Academic Publications
Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation
2001. Refiguring English Studies series, NCTE Press.
The birth of my son in the 1990s coincided with a surge in research on ecological sustainability in a range of fields; both events shaped my teaching in no small way. I was convinced that, as we entered the 21st century and conditions continued to worsen, concerns for ecological sustainability couldn’t help but circulate more and more in academia. I naively thought “sustainability” would prompt a new pedagogical ethic that would shape college core and gen ed curricula. (For a few years after publication, “ecocomposition” garnered a little bit of attention in the field of composition studies, but this was short lived and never really amounted to more than a fringe specialization.) Looking back more than 25 years after its publication, the current climate crisis now makes my earlier focus on sustainability seem quaint in comparison. The bulk of core college curricula in the U.S. still remains largely detached from the cataclysmic changes underway. (Young people, however, are now doing far more to call attention to the climate crisis than many of our academic institutions: “A Teachable Moment: Educators Must Join Students in Demanding Climate Justice,” Jonathan Isham & Lee Smithey.)
In this book I argue that, in light of worsening environmental crises and accelerating social injustices, we need to use sustainability as a way to structure courses and curricula, and that composition studies, with its inherent cross-disciplinarity and unique role in students’ academic lives, can play a key role in giving sustainability a central place in students’ thinking and in the curriculum as a whole.
Here I articulated a pedagogy that gives students opportunities to think and write in three zones of inquiry: place, work, and future. This approach allowed for the creation of a variegated course in which students wrote neighborhood portraits, critiqued their work experiences, reflected on their majors, investigated alternative theories of education, composed oral histories, constructed narratives about their futures, and designed their own assignments—all from the implicit perspective of sustainability. In the book I juxtaposed their insights with observations from scholars writing about architecture, ecological economics, future studies, planning, sociology, sustainable business, and urban studies. The appendixes include a handful of environmental statistics, as well as a detailed description of a composition course I once taught.
Resisting Writings (and the Boundaries of Composition)
1994. Southern Methodist University Press.
My first book for an audience of composition faculty grew out of my dissertation. While dated in some respects (the internet had yet to redesign our psyches when I wrote it; we were still talking about hypertext then), I stand by the general premise in this volume: that the teaching of writing ought to be deeply cross-cultural, multimedia, and above all, experimental. The book ends with a series of proposals for new curricula that, as a doctoral student in the late 80s, I was eager to see realized in the University.
(from the jacket blurb:)
What do H.D., John Cage, Gertrude Stein, Susan Howe, Howlin' Wolf, Public Enemy, and the French Oulipo movement have to do with the teaching of writing? Everything, Derek Owens argues in this ambitious and eclectic rethinking of composition studies. This timely analysis will be of interest not only to those involved with the teaching of composition, but also to those interested in rhetoric, literature, and creative writing, as well as in feminist and cross-cultural studies. Rather than condemning either academic or "expressive" discourse, Owens proposes to overlap the worlds of composition and poetics and to teach writing from a perspective inclusive of feminist, non-Eurocentric, and experimental ways of making discourse. Owens advocates a pluralistic tolerance for radically conflicting writing philosophies throughout the university. This pragmatic work begins with analyses of experimental expository prose (H.D., William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, John Cage, Alan Davies), avant-garde feminist poetics (Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Howe, Madeline Gins, Nicole Brossard), African American discourse ("nommo" to blues, jazz to rap), hypertext, and other innovative discourse influences, ending with a series of proposals intended for teachers, theorists, graduate students, and administrators concerned with the teaching of writing and literature, as well as with writing program and writing across the curriculum design. "No one who reads this book will ever return to teaching composition in the same old way without at least a twinge of guilt." -- Gary Tate. Southern Methodist University Press
For a listing of other published academic work, see CV under the “About” section.
Teaching
I’ve been a professor at St. John’s University in New York since 1994. Before that I taught in Harvard’s Expository Writing Program, Tufts University’s Experimental College, and at Siena College where I also worked as an academic advisor in the Higher Education Opportunity Program. While a teaching assistant at the University at Albany I was a substitute teacher for elementary, middle school, and high school. As an undergraduate I taught weekend art courses to children as well as evening art classes in migrant camps in Wyoming county, NY. I’ve just recently begun teaching collage making workshops at the Art League of Long Island. Below you’ll find my teaching philosophy; a list of courses designed and taught at St. John’s (an asterisk next to a course indicates it’s a new course I added to the University curriculum); and some information on the Institute for Writing Studies I created in 2006 and which had a good run before being killed by a new president a decade later.
Teaching Philosophy
I privilege classroom environments where students explore and reflect upon the course content via their unique histories and emerging philosophies. I value intellectual, linguistic, and compositional variety, giving students a number of choices for how they might meet course objectives. Students are invited to work in a range of forms and materials as they engage with the material. Multimodal, multimedia, and multigenre practices are encouraged and supported. As a proponent of arts-based research, practice as research, and research-creation, I create spaces in my courses for interested students to experiment in alternative forms. Ultimately I’m interested in exploring syntheses between the binary of “critical thinking” and “creative making”, as I see these as two sides of the same coin.
I assess student performance through a contract grading approach that is uninterested in whatever “talent” a student might bring to the course but instead values behavior and input. If a student completes all required work on time, while addressing any concerns I might have along the way, the grade is an A. Grades less than that are generally a reflection of consistently late or missing work.
Many of my courses resemble large clusters of independent studies. While the theme of every course is the umbrella concept linking assigments, I prefer that students engage with this content via their own local needs and interests. (I am influenced here by Stephen North’s idea of a “fusion-based curriculum”.) I enjoy the variation and surprises this can bring to the classroom.
When researching the history of studio art and creative writing pedagogies in MFA programs I was overwhelmed by stories of masculinist, controlling, and not infrequently abusive treatment of students. I’ve documented these findings in my article “Workshops, Crits, and the Arts of Response” in Exquisite Corpse: Studio Art-based Writing in the Academy (co-edited by my former doctoral student Nathalie Virgintino). In this article I propose student-centered “empathic critique” as an alternative to traditional art and writing critiques.
Courses taught at St. John's University
= course I created & added to the curriculum
Undergraduate, English Department
Introduction to College Writing
Composition and Rhetoric
Advanced Composition
Business Writing
Honors Composition
Introduction to English Studies
Introduction to Literary Theory
Contemporary Poetry
Constructing Suburbia in Film and Literature*
Seminar in the Teaching of Writing*
Creative Writing--Nonfiction
Creative Writing--Fiction
Creative Writing--Poetry
Writing the Future*
Utopian and Dystopian Literature*
"Post"*
Undergraduate, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing
ePortfolio Workshop*
Graduate, English Department
Composition Theory
Writing Theory/Writing Practice*
Literary/Visual Texts*
Constructing Suburbia in Film and Literature*
Emerging Technologies and the Making of Meaning*
Introduction to the Profession of English
Theories of Literacy*
Writing Nonfiction Workshop
Writing the Future*
Young Adult Literature*
Independent Study in Writing Center Theory and Practice*
Independent Study in Flash Fiction*
Independent Study in First-Year Writing Pedagogy*
Institute for Writing Studies
At the request of former University President Donald Harrington and Provost Julia Upton I was asked to design and direct an ambitious new writing program. In 2006 we opened the Institute for Writing Studies, comprised of three units: the University’s first First-Year Writing Program; a much expanded University Writing Center; and the University’s first Writing Across the Curriculum program. It was one of the largest multifaceted writing programs in the country and caught the attention of the Chronicle of Higher Education. We created 20 full-time contract faculty positions (which the University would later convert to tenure-track lines), three new tenure-track faculty director positions, three administrative assistant positions, and numerous student assistantships, fellowships, and Writing Center consultants. The Institute for Writing Studies lasted for 11 years. After “Bobby” Gempesaw became president of the University, he dissolved the Institute for Writing Studies; not long afterwards he retired in the middle of the pandemic.
(When I was hired I created a small Writing Center at St. John’s. One room had a big bare wall where I painted a mural one weekend, a map of the universe inspired by elements in the drawings of my 5-year-old son. The university later painted over it, the building supervisor calling the painting an act of vandalism. You can see a glimpse of it below.)
