Aetna Chair of Writing

The Aetna Endowment enhances the University's efforts to encourage excellent student writing and excellent teaching of writing, throughout the UConn system, the State of Connecticut, and the nation.

2001-2002 Activities

University:

Freshman English. Gesa Kirsch, Professor of English and Research Fellow at the Center for Business Ethics, Bentley College, spoke on "From Feminist Ethics to Business Ethics: Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries" at the eleventh Celebration of Teaching on April 25, 2002, planned by the Aetna Chair and the English Graduate Student Association under the direction of Jenny-Rebecca Falcetta. Recipients of the 2001-2002 Aetna Teaching Awards are: First Prize, Tonya Moutray McArthur; Second Prize, Richard Pickering; Third Prize, Kathrine Aydelott.

ESL:

Efforts (coordinated with others around campus) have begun to enhance UConn's support of teaching English as a foreign language to an increasingly multinational and multilingual student population, freshman through graduate. Aetna funding has helped to bring speakers on ESL to campus. to work with Writing Center tutors and TAs.

W (Writing Intensive) Programs:

This program (currently under revision) has an admirable philosophy: that students need to write well in their chosen disciplines, and that faculty in those disciplines should help them to learn to do this by at least 5000 words of writing in two 200-level W (writing intensive) courses. To implement this philosophy, Lynn Bloom and three Agricultural Sciences faculty (Tom Hoagland, Cameron Faustman, and John Reisen) have been awarded a $98,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and have co-authored, with TA Kim Freeman, Improving Student Writing in the Agricultural Sciences: A Field Guide for Instructors (2000), available for nationwide distribution in hardcopy and on an Internet website. The Aetna Chair invited and organized a day-long consultation with Martha Townsend, Director Campus Writing Program, U of Missouri on April 1, co-sponsored by CLAS, the Humanities Institute, the Department of English, and the Institute for Teaching and Learning.

Graduate Programs:

The graduate courses in Autobiography (as a literary genre, and as a mode of writing), and in Rhetorical Theory and Composition Research, inaugurated in 1988-89, continue to flourish, as do M.A. and Ph.D. prelim exams in composition and rhetoric. Students are writing­-and publishing­-doctoral dissertations and articles grounded in rhetoric and composition studies, currently Jenny Spinner's critical anthology of women essayists, and Stephanie Roach's analysis of the issues, research paradigms, and configuration of writing directors emerging from the first 20 years of Writing Program Administration (1981-2001). Aetna funds have helped send graduate students as presenters to national and regional writing conferences, such as the Penn State Rhetoric Conference, Conference on College Composition and Communication, Computers and Composition, AWP (Associated Writing Programs), multi-ethnicity, peer tutoring, national Council of Writing Program Administrators summer workshop and conference, and conferences at UNH and URI on composition and teaching.

Nonfiction Essay Prizes:

Now in its eleventh year, the annual Nonfiction Writing Prize Award evening has evolved into a particularly happy and festive gathering of faculty, students, parents, administrators, and Aetna Fellows (see below). On November 8, 2001 the 9 Aetna, McPeek, and Ratcliffe-Hicks student prizewinners, freshman and graduate students (Aaron Bremyer, Genevieve Brassard, Anita Duneer, and Jenny Spinner), read from their works, followed by Professor and Connecticut Poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson's reading of her essay, "Reading to Write." Aetna also funded seven writing awards for Connecticut Writing Project teachers.

The Aetna Celebration of Creative Nonfiction was inaugurated on April 10, 2002 with a reading by Scott Russell Sanders and the awarding of undergraduate prizes for creative nonfiction to Rebecca Murphy and Tarik Hadzic.

Publications:

Aetna Funds have made possible the publication of Essay CONNections, a 100-page booklet of UCONN Freshman English Prize Essays, 1990-94; Vol. 2 1995-98 was published in fall, 1999. Free copies are distributed to all teachers of UCONN freshman English at all UCONN campuses and in the statewide high school CO-OP program, to provide exemplary models for successive freshman classes.

State of Connecticut:

Connecticut Writing Project:

The Aetna Endowment pays the tuition for teachers who attend the Connecticut Writing Project Summer Institute on the UCONN campus. Thirteen teachers, designated as Aetna Fellows, were funded in 1998, 1999, and 2000, despite steady tuition increases over the past decade. By eliminating tuition payments for Fellows who don¹t need the extra graduate credit, we have funded thirteen in 2001. Each summer Dr. Bloom teaches a class for the CWP, Storrs; she also serves on the Advisory Board of the Connecticut Writing Project.

Nation:

Aetna funding enabled UCONN to co-sponsor a national research conference whose papers have been published in Composition in the 21st Century: Crisis and Change, co-edited by Lynn Bloom, Donald Daiker, and Edward White (Southern Illinois University Press, hardcover 1996, paperback 1997; new printing 2001); this has become a standard reference. A comparable conference, "Composition Studies in the 21st Century: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future," was held at Miami University of Ohio Oct. 5-7, 2001, and a companion volume of conference papers will be published, again by SIUP, in 2003. Dr. Bloom was one of the principal speakers.

Dr. Bloom serves on the Board of Directors of the National Archives of Composition and Rhetoric, and as an Advisory Board member of the New England Consortium of Land Grant University Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition.

Research:

Other national activities include the USDA grant (above) and Lynn Bloom's keynote presentation on "Myths and Realities in Teaching Personal Writing" at the English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities, Oct. 2001, with another version delivered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 2002; and a plenary talk on "The Essayist In­and Behind­the Essay" at the Research Network Forum, College Conference on Composition and Communication. Chicago, March 2002.

Dr. Bloom's research on "The Essay Canon" (College English, March 1999) and "Once More to the Essay: The Essay Canon and Textbook Anthologies" (symplokë in press 2001) are precursors to the book-length version forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. A direct pedagogical application of this research led to the publication of the St. Martin's Custom Reader (2001, co-ed. Louise Z. Smith), a print-on-demand textbook derived directly from the data base of 250 essays by canonical essayists. The Aetna Secretary has compiled and continues to revise an extensive data base of 22,500 items that provides the data for this research and its applications, derived from a painstakingly acquired collection of some 325 textbooks--all the freshman reading textbooks published in four or more editions 1946-96, recently updated to 2001.

Conclusion:

Endowment funds have enabled us to sustain a number of the activities identified here; they also provide the excellent secretarial services and computer expertise of Lori Corsini-Nelson. The University of Connecticut has reason for particular pride in the activities of its undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in rhetoric and composition on state, regional, and national levels, made possible in part by the Aetna Endowment.

Lynn Z. Bloom
Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor
Aetna Chair of Writing
August 12, 2002