Over the years, Mary and Allan Kollar have generously supported the UW English department. Their most recent gift, the Kollar Teacher Community Support Fund, provides broad-based support for K-12 and post-secondary teacher education programming and activities. The fund is a major investment in teacher education and professional development for our department and writing programs.
The Kollar Teacher Community Support Fund addresses two related department needs. One part of the fund supports students who are pursuing teaching careers. Led by Candice Rai, Cristina Sánchez-Martín, and Renee Lynch, we have created mentoring groups to help students make connections between their English courses and their teaching goals, meet with local K-12 teachers, think together about how to empower student voices, and cultivate ongoing community. The other significant part of the fund supports the professional development for teachers of writing in the English Department’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) and Program for Writing Across Campus (PWAC).
Combined, the two parts of the fund will allow us to offer professional development to the nearly 150 instructors who teach in our writing programs and also to welcome our undergraduate students interested in teaching careers and experienced teachers in the UW in the High School program into a broader teacher community.
English Chair Anis Bawarshi expresses our thanks to Mary and Allan for their support:
More than the dollar amount, Mary and Allan’s gifts come with something even more valuable: their dedication to and care for the work of teaching and learning, which over several gifts in the last twenty years (“Literacy as Social Action”; “Summer K-12 Teacher Professional Development”; the Kollar scholarship; and the Mildred Cartwright Hainer fellowship) have helped us create spaces for teacher support, connection, and community that resonate well beyond the projects they sponsor.
As a teacher of writing and a literacy educator myself, I and colleagues like Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Simmons-O’Neill and Professor Candice Rai have witnessed first-hand what Mary Kollar’s commitment to build and nurture teacher communities and partnerships has meant. And now, colleagues in our two writing programs as well as undergraduate students will be the beneficiaries of the Kollar’s generosity too.
The Kollar Teacher and Community Support Fund, as previously stated, is earmarked to support an ongoing overhaul of in-house writing teacher development. This reimagining is the product of many minds and voices, spearheaded by Professor Megan Callow (director of the Program for Writing Across Campus) and Professor Stephanie Kerschbaum (director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric). Together, these two award-winning programs are larger than some departments in the College of Arts and Sciences. In offering nearly 280 writing courses annually, training and mentoring nearly 150 instructors, and helping over 6,000 UW students a year fulfill the UW’s composition requirement, they are vital to the department, Humanities division, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the UW.
Our newer model for training and supporting department writing teachers prominently features conference-style learning, wherein participants have opportunities throughout the academic year to present, listen, ask questions, and interact professionally. Other programming that the Kollar fund supports include:
- Teaching Cafés. Proposed and led by faculty, graduate instructors, and experts across the UW, Teaching Cafés offer casual conversations over a wide range of teaching topics, from supporting multilingual students to accessible teaching practices to leveraging the UW libraries in the classroom.
- Stephanie Kerschbaum and Professor Eva Cherniavsky have designed a two-part workshop to support the drafting of fellowship applications for graduate students.
- We continue to invite keynote speakers from outside institutions to speak to particular areas of expertise. For example last year we invited Antonio Byrd from the University of Missouri-Kansas City to lead a discussion on black feminist models of care in relation to writing assessment, and the year prior we had Virginia Schwarz from San Francisco State University (co-leading with one of our graduate students, Anselma Prihandita) a workshop on alternative forms of writing assessment. This year we invited Florianne (Bo) Jimenez from the University of New Hampshire, whose research looks at Filipino student writing at the turn of the century in relationship to resistance and power.
- The English Department’s Praxis Conference will be resurrected. In hibernation since the start of the pandemic, the Praxis Conference is a faculty and graduate student-run conference on a wide variety of topics related to writing, literacy, language, rhetoric, and teaching, and in past years it has drawn participants from across the UW campuses, partner teachers in the UW in the High School program, and local high school teachers. Surely you recall English Matters' reprise of Praxis 2017? We are excited to see this home-based opportunity for professional growth return.
Outside of these core projects already operational or in the works, Professor Kershbaum outlines other ways in which Kollar funding will be put to good use, including
travel support for instructors to writing- and pedagogy-related conferences and events, with follow up sharing of what they learned; supporting guest speakers in writing classes; supporting graduate students to work with faculty in doing pedagogical research and program assessment; and building strong teaching communities through social events and team-building.
Writing is vital to our students’ success across campus, both in their academic endeavors here and in their future lives and work in our greater communities. By way of improving the professional development of current and future writing teachers, the Kollar Teacher and Community Support Fund tosses a pebble that creates lasting ripples. Professor Callow expresses our profound gratitude for this gift:
Thank you, Mary and Allan, for caring about the development of our teachers. Learning how to teach is never easy, but the last several years have been especially challenging and the job market is as tough as ever. We are thrilled to now have so many new possibilities at our disposal for helping our instructors to become highly qualified writing teachers in a nurturing, supportive environment.
It goes without saying that all support for the English Department is both vital to our mission of serving the greater good through education and deeply appreciated. You dear readers have been a wonderful part of that support. Through your bigheartedness for instance, our list of endowed scholarships and fellowship has healthily grown. If you’d like to support this or other department initiatives, please click our English Department Support link to get started.
Again, we thank Mary and Allan Kollar for their generous support!