Jessie Borgman
Adjunct Lecturer; Composition
Office: DW 3176
Phone: 520-4887
Email: borgman@iusb.edu
Education
B.A.English and History, Indiana University, 2005
M.A. Western Michigan University, 2008
I am originally from Bloomington, Indiana where I spent the majority of my life. In 2005, I received my BA in English and History from Indiana University Bloomington. I took a year off from school and in the fall of 2006, I moved to Michigan to pursue a MA in English from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While attending Western Michigan University, I got the opportunity to teach several sections of the first-year writing course.
As I got further into my studies at Western Michigan University, I began to truly grow an interest in the writing studies scholarship I was using in my first-year writing class and reading for my own graduate classes. After my first semester teaching, I took as many classes on the study of composition as the university offered and began reading on my own about the field of Rhetoric and Writing Studies. In April 2008, I received my MA in English. During the last year of my MA, I was chosen to be a co-editor of a custom published composition textbook for Western Michigan University called Writing Beyond the Rules: Juxtaposition, Disruption and Multiple Genres. I put my heart and soul into this project and I am so proud of this textbook because I feel that it represents most of my philosophy on the teaching of writing; it’s a messy and complicated process.
During the summer of 2008, I was offered a visiting instructor position at Indiana University South Bend. I am thrilled to be working at Indiana University because of my long history and interest in the university and mostly because I truly love teaching people how to write. I am fully invested in figuring out ways to teach writing that does not solely focus on rules. In my own experience learning to write and through my experience teaching others, I am always turned off by the emphasis on rules in writing, so I would like to put my energies towards writing beyond the rules. I am also extremely interested in the process of composing…that is, how do we get thoughts from our head on to the page? Most recently, my interests include those places where writing and technology intersect and how the use of technology is influencing the way we compose and what we write.
I would eventually like to pursue a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the future, though I know I would like to get a few more years of teaching experience and a few more years of researching the field before I tackle that pursuit.
