Rollins College Campus Visit

Writing Studies & Director of College Writing Candidate Matthew Vetter

Thank you for inviting me to the final stage of your search. I am excited to be a candidate for the Assistant Professor of Writing Studies & Director of College Writing at Rollins College. I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University Zanesville and a section editor at Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy. As a former Assistant Director of Composition at Ohio University, I have formal experience in writing program administration, including in faculty development and teacher training, curriculum development, and program assessment. I also have experience and expertise in the teaching of developmental writing, first year composition, digital writing, professional writing, digital cultural studies, and composition pedagogy. I enjoy and am challenged by curriculum development initiatives and am passionate about supporting others in the use of technology in the writing classroom. As someone who has degrees across the braid of English Studies, in creative writing and literature, I both understand and see value in diverse methods for teaching academic writing.

This page provides resources and additional materials to help you learn more about my qualifications and to support my teaching demonstration and scholarly presentation (job talk) during the campus visit. If you have additional questions for me, write to vetter@ohio.edu.

 

Teaching Demonstration Slides

Teaching Demonstration Materials

Teaching Demonstration Lesson Plan: Synthesis Lesson Plan

Synthesis Example: Sample Lit. Review

Activity Hand-out: Synthesis Matrix

Scholarly Presentation (Job Talk)

Wikipedia writing projects provide accessible opportunities for teaching procedural, social, and rhetorical writing knowledge, and for practicing specific skills related to research and digital literacy, all while working to improve a public knowledge resource. In this talk, I review some of my early research to explain how teaching with Wikipedia can help students understand and practice writing, and discuss how this approach might be understood from a service learning or community-engagement model. I then problematize this model by asserting the need for a writing pedagogy that moves beyond engagement, towards reflective action. Description of a specific case study detailing a learning project to remediate Wikipedia’s gender gap helps to articulate the need for a pedagogy that allows for what I call critical digital praxis. Following Freire’s notion of praxis as “reflection and action directed at the structures to be reformed,” I define critical digital praxis as a mode of action for teaching and scholarship that allows for writing interventions in public digital cultures in order to both better understand the writing activities of those cultures and make meaningful impressions with/in them. The talk concludes with speculation about future directions and questions for this research.

Research Presentation (Job Talk) Slides