I'm on leave from Baruch College (but not the Graduate Center) while acting as Director of Instructional Technology for CUNY, a job that, since 2001, has me flitting about the City University facilitating technology-enhanced teaching. Coming out of an interdisciplinary PhD program at Stanford in the early eighties, I quickly became a writing director, more or less by accident, but took the job seriously enough to make composition and rhetoric the focus of most of my subsequent teaching and writing. While I was a writing director (I have since directed writing-across-the-curriculum and high school outreach programs), I was co-chair, for ten years, of the CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors. Fond of collaborating, I often function in the role of co-worker: I've co-authored two books -- Casts of Thought: Writing in and against Tradition (with Linda Palumbo) and Writers' Roles: Enactments of the Process (with Nondita Mason); I was, from 1998-2005, co-director (with Sondra Perl and others) of Looking Both Ways (a professional development project bringing together high school and college teachers), and I co-edited the Journal of Basic Writing (with Trudy Smoke and then Bonne August) from 1996 through the end of 2002. Currently focusing on instructional technology, my most recent publications are a chapter on computer-mediated communication in a book called Teaching Writing in the Late Age of Print and an article on online learning in the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, but I have, forthcoming, a book on Basic Writing from Parlor Press and a chapter on BW at CCNY in Basic Writing in America, a collection of site-specific histories due out from Hampton Press. I also teach in the Grad Center's Technology and Pedagogy certificate program and am Academic Director of the CUNY Online Baccalaureate. E-mail me at George.Otte@mail.cuny.edu.
PROFESSOR SONDRA PERL
I began teaching at CUNY in the early 70s and now, 30 years later, am still here. Looking back, I recall the days when students of all backgrounds and abilities were welcomed into the university and writing as an intellectual and personal act was valued. Now, though, I am concerned that the strides in composition scholarship and the innovative teaching that accompanied them are threatened as the emphasis in higher education shifts from teaching writing to testing it. Nonetheless, our program continues to grow and students find themselves engaged in a range of challenging projects. As a founder and former director of the New York City Writing Project (the NYC site of the National Writing Project), I continue to work closely with teachers in urban classrooms, and I am currently helping to direct two collaborative projects at CUNY: The university-wide Writing Across the Curriculum Initiative and Looking Both Ways, a professional development seminar series for university and high school faculty. I have received numerous awards and honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Carnegie Foundation's Professor of the Year Award for New York State. I enjoy offering seminars on feminist theory, ethnography, creative nonfiction, pedagogy, cross-/E-E/C-C/E-C/C-ecultural dialogue, and the literature of testimony. Two books are forthcoming: On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate (SUNY Press) and Felt Sense: When the Body and the Mind are Connected (Heinemann).
PROFESSOR IRA SHOR is Professor in the City University of NY's Graduate School, where he started up the doctorate in composition/rhetoric in 1993. He also serves on the English faculty at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. His 9 books include a recent 3-volume set in honor of the late Paulo Freire, the noted Brazilian educator who was his friend and mentor: Critical Literacy in Action (for college language arts) and Education is Politics (Vol. 1, k-12, and Vol. 2, Postsecondary Across the Curriculum). Shor also authored the widely used Empowering Education (1992) and When Students Have Power (1996), two foundational texts in critical teaching. His Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (1980) was the first book-length treatment of Paulo Freire methods in their North American context. Shor's close work with Freire began in the early 1980s and lasted until Freire's passing in 1997. He and Freire co-authored A Pedagogy for Liberation in 1987, the first book Freire did with a collaborator. At CUNY's Ph.D Program, Shor has offered seminars in the pedagogy and rhetoric of critical whiteness, postcolonialism, social class vis a vis gender and race, autobiography, and composition studies. Professor Shor convenes the working-/E-E/C-C/E-C/C-eclass studies group at the Conference on College Composition and Communication through which he is co-editing a group research project on class in the writing programs. In addition, he coordinates a labor initiative with colleagues in the field to address the abuse of adjunct teachers.
Professor Shor came to the City University of NY in 1971 during the Open Admissions battles of that time. Experimenting with critical teaching and literacy, he taught Basic Writing for 15 years and still teaches first-year composition and other writing courses. In 2000-01, Shor was Distinguished Visiting Scholar at William Paterson University in New Jersey. He lectures widely around the country. He came out of the public schools of New York City, where he grew up in the Jewish working class of the South Bronx, went to the Bronx High School of Science, and then to the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin. His dad was a high-school dropout and a sheet-metal worker. His mom finished high school but could never afford college, so she became a bookkeeper until she retired. Shor now lives in Brooklyn with his wife Maryann.
Alumni
CATHY E. FAGAN
Cathy Fagan completed her Ph.D. in English Literature with a certificate in American Studies, in the spring of 2002, at the CUNY Graduate Center. She also holds an M.A. in English from Hofstra University, and an M.S. in Secondary Education, with a Language Arts specialization from Fordham University. Her dissertation, "The Excitement of an Afternoon Call: Re-Framing the Regional and the Modern Through the Poetry of Jeanne Robert Foster", focuses on reclaiming the work of an Adirondack native whose life and art span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reshaping our concept of modernism through her regionalized view of America and Americans. This work won the 2002 David Gordon Dissertation Award in 20th Century Literary Studies, given by the CUNY Graduate Center. An essay based on excerpts from this work appears in the collection Prodigal Father Revisited: Artists and Writers in the World of John Butler Yeats, edited by Janis Londraville, West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2003.
Dr. Fagan's connection to the Comp/Rhet group at the GC is an informal one, in the sense that she has audited Comp/Rhet courses (in writing, memoir theory and construction, and composition pedagogy) but has not taken courses for credit. Her early teaching focused on elementary and secondary level instruction of students in reading and composition, and culminated in her creation of a Reading Department, both developmental and progressive, for Holy Trinity High School in Hicksville, NY. Returning to the classroom, and to graduate study when her family was established and growing, Dr. Fagan became involved in teaching composition at the college level, and has been involved in the developing field of composition theory and praxis for the past thirteen years. She currently directs the Writing Center at Hofstra University, where she also teaches composition, advanced grammar, and literature. She has also worked in Hofstra's English Language Program, the Hofstra New College for alternative learning, and the School of Continuing Education, as well as at the Molloy College Writing Center. She is an active member of the CCCC's association, as well as the NCTE, MLA, and Modernist Studies Association, and is especially interested in the uses of A Felt Sense in the undergraduate composition classroom, valuing the opportunity to explore the innovative work of Dr. Sondra Perl, Dr. George Otte, and Dr. Ira Shor at the Graduate Center.
For those students who are turning or returning to academia at a point in life a bit past the "twenty-somethings," Cathy would be more than happy to serve as a sounding board for your ideas, or to answer any questions you might have. She can be reached at engcef@aol.com.
MARK McBETH is an Assistant Professor at John Jay College. In his dissertation, Oscar Browning and the Tightrope of Desire: A Pedagogical Biography, he explores the teaching of a Victorian educator and educational reformer to discuss teacher-student relationships and the role of desire and pleasure in the classroom. His publications include:
2001 "Tightrope of Desire: Victorian Student/Teacher Relationships." Gender, Politics, and the Experience of Education: An International Perspective. London: Woburn Publishers.
2000 "The Queen's English: A Queery in Contrastive Rhetoric." Contrastive Rhetoric Theory Revised and Redefined Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
2000 Guggenheim Museum Educator's Guide -Thannhauser Collection Guggenheim Museum NYC.
2000 Review of Queerly Phrased. Journal of Advanced Composition.
1999 "Teacher Self-Awareness and Student Motivation." Looking Both Ways: High School Teachers Talk about Language and Learning. New York: CUNY Office of Academic Affairs. 31-42.
1999 "Monstrous Cravings: Composition, Desire and Dream in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." The Explicator 57: 3 (Spring), 143 -145.
1998 "Body Oddities: Hypothetical (Com)Positions from the Physically Extreme." Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (Winter) 4: 10-24.
1998 "In My Absence" Global City Review 10: 76-79.
1998 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Educator's Guide. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain.
1997 "Practice Makes Perfect: Learning to Teach as a Graduate Student." ADE Bulletin. (Winter) 118:15 - 21.
1995 "The Paradigm of the Desk." English in Texas. 26 (Summer): 42-48.
1995 "Six Hours and a Car." Whatever. 2 (Summer): 42-43.
WENDY RYDEN
I recently completed my Ph.D. in Oct 2002 and am currently an Assistant Professor at Montclair State University. I will be joining the English Department at C.W. Post-/C-eLong Island University in the fall of 2003 as an Assistant Professor to direct the Writing Across the Curriculum program and am currently working with Ian Marshall on co-editing a collection of essays about the intersections of composition and critical whiteness studies.
Recent publications:
"Conflict and Kitsch: the Politics of Politeness in the Writing Class." A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Ed. Laura Micciche and Dale Jacobs. Forthcoming from Boynton/Cook 2003.
"Bodies in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Competing Discourses of Reality and Representation in Bioy Casaress. The Invention of Morel." Atenea 3.1-2 (2001): 193-208.
"How Soft Is Process? The Feminization of Comp and Pedagogies of Care." Journal of Basic Writing. 20.1 (2001): 22-32.
"Montaigne's Essay and Writing Across the Curriculum." Inquirer 7 (2000): 42-44.
"Interrogating the Monologue: Making Whiteness Visible." College Composition and Communication 52.2 (2000): 24-59. (co-authored with Ian Marshall)
email:wryden@earthlink.net
CARL WHITHAUS graduated in 2001. He is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing Tutorial Services at Old Dominion University (Norfolk, VA). He teaches courses in rhetorical studies, methods of teaching writing and computer-mediated communication in the Professional Writing Program. His dissertation, Writing Our Way Towards Interactive Evaluation (CUNY 2001), won the Hugh Burns Dissertation Award from Computers and Composition for outstanding research in 2000-2001. His first book, Teaching and Evaluating Writing When Computers Enter the Classroom, is forthcoming from Erlbaum (2004). He has also published articles on software and writing assessment as well as critical pedagogy and computer-mediated communication.
Students
FRANK GAUGHAN
Besides two pennies rolled flat by a Wisconsin freight train, what is on my desk right now: One nearly novella filled with imaginary people who can't seem to fit their lives into a linear narrative, two in-process conference papers (one on Writing Across the Curriculum and another on Gertrude Stein), some reading I've been meaning to do and more drafts of a dissertation prospectus than I care to count, several American literature anthologies into which are stuck index cards with scribbled ideas for syllabi: a creative writing course and a post-WWII literature course. There is also a stapler, which--preferring paper clips--I rarely use.
I'd be happy to answer questions about New York City or CUNY. Feel free to contact me at frank_gaughan@yahoo.com.
MIKHAIL GERSHOVICH
After finishing my undergraduate work at UC Santa Cruz (home of the non-competitive but still fightin' Banana Slugs) I moved to Boston where I received an MA in English from Northeastern University. After a few quarters of adjuncting at Northeastern, I managed to land a full-time Lecturer position in the English department where I taught courses in all levels of composition including basic writing, first year composition, ESL, and professional and technical writing in addition to an occasional literature course. After two years of that, I came to New York, started the Ph.D. Program in English at the Grad Center and began teaching composition at Baruch College. In the fall of 2000, I accepted a CUNY Writing Fellowship at Baruch which had me working with faculty in a number of different disciplines on incorporating communication intensive activities into content area curricula. I'm still doing the same sort of faculty development work at Baruch but now as a Senior Communication Fellow (fancy title!) at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute. For the last four summers, I've taught courses in American film in the American Studies department at SUNY Old Westbury. I first decided to try teaching film because it "seemed like a fun thing to do" but have since cultivated an academic interest in movies which has gradually merged with my interests in composition studies. My dissertation, in its first stages and yet untitled, is a historical study of the intersections of discourses on composition-rhetoric instruction and reactions to film between 1912 and 1940. I'd be happy to answer any questions and can be reached via email at Mikhail_Gershovich@baruch.cuny.edu
BOB LAZAROFF
I'm a Level II candidate at the Graduate Center. I received an MA from Lehman College in English Education in 1990, and have taught English on the Jr. High, High School, and College level. In my studies and in the classes that I teach, I am interested in the play of photography, images, and music and in the way different media and technology intersects with the written word. In addition to my studies and teaching, I am a Contributing Editor with Popular Photography & Imaging Magazine. Before all of this, I was playing in rock bands in the 80s, releasing records as Whooping Cranes on our own independent label, Zip Records. And - yes - pedagogy can intersect with rock and roll; I find a strong correlation between performing and teaching - though mosh pits have given way to workshop groups. You can contact me at rlazaroff@aol.com.
TIM McCORMACK
After obtaining an undergraduate Journalism degree from St. Bonaventure University, I spent six years working in public relations and two years as a freelance writer for magazines and corporations. Then I took a small writing workshop at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, which led me to apply to the Creative Writing program at Queens College, CUNY. While working with published authors Joseph McElroy and John Weir on my fiction, I registered for Ira Shor's survey class in Composition and Rhetoric at the Graduate Center--and that changed everything. His class revolutionized my ideas about teaching and writing, so I finished my Master's work and enrolled the following Fall (1994) at the GC. While working on my degree, I greatly enjoyed seven years of teaching at three different CUNY campuses, teaching everything from remedial writing to journalism to writing for the social sciences. While at City College, I was also a "Writing Fellow" in a Writing Across the Curriculum initiative started by the university. I worked with instructors in Art, Biology, Psychology and Education to help facilitate and enhance the use of writing in their courses. Since the Fall of 2002, I have been a faculty member at New York University, where I teach their composition sequence and specialized writing and rhetoric courses for sophomores. As for my scholarship, early on in graduate school, I was greatly influenced by the work of Paulo Freire, John Dewey, James Berlin and Raymond Williams and began investigating issues of critical and cultural theory related to classrooms and teaching. After reading the work of Jonathan Kozol and Michelle Fine however, I decided that rather than talk down from theory to classroom practice, I wanted to "talk up" from classroom practice to educational theory. Luckily, the Graduate Center faculty included Sondra Perl who has extensive work in classroom research, and so I am working with her on my dissertation, a phenomenological study of remedial writing classrooms at City College. With the support of the Graduate Center, I have presented portions of my study at the CAWS Conference (CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors), the MLA Conference, CCCCs and the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research in Education Conference. Feel free to contact me with any questions at tim.mccormack@nyu
LEO PARASCONDOLA is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate School, currently writing a dissertation, "Class and Conflicting Discourses of Student Need in the Teaching of College Writing." His areas of specialization include Rhetoric and Composition Studies and American Literature. He is currently the Coordinator of the Bridge to College program at CUNY on the Concourse. He has taught Basic Writing English Composition, and American Literature at CUNY's Lehman College and at Montclair State University. He has also taught at Rutgers University (Newark). In 1999, he was appointed as a CUNY Writing Fellow at Lehman College.
Forthcoming Publications (Fall, 2003)
Tenured Bosses, Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University. Edited by Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, and Leo Parascondola (Southern Illinois University Press).
This collection addresses the following questions: In what ways is the composition discourse a management discourse, producing metanarratives that legitimate the degradation of academic labor? What kind of literacy is produced in the scene of managed labor? Isn't writing work faculty work? This collection features a diversity of perspectives in the academic labor and left-composition conversations. A partial list of contributors includes Richard Ohmann, Randy Martin, Paul Lauter, Gary Rhoades, Donna Strickland, Eileen Schell, and Steven Parks.
Leo was co-editor of the Spring 2001 special issue -- "Composition and Managed Labor" -- of Workplace: a journal for academic labor (www.workplace-gsc.com) and is a member of its editorial collective. He has published several pieces for Workplace, among them interviews with Paul Lauter, Barbara Foley, and Ira Shor.
His interests extend to academic activism around issues such as exploitation in the academic workplace. He is a member of the Steering Committees of the Graduate Student Caucus and Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA). He is co-author of several resolutions and motions passed by the Delegate Assembly of MLA requiring that organization to support and encourage unionization among academic workers.
In Fall 2000, he was elected to the Delegate Assembly of the MLA as Graduate Student representative for New York State. He is also a founding member of the Working Class Students Special Interest Group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Feel free to contact Leo at leoparas@earthlink.net
ANN TABACHNIKOV has been teaching college composition and literature for over ten years. Most of those years have been spent at The City College of New York, where she received her BA and MA in English and Creative Writing, respectively. She has taught at several other City University of New York campuses, and currently divides her time between The City College and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her most recent conference paper, entitled "The Mommification of Writing Instruction: A Tale of Two Students," was presented at the National Women's Studies Association conference in Boston in June 2000, and again at the CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors (CAWS) Conference in October 2000 in New York. It will appear as an article in the Spring 2001 issue of the Journal of Basic Writing. As a doctoral student specializing in Composition and Rhetoric at the CUNY Graduate Center, Ann is working on a dissertation on issues of identity in collaborative learning groups. Beginning in August of 2001, she will begin a two-year stint as a CUNY Writing Fellow at The City College.
