Ann Merle Feldman, PhD
Professor Emerita
English
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About
Ann Merle Feldman directs the First-Year Writing Program at UIC and is the founder and director of the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program (CCLCP). Her scholarly interests include genre and rhetorical theory, e-learning, civic engagement and service learning, higher education, and socio-cultural theories of writing. Her recent book, Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged University (SUNY Press, 2008) argues that teaching writing as a situated, civic activity must be a core intellectual activity in the engaged metropolitan university. Her work with the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program illustrates the possibilities for learning when UIC undergraduates hold writing apprenticeships with local community not-for-profit organizations. Feldman was nominated by the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) for the Lynton Award for Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach. As the Director of the First-Year Writing Program, she teaches a graduate seminar to train new teaching assistants, develops curricula, and assesses learning for the program's 2,500 students. She has written two textbooks that provide a conceptual framework for the writing program's required courses: Writing and Learning in the Disciplines (HarperCollins, 1996) and In Context: Reading and Writing in Cultural Conversations (with Nancy Downs and Ellen McManus, Pearson/Longman, 2002, 2005). Ann Feldman's earlier work on cognition and learning focused on writing processes. An edited volume, Writing in Real Time (Ablex, 1987; published as Ann Matsuhashi) discussed cognitive approaches to writing as did a group of journal articles on empirical research and theoretical perspectives.