Bridget Fullerton is a writing educator, writing program administrator, and writing center director who seeks to center and uplift all student voices in the academy. Helping others tell their most honest and courageous stories is what she loves to do. Bridget, who goes by “Dr. B” with her students and tutors, has over 30 years of experience working in public and private secondary and post-secondary classrooms across the country and has been at Bates since the fall of 2017. Her areas of research and professional interest are radical writing center praxis, linguistic justice, equity-minded writing pedagogy, labor-based grading, writing technologies, writing assessment and curriculum design. Poetry, personal narrative, nonfiction essays, memoir, and authoethnography are her genres of choice; emails and end-of-year reports are her genres of necessity.

Bridget holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Secondary Education, a Master of Arts in English and Technical Communication, and a Doctorate in English, with a specialization in Rhetoric and Composition, or Writing Studies, and a certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. The publications of which she is most proud are:

• her dissertation, entitled “Undergraduate Student Perspectives on Electronic Portfolio Assessment in College Composition Course,” which used a qualitative approach to listen for the messy truths and emergent learning insights students offered about their e-portfolio experiences and called for writing instructors and program and university administrators to attend closely to the evolutions and performances of students’ writerly selves throughout any assessment experience;
• a co-written article for which she and three of her graduate student colleagues received the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ (CWPA) Award for Graduate Writing in WPA Studies and that appeared in The WPA Journal as “Preparing Graduate Students for the Field: A Graduate Student Praxis Heuristic for WPA Professionalization and Institutional Politics“; and
• a book chapter she co-wrote with three of her WPA colleagues, entitled “This Will Never Be 20/20: What Reflection Teaches Us About Assessment,” which appears in the edited collection Writing Assessment at Small Liberal Arts Colleges (Parlor Press 2024).

She is also working with her father, Michael Heaney, a Vietnam Veteran and historian, on completing his combat memoir.

Prior to joining Bates, Bridget taught English in public middle and high schools in New Jersey, North Carolina, and East Palo Alto, California, and she tutored and taught writing at community colleges in Steamboat Springs, Colorado and San Jose, California and at the University of Rhode Island. She also spent some time working in New York City at a children’s book publisher and then as a curriculum and teaching specialist for a non-profit educational technology firm that designed computer simulations for 6th-12th grade students in which they could apply literacy and quantitative skills in an adaptive workplace environment.

Bridget’s work in Writing Program and Writing Center Administration is centered on anti-oppression and linguistic justice, on thoughtful and meaningful assessment, and on research, collaboration and leadership development. At Bates, Dr. B teaches a First-Year Seminar (FYS) entitled Writing Ourselves, Writing With Others; EXDS 201: Writing Process, Tutoring Practice; and EDUC s19: Teaching and Tutoring Writing (With) Power.

If you can’t find Dr. B in her office or in a classroom, you’ll probably find her working with students or talking with tutors in the new Peer Learning Commons (PLC) on the Ground Floor of Ladd Library. Otherwise, she’s crocheting or enjoying a break in the local L-A community where she lives: hiking with her dog, making music with her husband and friends, or playing soccer or a good board game with her son.

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Will holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Bowdoin College and a Master of Education in Learning and Design from Vanderbilt University. Before joining Bates, Will taught English/Language Arts for eleven years in public high schools in Maine and Salt Lake City, UT. He has also mentored pre-service teachers in Nashville, TN, and taught English to non-native speakers in Bogotá, Colombia. Will is especially interested in writing across the disciplines, climate education, and learning beyond the classroom. Outside of work, you can find him reading books with his kids or romping through Maine’s woods, waters, mountains, and snow.