About

I am a Clinical Associate Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Teaching in the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, with over twenty years of experience teaching writing, rhetoric, communication strategy, and literature.

I specialize in bringing active-learning and collaboration strategies to writing instruction across the curriculum.

Today’s students need strong critical-thinking and writing skills more than ever for their personal and professional empowerment. But those skills become increasingly meaningless in today’s world without a digital literacy and models for thinking, writing, and working collaboratively with a diverse set of people and perspectives.

I meet this call in my praxis by designing courses that position students as both meta-reflective learners and as participants in a learning community. Together, my students and I:

• consciously and constantly articulate goals and learning outcomes


• hold ourselves and one another accountable for the shared learning experience


• identify and interrogate our positions, processes, and tools, including when and why we employ different kinds of technology, from low-tech paper and whiteboards to high-tech apps and platforms

Working and writing in community dispels the abstraction that frustrates students in typical writing instruction. They come to see rhetoric as a dynamic, living set of interdependent choices that motivate real people and propel concrete actions and consequences. Such awareness of choice and process nurtures the growth mindset that enables lifelong learners, communicators, and collaborators.

As both a professor and administrator, my current work runs along two tracks. One track is devoted to my own scholarship of teaching and learning, whereby I design and teach writing-intensive courses, gather and analyze data about student learning, and publish SoTL articles and open educational resources. The other track focuses on designing and supervising undergraduate curricula for many of my department’s multi-section courses, which includes mentoring our graduate-student instructors in writing pedagogy, digital pedagogy, and multi-modal curriculum design.

Before taking up this position, my PhD training in the Humanities, my experience in corporate communications, and my interdisciplinary experiences across a number of departments forged my uniquely broad slight lines. I understand the power of writing and the challenges surrounding its instruction from a variety of vantage points. This dexterity allows me to design student-centered courses that deliver department, program, and university-level objectives.

I have leveraged these broad sight lines across multiple university departments – piloting online software for writing instruction in the University of Georgia’s First Year Composition program, establishing a Digital Composition program in Indiana University’s Department of English, building the Kelley School of Business’ undergraduate professional-skills curriculum (“Compass”), and designing new courses for Kelley’s MBA program as well as Indiana University’s Liberal Arts and Management Program (LAMP).