Sarah Swofford, PhD

My name is Sarah Swofford. I am the Founding Director of USCB’s Center for Teaching and Learning for faculty, Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric, and the Writing Program Administrator.   

I spend a lot of time thinking and teaching about teaching. In my capacity as the Founding Director of USCB’s Center for Teaching and Learning, I support other faculty who want to continue to become more and more effective educators. I plan workshops and events, conduct observations, offer resources, and facilitate all kinds of conversation about teaching. I love helping support faculty as they work to support USCB’s students. I also help brand-new teachers before they enter the classroom, through my classes that are required for English secondary education majors. In those classes, we learn English content like the history and structure of English, or how to teach writing, with special attention to how that content is important in secondary classrooms (and beyond!).

As Writing Program Administrator (WPA), I facilitate curriculum development for First Year English and our minor and concentration in Professional Writing, and I help develop assessment plans so we can make sure students are learning what our faculty value most about composition and rhetoric. I also train and support our undergraduate writing center tutors, who are amazing! They must be prepared to offer tutoring for writing in every class at USCB, not only English courses, so we learn a flexible set of strategies that are undergirded by theories of composition pedagogy and rhetoric. It's a tall task, but they continually impress me with their maturity, care, and thoughtfulness. I love the time I spend with them, as we work together to troubleshoot and problem-solve the wide range of experiences that students bring to their tutoring sessions. Basically, I get to spend a lot of time with people who care intensely about making sure that students at USCB have the tools they need to be effective writers, and I get to help them do that really important work.

I specialize in composition and rhetoric, which some people call "writing studies." This means that I get to join with other people in my discipline who ask big questions about how people learn to write, what kinds of writing we use in all kinds of different contexts (in and out of school), and how our identities as people shape our experiences as writers. My research and my teaching are so deeply connected that I often can't easily separate one from the other. In my research, I explore questions about how students develop as writers. I trace the transition to and through college. In my teaching, I walk alongside students as they experience the transition to college (in English 101 and 102) and through college (in classes like The Teaching of Writing, Histories of the English Language, Modern English Grammars, and Professional Writing Workshop). 

Some of my research brings together composition studies, sociolinguistics, and educational research as I think and write about how rural Southern students move from high school to college writing, and how people's attitudes about their language use influence that transition. This is really fun for me, because I am from Spartanburg, SC, so my work is connected in really important ways to my own experiences as a speaker of Southern American English. I also publish about teaching and ways that we can help students become more effective writers and more engaged members of their communities. What I learn in that research I bring into my classroom, and because of that work, my students learn about how their linguistic and social identities influence how they think about themselves and how other people see them as writers and as students. My research looks for ways for us to invite student writers who do not come from wealthy or privileged backgrounds into academic and professional contexts.  

I'm constantly thinking about how my students and I can foster curiosity and ask interesting questions of one another, and I work to explore the tension between giving students the time they need to develop their thinking and helping them learn to present that thinking to audiences who demand polish and professionalism. Learning to write is hard. It forces us to confront who we really are and who we can become, and it asks us to connect in deep and powerful ways with people who are not like us. I love the challenge that teaching writing and supporting other educators brings me. We're never "finished" as writers, just like we're never finished as learners, and that's one of my favorite things about what I get to explore with my colleagues, my students, and in my research.