Madeline Walker

Madeline Walker , BA, MA, PhD in English Writing scholar Phone: 250.472.5655 Fax: 250.721.6231 Email: mrwalker@uvic.ca HSD A439

School Role

My role at the School of Nursing is to assist post-RN, graduate students, and faculty with writing.  I offer two online courses and a full range of writing coach services, including online tutoring, facilitation of writing groups, editing services for faculty, and assistance with Ph.D. dissertation writing.

On my web page I offer PowerPoints on many writing issues and links to useful resources.  My PhDis in English and my field is American literature, with a focus on multi-ethnic literature. I continue to follow my interest in this field, and I volunteer as an instructor in American lit for University 201, an accessible and free university program at the University of Victoria. 

Research

My current research interests are in rhetoric, teaching writing, and online technologies. Prior to my current position as Writing Scholar, I researched and wrote in the field of 20c American Literature --in particular African American literature, multi-ethnic literature, autobiography, and religion.

Teaching

I teach two online courses: 490 and 590, Introduction to Academic Scholarship.  I also teach by tutoring and coaching individual students on their writing.

For me, teaching writing is exciting because the “a-ha” moments for my students come unexpectedly to surprise both of us. When those moments happen, I feel like a midwife—I assist and coach while students do the hard work and see the results. While I do teach a set of skills and conventions around academic writing, there is a deeply personal process in writing that I cannot teach, but can only facilitate as my students discover what works for them. 

My teaching is student centred: I expect my students to take responsibility for their own learning and thus I expect them to set learning goals, reflect on their progress, keep error logs, and become increasingly aware of how they write, their strengths, and their challenges.

My teaching is scaffolded and built around the idea that writing is rewriting.  I create assignments that include a revision component so that students can get feedback and resubmit for marks.  Often, students learn more about writing when they can carry one idea or topic through several incarnations—for example, an argument, a literature review, and a research paper. I use continuity to show students how to rework their words and ideas for different genres, in different styles, for different audiences.

Publications

• Walker, M. (2011). The trouble with Sauling around: Religious conversion in ethnic autobiography 1965-2002. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
• Walker, M. (2010). Converting the church: Richard Rodriguez and the Browning of Catholicism. English Studies in Canada.  (35)2-3.
• Walker, M. (2009).  Conversion, deconversion, and reversion: Vagaries of religious experience in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s autofictions. The Journal for the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. (34)4.

Projects

• I am currently researching and writing an article on the importance of teaching writing in Schools of Nursing to follow my conference presentation at WRCASN in February 2011: Dedicated writing teachers in schools of nursing: A new wave?
• I am developing a textbook, Writing Guide for Nurses, aimed at graduate students. The textbook will provide guides and models for writing in a variety of genres: the argument, literature review, abstract, annotated bibliography, executive summary, and grant proposal. I will use a variety of both student writing and reprints of published articles as teaching models.
  
  
• I will add to the current library of narrated PowerPoints on writing issues. Possible topics are:
• the argument
• the literature review
• great introductions
• writing about quantitative research
• writing about qualitative research
• incorporating the work of others
• the throughline,
• writing for publication

I welcome suggestions from students and faculty for PowerPoint topics.

• In my forthcoming book The Trouble with Sauling Around, I probe the complex and troubled relationship between ethnicity, society, and religious conversion in late twentieth-century African American and Mexican American autobiography.
  
  Religious conversion—the turning away from an old, sinful life toward a new life of salvation—manifests as an intensely personal experience, yet calls into play a wide variety of social, cultural, economic, racial, political, and psychological forces. I examine autobiographical texts by Malcolm X, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Amiri Baraka, and Richard Rodriguez to interrogate rosy views and simplistic binary conceptions of religious conversion.