Recipients of the Bazerman Faculty Fellowship include the following:
2025-2026: Dr. Peter Huk, Reentry Pedagogy: Supporting Formerly-Incarcerated Student Transfer and Navigating Liminal Spaces through Relational Mentorship and Narrative
This project develops a specialized “reentry pedagogy” to support formerly-incarcerated students transitioning to four-year universities. Using “liminality” as a theoretical framework, this research implements a relational model of mentorship and narrative to address the unique challenges of this population. Through a qualitative study including interviews with system-impacted students, the goal of this project is to produce a digital handbook of student transfer narratives, a replicable learning module for other institutions, and a scholarly article co-authored with students. This work contributes a new, adaptable pedagogical model to writing studies and prison literacies, fostering student success and amplifying the voices of a historically marginalized community.
2024-2025: Dr. Nicole Warwick, Course Reflection as Autoethnography
Dr. Nicole Warwick’s Bazerman fellowship responds to a common challenge in writing courses: the often-superficial nature of end-of-quarter reflective assignments. She explored autoethnography as a means of helping students deepen their reflection on their learning. Students in her first-year and upper-division courses maintained weekly autoethnographic field journals of their in-class experiences while she also kept her own reflective journal. She will present the results of her autoethnography at academic conferences.
2024-2025: Ellen O'Connell Whittet, Building Trauma-Informed Writing Pedagogy Through Institutional Partnership
Through the Bazerman Fellowship, Ellen O'Connell Whittet conducted IRB-approved research examining the disconnect between student needs, faculty responses, and institutional expertise regarding trauma in writing classrooms. The research included a survey of UCSB students about writing and difficult experiences, alongside interviews with staff from CAPS, CARE, RCGSD, and Title IX. Key findings revealed that 85% of students have written about difficult experiences for class assignments, and 76% would do so again "under the right conditions"—conditions that align closely with what campus support services already recommend but that rarely reach writing classrooms. The fellowship resulted in practical recommendations for Writing Programs, including syllabus templates incorporating Title IX reporting obligations, protocols for connecting students to campus resources, and frameworks for building instructor-student trust. This work challenges the false binary between academic rigor and student support, positioning trauma-informed pedagogy not as a constraint on difficult conversations but as the foundation that makes them possible.
2022-2023: Dr. Patricia Fancher, Queer Techne
In the book manuscript, Queer Techne, Patricia Fancher constructs a counternarrative of the history of computing through an analysis of the embodied and queer rhetorics encoded in technical communication. The book focuses first on Alan Turing, who is celebrated as an important father of digital computing, and the embodied, queer rhetorics in his technical writing. Then, each chapter expands to include a broader, embodied social network—a small queer intellectual community of mathematician and engineers, a large under-class of women computers—all of whom shaped the development of digital computing. This manuscript has an advance contract with the Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series through CCC.
2021-2022: Dr. Jennifer Johnson, What Does it Take to Be a Writing Studies Wikipedian? Participation in the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative
Dr. Jennifer Johnson focused her Bazerman Fellowship towards significant participation in the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative, specifically by updating articles pertaining to writing studies and holding regular workshops with Writing Program colleagues to support them in their participation in the Initiative. This work then sparked two research projects designed to better understand the tension between Wikipedia's stated desire to involve scholars across the disciplines and the challenges scholars face when undertaking this work.
2019-2020: Dr. Bob Samuels, Best Practices for Teaching International Students in Our Writing Courses
Dr. Samuels' research identifies specific pedagogical strategies to utilize when teaching international students in college composition classes. He also examines the question of how we can best help our students from China succeed in our courses. Special attention was given to the teaching and assessment of grammar and other formal aspects.
2018-2019: Dr. Kathy Patterson, Blogging and Threshold Concepts in First-Year Writing
I am particularly interested in the ways in which blogging can be used to introduce students to threshold concepts in Writing Studies and provide occasions for developing and practicing the “habits of mind” generally understood to facilitate a successful transition to college writing. I am also interested in the ways in which blogging can promote a sense of belonging for students for whom the transition to college writing—and college in general—may pose unique challenges.
2017-2018: Dr. Katie Baillargeon. Apprentices Becoming Masters: Dissertation Boot Camps and Aiding Dissertation Writers
“Go write a book without any help” is how one graduate student in the humanities described her dissertation process and the tenor of the advice she’s received from her advisors. My research focuses on UCSB’s Dissertation Boot Camp, our most recent initiative to aid graduate student writing, and how writing faculty can both help these writers and shape the conversation at the university as a whole. I argue that these retreats are helpful for a specific population—doctoral students in the middle, liminal stage of their dissertation—and that boot camps are an excellent way to begin thinking and talking about the much-needed systemic shift in focus to graduate student writers. To that end, I tie some concepts from FYC (first year composition) to better understand the dissertation writing process and why the retreats are useful.
2016-2017: Dr. Christopher Dean. Teaching First-Year Composition
My goal is to do for the teaching of first-year composition what Jim Burke, author of The English Teacher's Companion, did for secondary school English Language Arts teaching. I want to blend sections of theoretical descriptions with narratives of classroom practice, and I want to also share the teaching materials I have amassed over 20+ years of teaching first-year composition courses across four disparate institutions.