Spring 2006 Sabbatical Report

Description of Sabbatical Activities:

I travelled to Belmont University in Nashville Tennessee, where I team-taught writing classes with Professor Andrea Stover to test out some of our draft writing exercises.

I attended Belmont’s annual Faculty Recognition Luncheon, where faculty are recognized with a luncheon and plaques for extraordinary teaching, research and service.

I worked on book project: initially entitled, The Joy of Writing: Teacher Tested Recipes for the Composition Classroom,  Dr. Stover and I changed the title to a more direct one, which is our current working title: Recipes for Writers.  We spent time each day brainstorming ideas for the book based on our preliminary chapter categories.  As writing progressed, we changed these categories entirely to reflect those we felt were most useful for writing teachers.  We followed the writing process that we ourselves teach: after brainstorming, we went through our work and re-drafted our text.  In my time in Nashville, we came away with 120 pages of notes toward recipes.

Since returning from Nashville, Dr. Stover and I have worked on revisions of recipes each week. We “meet” by phone each week while at our computers, revising in real-time.  Some of those recipes will be distributed to faculty at the sabbatical presentation.

In addition to Nashville, I also went to New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two of the nineteenth century’s utopian communities http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/KADE/newharmony/home.html.  As a feminist literary scholar and teacher of women writers, this tour was very informative, as the community produced and attracted important writers and thinkers of the time, including Fanny Wright and Robert Owen.

I also visited University of Southern Indiana, where Maurice Hamington is now assistant professor of philosophy. (He misses Lane but loves it at USI).  While there, I also visited their Tutoring Center, which is a huge facility (Maurice’s wife runs the Learning Center). I was given a tour, and told about the successful Supplemental Instruction and other tutoring services they have at the well-staffed and equipped center.

Dr. Stover and I wrote and submitted a panel proposal for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) on how to recognize and assess latent and manifest learning outcomes.  This proposal was itself an outcome of our discussions around the book we are writing.

I have also continued working on a draft of a memoir of Catholic school, whose working title is Reading and Sinning.  This book has emerged out of a piece I published several years ago in the Community College Moment.  I will be reading a short piece from this book at the sabbatical reports.  As a teacher of writing, it has been deeply rewarding to have time to write these books (although they will take much more than 3 months to complete!).  I have written many documents of various kinds and sizes since coming to Lane, but the process of working directly with my own ideas and memories (in Reading and Sinning) and in collaboration with a colleague teaching at  a very different kind of institution (Recipes)  has been invigorating.  I have committed myself to continue with these projects, even as I go back to teaching and the hectic pace of Lane.