DEPAUL UNIVERSITY MA IN NEW MEDIA STUDIES MA IN WRITING, RHETORIC, AND DISCOURSE

MA programs congratulate graduates, welcome new students

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This spring, the MANMS program welcomes new students John Burfisher, Erin McAleese, and Emily Mercavitch. NMS congratulates spring graduates Lissette Alvarez, Daniel Carroll, Michael Childs, Dana Clark, Mary Cronley, Heather Eidson, Kelson Fagan, Jason Grodsky, Marnita Harris, Katie Holland, Manar Jamal, Elizabeth Knachel, Susanna Ludwig, Monique Medina, Jessica Moore, Michelle Mustion, ShaVon Simmons, Andrew Wenum, and Jessica Wilson, along with summer graduates Carolyn

MAWRD students participate in new teaching program

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Bank, Philip De La Vega, and Daisy Franco. The MAWRD program welcomes new students Alyssa Conway and Camille Costa and congratulates spring graduates Kimberly Coon, Errin Courtney, Bridget Greenfield, Bryan Grobstein, Elizabeth Lane, Bobetta Saintange, Stephen Skok, Erin Stiverson, and Antonio Zakarija. WRD welcomes new TESOL Certificate students Catherine Brown, Mitchell Goins, Sarah Hughes, and Matthew Marks.

Brandt to speak at Second Annual WRD Awards

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According to recent MAWRD graduate Allison Dowe, first-time teaching can be angst-ridden. “Anyone who has ever taught can tell you how scary it is to walk into that classroom for the first time,” she said. “You think you understand rhetoric and discourse? Try explaining it. I found it to be harder than I thought it would be.” With the support of WRD’s new Teaching Apprenticeship Program (TAP), however, Dowe was able to tap into a network of WRD resources as she taught a course in DePaul’s First-Year Writing (FYW) Program.

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“When you’re a new teacher, it’s invaluable to have someone you trust there to help you figure things out,” Dowe said. This year’s six TAP instructors taught sections of WRD 103 under the close supervision of WRD Professor and FYW Director Darsie Bowden, who provided just that kind of support. Bowden was “at the same time both completely supportive and completely willing to let us run our own classrooms,” Dowe explained. The 2012 Winter Quarter

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On Friday, June 8, 2012, WRD will honor graduating students and student work at the Second Annual WRD Student Awards Ceremony, to be held in Schmitt Academic Center room 254, on DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus. The event will kick off with a reception and display of student work at 5:30pm, then will continue at 6pm with a program featuring student awards and a lecture from nationally known literacy scholar Deborah Brandt.

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u STUDENTS PRESENT AT ANNUAL WRD GRADUATE CONFERENCE ................... 2

u MAWRD GRADUATE NATHANIEL NGUYEN TAKES THE TEACHING TRACK ............... 3

u WRD STUDENTS, ALUMNI, AND FACULTY SHARE ACCOMPLISHMENTS ........... 3 The WoRD: grad edition

ISSUE 3 SPRING 2012 VOLUME 4

cont’d on page 2 TAP Instructors Steve Skok and Erin Garvey take a break during a weekly meeting with other instructors and Professor Darsie Bowden.

Students Present at 4th Annual Graduate Conference

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Amanda Bryant (MAWRD) Writing Centers Workshop: Collaborative Learning to Benefit Adult Students Itai Elizur (MA in Media Studies, The New School) We News: The Effects and Power of UGC on Israeli Online News Amy Hubbard (MAWRD) Frank Macarthy (MAWRD) Identity and Memory Construction in Digital Storytelling Mark Jacobs (MA in English) “Where I'm From”: Paraleptic Narrative and Re-Imagined Geography as Counter-Hegemonic Strategies in Immortal Technique’s “The 3rd World” Joseph Klein (MAWRD) Occupation, Performance, and

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Place: A Rhetorical Analysis Liz Lane (MAWRD) Remembering “Where I Was” A Decade Later: Vernacular Voice in Online Epideictic Texts Representing National Memory of 9/11 Neftali Morales, Jr. (MANMS) The Analog Book and Craft in New Media Christine Scherer (MAWRD) The Modern Language of Universal Communication: Global English Case Studies Each year, the conference is organized by WRD’s graduate assistants. According to Professor Christine Tardy, Director of the MAWRD, “Many people don’t realize how much work is involved in bringing off this event, planning for which began back in the fall.

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Our GAs, Kimberly Coon and Amy Hubbard, have done a really fantastic job this year.” The conference was made possible with support from WRD faculty, staff, and students as well as support from College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences’ Dean Charles Suchar. Conference organizers Coon and Hubbard wanted this year’s event to bring together a diverse group of presentations and students and stimulate conversions on how writing, rhetoric, and new media are converging in unexpected and provocative ways. “The Spread the WoRD Conference has always been a venue for celebrating student work,” Coon said, “but the issues students presented on this year were especially relevant and intriguing for graduate students studying in a range of fields.”

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On Saturday, May 12, 2012 WRD hosted its annual Graduate Student Conference at DePaul’s Schmitt Academic Center. The conference, now in its fourth year, provides an opportunity for students studying in writing-related disciplines to develop and share original research, gain experience presenting academic work, receive feedback from peers, and network with other graduate students and faculty. This year, more than 35 students, faculty members, and friends of WRD attended the conference to watch student presentations on topics ranging from Occupy Chicago to user-generated content in Israeli online news. The following students presented at this year’s conference: Katie Brown (MAWRD) Revising the Structure of the Writing Fellows Program

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marked the launch of the program, which is a guided, first-year composition teaching experience for graduate students in the department’s MAWRD program. A small, highly competitive program, TAP requires instructors to be near completion of the MAWRD, have taken a set of teaching writing courses, and submit an application detailing teaching philosophy and experience. Each week, instructors met as a group with Bowden to problem-solve, discuss positive classroom experiences, consider theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings, and workshop teaching methods. Instructors also worked together to assess potential assignments, grade papers and projects, and prepare for the coming week. “The most valuable resource was having a group of new teachers in the same position as me to talk with on a weekly basis,” Dowe said. “I was in class with a really great group of people who were willing to just put

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everything on the table.” TAP Instructor and recent MAWRD graduate Erin Garvey agreed, emphasizing the value of having “the safety and space of the TAP seminar to brainstorm, problem-solve, and sometimes even try things out with the other instructors,” she said. “We helped each other through situations, pulling from our own experiences as students or from our own life experiences.” The TAP approach, Bowden explained, enables new teachers, “in a guided circumstance, to put theory into practice.” In addition to a pre-quarter teaching workshop, an annotated syllabus for the first several weeks of teaching, and weekly meetings, instructors had access to a support apparatus that included FYW and graduate faculty members and DePaul’s Writing Center. According to Bowden, TAP’s rich, supportive environment coupled with the real-life teaching skills instructors gain make the program an excellent “jumping off point” for MAWRD students

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to move into any type of teaching. “The kinds of things you learn teaching first-year writing are directly applicable to many other areas of teaching,” she said. In addition to developing strong teaching skills for MAWRD students, the program also represents the department’s investment in its FYW Program. “We do the best job we can, not just with our graduate students, but also with the students they teach,” Bowden explained. “These instructors were highly motivated and so invested in their students, and students sensed this commitment.” Garvey echoed Bowden’s emphasis on creating positive learning environments for FYW students. “In my class, I strove to teach them that writing matters because even if they never write another essay at DePaul, they will continue to write every single day. Everything you learn in WRD is applicable, contextual, and transferable,” she said. “This was a tremendous

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learning opportunity that came at exactly the right time in my WRD career.” For Dowe, teaching through TAP both reinforced the pedagogical techniques she had learned through MAWRD courses and added new layers of theory, pedagogy, and classroom know-how. “The biggest thing I took away from this experience is that sometimes even the best plans will totally bomb in practice,” she said. “I quickly learned to roll with the punches and have Plans B, C, and D up my sleeve for when Plan A falls flat on its face.” Dowe added that developing a student-centered attitude was a key TAP lesson for her. The commitment of instructors like Dowe and Garvey along with the benefits the program offers to both MAWRD and FYW students make TAP a valuable new component in WRD’s offerings. The department will continue the program with a second cohort in Autumn Quarter 2012.

TAP, cont’d from page 1

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Students share how they’re tailor-making WRD’s MA programs for their interests

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English at Two-Year College Certificate. I avoided all PTW [Professional and Technical Writing] courses in order to make room for the courses I want. Many of the course requirements for TESOL and Teaching English at Two-Year College Certificates overlap each other, and so I made sure to take courses that were of interest to me but also fulfilled the requirements. Some of the courses I enjoyed most were Teaching Writing, Teaching ESL Writing, Teaching Literature, and Developing Instructional Practices. These courses gave me theoretical knowledge as well as hands-on opportunities for teaching practice and developing resources for the classroom. Since I came into the program with no teaching experience at all, these courses gave me the baby steps in understanding and practicing teaching pedagogies. I remember doing classroom observations and having to develop lessons and teach them to the class as well as to real WRD 103 classes. These opportunities certainly gave me the confirmation I needed to know that I’m on the right track. I also enjoyed many theory courses such as Introduction to Language and

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In this feature, we talk to students and alumni from WRD’s MA programs about how they’ve customized the programs for their career pursuits. This quarter, we talked Nathaniel Nguyen, a 2012 MAWRD grad. Describe your career interests and pursuits. My career interest is to teach rhetoric and composition, English, or ESL at the collegiate level. My hope is to find either a part-time or full-time job in South California at a community college or university. To achieve that goal, I have worked tirelessly in the last two years to design my own course of study to fit what I want to do. How do you utilize the program's course offerings to fit your objectives? When I entered the program, I knew exactly that I wanted to prepare myself to teach writing, English, and ESL at the collegiate level. I also realized that because I want to teach, I need to make myself as marketable as possible (meaning I need to be prepared to teach more than just rhetoric and composition). Therefore, I obtained an MA in WRD with TWL [Teaching Writing and Language] concentration, TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) Certificate, and Teaching

WoRDing It Your Way

Nathaniel Nguyen accepts an award from WRD Professor Christine Tardy at the 2011 WRD Student Awards.

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Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Ancient Rhetorics, and Pedagogical Grammar. These courses gave me a stronger foundation in understanding rhetoric and language, which helps support my theory and practice in teaching. ������ In what ways, if any, were you able to use internships or independent studies to support your objectives? ��� In my last year in the program, I took up a teaching internship at College of Lake County through DePaul’s English department. In the internship, I worked closely with a mentor and we co-taught a Creative Writing class. It was a

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lot of fun and I learned to apply my coursework knowledge to a real classroom. In my last quarter, I was given the opportunity to participate in a new program, the Teaching Apprenticeship Program (TAP). I taught my own class at DePaul with the support of WRD Professor Darsie Bowden and my cohort of fellow TAP teachers. This was a dream come true for me. I didn’t think I would get to have this teaching experience before graduation. To be in charge of your own classroom and independently make choices that affect the classroom is a huge step in translating theory into practice, as well as gaining the experience needed for employment.

Brandt, cont’d from page 1

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Drawing on her upcoming book Writing Now: New Directions in Mass Literacy, which traces the rise of mass writing over the last 60 years as it has accompanied economic shifts and technological change, Brandt will deliver a talk entitled “Taking Writing Seriously.” Brandt’s research focuses on the social contexts of mass literacy and literacy learning in the late 20th century and early 21st

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century. In addition to the more than two dozen articles and book chapters, she is the author of two highly influential, award-winning monographs: Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts and Literacy in American Lives. In the latter text, Brandt uses the life history accounts of more than 80 Midwesterners to trace the changing conditions for literacy and learning across the 20th century.

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A teacher of English undergraduate and graduate courses for nearly 30 years and professor emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Brandt has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and, most recently, the Guggenheim Foundation.

Student, Alumni, and Faculty News

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Research Fund (GRF) to present at the conference. Liz will be attending Purdue University in the fall as a doctoral student in rhetoric and composition. Alumni Steven Accardi (MAW 2005) presented “Exploring Rhetorical Agency in Postmodernity: How One Humanitarian Group on the US/Mexico Border Disrupts the Discourse of the State” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis, MO on March 24. Sarah Brown (MAWRD 2010) presented “A Shift in the Construction of Self: What new social media practice means for people whose digital identities are created for them” at the Computers and Writing Conference on May 20 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Karen Carter (MAWRD 2010) presented “Alternative Gateways: Public Sphere Theory, Theater and the Reconstitution of an Ethnic Image” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication on March 22 in St. Louis, MO. She was also honored as a 2012 CCCC Scholar for the Dream. Jennifer Clary-Lemon (MAW 2000) presented “Cross-Border Collaboration in Charting a Department’s Future: Toward a North-American Conception of Rhetoric and Writing Studies” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication on March 22 in St. Louis. She also published, with Lynne Williams, “Teaching and Learning Oral History/Theory/Performance: A Case Study of the Scholarship of Discovery, Integration, Application, and Teaching” in Oral History Forum/ d'histoire orale. 32 (2012) 1-24. Oral History Forum/ d'histoire orale is the online journal of the Canadian Oral History Association. Bethany Davila (MAW 2006) has accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Rhetoric and Writing Program at the University of New Mexico, to begin in the fall. Bethany also published “Indexicality and ‘Standard’ Edited American English: Examining the Link Between Conceptions of Standardness and Perceived Authorial Identity” in Written Communication. 29.2 (2012): 142-79. Bethany also received the Dimond

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Students Kimberly Coon (MAWRD student) presented “Disability Rhetoric in a Digital World: Digital Storytelling with Developmentally Disabled Individuals” at the Computers and Writing Conference at North Carolina State University on May 18 in Raleigh, NC. Kimberly received funding from the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Graduate Research Fund (GRF) to present at the conference. In July, Kimberly will begin working as a marketing coordinator for the Damien Center, a nonprofit agency in Indianapolis, IN. Heather Eidson (MANMS student) presented “Visual Literacy, Authorship, and Potentials for E-learning” at the Computers and Writing Conference on May 18 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Heather received funding from the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Graduate Research Fund (GRF) to present at the conference. Joseph Klein (MAWRD student) presented “Occupy Chicago: The Rhetoric of Body and Place” at the 12th annual Craft Critique Culture Conference at the University of Iowa on April 1. The theme of the conference this year was “The Art of Revolution.” Liz Lane (MAWRD student) presented “Digital Literacy and Music Blogging: Consumers, Creators, and Evolving Authorship” at the Computers and Writing Conference on May 18 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Liz received funding from the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Graduate

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Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2012 from the University of Michigan's School of Education. Amanda Hobmeier (MAWRD 2010) presented “Mixed Modeling in L2 Writing Instruction: A Critical Analysis of Hybridized Genre and Process Pedagogies” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication on March 22 in St. Louis, MO. Eric Iberri (MAWRD 2010) began working as an instructional media specialist at Azusa Pacific Online University in April. Brenda Kilianski (TESOL Certificate 2010) co-presented “Summer in the City: Using Chicago as a Language Classroom” at the Illinois Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages - Bilingual Education (ITBE) Conference. Brenda was recently hired as a full-time international advisor/counselor in DePaul’s Office for International Students and Scholars. Karen Kopelson (MAW 1997) won the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Louisville, where she is an associate professor and director of graduate studies. Kathy Kusiak (MAW 08) earned tenure at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, IL, and is co-chair of the English department. Eileen Lagman (MAW 2008), a PhD candidate in the Center for Writing Studies in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was honored as a Scholar for the Dream at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis, MO, in March. Ray Salazar (MAW 2003), a writing teacher and interventionist at Hancock High School on Chicago’s Southwest side, worked with his journalism students to start a blog on ChicagoNow.com. Whatchoo Got to Say is the only blog by teens on this Tribune Media Group site and presents responsible and engaging commentaries by young people for all Chicagoans. Posts include editorials on the need for Affirmative Action, the value of high-school art classes, and the power of spoken word.

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Have an announcement you’d like to share? Look for a quarterly call for updates for details on where to send it. We’d love to hear about: • New jobs or internships • Conference presentations,

lectures, and other talks • Publications (books,

articles, blogs, etc.) • Awards and honors • Scholarships and grants • Other accomplishments

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MCGAW 255 802 W. BELDEN AVE. CHICAGO, IL 60614 773.325.4180 MA IN NEW MEDIA STUDIES LAS.DEPAUL.EDU/NMS MA IN WRITING, RHETORIC, AND DISCOURSE LAS.DEPAUL.EDU/WRD

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Tom Truesdell (MAW 2004) has been appointed the new Writing Across the Curriculum coordinator at Northwestern College in Iowa. He will continue to serve as director of the Writing Center and Writing Fellows Program. Stan West (MAW 1999) presented “Our Bronze Book-Connections?” at the Teaching Artists Development (TAD) Studio at Columbia College on April 20. West also was awarded a two-week fellowship by the American Society of Newspaper Editors Reynolds High School Journalism Institute to visit Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication this summer. Melanie Yergeau (MAW 2007) was awarded the 2012 Computers and Composition Hugh Burns Dissertation Award. Melanie was honored for this award at the Computers and Writing Conference on

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May 18 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC, where she also presented “Hacking the Classroom: A Roundtable of Lightning Talks” on May 20. Faculty Julie Bokser published “Reading and Writing Sor Juana's Arch: Rhetorics of Belonging, Criollo Identity, and Feminist Histories” in Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42.2 (Spring 2012): 144-163. ������ Sarah Read presented “Exploring A Writing-About-Writing Approach to Teaching Professional Writing: Teaching Workplace Writing as a Research(ed) Activity” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis, MO on March 23. Christine Tardy has been appointed as an LAS representative to the Comprehensive

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Internationalization Committee, a university-level group that will work directly with Academic Affairs to define and implement the University’s international agenda. Christine also presented “Innovation in International Scholarly Publication: Obstacles and Opportunities for Diversifying Genre Norms” at the International TESOL Convention in Philadelphia, PA, on March 29. Finally, she published a book chapter, “A Rhetorical Genre Theory Perspective on L2 Writing Development,” in L2 Writing Development: Multiple Perspectives. Ed. Rosa M. Manchón. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012. 165-190. Peter Vandenberg presented “Holding On, Letting Go: ‘Our’ Curious Relationship to Discipline” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis, MO on March 22.

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