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from the issue of April 8, 2004
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Ritchie brings theories to life in the classroom
BY TOM HANCOCK, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS
The interplay between teaching theory and hands-on education in the classroom is a prime area of interest and practice for Joy Ritchie, professor of English and director of the women’s studies program at UNL.
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| | | Christine Stewart-Nunez and Eric Turley in her office in Andrews Hall. Ritchie received the University of Nebraska systemwide Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award for 2004. Photo by Brett Hampton.
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For her work, Ritchie received the University of Nebraska systemwide Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award for 2004.
Nominators for the OTICA award cited Ritchie’s contributions to the teaching of undergraduate and graduate students, mentoring of graduate research assistants, working with her peers to improve teaching practices, and helping public school teachers improve their skills.
Ritchie earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia University and a master’s in English from Indiana University. She taught high school English for five years in Nebraska and North Carolina before coming to UNL to work on her doctorate in English education, which she received in 1983.
Ritchie was co-coordinator of the composition program before taking on her current role in women’s studies. In this role she refined, developed and revised the writing curriculum. She has also worked with high school teachers, helping them examine their own writing practices and think about what they can use to refine and improve their teaching.
Ritchie’s current work involves rhetoric, especially uncovering women’s contributions to the field.
“From Aristotle and Plato, from Augustine to Kenneth Burke, the tradition of rhetoric has shaped and influenced how we teach writing and speaking in schools and universities,” Ritchie said. The types of assignments teachers give, how they respond to student writing and what they value in student’s writing is shaped by this 2,000-year-old tradition, she said.
Ritchie is co-editing a collection of essays, “Teaching Rhetorica: Redefining Theory and Practice,” from leading scholars in the field of women’s rhetoric. There is a lot of new scholarship on women’s rhetoric, Ritchie said, and the book will focus on its implications.
Women were not part of the tradition of classical rhetoric through the 19th century, Ritchie said, so it was thought there were no women rhetoricians on the scale of Aristotle and Augustine.
But there have been influential women in rhetoric, Ritchie said, from Christine de Pizan from the Middle Ages, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz from the Renaissance, and Virginia Woolf and Audre Lorde from the 20th century.
There is also an emerging body of women’s rhetoric, Ritchie said, and in her latest project she has asked a group of scholars what can be learned from women’s rhetorics for the teaching of writing and rhetoric.
“We now have this new conversation emerging from the women rhetoricians, so it’s time to ask ourselves, should we be doing anything different based on what they are teaching us?” Ritchie said.
Ritchie’s research has been influenced by her classroom experiences. She teaches the course “Rhetorical Theory: The Rhetoric of Women Writers.”
“My students’ insight is a really rich and informative part of my scholarship,” Ritchie said. “The way they read and interact with text helps me see the value and the uses and the functions of those texts.”
Women have participated in and learned from the male rhetorical tradition, Ritchie said. But there are other things to learn from the new body of scholarship in women’s rhetoric, she said.
“One of the things we see in women’s rhetoric is a more dialogic quality,” Ritchie said. “They seem to facilitate conversation among multiple perspectives.”
Women also tend to use experience as a foundation for their work, rather than a logical premise, which men most often use.
“Women have tried to answer the question ‘What’s missing here?’” As an example, Patricia Williams, an African-American legal scholar, has challenged legal definitions by determining whether a particular legal concept applies if you look at the experience of, for example, African-American women.
“Women have challenged some of our long-held standards about what is authoritative,” Ritchie said. “They may say, that doesn’t resonate with me, doesn’t represent my experience, or Latina women, or women who are mothers, or poor women. The great contribution is they have made us stop and think about what we haven’t seen yet. They bring a different perspective.”
Service learning is an integral a component of Ritchie’s teaching, and she was one of the pioneers of the process at UNL. Her students can do an analytical project on a piece of women’s literature, or they can go into the community to be a tutor or work at the rape spouse-abuse center or the YWCA. Students then reflect on how their reading and experience relate to each other. Some present their research in different venues, such as at the No Limits conference, an annual regional research conference for undergraduate and graduate students.
Ritchie also teaches composition theory and practice for prospective English teachers. In one course, she arranges with a high school teacher to have a UNL student partner with a high school student. Through the semester Ritchie and the UNL student examine the high school student’s production, which provides a real, in-depth experience of working with a high school writer. In this way students are able to apply theories and see how they work (or not), and how things get complicated when working with a “real” high school student.
Ritchie traces her interest in women’s rhetoric and the process of teaching to her early collegiate experiences.
“One of the things I noticed is the absence of women writers,” Ritchie said, other than George Eliot, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson. “The other missing thing was writing and teaching of writing. It was assumed that an assignment was given and the paper would be brought back perfectly formed. There was no attention to the process, the intellectual strategies or the rhetorical strategies that writers need to write. That influenced my goals as a Ph.D. student.”
Teachers’ rhetorical strategies are especially helpful for first-year students to focus on what they need to learn. In a broader sense, they also help students learn to be lifelong learners, Ritchie said.
“I could give students assignments and see if they sink or swim, or I can also show them how to be successful writers and successful students.”
Ritchie’s role as director of the women’s studies program has raised issues for her regarding gender and racial roles.
“Some of the premises of feminist theory help us explore the gaps in our knowledge, the absence of women in the canon of literature, in history or the way we study and the research methods we use,” she said.
In teaching theory, Ritchie said, it’s important to incorporate critical and analytical tools that, for example, feminism and African-American perspectives have made available. This lets scholars uncover issues regarding women, social class and race that previously haven’t been evident.
“One of the things that feminist theory has highlighted is that often we get more accomplished through collaboration and dialogue than we do by competing,” Ritchie said.
Ritchie said one of the aspects in creating a supportive, not competitive, environment is building in mentoring and making sure that women have people who encourage them to form their own collaborative group.
And collaboration, as her OTICA nominators wrote, is central to Ritchie’s career.
Second in a series
This is the second in a series of articles spotlighting UNL’s winners of the University of Nebraska’s Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Awards and Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Awards.
GO TO: ISSUE OF APRIL 8
NEWS HEADLINES FOR APRIL 8
Ritchie brings theories to life in the classroom
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New Web site answers ag, food questions
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