Roseanne Gatto
Assistant Professor of Writing, Institute for Core Studies
First-Year Writing Program, Institute for Writing Studies
gattor@stjohns.edu
Ph.D. in Composition, Indiana University-Pennsylvania
A Greek of the fifth century B.C. lived in a polis—a civilized
community the size of a small city but with the political autonomy
of a state. In such a situation a youth would grow to manhood
feeling his constant interrelatedness with the life and aims of his
polis and knowing that the principal road to success was likely to
lie in a political direction. The virtue, the arête, the human
excellence that the youth would wish to develop for himself would
be personal and political at once.
— Phillip Wheelwright
The problem is not changing
people’s consciousness--or what’s in their heads--but the
political, economic, institutional regime of the production of
truth.
— Foucault
As a teacher, I see my role as creating a space that is full of
the kind of difference and tension that encourages a meaningful and
rich classroom happening. As my students enter the classroom,
I ask them one question. What are they burning to tell the
world? The answers I receive vary drastically, but the
underlying philosophy of my approach is that our students have
something important to say, if only we give them the space to do
so. Students spend the semester writing and publishing a book
about what they are burning to tell the world. These books
cross a number of genres. I encourage my students to embrace
hybrid multimedia projects and research, while pushing them to take
seriously academic forms they find daunting. I want them to explore
their mother tongues critically, to celebrate their home discourses
and dialects without romanticizing them. And I need them to
critique and rethink their understanding of academic discourse—not
to fetishize academic dialects, but rather to explore them as
equally viable sites for imaginative thinking and political agency.
The bottom line is that I want my students to approach a variety of
discourse communities—whether local or academic, vernacular or
research—from their own situated experiences, to think
imaginatively and critically about traditional and hybrid forms and
media.
In my time at St. John’s, I’ve held a number of leadership
positions that have enabled me to work on multiple writing
initiatives across disciplinary boundaries. Over the past
year, I’ve had the opportunity to create and facilitate a variety
of workshops for students, faculty, and administrators through our
university’s Ozanam Scholars Program and our Vincentian Mission
Certificate Program. I have worked closely with the Ozanam
scholars, a cohort of honors students involved in intensive
research and service, and led journaling programs for faculty and
administrators. In addition, I am co-organizer of our
department’s “Comp and Coffee” Speaker Series, featuring noted
names in the field of Composition and Rhetoric such as Sondra Perl,
Mark MacBeth, and Derek Owens.