EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING

    As an assistant professor of English at UAlbany, Robert Yagelski spends part of his time on campus teaching students. He spends the rest of it teaching teachers - specifically, working with future teachers on the techniques and technologies that will make them effective in the classroom.
    Yagelski, director of the University's Writing Center and an Albany faculty member since 1995, has worked with the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning’s faculty orientation program during the past few years. This year, he took advantage of the opportunity to spearhead another initiative: a program designed to prepare teaching assistants. The initiative, new this semester, is a component of the English department's graduate program. 
    For Yagelski - who earned degrees at Penn State, the University of New Hampshire, and Ohio State - teaching at Albany has proven to have “real advantages.” In addition to being able to work with “small numbers of students” in the classroom, “I'm focusing my energies on helping these promising graduate students become effective teachers. I feel very lucky to be a part of that effort,” he says.
    Through the training program, Yagelski expects to work with ten to 12 teaching assistants each year. “Most of the new TAs are assigned to the Writing Center for the first year; the five in the program right now have moved from tutoring, primarily, to working in the classroom for the first time at Albany,” he explains.
    Yagelski formerly taught at Purdue University, where he co-directed the English Education Program. He also has experience at the secondary level: For three years, he taught 11th- and 12-grade English at an independent school in southern Vermont.
    The Scranton, Pa., native left high school teaching to pursue doctoral study because he believed that such study could lead to better teaching. “To be an effective teacher,” Yagelski says, “you have to be a scholar. That doesn't mean being locked away in a library; it means exploring complicated questions that grow out of teaching. While I taught high school, I wrote professional articles and went to conferences, but those were not valued activities; what was valued was time in the classroom. Engaging in inquiry informs and enhances my teaching.” 
     He continues: “I really enjoy college-age students. At Albany, I get to work with a lot of interesting people; I have 18-year-olds in my classes, but there are also students who are 50. Teaching at the University is a great deal of fun, and very gratifying. In particular, I enjoy helping graduate students to establish their careers. I like working with people, rather than with material alone. My task is to be a teacher of writers. I help shape my students' views of how language works in the world, how they use language, and how reading and writing impact on their lives.”
    Yagelski has ample opportunity to be “a teacher of writers.” In fact, his love of writing compelled him to teach. “As an undergraduate,” he recalls, “I took a course called Article Writing; it was taught by a freelance writer who was not an academic. The course didn't focus so much on writing itself as it did on the business of being a freelancer.” Yagelski himself became a freelancer and worked as a stringer for local newspapers in Pennsylvania; after a few years, however, “I decided to take another step and explore the possibility of doing other things with my writing.”
    One of the things he did was enroll in the University of New Hampshire's graduate program. At UNH, “I taught my first class, and I got swept up in teaching. I really loved working with the students, and my writing background gave me credibility with them,” Yagelski says.
    After earning his Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition at Ohio State in 1991, Yagelski went to work at Purdue, where he taught graduate and undergraduate courses. While he enjoyed working in Indiana and had never lived in the Capital Region, he feels that the move to Albany was “almost a homecoming” for him, his wife Cheryl, and their sons Adam and Aaron. They had visited family in the area and were familiar with its other attractions - particularly in terms of lifestyle. “As the state capital, Albany is more diverse and affords us more economic and cultural opportunity. We'd lived in the Midwest for seven years. We love the mountains and wanted to be closer to the coast. We missed the winters - unlike most people here! I applied to the University in an attempt to balance family with professional needs. I'm very committed to public education. One of the things I like about the University at Albany is that its mission - to serve the students and the citizens of New York - is very clear.”
     Yagelski is equally clear about his own mission as an Albany faculty member. In his recently published book Literacy Matters: Writing and Reading the Social Self (Teachers College Press, Columbia University), he uses his teaching experience as a backdrop for examining the nature of literacy and how it can empower students if it is taught within the context of their lives. The author asserts that, “ultimately, the English teacher's most important job is to reveal to students the ways they can participate in the discourse that shapes their lives,” while offering insight into “how technology has influenced the way we write and read.”
    In his students, Yagelski, the great-grandson of Polish immigrants, maintains, “I see some of my own background. Many of them are the first in their families to attend college, as I was. That was also what attracted me to Albany: the opportunity to work at a racially and culturally diverse institution that draws students from poor rural areas, the inner city, and wealthy suburbs.”