Opened Practices Users Working at: Eastern Michigan University

Dr. Linda.Adler-Kassner is interested in how different groups and individuals define literacy, and how those definitions shape their interactions in various contexts (like school and home).

I joined the English Department at EMU in the fall of 2000 as the Director of First-Year Writing. Much of my job here involves working with our first-year writing courses and the graduate instructors teaching those courses. I also teach first-year writing (ENGL 121), upper-level writing courses like Writing, Style, and Language (ENGL 328), and graduate courses in composition and literacy theory and pedagogy. EMU is a comprehensive university of about 24,000 students, and about 90% of them take at least one of our two first-year courses (ENGL 120 and ENGL 121). Our program is exciting, dynamic, and challenging. We build our own curriculum, and are always engaged in study of that curriculum and data-driven revision of it. In 2005, our work was recognized by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) with a CCCC Certificate of Excellence.

My current research focuses on students, writing, and literacy practices. More specifically, of late I've focused on strategies for writing program administrators (WPAs) and instructors to advocate for students, conceptualizations of writing and literacy, and the work of writing programs through alliance building and smart assessment. This is the subject of my new book, _The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers_ (Utah State UP), as well as many of my recent articles and presentations. I am also the coordinator of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) Network for Media Action (or WPA-NMA), a project devoted to developing resources for WPAs to affect public discussions of and public policy around writing instruction. I am also the current Vice President of the WPA and will become president in 2009.

My interest in assessment also stems from my work around writing instruction and advocacy. We're in the midst of a long assessment process in our program, as above; I also work with the Higher Learning Commission (our regional accreditor) as a facilitator for workshops like the Academy for Assessment of Student Learning, which helps institutions develop smart assessment projects.