Sharon Marshall
Assistant Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
M.A. in English, Creative Writing 1993
The City College of the City of New York (CUNY); Columbia
University
B.A. English, Vassar College
marshals@stjohns.edu
As a teacher, I...
• use a workshop approach to teach first year writing and
emphasize active participation, collaboration, as well as
individual responsibility in the classroom. I try to foster a sense
of engagement and belonging in our local classroom and University
community and to help students see the interconnectedness of ideas
and people across disciplines, genres of communication, and
cultures. Students write in every class, learn how to respond
constructively to each others’ writing, and often take
responsibility for presenting course materials, and researching
common writing problems and questions.
• hope that my students will learn to write thoughtfully,
persuasively, and critically as they move along a continuum of
writing tasks that range from personal reflections to public
arguments and discover their identities as writers. My aim is not
only to awaken them to the possibilities of the written word and to
introduce them to the conventions of academic writing, but to help
them become global citizens who use knowledge to make a difference
in their own lives and in the lives of others.
• try to appreciate and teach according to the individual
personalities, preparedness, language backgrounds, and learning
styles my students possess. I especially value one-on-one
conferencing where students read their papers aloud and we discuss
individual pieces of writing.
• create themes that are designed to appeal to a diverse student
body and promote ideas of equality and respect for others, and
environmental stewardship.
• encourage students to use writing to examine their own
beliefs, grow in their understanding of other’s beliefs, values,
and experience, and to view required writing assignments not as
chores, but as opportunities to learn about topics and issues they
care about, create new knowledge, assert themselves, and take
action in the academic community and the world.
• show students how to use exploratory and informal writing to
increase their fluency, generate ideas, enrich their thinking, and
decrease their anxiety and tendency to procrastinate when it comes
to formal essays and assignments.
• develop assignments that encourage students to do primary
research through fieldwork, collecting oral histories, writing
about their own experiences, and conducting surveys.
• stress the connection between language and thinking and
encourage students to explore analytic, narrative, poetic and
reflective modes of writing.
• encourage students to see how using certain genres, grammars,
dialects, and stylistic choices reflects different ways of
thinking, different ways of viewing and processing experience, and
influences how readers will receive one’s written text.
• encourage students to take responsibility for their own
learning by creating multiple opportunities for them to reflect on
their writing practices and choices, so they can apply what they
learn to future assignments or composing situations.
• stress the connections between close and careful reading and
developing critical thinking capabilities, enriched language
resources, and a functional knowledge of rhetoric and rhetorical
strategies.
• continue to reflect on and try to refine my teaching through
discussion and participation in conferences and symposia with St.
John’s and other colleagues. My service on the board, and the
workshops in writing pedagogy that I conduct and attend through the
Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College have been
especially helpful in my continuing development as a teacher and
scholar.
As I writer and scholar, I...
• am primarily concerned with research concerning writing
pedagogy
• am working on an essay on Buddhist principles and the teaching
of writing, and a paper that examines the impact of digital
technology on the physical space of the writing classroom.
• came to the teaching of composition through my work as a fiction
writer and poet. I continue to write fiction, as well as the
occasional poem. Because of this background, I am interested in
investigating and promoting the idea of what I will call a
“Consilience” or unity of writing knowledge, to borrow E.O.
Wilson’s term, that questions prevailing distinctions and value
judgements between types of writing: e.g. creative vs. academic
writing; pedagogies: e.g. expressivist vs. social epistemic;
genres: e.g. personal essay vs. academic paper, and the
hierarchical ranking of writing that positions what Peter Elbow
called “author evacuated” objective discourse above writing that
relies on personal subjectivity. I would like to emphasize
connections and redefine various writing modes and practices under
the umbrella of a 21st century “new rhetoric” whose unifying
feature is experience.
• will present a paper at the 2009 Conference on College
Composition and Communication called: “Writing Towards Compassion:
Transforming the World from the Inside Out.”
• have contributed a chapter entitled “A Case for Private Free
writing in the Composition Classroom” to a book to be published by
SUNY Press in 2009, Enduring Questions and Essential Practices:
Reflections on Writing Based Teaching.