Highlights:
“ Jesse Rice-Evans (hereafter JRE)…takes a student-centered, respectful, collegial, and dialogic approach to teaching. Upon first glance, an uninformed teacher may wrongly label JRE’s teaching as too unstructured or overly “laid back”; however, I observe in her teaching and pedagogical materials a carefully crafted dialogic approach wherein students’ authentic and collaborative learning are prioritized and fostered. She has effectively shaped her classroom space so that her authority as the instructor is decentered and student agency is forefronted. Students in her classroom are given ample opportunity to provide knowledge, shape the focus of class, and pose questions to each other and to her. She has clearly built a strong and mutually respectful rapport with students. Still, while her role is decentered, JRE highlights for students the oft-invisible practices and codes of conduct in academia. Her attention to demystifying not only academic practices and conventions, but also the politics of such practice and conventions, was impressive. Her online syllabus suggests that her curriculum is extensively researched and meticulously organized. She has built her assignments around rhetorical terms and knowledge, clearly takes a multimodal model, and makes excellent use of digital technologies. Students are lucky to benefit from her support and expertise.”
“Prof. Rice-Evans is a confident, friendly, helpful, attentive, and supportive professor, and she creates a highly welcoming classroom environment in which students feel comfortable sharing their writing…Prof. Rice-Evans is a first-rate professor whose passion for teaching and for her students is readily apparent. Baruch is lucky to have her.”
“The instructor in this class was supremely effective. In planning the course, she demonstrated a profound knowledge of emerging fields. Her course materials were imaginative and original. She developed a pathbreaking curriculum focused on queer literature and criticism as well as the construction of student writing. In class today, she demonstrated that she had made these interventions perfectly understood; the students appeared to be very much in sync with the methods and materials that she was using so expertly… The instructor moved swiftly though complicated web mechanics that included titles, themes, menus, new pages, and plugins. She deftly fielded questions and arranged for students to aid slower students. She monitored all the individual students and was quick to aid anyone who seemed confused. She explained how to remove unwanted widgets and copyright one’s own work on the web. Rich in information and expertise, Ms. Rice-Evans is among the few who are teaching the emerging rhetorics of our time, training our students in new and dominant modes of writing.”
