The Scroll

As an English major alumnus of Elon University, Colin Rackley has recently made a generous donation to the Elon English Department for his Elon Day Donation. He has expressed his great admiration for the English department and deeply hopes that other Elon graduates of the English department will make donations as well. 

Rackley obtained a degree in a Creative Writing concentration and was part of the graduating class of 1998. During his time as a student, Rackley was involved in the English Department newsletter and the student-led service organization Circle K International (CKI). 

Since graduating from Elon, Rackley has worked in a variety of different positions to find his passion. He has worked in transportation, hotel business, and non-profit sectors. When asked how he has applied topics that he learned within the English department or at Elon in general to his career, Rackley replied that he has been able to apply knowledge from Elon in a multitude of ways. For instance, when Rackley was a supervisor in the hotel business he had to be very specific when training another person and detailing the specifics of a job position. He believes that the detail-oriented mindset that he formed from the English department helped him to succeed in this position. Rackley also worked for a non-profit dedicated to assisting troubled youth. As part of his role in this non-profit, he worked to develop advertising, flyers, and events to recruit volunteers for the organization. He stated that the creativity he developed from the English department greatly helped him to accomplish these tasks in an effective manner. When he needed to tell stories at events about troubled youth he used creativity and effective language in order to deliver a persuasive message and moving story. Rackley feels his degree in Creative Writing helped him to communicate to the community.
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This week I sat down with English and Drama Studies Professor Scott Proudfit (pictured left) who recently was recognized with the Elon College Excellence in Teaching award. We discussed his award, his nine years of experience teaching at Elon, and finally his goals for the future. Professor Proudfit’s students describe him as the “Best person on the planet,” and he says that he feels “flattered” to be recognized by both the University and his students.

Professor Proudfit is passionate about creating courses that reflect life experiences. He has designed and taught many classes at Elon like “The Graphic Novel” and “The AIDS play.”

“I am very privileged to be able to design classes and majors that I am truly passionate about because I know not everyone gets that opportunity.”

I asked him about his impression of Elon students over the years.

“Elon students are normally pretty stressed, but they are also looking for big answers to big questions about things like gender, sexuality, and race and my classes are the places for them to really discuss these difficult topics with other people.”

Professor Proudfit describes his biggest teaching challenge as making his students comfortable without the protection of electronics. In his classes, there are no phones and no computers; just a group of people discussing important topics and big ideas. An uncommon way of teaching, but it seems to be working for Professor Proudfit.
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Professor Paula Patch is the College Writing/English 110 program coordinator, a senior lecturer in the English major and ENG 110 program and the newly elected Vice President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, a national organization composed of writing teachers and writing program administrators. Additionally, Professor Patch recently co-authored an article based on the takeaways from teaching high school students: “What College Faculty Can Learn From Teaching High School Students,” with Professor Greg Hlavaty.

Professor Patch and Professor Hlavaty have been teaching Alamance County high school juniors for eight consecutive years for the College Writing for High School Juniors program, which is co-administered by the Elon University English Department and Collegiate Start @ Elon in the Office of Education Outreach in the Elon University School of Education.“We find that we really love teaching the class because there is something about the energy that high school students bring to a classroom that college students either hide or put elsewhere,” Professor Patch said, “You’re just getting like the real, raw person in a high school class.”

The first part of the class focuses on college essays and other materials for college admissions and the second half on college writing preparation, such as rhetorical skills, process skills and argumentation skills. “We want to give them a preview and some preliminary work into developing those rhetorical skills, process skills and argumentation skills that we know everybody can use constant, repeated practice with,” said Professor Patch, “It’s been fun because we’re teaching similar things [as English 110], but with different purposes.”
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In addition to being a professor in the English Department who teaches Professional Writing and Rhetoric classes, Dr. Paula Rosinski is the Director of Writing Across the University in the Center for Writing Excellence. Dr.  Rosinski explains that the Professional Writing and Rhetoric major is a “traditional rhetorical education, updated for the 21^stcentury” and that the WAU program supports the teaching and learning of writing on Elon’s campus.

Dr. Rosinski specializes in multimedia rhetoric and writing technologies. She said that “in the writing technologies class I teach, we examine the biases, affordances, and limitations of different writing software and technologies that are common to professional writers, because they impact everything about the rhetorical situation: the audiences you can reach, the genres you can produce, and how texts are delivered and consumed.

This semester, she is teaching PWR 212, Multimedia/Visual Rhetoric I, in which students revise traditional rhetorical strategies and apply them to produce their own multimedia and visual texts. These two classes go hand-in-hand, because “To be able to produce emerging genres and multimedia and visual texts, you need to have an understanding of the software and hardware. Analyzing isn’t enough. Students should practice how to produce these kinds of texts, too.”

Dr. Rosinski’s role as Director of Writing Across the University involves developing programming to enhance the teaching of writing on campus, for example by offering workshops herself or inviting faculty to present on their own areas of expertise. Dr. Rosinski also coordinates writing pedagogy grants and scholarship grants, meant to support faculty as they teach and study writing, and she also organizes writing groups and writing “boot camps” for faculty and staff, which give them time to focus on their own writing.  “What’s rewarding is that the work I do with faculty directly impacts students,” Dr. Rosinski said, “I hear back from faculty saying not only did they learn to teach writing more effectively, but that their students are learning content better too.”
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Nicole Galante ’19 is an accomplished English major concentrating in literature and PWR and minoring in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Galante is a Provost Scholar and a Betty Gerow Scholarship Award recipient, among other titles.

Nicole Galante ’19 presents her research on young adult power in young adult literature at SURE day 2018.

An Elon College Fellow and Summer Undergraduate Research Experience participant, Galante is also the recipient of the Rawls Endowed Research Grant. She combines her expertise in literature, PWR and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies to conduct research and formulate theories about young adult power, or lack thereof, in the young adult genre. Throughout her two and a half year long research initiative, Galante has read and analyzed 20 contemporary young adult novels.

According to Galante, the inspiration for this research topic stemmed from her discussions with Dr. Cahill, Galante’s professor of Sex, Gender, and Power during the spring of Galante’s freshman year. Dr. Cahill introduced Galante to the idea researching the connection between childhood and oppression. “The idea blew my mind,” said Galante, “I’d always understood that children don’t have the same power as adults, but I’d never thought about it in the context of privilege and oppression.”
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