What made you want to work in Rhetoric & Composition?

When I first entered my Masters program at the University of North Dakota, I thought that I wanted to eventually pursue a doctorate in English – specifically post/colonial theory because I was invested in social justice, literacy, and issues of representation. However, after teaching in First Year Writing courses and learning more about the field of Composition Studies, I realized that these interests could have a direct impact on my students’ learning. I could do more than just theorize – teaching writing showed me that I could actualize these things to make the classroom a better place for my students. After completing my first conference in the field and finding many like-minded scholars who were just as passionate about teaching as me, I realized I had found a new home.

My research interests are primarily centered in the same ones that inspired me to pursue post/colonial theory initially: social justice, literacy, and issues of representation. I’m particularly interested in how individuals narrate their experiences developing different literacy practices, because I believe that everyone has a story to tell and that these stories have something to teach us – both about how our experiences shape us and how we in turn shape our experiences when we recount them to others.

I also enjoy researching about representation and circulation in visual and digital media – for example how are individuals, communities, and cultures represented in the media we consume daily? How does a particular image, such as a viral meme, circulate and who (or what) is influencing that circulation?

What do you like about working with students?

I think my favorite part of working with students is getting to learn more about them and helping them find ways to make the materials and subjects I teach work for them and their interests. Composition and Rhetoric are broad fields that encompass a lot of smaller subfields and research areas, and we have crossovers with many other disciplines. Helping students see their own interests in new and unexpected ways is always a great joy for me because it allows me to learn new things and enrich my own learning and research. I really enjoy researching with students and using my experience to help them explore their own interests.

Three book recommendations

This is a hard question. I have one “solid” answer that I’m always recommending to folks because it’s such a good book – it’s engaging, the content crosses over into a lot of disciplines, and even people who have read it outside of academia tend to like it: Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening. It’s a graphic novel and Sousanis’s dissertation and I’d recommend it for anyone who’s interested in the relationship between images and text, education, or who just likes a good graphic novel. The art is beautiful. The second and third books are a little harder for me to choose from, but I’ll limit myself to choosing two fiction texts. The first is S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. I don’t want to say too much about this book because it’s one of those books that if you talk too much about it, it ruins the surprise – but it’s worth it trust me. The last book I would recommend is one that had a pretty powerful impact on me as an undergraduate. It’s called Nervous Conditions and it’s by Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga. This book is the one that really pushed me into the area of post/colonial literature and theory, and it helped me better understand some of the ways that my own background and education had resulted in nervous conditions that still impact the way I learn and interact with others today. It’s a great novel.

Publications

Ashleah Wimberly, Amanda Ayers, Michael Neal, Amory Orchard. (2024). “Scaffolding for Collaboration and Multimodal Assignments.” Better Practices: Experts and Emerging Instructors Explore How to Better Teach Writing in Online and Hybrid Spaces. Edited by Amy Cicchino & Troy Hicks.

Amory Orchard, Michael Neal, Ashleah Wimberly, Amanda Ayers. (2024). “Open-Media Assignment Design to Address Access and Accessibility in Online Multimodal Composition.” Better Practices: Experts and Emerging Instructors Explore How to Better Teach Writing in Online and Hybrid Spaces. Edited by Amy Cicchino & Troy Hicks.