropriate uses of technology in student learning, take part in the iPad working group, and integrate elements of Connections pedagogy in their courses. They are receiving a modest stipend for their extra commitment and the use of an iPad 2.0 to explore teaching with technology.
As part of their responsibilities, these 13 (plus a few others) will be taking on the following leadership roles:
Marilyn Borner has assumed a leadership role with the department web site.
Christina Fontana has assumed a leadership role with WRT-related social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, PDWiki, etc)
Tina Hall has assumed a leadership role with writing marathons and other similar activities.
Jennifer Coon will continue her leadership role with the Festival of Writers, assisted by Tina Hall, Rebecca Rivard, and Cathy Rorai in planning and the remaining 4/4 SLs in execution. Rebecca Rivard is also running the youth writing camps and Tina Hall is running writing nights at several elementary schools in Lapeer. Both activities are sponsored by OU and MBWP.
Cathy Skomski, Laura Colbeck, and Glen Armstrong have taken on leadership roles with our Mt. Clemens offerings. They are piloting our first courses out there and will be offering a tour and Q & A later in the semester.
Ben Bennett-Carpenter will be a member of the FYW committee.
Matt Burkett, John Freeman, Suzanne Drapeau, and LaWanda Dickens will assist Sherry Wynn Perdue with Writing Excellence.
Amanda Laudig and Colleen Doyle (with the assistance of the other 11) will take on leadership roles with brown bags and professional development.
Timothy Briggs, Jennifer Coon, Tina Hall, and Cathy Rorai are our Connections instructors this year, and quite a few SLs are taking part in Dana's "writing about writing" pilot.
Cornelia Pokrzywa will continue to manage the Rochester Oral History Archives, take part in the iPad working group, and focus on service learning in her own classes. After two intensive years of highly valuable services, she has withdrawn from the tech committee to focus on her other interests. High five her if you see her.
Of course, we have a number of other high quality Special Lecturers choosing to teach various course loads (largely 3/3 or 3/2) either solely at OU or in coordination with teaching at other institutions:
Bill Byrne, Jill Chroback, Joe DiGaetano, Wendy Farkas, Matt Ferguson, Ryan Flaherty, Paul Gelinas, Lisa Hine, Laura Klein, Fran Kranz, Kathy Lawson, Catherine McQueen, Art Orme, Colleen Potocki, Leba Rautbort, Lauren Rinke, Bill Rouster, Craig Smith, Carol Trupiano, and Amelie Welden. We will be sure to include them in these engaging activities without requiring unreasonable time commitments.
Of course, this structure and these duties will all evolve as we move forward, adjusting for reasonable time demands and involvement, but this gives us a framework to begin with. In order to maintain a high quality of instructors and provide more stability for teaching schedules, I've managed to resist adding last minute classes with new hires. Instead, I cut a number of the 160 sections and reassigned
those instructors to 150s, and asked the orientation advisers to advise incoming students who placed directly into WRT 160 to register for WRT 160 in the winter semester. Hopefully, this will bring more
balance to our offerings so that instructors can maintain similar course loads from fall to winter.
Fall 2011: Welcome students
Welcome to the 2011-2012 school year. At this point, we have 49 officially declared majors and 17 officially declared minors. This has exceeded our predictions when we proposed the major several years ago. We will have an informational meeting for students on Tuesday, September 27th, at noon in the Gold Room, Oakland Center. A number of the faculty members will be there to talk about the major and minor, the tracks, the capstone, and course scheduling cycle so that students can better schedule their plans of study. Hopefully, we can get this done fairly quickly so that we can take suggestions on course offerings, convenient times for courses, and course content. We are currently working on course cycling and the 2012-2013 schedule, so this is the chance for students to put in requests as a collective for specific courses.
We've managed to ramp up our course offerings and are beginning to stabilize our course rotations. We have a number of exciting new courses in each track, including Introduction to Composition Studies (Discipline track), Writing for New Media (New Media track), Video Game Studies (New Media track), and Science Writing (Professional Writing track). If you haven't yet finalized your registration for winter, you can see the course list and current enrollments here: http://www2.oakland.edu/wrt/
Please put this meeting on your calendar and invite others that you know who are interested in WRT. The more people we have at the meeting, the better understanding we can get of the needs and desires of our majors.
Be sure to join our social media groups:
Department Sites
Department of Writing and Rhetoric Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/
Department of Writing and Rhetoric Twitter stream: http://twitter.com/#!/ouwrt
Department of Writing and Rhetoric Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/
Related Sites
Writing and Rhetoric Club Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/group.
Lori Ostergaard Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/
Timothy Briggs Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/
Rochester Oral History Archive Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/
Good luck this semester!
Dr. Kitchens
We've managed to ramp up our course offerings and are beginning to stabilize our course rotations. We have a number of exciting new courses in each track, including Introduction to Composition Studies (Discipline track), Writing for New Media (New Media track), Video Game Studies (New Media track), and Science Writing (Professional Writing track). If you haven't yet finalized your registration for winter, you can see the course list and current enrollments here: http://www2.oakland.edu/wrt/
Please put this meeting on your calendar and invite others that you know who are interested in WRT. The more people we have at the meeting, the better understanding we can get of the needs and desires of our majors.
Be sure to join our social media groups:
Department Sites
Department of Writing and Rhetoric Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/
Department of Writing and Rhetoric Twitter stream: http://twitter.com/#!/ouwrt
Department of Writing and Rhetoric Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/
Related Sites
Writing and Rhetoric Club Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/group.
Lori Ostergaard Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/
Timothy Briggs Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/
Rochester Oral History Archive Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/
Good luck this semester!
Dr. Kitchens
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