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RCL at OSU Newark.
The Ohio State-Newark campus, the oldest of the Ohio State regional campuses, is located in a post-industrial town of 50,000 that is also the site of the world’s largest ancient geometric earthen structures and lunar observatory, the Newark Earthworks. English is one of four degree programs students can complete entirely at the campus, and of the approximately 2,200 students enrolled here, about 80 are English majors.
Among these majors, as well as among majors in other fields, RCL courses are growing in popularity. A wider range of courses is being offered and the faculty is growing. We currently have one tenure-track faculty member, Elizabeth Weiser, and look forward to next fall when a second, Dan Keller, will arrive from the University of Louisville. Keller’s specialties are in the areas of reading practices and digital media; he is currently working on an ethnographic book project on the reading practices of entering college students and has had essays recently published on multimodal reading/writing. Next year he will offer English 264, Reading Popular Culture, English 569, Digital Media and English Studies, and English 574, History and Theories of Writing.
Dr. Weiser, who specializes in Kenneth Burke and modern rhetorical theory, historiographic research, and style, has brought several new courses to the Newark campus. Students in the always enthusiastic 572, Grammar and Usage, focus on the rhetorics of style and language theory. Dr. Weiser was part of the team that developed the new H591.02 Special Topics in Rhetoric course, and her spring 2006 class focused on Rhetorical Communities; students applied Burke’s identification and classical doxa to a study of how their own community forges its identity and portrays itself to the world. Field trips, Web and visual analyses, archival research, and ethnography culminated in a group-produced fifty-page report on the Newark Earthworks that is now housed in the archives of the Newark Earthworks Center. This past winter in 573, Rhetorical Theory and Discourse Analysis, students tackled eight different mini-research projects to learn research methods that culminated in final projects utilizing narratology, intertextuality, multimedia analysis, metaphor, and process analysis. Dr. Weiser is also introducing Honors program students to the rhetoric of war in an Honors Seminar course this spring, and next year, she will offer another Honors Seminar on narratology. Her recent publications have covered Burke, war, and style theory, and her book manuscript Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism is under review.
In addition to tenure track faculty, the program employs seasoned professional staff in the form of First-year Writing Program Director/Writing Lab Coordinator Dr. Elizabeth Caldwell, Writing Lab Assistant Coordinator Derek J. Boczkowski, and a faculty of six lecturers on annual or quarterly contracts. Dr. Caldwell specializes in writing-across-the-curriculum and composition pedagogy and mentors both new faculty and upper division students. She teaches English 467, a seven-credit combination of classroom and practicum, and she also introduced 567, Rhetoric and Community Service, to the Newark campus in 2004. Mr. Boczkowski brings to campus years of experience in writing center administration and the classroom, as well as considerable expertise in Web design and computer applications to the teaching of writing. His scholarship includes contributions to The Writing Lab Newsletter, presentations at the last three CCCCs, and a book chapter. Under his direction the Writing Lab has started a quarterly newsletter and has expanded its services to faculty.
The RCL program at Newark is expanding its presence on campus beyond the regular curriculum, too. In 2005 the program first funded the publication of Taproot, an interdisciplinary annual collection of student work. By next winter, the publication will be produced under Dr. Weiser’s direction by students in 662, Literary Publishing, and students will have the opportunity to study editing, design, and professional communication as they produce both print and online versions of the journal. To prepare students for that class, Newark is also offering for the first time in several years English 265, Fiction Writing.
In 2004, the program established the campus-wide Seaton Essay Competition in honor of retired English program coordinator Dr. Beverly Seaton. Last year the program inaugurated the Promising Writer Award exclusively for essays written in first-year writing program courses. Winners of these awards receive not only a cash prize but also publication in Taproot.
Finally, for all Newark faculty, Dr. Caldwell has put online a Carmen site called WACWorks, which serves as a resource on writing across the curriculum.
A particular point of pride for the RCL program at Newark is the accomplishments of peer writing consultants (PWCs) in its Writing Lab, all of whom are undergraduates who trained in English 467. Over the last seven years, more than fifty percent of the Lab’s PWCs have gone on to graduate programs in education, history, psychology, nursing, ESOL studies, law, and English, as well as to jobs in technical writing, management, computer security, publishing, teaching, and organizational administration, among others. So far this spring, six of our senior PWCs have been accepted into graduate programs for the fall.
They have also been highly active in research and writing competitions. Clay Caroon, a senior English major, has presented his works-in-progress at several venues, including the University of Frieberg (Germany) Writing Center, and has been awarded both a Fenner Undergraduate Research Award from the College of the Humanities and two Student Research Grants from the Ohio State-Newark to continue an independent research project on English-acquisition pedagogy in Vietnam under Dr. Weiser’s supervision. The East Central Writing Centers Association also named Clay its Outstanding Leader of the Year at its annual conference this past March. Another PWC, Sarah Boulard, has received an undergraduate student assistantship grant to work with Dr. Weiser doing historiographic research. Various PWCs, including Kelly Whitney and Will Brown, have won Seaton Essay Awards. Still others have presented at writing centers conferences, including Clay Caroon, Autumn Lee Hadley, and Cassie Craig Warren at the East Central Writing Centers Association 27th Annual Conference, Adrian, MI (2005); Will Brown, Clay Caroon, and Brittany Schumann at the National Conference on Writing Centers as Public Space, Chicago, IL (2006); Jarod Anderson and Clay Caroon at the East Central Writing Centers Association 29th Annual Conference, Bowling Green, OH (2007); and Kelley Whitney and Brittany Schumann at the Northeast Writing Centers Association Conference, Storrs, CT (2007).
Indeed, though we are small in numbers in Newark, the RCL program is strong in the creativity and dedication of its faculty and staff to nurturing the talents of its growing body of enthusiastic students.
