Bridget K. Fullerton

Director of Student Writing and Lecturer in Humanities

Associations

Student Writing, Language, and Speaking Support

Coram Library, Room 221

207-786-6133bfullert@bates.edu

About

Ph.D., English, Concentration in Rhetoric & Composition, University of Rhode Island

M.A., English & Technical Communication, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

B.A., English & Secondary Education, Albright College, Reading, PA

Most of my career in education has been in the public sector teaching students and collaborating with educators in low-income and culturally diverse rural and urban communities in North Carolina, New York City, South Dakota and the Bay Area. These experiences made me keenly aware of my own privilege and interested in issues of race, class, gender and power, particularly in writing programs and composition pedagogy. My contemplative, social justice and feminist approach to writing instruction and administration is intimately linked to these lived experiences.

In my teaching, I attempt to honor the voices and values of all students, encouraging and offering them opportunities to research and write about issues that affect them directly and in which they can use invitational or listening rhetoric to actively participate. I also enjoy bringing contemplative practices and mindfulness activities into classrooms as one way to help students become attentive to the embodied and affective aspects of any writing experience. I believe that writing spaces and compositional occasions can offer students opportunities for both cognitive and somatic understandings of the multiple perspectives that enliven, muddle, clarify and complicate today’s most pressing public issues. Taking a holistic approach to writing may better prepare students to intellectually navigate and physically participate in a highly interdependent, intersectional public sphere without shirking their responsibility to honor its differences or being overwhelmed by its demands on their attention.

In my writing administration work, I seek to listen to and collaborate with faculty, to invite dialogue in the contact zone and to share the theoretical and pragmatic insights we have garnered over the years about writing and writing instruction. I invite you to engage with me in conversations about the practical side of writing: peer review, revision, scaffolding assignments, process engagement, topic selection, grading and feedback on student writing, and multimodal writing, writing technologies, and multimedia assignments and presentations. I welcome, too, discussions about the more sociocultural aspects of composition: grading contracts, meaningful, or consequential writing assessment (like portfolios), contemplative writing practices, action research, grader/reader bias, and the multiple Englishes, multiliteracies and rich linguistic expertise students bring to our classrooms.

I am thrilled to be serving as the Assistant Director of Writing at Bates and to offer instructors and students my twenty-plus years of teaching experience and passion for ethical and inclusive civic, academic and professional writing and communication. I look forward to partnering with and learning from you!