Vanderslice named English Teacher of the Year

Dr. Stephanie Vanderslice, associate professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas, has been named Arkansas University English Teacher of the Year by the Arkansas Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts.

Vanderslice said she found out about the award a week ago and, “It was a total surprise.” 

She has been teaching at UCA for 12 years and has been teaching college on and off since 1990, she said. She teaches writing, creative writing and teaching creative writing. 

“I do a lot of different things,” Vanderslice said. “I work with undergraduates. I write and publish a lot of things about teaching undergraduates.”

She also works with teachers through the Great Bear Writing Project, a professional development project to enhance the teaching of kindergarten through 12th-grade writing. Vanderslice and others at UCA started the Great Bear Writing Project 10 years ago, and she is now the director. It is a site of the National Writing Project, she said.

“It’s really blossomed. I put a lot of work into it ... but it’s also blossomed because we have such wonderful leaders, and the teachers,” Vanderslice said.

Vanderslice added she hopes to “empower teachers to feel like they can teach writing and teach it well. It’s inspiring to work with the teachers.”

She is also involved nationally with leadership in the National Writing Project. 

She is serving a two-year term as a program leader for the Rural Sites Network, a program within the National Writing Project. UCA belongs to the Rural Sites Network because, while it is in a suburban area, it serves mainly rural communities, she said, and needs to be aware of issues in rural schools. Rural Sites is having a national conference in Little Rock in 2011, she said.

Along with colleague Dr. Kelly Ritter of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Vanderslice has edited and co-written two books on the topic of enhancing the teaching of creative writing nationally and internationally. She also co-edited a special issue of the national journal “College English” last year. 

Her work in progress is a book, “Revising Creative Writing in Higher Education: Programs and Practices That Work,” which is under review at Professional and Higher, a new publisher in the United Kingdom.

She also writes creative nonfiction and has published fiction, nonfiction, various anthologies and journals, and her blog www.wordamour.wordpress.com. 

Vanderslice concluded, “I think my goal is to inspire people to become readers and writers ... to empower them to reach their fullest potential.”

(Staff writer Rachel Parker Dickerson can be reached by e-mail at rachel.dickerson@thecabin.net or by phone at 505-1277. Send us your news at www.thecabin.net/submit)