To view my teaching philosophy, please click on the link to the right.

I have also placed links on this blog to representative publications. "Placing Assessment and Curriculum in Dialogue" appeared in a book honoring Ed White, who certainly might be considered the patriarch of writing assessment, perhaps with Charles Cooper and Lee Odell.  Ed (with whom I and Norbert Elliot are co-authoring a book) and Charles, my dissertation adviser, have played an extremely important part in my career. This article should give readers a good picture of how I used assessment to shape and reshape the writing program I directed at LSU.

"Online Challenge Versus Offline ACT" will round out that picture. This article is the consequence of research I completed on the efficacy of timed writing to predict student achievement in untimed writing situations.

I have included "Critical Thinking," a chapter from my book, Going North, Thinking West: the Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction. You might say I did some critical thinking about critical thinking. My initial research into critical thinking was, as Henry James would say, the germ of this book.

"The Stories We Tell" reflects the work I have done on social class relationships and language. The stories refer to the common narratives academics with working-class origins tell about themselves. I describe several of these narratives, some of which I have told about myself.

I have included in this list a chapter from a book my students in a composition theory class wrote last year because I  mentioned in my teaching philosophy statement what I learned from my students about journal writing. I think writing teachers will be interested in what these students have to say about journals.

I have also included a link to the entire book, Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives.  That's precisely what these students did. I think writing teachers will be interested in the entire book, which is really a book about writing by students. For the last four weeks of our class, the students organized themselves into groups and reviewed each others' writing to find excerpts to include and comment on in the different chapters. The last half of the book consists of chapters each student wrote about him or herself as a writer with samples of the writing he or she did in our class--and sometimes examples of self-sponsored writing. I think it's a great book. I have to apologize a bit because the students tend to make me look like a very good teacher--but in fact, they were just a wonderful class. We have self-published this book on Amazon.

And finally, I have included a link to an electronic book that I wrote for use in the writing program at LSU. This book reflects the importance I place on the use of student writing as text--a strategy that I inherited, you might say, from James Moffett. He insisted, as I do, on the circulation of student writing as the primary, if not only, corpus for a writing class. With the help of several teachers in the LSU program, I first wrote this book in, I believe, 2004. I would like to bring it with me to Drexel and with the help of other teachers expand it to fit the curriculum at Drexel.