Eleanor Kutz

| English

Welcome to My Homepage

Teaching and Research Areas:  Composition, Language and Literacy, Pedagogy

My work has long focused on issues of pedagogy, writing and linguistic diversity , and discourse and literacy.   My freshman writing text,  Exploring Literacy (Longman, 2004), invites students to undertake their own ethnographic studies of the discourse of the informal communities they belong to outside of their college classrooms and of the more formal academic discourse communities they’re encountering in their studies. My compelling concern continues to be working with linguistically diverse students and helping all students recognize and build on the rich discourse competence each brings to academic settings. Increasingly, the discourse of these communities is becoming electronically mediated, as information technology plays a more significant role in everyone’s communication. 

A grant allowed me to guide the development of an interactive website for the Freshman Writing Program (www.freshman.umb.edu) where students can post their work and respond to the work of others.  In my own teaching, the website has allowed the easy sharing of transcripts of recorded conversations, research memos about setting and communicative context, and ethnographic reports of different discourse communities, creating an authentic community of researchers. It has also stimulated my interest in learning more about new technologies and their effects on students’ literacies. 

Recently retired as a full-time faculty member, in my faculty emerita status, I am working  as a liaison between the Division of Educational Technology in Information Technology and the faculty and academic departments.  I also teach online courses in Language and Literacy and in Teaching English with Technology.