Brilliant Scholars, Beloved Teachers
You can find UW-Madison English Department teachers all over campus–indeed, all over south central Wisconsin–and you can find the impact of that teaching in the experiences of nearly 20,000 students each year. Students come to the English department for general education courses and they return to take advanced courses in creative writing, English literature, linguistics, literacy, and writing. They visit the internationally-acclaimed UW-Madison Writing Center, and their classes in departments across campus include generative writing assignments thanks to the combined efforts of the English department’s Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Fellows programs.
English department teachers are experts in writing and language; we’re also experts in guiding students as they work through high stakes ideas and craft consequential stories; and we create spaces where stories–read, spoken, written, shared–bring students into conversation with each other and with worlds they’d never otherwise know. We are devoted to helping students learn how to learn, to explore the many ways one can research and read well across platforms and places–from antiquated medieval books in our libraries to film screenings in our classrooms to AI literacy training sessions in the Writing Center.
Teaching Excellence in Practice
What does this teaching excellence look like in practice? It looks like an ecopoetry class traveling together to the Entomology lab to hold stick insects and craft poems about bugs; like an 80 person lecture that still includes hands-on, primary-source research in the UW archives; like a 200 person Shakespeare lecture where the instructor knows every student’s name and actors from American Players Theater are regular guests; like a class on grammar where students learn to diagram sentences and suddenly understand why they put words together as they do; like a first year composition course where students prepare for four years of college writing and learn how to navigate the University; like office hours where you spend as much time talking about ideas as impending assignments; like a creative writing class in Oregon Correctional Facility.
University-wide Recognition
The success of these efforts has been recognized by numerous campus-wide teaching awards, all of which speak to the impact of our teaching. In each of the last six years, an English faculty member has won a UW-Madison Distinguished Teaching Award–the university’s highest teaching honor. And that’s not new: since 1953, English faculty have accounted for 8% of all Distinguished Teaching Awards, making English the most decorated department on campus. English department graduate students learn pedagogical skills and values from their expert mentors. Not surprisingly, then, fifteen English department graduate student teaching assistants have earned campus-wide honors for their teaching in the last ten years (five in the last two years), accounting for 7% of campus-wide TA awards in that time period.