Our Rhetoric faculty and students are vital contributors to their professions and the larger community:

Rebecca Blair, Fellow of the Oxford Round Table, continues her leadership role with the Oxford Education Research Symposium, Oxford University, UK, researching pedagogical praxis within the universal theory of education.

Rebecca Blair, Provost’s Faculty Fellow for Accreditation, applies her expertise as a Peer Reviewer and Systems Appraiser for the Higher Learning Commission (the higher education accreditor for the central United States) to the preparation of accreditation documentation for the University of Iowa.  In addition, to her continuing role with the Higher Learning Commission, she serves as a consultant to higher education institutions on pedagogical practices and curricular and organizational assessments.

Cinda Coggins received the CLAS Collegiate Teaching Award 2012-2013 along with the International Advocate Award 2013-14. This certificate is presented to recognize exemplary support of international students, scholars, or internationalization efforts by staff and faculty on campus.

LuAnn Dvorak finished an art history in medicine book called the Lost Art of Retinal Drawing (2013) with coauthor Steve Russell, MD, LuAnn Dvorak. She has also been researching, for a series of shorter pieces, a couple of her ancestors and the hardships these women faced due to illness and the limited treatment options available at the time.

Matt Gilchrist, director of Iowa Digital Engagement and Learning, received renewed funding for the initiative from the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost. IDEAL continues to work with instructors from across campus to design innovative assignments that push learning beyond the classroom walls and yield a digital project. IDEAL also obtained funding from the Student Technology Fee to offer undergraduate peer tutoring in digital multimodal composition.

David Gooblar continues to write his “Pedagogy Unbound” column for The Chronicle of Higher Education every two weeks. He’s working on a book on college teaching called The Missing Course: Everything They Didn’t Tell You About Teaching in Grad School. 

Consuelo Guayara-Sanchez will be working with Honors students to explore our attitudes toward diversity through service-learning opportunities with the North Liberty Food Bank, The Children’s Center for Therapy, Shelter House, Pathways, and Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County. Prof. Guayara-Sanchez won an Instructional Improvement Award through the Council for Teaching to help facilitate this project.

Megan Knight was invited by Associate Dean Marc Armstrong (CLAS/graduate & online education) to develop a graduate teaching practicum (CLAS:5100 Practicum: College Instruction for TAs). As recent chair of PDP, and in response to a need for more professional development opportunities graduate students, she created a one semester hour course which will be offered for the first time during the Fall 2014 semester and will focus on practical pedagogical concerns, including how to structure a course, devise learning outcomes, develop a syllabus and a calendar of assignments, evaluate student work, and create a student-centered classroom with collaborate learning experiences; pre-semester intensive training session, weekly meetings during first month of semester, periodic meetings to address midterm and late-semester issues; concurrent with TA teaching assistantships. Take a look at the short video introducing the class: https://online.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/clas5100intro/

Carol Severino recently taught a week-long course "Writing for Academic Journals" to Mexican faculty at the Autonomous Popular University of Puebla.  The participants from across the disciplines are interested in publishing their work in Spanish and in English.  She is currently working on a longitudinal study of second language writing development and its relationship to writing center feedback and revision; she will present some of her results of the study at the Symposium on Second Language Writing in November.