Interior of a chemistry lab at DePaul

Sarah Read Collaborates with DePaul’s Chemistry Department

This past Autumn Quarter, WRD Professor Sarah Read was granted the Collaborative Instruction Fellow Stipend issued by DePaul University’s Quality of Instruction Council, which is headed by Anne Bartlett of the Cross-College Collaboration (C3) Task Force. Professor Read will use this grant to design a new Master’s level Chemistry course in collaboration with Professor Timothy French of DePaul’s Chemistry Department. This new course, Science Writing & Communication, will be co-taught by Read and French with the goal of teaching students how to communicate like a scientist.

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Laurie Alfaro Accepts Position at City Colleges of Chicago

WRD recently caught up with former faculty member Laurie Alfaro as she begins a career at the City Colleges of Chicago. Below, Laurie tells about her new position and shares about her experiences as a student and teacher in WRD’s New Media Studies program. Tell us about your new position at City Colleges. What will you be doing? I am the new Faculty Co-Chair of Computer Information Systems at Wilbur Wright College.

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News and Updates

News and Updates from MA Alumni and Faculty

  Here’s some news on what our MA in WRD and MA in NMS graduates and faculty have been up to in the last five months… NMS Alumni Daisy Franco (2012) began a new job in May as Director of Public Relations and Marketing for the City Colleges of Chicago. Kim Galovich (2014) recently started a position at Digital Marketing for RXBAR, a Chicago start-up company that sells natural protein bars. She handles email marketing and online advertising and manages website content. Mike Garabedian (2015) has a new position as an Account Coordinator at Fishman Public Relations in Chicago and Northbrook,

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WRD Helps Reframe Traditional Liberal Arts Education

The WRD Department and department chair, Peter Vandenberg, were recently featured in a DePaul Insights article. In it, author Melissa Smith writes about how WRD focuses on the importance of critical thinking, communication, and interpersonal skills–all of which are vital in the professional world. To read more about how WRD is reframing the liberal arts, click here to access the article on page 9 of DePaul’s Insights.

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WRD Professor Sarah Read Receives CCCC Research Grant

This quarter, WRD Professor Sarah Read was granted a competitive Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Research Initiative grant. Beginning in March, Read along with her colleague Michael Michaud at Rhode Island College, will begin a national survey research project called “Surveying the Status of the Multi-major Professional Writing Course in U.S. Institutions of Higher Education.” As the title of the project suggests, the main goal of this research project is to gather vital data about introductory professional writing courses taught at colleges and universities across the country.

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WRD Professor Michael Raleigh’s Mystery Series Reissued

Today, Diversion Books reissued 5 mystery novels written by WRD faculty member Michael Raleigh. Originally written in the 1990s, these novels are traditional private eye stories following a detective who focuses on missing persons cases. Set in 1980s Chicago, Raleigh provides readers with images of Chicago in the not-so-distant past. To effectively communicate the look and feel of a Chicago from days gone by, Raleigh’s novels are full of visually interesting street scenes featuring Uptown and Argyle Street, the Maxwell Street Market, and the now closed Riverview Park—an amusement park which operated from 1904 to 1967 near Belmont and Western

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Faculty Research Profile: Professor Bowden Studies Students’ Responses to Instructor Feedback

Composition studies has a rich tradition of research that aims to better understand the types of comments that instructors write on their students’ papers. But what—if anything—do students do with those comments? WRD Professor Darsie Bowden aims to find out. Since January 2014, Bowden has been interviewing students in first-year writing classes at DePaul to learn more about how they respond to their instructors’ feedback. Her interviews are divided into two parts: she meets with students after they have received feedback on a paper and again after they turn in their final drafts. Bowden’s goal is to find out what

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News and Updates

News & Updates

WRD students, alumni, and faculty share their recent professional and academic achievements. Students & Alumni Sarah Brown (MA in WRD 2010) presented “The Girl Scout Career Model: Open Badging and Representations of Learning” at CCCC in Indianapolis, Indiana in March. Eric Iberri (MA in WRD 2010) recently began working as a Proposal Editor for SpaceX in Hawthorne, CA. Stephanie Irvine (MA in WRD 2011) quit her full-time marketing job in February to pursue an independent writing career.

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News and Updates

Alumni and Faculty News

  WRD alumni and faculty share their recent professional and academic achievements. Alumni Jessica Vician (MA in NMS 2013) and colleague Libby VanWhy (MS in HCI 2014) launched YOUparent.com, a parenting website that provides community support for child success, in December 2013. Laura Collins (MA in NMS 2013) designed the winning logo for the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation’s new project, Gen Ops Plus.  The project expands grant-making opportunities for Chicago-region art groups. Ana Milena Ribero (MA in WRD 2009) received the Scholars for the Dream Award from the Conference for College Composition and Communication.

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WRD Professor Explores the Rhetoric of Green Spaces

On Tuesday, February 11, WRD Professor Christine Skolnik participated in “Ecological Imaginings,” an interdisciplinary panel discussion sponsored by DePaul’s Institute for Nature and Culture.  In her talk, “Imagined Ecofutures,” Skolnik explored the persuasive, imaginative rhetoric of visual urban plans and their implications for ecological restoration. Skolnik, who holds a PhD in English and Rhetoric from Penn State, recently completed an MA in Urban Sustainability and is a faculty advisor for the Institute for Nature and Culture.

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