News and Events
Mindy Wright's New Position
Mindy Wright, Coordinator of the Writing Workshop, has been appointed Director of Community Partnerships in the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences. In that role, she will serve as liaison between ASC and organizations and individuals outside the university, working to establish systematic and sustainable partnerships with community organizations. As director, Mindy will (and, in fact, has already begun to) establish the Public School Partnership and Non-Profit Partnership Advisory Committees, design new courses, and propose university structures that may support partnerships (such as the recent CAA approval of an "S" designation for service-learning courses).
We are, of course, delighted for Mindy but also regret losing her from English, where she has served as the coordinator for the Writing Workshop since 1992. But her tenure with the Writing Workshop extends, in fact, back to 1979 when she served first as a teacher and then as assistant director. During her time in the Workshop, Mindy led the development of new courses and built and sustained partnerships with programs on and off campus. She led the piloting and development of English 110W (now 110.03) and English 109.01 and 109.02 and also service-learning versions of English 110.03 in which Ohio State students tutor elementary school students one day a week in Columbus Public Schools. To support the development of these and other new courses, she has worked with colleagues to win ten internal and external grants. The Workshop, under Mindy's direction, has continued to be a teaching laboratory, conducting programmatic research to support piloting and development of new courses and hosting graduate student research, including dissertation projects by Rebecca Greenberg Taylor and Nancy Pine, as well as research initiated by Ohio State's Service-Learning Initiative.
Mindy's history of the Writing Workshop will appear in the Hampton Press Basic Writing in America (Patricia Alexander and Nicole Green, eds.), a study of the histories of nine basic writing programs in the US. With Mindy's departure, the Writing Workshop will move from its Stadium quarters to Denney and will be more directly supervised by our Rhet/Comp/Literacy program. The Department very much appreciates Mindy's service, and we are glad that she will continue to teach for us English 567: Rhetoric and Community Service.
