Alumni Updates - Recent Faculty News

Kris Blair:Technology Innovator -- Edwards & C.S. Lewis
CCCC Features Gebhardt Article -- Recent Scholarship by Sue Carter Wood

Recent Student News

Kris Blair Wins Technology Innovator Award
Kris Blair received the Technology Innovator Award at the 2007 Computers and Writing Conference at Wayne State University in Detroit, May 17-20. This award is presented annually by the Committee on Computers and Composition of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (or 7C’s as it is known for pretty obvious reasons). According to the 7C's website, the award is presented “to a person who serves as an exemplar for teachers working with computer technologies in their classes and who represents the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession.” The recipient should be “an outstanding leader in computer-based pedagogy who has made a continuing contribution to the application and use of computer technology in the field of composition studies” and “a person who pushes the envelope, who...calls our assumptions into question, urging us to engage in an active search for new and exciting ways to accomplish our pedagogical goals in the composition classroom.”

Utah State University's Cheryl Ball, Co-Chair of 7C's, shared excerpts from nominating letters from some of Kris's former students. "As a graduate teacher," one recent R&W PhD Program graduate wrote, Kris "found ways to support a superior learning environment by challenging her students with new ways of looking at issues in the various permutations of rhetoric and writing, and I am amazed at the many ways that she challenges both the technology neophyte and technology guru in the same class.” Another graduate wrote: “Although I have found that the field of Computers and Writing includes many dedicated scholars and teachers, Dr. Blair not only matches that level of dedication, she exceeds it by looking for and creating new opportunities for professional development, service, and scholarship with an emphasis on feminism and collaboration.” And a third person emphasized Kris's "contribution to digital scholarship [which] has had a major impact on feminist rhetorical theory in digital spaces...With over thirty articles, book chapters, proceedings, reviews, and online publications as well as five edited collections and texts, by anyone’s standards she is a major influence within digital scholarship."

Kris Blair, a professor and Chair of the BGSU English Department, edits the refereed journal Computers and Composition Online.
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Bruce Edwards Edits Major C.S. Lewis Publication
Bruce Edwards is the General Editor of C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy, a four-volume work just published by Greenwood Publishing Group. The hope of this 1400-page project, Bruce says, is to provide the definitive research tool on Lewis for the next generation of scholars interested in the life and work of a prolific author of poetry, literary criticism, memoir, Christian writing, autobiography, and letters.
The different emphases of the four volumes are suggested by their titles: "An Examined Life"; "Fantasist, Mythmaker, and Poet"; "Apologist, Philosopher and Theologian"; and "Scholar, Teacher, and Public Intellectual." In those four volumes, according to the publisher's website, "experts in the field of Lewis studies examine all his works along with the details of his life and the culture in which he lived to give readers the fullest complete picture of the man, the writer, and the husband, alongside his works, his legacy, and his place in English letters." For more information, you can check this link.

One of the two founders of Bowling Green's rhetoric and composition doctoral program in 1980, Bruce Edwards is also now professor of English and Associate Dean for Distance and International Education at BGSU.
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CCCC Session Features Article by Rick Gebhardt
At the 2007 CCCC meeting in New York City, a 1977 CCC article by Rick Gebhardt was featured in a session by several leaders in writing-teacher education, an evolving field involving people in rhetoric and composition and in English education. The Thursday afternoon program session called Writing Teacher Education: Thirty Years After “Balancing Theory With Practice in the Training of Writing Teachers” had been planned by leaders of the CCCC Special Interest Group on English Education/Composition Connections to acknowledge the impact of Rick’s Braddock Award winning article on the preparation of writing teachers, whether for college classrooms or the schools.

For instance, Elizabeth Brockman of Central Michigan University and Mark Letcher of the University of Oklahoma emphasized how “Balancing” had drawn no distinction between pre-service school teachers and graduate teaching assistants, as they reported on research on students who crossed the borders of English education and composition. Jonathan Bush of Western Michigan University recounted how his accidental discovery of the article in 1996 left him “with a new mission and a new understanding of [his] place in composition studies, English education, and the connections between the two.” And he spoke of “Balancing” as “an opening text” that “helped launch the community of writing teacher educators that exists today.”

Rick served as Respondent at the end of the session, something, he says, that was very gratifying and quite weird-feeling, too. “When I started drafting an article based on a course for prospective writing teachers at Findlay College in 1975,” Rick began his remarks,“ I never imagined that it might be remembered, let alone still used, in the next century. Instead, I was wondering if I would ever finish the thing and, if I did, whether Ed Corbett might publish it in CCC. So it is gratifying to read the title of this session . . . and listen to the presentations and to sense that the article is still useful for people who are teaching writing teachers and working to shape the field of writing teacher education.” In part, Rick’s comments emphasized how much the field--and research and approaches writing teachers can draw on--has changed over the three decades since publication of “Balancing Theory With Practice in the Training of Writing Teachers” (College Composition and Communication, May 1977).
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Recent Scholarship by Sue Carter Wood
Sue Carter Wood's co-authored article "What about Sex? Reconsidering Histories of 19th Century Women's Public Reform Discourse" has been accepted for future publication in Sizing Up Rhetoric, ed. by David Zarefsky. Sue's co-author is Rhetoric & Writing PhD Program graduate Inez Schaecterle. They were co-presenters a version of the project at the Rhetoric Society of America meeting in Memphas last May. In a second review process, a revision of that refereed paper was later selected for the book growing out of the 2007 RSA meeting.