Alexander Champoux-Crowley

• Lecturer of English & Director of First-Year Composition

I was an English major in college with focuses in Creative Writing and Literature when I discovered the campus writing center, writing pedagogy, and what it might mean to apply English skills to a broader range of "texts" or instances of meaning making. In the years that followed--running the writing center at Colby College and doing my M.A. at UMaine--I found my place in the field of Rhetoric and Composition and decided to go for my Ph.D. Reflected in my position here at McDaniel and my research interests, my dissertation looked at how writing program administrators--as teachers, teacher educators, and administrators--do transformative and liberatory work, ideally making first year composition programs more welcoming places for students.

Over the years I've taught undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorical theory, academic writing, composition pedagogy, and professional/technical writing at Colby College, the University of Maine (Orono), Metropolitan State University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Southern Maine; while I teach rhetoric, writing, and composition, my classes often also reflect my interests: for example, research methodologies across the curriculum (students often do primary research), critical and social scientific approaches to education (interrogating, for example, the deployment of "sense of belonging" in schools), and foodways/food rhetorics. As a teacher of college composition, my goal is to introduce students to practices of metalinguistic and metacognitive reflection as they approach the diverse language situations that they will encounter at the university and beyond.