Rachel N. Spear, Ph. D.
sample courses
“I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...education as the practice of freedom...education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Learning is a place where paradise can be created.”
- bell hooks
Advanced Composition:
Stories of Trauma
“Writing has helped me heal. Writing has changed my life.
Writing has saved my life.”
– Louise DeSalvo
Themes in Literature:
Trauma and Healing
"Testimonial life-writing allows the author to share an unutterable tale of pain and suffering…in a discursive medium that can be addressed to everyone or no-one…It is through the very process of rehearsing and reenacting a drama of mental survival that the trauma narrative effects psychological catharsis."
– Suzette Henke
Expanded Composition:
First-Semester Fall Sequence (Co-created this common syllabus)
“Don’t tear up the page and start over again when you write a
bad line – try to write your way out of it. Make mistakes and plunge on…Writing is a means of discovery.”
– Garrison Keillor
Composition II:
International Women's Issues with Service-Learning
"A conversation of ‘us’ with ‘us’ about ‘them’ is a
conversation in which ‘them’ is silenced."
– Trinh T. Minh-ha
Women in Literature
“Women must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been drive away… Women must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.”
– Hélène Cixous
Technical Writing:
Writing in Professional and Public Contexts (Adapted, Online)
"The difference between the right word and the almost
right word is the difference between lightning and
the lightning bug."
– Mark Twain
