Dear Pomona Students: Please help the Search Committee welcome our second finalist for the position of Director of College Writing, Kara Wittman (Mills College), on Thursday, Jan 28 (tomorrow) and Friday, Jan 29. The following two presentations should be of special interest to students. Thursday, January 28, at 12:15 (SCC 208), Kara Wittman will give a demo “ID1” class. A small group of students has already committed to attend this presentation, but interested students are still welcome to join. On Thursday, January 28, at 4:15 (Crookshank 108), Kara Wittman will give a research talk, "Only This and Nothing More": Things We Learn from Talking Birds.” A fter this talk, the candidate will be available to answer questions over light refreshments. As the title suggests, this talk will consider what we can learn from talking birds (in literature, in philosophy, in general). What, for example, can the Raven’s persistent, cryptic “Nevermore!” teach us about written and oral communication, and even about teaching itself? Introducing his concept of the “phatic function"—speech designed merely to keep channels of communication open—the linguist Roman Jakobson compares this aspect of language to the speech of “talking birds”: compulsive, communal, and meaningless. This talk looks at a number of birds that talk in literature and philosophy to make the case that phatic communication—seemingly insignificant chatter—in fact offers us a way to think about a kind of communication that sidesteps traditional views of lyric subjectivity and personal expression, instead emphasizing community and offering us another model for thinking about what we do when we communicate with each other in writing, in a classroom, and in the world. I’ve attached Kara Wittman’s CV and Cover Letter to this message. After each candidate's visit, the committee will send out a (very simple!) survey to students who have signed in to the events to garner feedback. With best wishes, Anne Dwyer — Anne Dwyer Associate Professor of Russian and ID1 Coordinator Pomona College 550 N Harvard Ave Claremont, CA 91711
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Writing Program Pomona College Smith Campus Center 148 170 East Sixth St. Claremont, CA 91711 15 November 2015 To the Members of the Search Committee: I write to apply for the position of Director of College Writing at Pomona College. I am currently Director of the Program in Rhetoric and Composition and a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Mills College. I received my PhD in English from Stanford University in September 2008 and have been teaching writing at the college level for seventeen years; I have ten years of administrative and assessment work in writing programs. I am excited by the prospect of developing the new Writing Program and teaching writing at an institution so deeply committed to the rigorous and interdisciplinary study of writing, to diversity, and to a culture of care. To talk about my work as an administrator, program director, and researcher, I have to begin with my teaching. The students in my “Advanced Expository Writing” course are always surprised to see that there are no set readings on the syllabus. Depending on how a course develops, I introduce appropriate readings as we go, teaching billboards and bumper stickers, text messages and tweets, their own essays (always) and other exemplary essays (sometimes), poems, other course titles, political legislation, and cryptic email messages from my dad. We read for the way single words and sentences work, how arguments move, for the grace and etiquette of address, and the thrill of the rhetorical lourish and the strong claim. We read anything and everything to think about how to write. My courses are always grammar courses; grammar, my students discover, is not boring or just “commas and stuf.” It is the skeletal system that keeps everything in language at every level from falling to mush. I prepare my students to understand writing at a cellular level so that whether they become biologists, dancers, teachers, or senators, they know how to peel back the rhetorical layers of their chosen discursive body to see how their writing works and to do that writing well. Writing pedagogy has to be asset-based and individualized; it needs to move luidly through and beneath the entirety of a student’s education, allowing that student to communicate successfully in and after college. Thinking clearly about writing practice in the classroom has helped me understand how to bring writers together—students, faculty, professionals, administrators—for a shared project while also respecting crucial disciplinary, political, and personal distinctions. As Director of Rhetoric and Composition, I redesigned our irst-year writing program and its core course with these goals in mind. I help my instructors to lend students the discipline they will need to write both generally as college students and speciically as professionals; we emphasize
drafting and revision, asking good questions, developing an argument by induction, joining a conversation, and understanding how to take apart a piece of writing and see how it works. Our goal is to help students read, understand, and navigate the widely diverse and sometimes stressful rhetorical situations they will encounter as writers and communicators in college and in the communities from which they come and to which they may return. I also created the new program to recognize and build on the rhetorical strengths and assets students bring to college: we now require irstyear writing of every student without exception and we ofer, in addition to 150 minutes of weekly classroom time, a 30-minute weekly individualized instruction session. This one-on-one intensive makes up twenty percent of the overall course credit; curriculum for these sessions grows out of students’ positive experiences—prior to and/or outside of college—with language and rhetoric. We can now personalize instruction, reimagine our classrooms, and guarantee that we base our teaching in students’ individual strengths and talents. My understanding of writing as at once a specialized discipline and as a stem tissue for every other discipline informs my work with the Curricular Transformation Task Force—now the Academic Core Implementation Committee—revising the general education requirements at Mills College. My task there is to design and implement the Written and Oral Communication requirement. I work closely with faculty members from diferent disciplines to identify what aspects of writing might be “universal” to academic writing and what aspects are so enmeshed in the disciplines that they must be considered, assessed, and taught separately. I am also working with colleagues in digital humanities, information technology, and computer science to develop this as a multimodal communication requirement. The goal here is to foster a college culture of writing that can work both within and across the disciplines. This clear and deliberate attention to how we teach and what we expect from student writing will also allow us to think together and think creatively about our assessment practices, where assessment is not an external imposition on teachers but instead is organic to the development of our pedagogy and the ongoing conversation about our values, our expectations, our methods, and our mission. I am currently overseeing a general assessment of all capstone-level writing at Mills College. How, I am asking, does students’ inal writing relect what diferent majors have learned about written expression and what can it tell us about the possibility of creating shared and holistic goals when it comes to college writing? I am looking with mathematicians at both proofs and word problems to determine how general problems of connotation and syntax both interfere with and enrich the logic of math. I am working with philosophers to understand how the paragraph works diferently in philosophy papers; the chemists and I are thinking about ways to support students in precise word usage and sentence economy. I am, in other words, working to see both what diferentiates writing from major to major and to see what these disciplines might have to teach each other.
In addition, I am working to form new communities that support written communication at all levels, irst-year students to senior faculty. In January I will be introducing, along with our faculty in Modern Languages, the multilingual component of our Writing Center: students will now be able to get rigorous tutoring on essays and assignments in French, Spanish, and Chinese, as well as in English. I am currently working on a project with a colleague in the English Department on writing pedagogy in the literature classroom; we are experimenting with bringing Lesson Study to higher education classrooms in order better to understand the relationship between the literature we teach, the assumptions we make about reading, and the writing we ask our students to do. This work emerges in part from consulting I do with Bay Area high schools on history and ELA programs both to help them enrich their programs and also so that I better understand the transition from high school to college. And I am working with a consortium of West Coast colleges on a Teagle Grant project to extend written communication support beyond the brick-and-mortar institution, bringing high impact practices to online education. My work with local community colleges, especially the Peralta Colleges, keeps me alive to the needs of our transfer students and also helps me work with those of our graduate students who will eventually be employed by the Peralta Colleges; I see myself as working as a part of a network of diverse and talented individuals across the Bay Area helping both local and newly-arrived students articulate their dreams so that they can eventually follow them. My teaching also informs my research and writing. I am currently writing an essay called “Jakobson’s Birds: Echolocation and Inclusion in the Composition Classroom” that explores what the structural linguist Roman Jakobson calls the “phatic function” as a way of teaching voice, style, and audience in the writing classroom. I have found Jakobson’s “six functions of address” essential to my work, and the phatic, the moment of pure contact between addresser and addressee (what, he says, birds do when they ‘speak’), gets left out of most composition scholarship. I argue that seemingly arhetorical moments of “are you listening?,” “hello?,” “hey guys?,” ofer us ways to help students think about how social convention and gesture gets expressed in writing and how the moment of contact (is anyone out there?) we make in writing is a site of rhetorical richness, a deeply felt instantiation of voice and style. A short version of this essay is forthcoming in the Northern California Writing Center Association’s annual publication. My second project is a book on the relationship between literacy narratives and the written feedback we give on student papers. An early part of the project is forthcoming from College Composition and Communication in June 2016; in this essay, “Literacy Narratives in the Margins,” I suggest that marginal comments are themselves tiny literacy narratives, supercompressed stories of our own complex coming into literacy that collide, sometimes violently, with our students own equally complicated stories. As this project moves forward, I hope to do three things: conduct a campus-wide study of
marginal and terminal comments from all disciplines; commence a short-term longitudinal study of both faculty and student literacy narratives (and how they change over the course of a four-year tenure at Pomona); and look at the way moves toward systematized assessment, “robo-grading,” and online teaching afect the way we respond to student papers, and the way this in turn afects retention and student success. It might be axiomatic that writing efectively requires sharing work with other people; perhaps it is less of a given that thinking about, assessing, developing pedagogy for, and teaching writing are also community eforts. Pomona College recognizes this and that is irst and foremost what excites me about the prospect of joining this community. I would be thrilled to work with faculty and students on the study of writing in Pomona’s rigorous and vital intellectual environment. My CV and statements of scholarship, of teaching, and of mentoring a diverse population are included with this letter; my dossier is being forwarded to you. I will be happy to provide any other materials upon request. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, Kara Wittman
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KARA ELIZABETH WITTMAN Department of English Mills College Oakland, CA 94613
[email protected]
Mailing address: 3823 26th St San Francisco, CA 94131 (415) 781-9654
______________________________________________________________________ CURRENT ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT Director, Program in Rhetoric and Composition, 2011Visiting Assistant Professor, 2008Mills College, Oakland, CA EDUCATION Ph.D. in English Stanford University, 2008 M.A in English Stanford University, 2003 B.A. in English, summa cum laude Minor, Plant Biology & Environmental Conservation Arizona State University, 2000 RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS Rhetoric and composition; writing in the disciplines; writing across the curriculum; history and theory of writing pedagogy; secondary and postsecondary multimodal literacies; narrative theory; novel theory; nineteenth-century British literature; history and philosophy of science; philosophy of language; poetry and poetics TEACHING MILLS COLLEGE, OAKLAND, CA (Lecturer 2006-2008; Visiting Assistant Professor, 2008- ) ENG 001: Critical Reading and Expository Writing ENG 001: Rhetoric and Composition for the College Writer SAW 001: Writing Seminar, Summer Academic Workshop for Leaders and Scholars ENG 066: Survey of British Literature II, 1700 to the present ENG 102/202: Advanced Expository Writing ENG 180: Special Topics “Ghost Writing: Supernatural Forms in Romantic and Victorian Lit.” ENG 180/280: Special Topics in Narrative Theory “The Story and the State” ENG 183/283: Advanced Seminar “The Exorcism of the Nineteenth Century: Literature in a Disenchanted Age.” ENG 200: Writing and Research for Graduate Students in English ENG 202: Critical and Academic Writing for Graduate Students in English. ENG 250A: Reader, MA Thesis. ENG 175/275: English Romantic Poetry
ENG 176/276: Victorian Poetry, Prose, Drama ENG 180/280: The Once and Future Story: Narrative Theory and the Digital Humanities (Spring 2016) ENG 187/287: The British Novel in the Twentieth Century and Beyond ENG 188/288: The Nineteenth-Century British Novel. ENG 272: Theories and Strategies of Teaching Writing. ENG 280: Special Topics [Literature and History] “Literature and the Commons” ENG 283: Advanced Seminar “The Curious and the Damned.” ENG 283: Advanced Seminar “Narrative Agonistes: Theory, Exile, War” ENG 295: Independent Study, Goethe and Carlyle STANFORD UNIVERSITY, STANFORD, CA FMST Honors: Feminist Studies Honors Thesis Mentor PWR 1 & 2: Program in Writing and Rhetoric, “Apocalypse, Twilight, and Silence: The Rhetoric of the End.” Freshman writing seminar. PWR 6: Introductory Writing Seminar for Stanford athletes ENG 09/109: Masterpieces of British Literature, I: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Their Contemporaries. Undergraduate lecture course with Professor Edward Steidle. (Teaching Assistant) ENG 10/110: Masterpieces of British Literature I: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Their Contemporaries. With Professor Angus Fletcher. (Teaching Assistant) ENG 397A: Pedagogy Seminar II. (Co-Instructor with Andrea Lunsford) SELECTED PROFESSIONAL SERVICE MILLS COLLEGE Academic Core Implementation Committee, 2015-2016 Chair, Written Communication Assessment Committee, 2014-2016 Planning Committee, Center for Teaching, Learning, and Communication, 2014present [in progress] Director of the Writing Center, Mills College, 2012-present General Education and Assessment Committee, Mills College, 2014-present First-Year Experience Committee, Mills College, 2014-2015 Curricular Transformation Task Force Working Group, Mills College, 2014-2015 Chair, Non-Tenure Track Faculty Task Force, Mills College, 2013-2014 Member, Non-Tenure Track Faculty Task Force, Mills College, 2012-2013 Director of First-Year Writing, Mills College, 2011-2012 Writing Across the Curriculum Task Force, Mills College, 2010-present Assessment Committee, Written Communication Requirements, Mills College, 2010 Academic Advisor, Mills College, 2008-2010
REGIONAL
Consultant, ELA and History Curriculum Development, Jewish Community High School of the Bay, 2012 CPEC OUSD/Mills College/ACOE “Lesson Study” Planning Committee, 2011-2012 Thesis Advisor, Feminist Studies Honors Program, Stanford University, 2007-2008 Graduate Admissions Committee, Department of English, Stanford University, 2005 Organizer, Stanford/Berkeley Graduate Conference, Stanford University, 2003 Qualifying Exam Reassessment Committee, Stanford University, 2002-2003 PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS “Literacy Narratives in the Margins” College Composition and Communication, forthcoming June 2016 “Jakobson’s Birdsong: Unwritten Language in the Writing Tutorial” NCWCA Newsletter, forthcoming Fall 2015 “Learning to Read with Mary Shelley,” under review at Modern Language Quarterly “Jakobson’s Birds: Echolocation and Inclusion in the Composition Classroom ” article in progresss SELECTED PRESENTATIONS AND INVITED TALKS “Jakobson’s Birdsong: Unwritten Language in the Writing Tutorial,” NCWCA, Fresno, CA, March 2015 “Why the Humanities?” Invited talk. Academic Expo, University of California, Berkeley, August 2012 “Reading to Write: Joining Students in Conversation Around Writing.” Invited talk. Words that Made America Summer Institute, Alameda County Oice of Education, August 2012 “Responding to the Text: Moving from Reading to Making the Argument,” OUSD/Mills College/Alameda County Humanities Collaborative for the California Postsecondary Education Commission, June 2012 “Individualized Instruction and the First-Year Writing Course,” with Kirsten Saxton and Thomas Galguera. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference, June 2011 “The Everlasting Pause: Stopping to Wonder in Sartor Resartus.” NAVSA, November 2010 “Stopping Time in Sartor Resartus.” International Society for the Study of Narrative, June 2009 “Caliban’s Library: Wonder and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Invited talk for Oberlin College Dept. of English, January 2009
“Supernatural Century.” Invited talk for the Mills College Associate Council, Mills College President’s House, October 2008 “Novel Supernaturalism: Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.” Center for the Study of the Novel Working Group, Stanford University, May 2008 “Really Wonderful: The Admirabiles Mixturae of Nineteenth-Century Realism.” ACLA, April 2008 Leader, community seminar on The Pickwick Papers. Dickens Universe, UCSC, Summer 2007 “Pickwick’s Spectacles: Cabinets of Wonder and the Novel.” NASSR/NAVSA, Aug./Sept. 2006 “The State Beyond the Sublime: Mary Shelley’s Valperga and The Last Man.” NEMLA, March 2006 PROFESSIONAL WRITING (NON-ACADEMIC) Outside Magazine Travel and Copy Writing Endicia Inc. Copy Writing
2009-2014 2009-2011
HONORS, AWARDS, AND FELLOWSHIPS Co-PI (with Cynthia Scheinberg). Reading to writing: Using Lesson Study to improve teaching and learning in literature classes. Mentored Study Anonymous Donor Funds, Mills College English Dept. 2015-2016 Co-PI (with Cynthia Scheinberg). Reading to writing: Teaching literature, learning writing: a student-faculty mentored research group. Anonymous Donor Funds, Mills College English Dept. 2014-2015 Teagle Foundation Grant [with representatives from Dominican University, Whittier College, and the University of Puget Sound] Integrating Online Education and High Impact Practices 2013-2015 Finalist, Keck Foundation Grant, 2012 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference Participation Grant, 2011 Curriculum Development & Research Grant, Mills College, 2010-11 Killefer Dissertation Fellowship, Stanford University, 2006-2007 Stanford University College of Humanities and Sciences Graduate Fellowship, 20012006 Mellon Fellowship in the Humanistic Studies, 2001 College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Scholarship Graduate Award, Arizona State University, 2000 PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS Modern Language Association National Council of Teachers of English Northern California Writing Center Association
North American Victorian Studies Association REFERENCES David Donahue, Director, Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, University of San Francisco [and former Interim Provost, Mills College] Marc Joseph, Chair, Department of Philosophy, Mills College Andrea Lunsford, Professor of English (Emerita), Stanford University Franco Moretti, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University Kirsten Saxton, Professor of English, Mills College Cynthia Scheinberg, Professor of English, Mills College Andrew Workman, Provost, Roger Williams University
