Robert Yagelski
PhD, The Ohio State University
MS, University of New Hampshire
BA, Pennsylvania State University
About
Robert P. Yagelski is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice and was also an affiliated faculty member of the Department of English. He was named the inaugural Dorothy G. Griffin Professor of English Education in 2021, the first endowed professorship in the School of Education. He taught in the doctoral program in curriculum and instruction and the graduate program in secondary teacher certification and worked with students in the doctoral program in English. He was Founding Director of the Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry, which he helped establish in 2013 as part of UAlbany's new General Education program and directed until 2022. He also served as associate dean for academic affairs of the School of Education and chair of the Department of Educational Theory and Practice. He taught courses in writing, composition theory and pedagogy, critical pedagogy, qualitative research methods and the history of rhetoric.
Professor Yagelski served as director of the Capital District Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project, from 2003 to 2017. Previously, he directed the Writing Center at UAlbany, co-directed the English Education program at Purdue University, and chaired the English Department at Vermont Academy, an independent high school.
He serves as a consultant for the writing component of the Diagnostic Assessment and Achievement of College Skills. He also serves on the executive board of the International Association for Research in L1 Education (ARLE).
Research
Robert Yagelski on Google Scholar
Research Interests
Professor Yagelski's recent research focuses on understanding the ontological dimensions of writing and the transformative capacity of writing, with an emphasis on the connection between writing and well-being. He has also studied formal error in the writing of adolescent students, the analytical strategies college students employ in their writing, revision in student writing.
Publications
Professor Yagelski is the author of Writing as a Way of Being: Writing Instruction, Nonduality, and the Crisis of Sustainability (Hampton Press, 2011), Literacy Matters: Writing and Reading the Social Self (Teachers College Press, 2000), and numerous articles and essays about teaching writing that have appeared in College Composition and Communication, Research in the Teaching of English, College English, English Education, Composition Studies, and Radical Teacher, among others. He is also author of several writing textbooks, including Writing: Ten Core Concepts, 3rd edition (Cengage, 2022), Reading Our World, 2nd edition (Wadsworth/Cengage, 2009) and (with Robert K. Miller) The Informed Argument, 8th edition (Wadsworth, 2011). He is co-editor (with Scott Leonard) of The Relevance of English: Teaching That Matters in Students' Lives (NCTE, 2002) and author of The Day the Lifting Bridge Stuck (Bradbury Press, 1992), a children's book.
His latest book, Madeline Was Our Sister: Writing, Storytelling, and Truth, which is forthcoming from the WAC Clearinghouse/University Press of Colorado, explores the related propositions that writing about our experiences in the world can be an essential act of truth-seeking and that truth might reside in the experience of writing-in-the-moment rather than in the text or the subject of the writing. A blend of theoretical inquiry, memoir and narrative, the book focuses on the process of writing a true story about a person whose extraordinary life raises complex questions about meaning, identity, family and faith.