Bethany Blankenship is dedicated to incorporating experiential learning into all her classes.
The primary architect of Stretch English, a course in college composition designed to help basic writers, Blankenship uses classroom time to build confident writers. She believes the best learning happens when students are fully engaged in activities like small group discussions, peer editing, and service learning projects. Blankenship’s students have worked on behalf of the Beaverhead County Humane Society, the Dillon Public Library, the Women’s Resource Center, and the Dillon Tribune.
Blankenship’s research on teaching and learning can be read in the books “MLA Approaches to Teaching The Canterbury Tales” and “Linked Courses for General Education and Integrative Pedagogy.” Her current book project, tentatively entitled “Experiencing Literature,” explores the intersection of experiential learning and literary studies.
Shane Borrowman is a teacher of writing and editor/co-editor of six collections of original scholarship, including “Trauma and the Teaching of Writing,” “Rhetoric in the Rest of the West,” and “On the Blunt Edge: Technology in Composition’s Pedagogy and History.” He has also edited/co-edited three writing textbooks, including “The Promise of America” and “The Cost of Business.” As a writer, his work has appeared in publications as diverse as “Renaissance Magazine,” “Brevity,” and “Rhetoric Review.” Borrowman has written on topics ranging from boxing in medieval England and the value of the astrolabe to Renaissance navigation to medieval Arabic scholars on Aristotle and Jeannette Rankin’s overlooked importance in the history of the American peace movement.
Brian Elliott earned his B.S.in Computer Science and English from Muskingum University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Ohio University, where his research focused on nineteenth-century American literature and Transatlantic Romanticism. His research and teaching interests include early American literature, British and Transatlantic Romanticism, satire, mythology and folklore, and the social dimensions of violence in literature.
Elliott has recently presented work on Ambrose Bierce at the American Literature Association symposium on crime fiction and Charles Brockden Brown at the College English Association annual conference. His current research project explores the role of revenge in American frontier novels. At Montana Western, he teaches courses in graphic novels, early American literature, fantasy and science fiction, and composition. Elliott comes to Montana Western from his previous position as Assistant Professor of English at Urbana University in Ohio, where he also served as Chair of Humanities and director of the William G. Edwards Honors Program.
Laura A. Wright earned her BA degrees in English and Drama at the University of Montana and completed her MA and PhD at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include multiethnic literatures of the United States, graphic narrative, and dystopian literature. In the classroom, she encourages students to challenge dominant cultural narratives by reading with and against materials, and to speak back to these narratives with materials of their own.
Her book manuscript, “Prizing Difference: PEN Awards and Multiculturalist Politics in American Fiction,” examines the intersection of national prizes for the novel with discourses surrounding multiculturalism from the 1930s to the present. She has received a fellowship from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and archival fellowships from the libraries at the University of Virginia and Princeton University in support of this project. She enjoys spending time hiking and fishing in the Montana outdoors.
