Editor's note: The Eastern Echo staff meets regularly with interesting people on and off campus. Engage in those conversations with us through our Q&A reports.
According to Ann Blakeslee, everyone is a writer, and she is working to empower students in classrooms across Eastern Michigan University to believe it.
Blakeslee is an English professor and the director of the Office of Campus and Community Writing at EMU, where she oversees the university's Writing Across the Curriculum program. She has worked at EMU for 30 years and is also the co-founder of the writing-focused Ypsilanti nonprofit YpsiWrites. She earned her doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992. She is a fellow for the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing and a distinguished fellow for the Association of Writing Across the Curriculum. She was honored for excellence in research by the former Society for Technical Communication.
Q: Could you start by explaining your work in the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Eastern?
A: I will say, starting out, that we're celebrating, and we've been celebrating this year, the 25th anniversary of the WAC program, and I was here for the very beginning of it, in the year 2000, so that was pretty exciting. Last year was 25, but it's kind of a full-year celebration. And it is basically a program that supports faculty, and the idea that we sort of believe in is that everybody should be integrating writing throughout the curriculum. It's not something students should only encounter, say, in first-year writing, or in the writing intensive classes, but through all faculty.
Writing is a way of promoting critical thinking and other really essential skills. So, it is our hope that we can provide the kind of support to help faculty create effective assignments, and to be able to assess those assignments well, and to integrate those assignments well within the structure of their courses, and in relation to their learning outcomes. So that that writing is meaningful to students, but also helps the faculty member assess student learning, and in every way, sort of connect it to their goals for the course.
Q: Are there some examples showing how the program has developed a more cohesive, writing training across disciplines at EMU?
A: We've achieved a lot with that program in terms of creating a culture that really supports writing across campus, and more faculty, and I've seen a lot of growth and change over the years. Faculty, initially, there sometimes was a reluctance to use writing in their classes, or the feeling that we should be teaching writing as English professors, and they shouldn't have to do anything with writing as professors within their disciplines. I don't think that exists at all anymore. I think there's been a lot of growth in faculty understanding the importance and significance of writing and helping their students to become better learners, better students, better professionals, ultimately.
We hold a spring institute every year. Some years, we've had over 60 faculty and lecturers participate in that, so it really has a strong cohort and a very large cohort. At some point, we started, many years ago now, doing advanced WAC institutes, because people wanted more, and then we eventually started developing and offering programs throughout the course of the academic year. So, we have book groups that we do. We have workshops that we do. We have different kinds of learning communities, and we are calling them collectives and communities of practice, focused on things like alternative grading. We have a big cohort of almost 60 faculty members who are interested in alternative grading, or have been reading books and articles, and having conversations about that. So WAC becomes sort of a place or a space where people, faculty from all disciplines — and they love that about it because they get to know one another — can come together and share their interests in learning, teaching, and best practices ... and we can have really fruitful conversations and productive conversations about classroom practice.
Q: Could you explain a bit more about alternative grading and what that looks like?
A: Alternative grading sometimes is referred to as un-grading. It's really gained in popularity nationwide, over, I want to say the past decade; it might be a little bit more. There are some early works in that area. There was a volume produced, a collection of essays on un-grading. There are all kinds of discussion groups through social media that some faculty belong to. But there are a lot of different types of un-grading, and the whole idea underlying is to make assessment more fair, more equitable for all students, and to really place the emphasis on learning and growth, as opposed to evaluation and assessment. That is obviously still a component of every course, because you have to get a grade at the end, but it really shifts the dynamic, I think, in the classroom.
More and more faculty on this campus have been practicing that. I think a lot of students have come to really appreciate the opportunities it provides. It still makes some students very nervous, and some faculty very nervous, but it is something people can do or faculty can do in parts, or they can do it more extensively. There's a lot of choice involved, too. There are things called specs grading, which are basically specifications, there's contract gradings, so there are a lot of flavors of un-grading.
Q: Considering your specialty in technical writing, what is the value for students in learning technical writing?
A: A lot of the writing we do throughout our lives on some levels is technical writing, and I think of technical writing in pretty expansive ways. I've been in that field all my life, but I, professionally, kind of straddle different fields. Writing Across the Curriculum is its own field, and I'm really involved as a professional leader in that field, internationally, and same with ATTW, Association for Teachers of Technical Writing. I was involved with that for 25 years. I think it provides students with the ability to use language effectively and clearly and in a way that addresses and gets across their messages to their audience and achieves their purposes.
Q: What advice do you have for young writers?
A: Keep writing. Just write, all the time. Whatever strikes you. We're doing a book club this semester on sort of reframing writing, to get faculty — especially faculty who may find writing challenging or difficult at times — to kind of shift how they think about writing, and in doing that, the aim is to also shift how we think about working with students as writers.
I think, like, keeping journals, or I started a sort of collective journal with some of my colleagues across the country, where we just sort of write about things we're encountering in teaching right now, and the work that we're doing. It's a space where we can share our thoughts and ideas, and express ourselves, where somebody else benefits from seeing what we're dealing with, and we feel less alone. So, I think writing, any type of writing, helps people feel less alone. I also founded a writing nonprofit, and our sort of tagline is “everyone is a writer.”
Q: Can you tell us some more about that, your work at YpsiWrites?
A: I co-founded it with a colleague who is now retired. Her name is Cathy Fleischer. We had been doing a lot of work in the community. She had been working a lot with teachers in the community and schools, and I had been working a lot with nonprofits and other groups. We had colleagues at Saginaw Valley, who had developed a community writing center, and I thought, “that's a pretty cool idea,” because Ypsi is a pretty cool community, with a lot of arts, and a lot of people who are creative types.
We met with Ypsilanti District Library people. We did a survey of the community through YDL. There was clearly interest, and we started out really small, just kind of offering open writing, like, a writing center, kind of, “Just come in and talk about your writing.” We offered a few workshops, and then the pandemic happened, and we pivoted online, and we started offering all these workshops and getting lots and lots of people, 20, 30, 40 people at workshops. We did a memoir series. We have done everything under the sun. We do poetry workshops. We do publishing workshops, fiction workshops, songwriting workshops, and then we developed a program called The Writers of Ypsilanti. So, every year, you can self-nominate, or people in the community can nominate you. You have to have a connection to the Ypsilanti community. Like you could nominate yourself. And we name up to 12 writers of Ypsilanti who are writers for the next year, and they help us with programs, they maybe do workshops, we honor them, we elevate who they are, and promote them, and do things like that.
Now we have a writer in residence that we select from past Writers of Ypsilanti, who then participates. We pay that person, that person gets an award, and we elevate their writing, but they also run a program throughout the year. They propose something they want to do to promote writing in the community. So it's become a really cool program. We do a lot with community partners. So we have a write for mental wellness program that we do in conjunction with the Washtenaw County Health Department, and it is the Wish You Knew Washtenaw program. We're now partnering with another new nonprofit at the University of Michigan, where it was founded by two students who place journals out in the community, and they're sort of, like, community journals, and people write in them. We're actually helping them produce one that has specific prompts that we produce for the mental wellness program, on particular themes and topics. And so that's, like, the perfect marriage of two initiatives that really have the same mission.
Q: Could you talk a little more about the tagline, “Everyone is a writer.”
A: When you teach writing, what you find out is a lot of people say, “Oh, I can't write,” or “I'm not a writer,” or, “Oh, my God, my grammar.” People don't want to show me their writing. And I don't think of writing at all as that way. I think of writing as an expression in communication, and hopefully you all do at The Echo, too.
It's such a gift for all of us. The ability to use language, whether as a speaker or as a writer, is just also so cool. Not to go political, but I'm just, fangirling over, or fan-whatever, over [Canadian Prime Minister] Mark Carney's speech at that conference, [the World Economic Forum] because, what an eloquent use of language. It's brief, it's to the point, it conveys so much, and the richness of that text, I could sit forever and read that and just unpack it. There's so much there. And I think anyone can achieve that.
We can all express ourselves, and I think we express ourselves best when we express ourselves from the heart. That doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a type of personal writing, but, I suspect you have this experience: Most of us, as students, enjoy writing most on writing about something that interests us. We hate writing most when a professor gives us an assignment about something for which we could care less. Then it is a real struggle. I just had a faculty member say to me the other day, she just gets blocked and stuck and frozen. And I said, “You know what? Just your goal between now and Tuesday is to write the crappiest draft you can possibly write." Just get something down.
Q: What values do you try to instill in your students as writers?
A: That's a good question. That would be a great question to ask some of my former students. I'm in touch with, like, all of them. I think integrity and honesty are important — I'm thinking of some of the students who I worked with 10, 20, 30 years ago — using communication for positive and productive means, and that can be in a professional setting, that can be in a personal way. Being authentic. You know, developing their voices, and being confident about their voices, and about their ideas, and, yeah, having that consonance, becoming self-efficacious.
Q: What are the main challenges of professors in higher education today?
A: I'm gonna go a different route here. I'm one of the associate publishers for something called WAC Clearinghouse, which is an enormous, open-access publishing venue. Open access is really important to us. That is something we value, making ideas and information freely available. So, you know, for example, a student or a scholar who can't afford to purchase a book, or to need access to something, shouldn't be prevented from having access. So, in my role, I oversee like 13 book series. I think it is just really important for us as educators to expose our students to as much as we can expose them to, especially to have them become critical thinkers and critical consumers of information.
One of the challenges we face is there is so much disinformation available now. And obviously, when I started teaching, we didn't have social media. We didn't have all these alternatives, and we didn't have media that was as influenced or biased as it has become, which is really, really difficult to see. So, helping students and others really be able to assess information, be able to make decisions, be able to form their own opinions, be able to express those opinions. I believe — as I'm sure you do too, because you're in journalism — in the freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and I think it's difficult to see some of the constraints that are being placed on free speech.
Q: Amid those challenges — especially on assessing information when you make decisions and constraints on free speech — how do you find ways to inspire students to pursue writing, whether academically or in a career?
A: You know how I do that? I am enthusiastic about it. I love it. I am passionate about it, and I have had a lot of students over the years tell me that I inspired them. If you're passionate about something, people pick that up and they see it and they become passionate. It's about helping people to care and helping them understand what is so important here.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about your own writing and what you have published or what you have been working on?
A: Yeah, that's a good question. So, I've done a lot of academic writing. I have published a couple of books. One was from my dissertation many years ago, but I was early on, I still am interested, I just don't have time to pursue it as much, in scientific writing. So, I did a study about writing and physics and about writing for audiences in physics. It was really fun and interesting, and I published that as a book.
I did a textbook with Cathy Fletcher, the same person who co-founded YpsiWrites, on qualitative research in our field of writing. I published a lot of chapters and articles. My early work was really focused on audience and on professional writing and working with real workplace situations and having students do authentic workplace writing within the benefits and value of that.
Recently, I have been doing work on more stuff on audience, but also on positionality in community work and in research. So, how we are in those spaces and how we interact with the people within the work and how important it is to think about that.
I do a lot of presentations. We just finished up a book project. It was an edited collection, a special for a colleague in our field, who retired, the person who was over me at the Clearinghouse, who was also a graduate student with me. We have been lifelong friends. So, we're editing that.
Now I am doing more in the later stages of my career. I do a lot more personal writing and more reflective kinds of writing. I am trying to write a book for my kids, it's more memoir-based, but it wouldn't go beyond my family. I'm not that interesting.
Q: I disagree, but I'm wondering, what is your favorite kind of writing to do, personally?
A: This might sound weird, but I love — I sometimes fixate on words and phrases, and I start to think a lot about the significance and the broader meanings of those words and phrases; things that I encounter in my own daily reading or what have you. So, I write those things in my phone, and then I go back to them, and I just reflect on them or write about them. That is part of this book that I am doing for my kids, it is just things that, you know, are meaningful in the moment or in our time or whatever, and just like a concept or an idea or a word or something; and just expanding on that.
I love that kind of writing because it just kind of allows me to work through things. It is a very relaxing type of writing. And I love being creative. So, my creativity is not, like, writing stories or things like that. I have done poetry, but my creativity is more, like, dreaming up programs and things, like for YpsiWrites; things that support and reach others. That's where my creativity sits.
Q: What are some moments in your career that you are especially proud of or that you found especially rewarding?
A: I was at University of Illinois, for my first job; that was very much a research-oriented university. I was able to realize during that time how much I love teaching or working with students, which was not valued as highly. I went out on the job market, and I had a lot of offers, and the department head here at the time kind of persuaded me to come here. That was a decision that was life changing for me. I have always loved this institution and loved the students at this institution, because you are all such real and interesting people. I mean, there is not a day that goes by that I probably don't interact with five to 10 of my former students, either on social media, or, like, those relationships endured across the years and they are such cool, interesting people.
I have many that are now retiring, so I got this bouquet of flowers last summer from a former student who had just retired and was thanking me. I had helped them get that initial job that they stayed at for their entire career. Being able to work with the students I worked with across my career has been so fulfilling. And to also still be able to really be involved in my professional world in leadership roles. I have won some significant awards in my field, kind of lifetime achievement awards. I won like, three of those, and being able to do that while working at a teaching institution versus a research institution, I felt really proud of, because I felt like I was able to have a life balance between teaching and doing the things that I love, raising a family, and yet continuing my scholarship and making a difference in my field in a positive way.
