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2014 Kramer Award Presented to Andrew Davis

Posted on: May 4th, 2015 by jsmitch1
Kramer AwardDWR instructional designer and composition instructor Mr. Andrew Davis is the recipient of the X. A. Kramer, Jr., award for outstanding teacher for 2014. In presenting the award to Mr. Davis, department chair Dr. Bob Cummings noted that Andrew was outstanding in his teaching, which students often comment on in their teaching evaluations of the courses that he teaches. Additionally, Mr. Davis supports many students during his visits to classrooms each semester to help students engage more thoughtfully with reflective writing, how to set up and work with e-portfolios, and how to work with and understand the affordances and challenges of multimodal composing.
Mr. Davis’s influence in DWR classrooms is far-reaching: through his work one-on-one with writing instructors in DWR courses, he helps them to think through the requirements of writing assignments, and to effectively respond to student writing. Both faculty and students in the DWR are fortunate to have Mr. Davis and welcome him as the recipient of this year’s Kramer award.

2014 Krieser Award Presented to Kelsey Lock

Posted on: April 29th, 2015 by jsmitch1

Krieser 2014 Winner This year’s Cynthia Krieser Award for Outstanding Freshman Writing was presented to pharmacy student, Kelsey Lock, by Dr. Robert Cummings, chair of Department of Writing and Rhetoric. Kelsey’s essay, “Gatorade: The Modern Day Water,” written during Shanna Flaschka’s WRIT 102 class, beat out many other entries for the award.

The Cynthia Krieser Award for Outstanding Freshman Writing is made possible by an endowment fund known as the Cynthia Krieser English Award Endowment fund, the purpose of which is to honor in perpetuity the late Cynthia Krieser and at the same time recognize outstanding first-year composition writing

Jennifer Jackson Presents at PCA About Using Horror Films to Understand Gender Theory

Posted on: April 16th, 2015 by jsmitch1

IMG_1020Jennifer Jackson presented a paper at the 2015 Pop Culture Association conference in New Orleans on Friday, April 3. On a Composition and Pop Culture themed panel, Jennifer presented her experiences teaching a successful writing course on the theory of horror film in the spring of 2014. Her paper, titled “‘I am the male gaze’: Horror Film Theory and Gender in a Composition Classroom,” explored the development of the course at the University of Arkansas at Monticello; the paper particularly focused on the significant role that gender theory played alongside horror theory in not only teaching students about horror film, critical analysis, and argument but also about opened dialogue in her class about real world issues like sexism and the “male gaze.” In her presentation, she offered a list of films she showed to the class, required texts, and a brief look at assignments from the course, including multi-modal extra credit opportunities and a multi-modal final. Also emphasized in her presentation were student responses and engagement in the course; she spent equal time discussing the most involved students and the most hostile, in this way opening a dialogue in the Q and A at the end on student behavior and response. Jennifer has proposed to teach a similar course at the University of Mississippi as a LIBA102, and her presentation on her class at PCA helped her more deeply reflect on what worked about the course and what she would like to revise. Overall, presenting her work and discussing it with others was an overwhelmingly enriching experience.