Eleanor Kutz

| English

Professor of English

EDUCATION

Ph.D, Indiana University, Comparative Literature

Books

Exploring Literacy (Longman, 2004)

As a writing teacher, I am particularly interested in the communicative competence (or discourse competence) that my students bring from the different worlds in which they’re “insiders” and in helping them draw on that competence and reframe it as they move into the new settings of their university classrooms.  That focus is represented in my recent freshman writing book, Exploring Literacy, which guides students through the reflective inquiry of memoirs and then ethnographic research into the communicative practices of thediscourse communities they choose, outside and inside the university. The readings for each unit include memoirs and ethnographic studies done by students in our freshman writing classes at UMass/Boston, as well as classic texts of each genre.

I’ve been using the book in my own sections of Freshman English, and you can see a sample of the work we’ve been doing by clicking on this link:  Kutz, website model .

Language and Literacy. Studying Discourse in Communities and Classrooms (Heinmann, 1997)

One of my areas of scholarship is the study of discourse, language as it is used by speakers and writers for authentic purposes. In Language and Literacy, offer an introduction to some underpinings in the study of language and to the practice of discourse analysis.  Throughout the book, I draw on studies carried out by students and teachers in a range of classrooms--kindergarten through college, urban and suburban, monolingual and bilingual--and in a variety of communities, including the my own studies of adolescents in my racially, culturally, and socio-economically mixes community to mixed community. Together, these studies shed light on the nature of discourse competence in a multicultural society and the ways in which I suggest iit can be supported through effective educational practices.  This book was a Choice selection for an outstanding book in language and literature for 1997.

The Discovery of Competence.  Teaching and Learning with Diverse Student Writers. With S. Groden, V. Zamel (Heinemann, 1993)

The Discovery of Competence grew out the work that my colleagues and I were doing with our freshman students at UMB--students who come from quite diverse backgrounds and who have often acquired mainstream English as a second language or second dialect.  We wanted to show how the writing classroom can be reconceived as an environment for collaborative inquiry by students and teachers and to explore effective pedagogical practices along with related concerns such as how to conceptualize multicultural curriculums and how to engage in effective writing assessment.  We believe that the writing classroom is a place where both students and their teachers may build on their competence and realize their possibilities as writers and learners;  therefore, throughout the book, we draw on our students' writing and research as the source of our own learning.  

An Unquiet Pedagogy.  Transforming Practice in the English Classroom. With H. Roskelly (Heinemann, 1991)

Our title for this book taken from an essay by Paulo Freire in his book with Donaldo Macedo entitled Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Like Freire, my coauthor Hepsie Roskelly and I believe that pedagogy must be critical -- that it must examine the assumptions that teachers and students bring to any educational enterprise, that it must take into account the contexts of learners' lives, and that it must question, rather than quietly accept, existing practices.  Throughout the book, we've drawn on the voices of students preparing to be teachers as well as experienced teachers in Boston-area schools, examining their experiences to show how the English classroom can become a place of inquiry for both teachers and students and how theory and research that provide an integrated perspective on language, literacy, and culture can inform teaching practice.