Position and Education
Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing
Center, this is Dr. Beech’s first year here at The University of Tennessee at
Chattanooga. Having earned her Ph.D.
in Rhetoric and Composition from The University of Southern Mississippi in
Hattiesburg, MS, Dr. Beech comes to UTC with full-time teaching and writing
center directing experience--most recently from Pacific Lutheran University
in Tacoma, WA. Dr. Beech began teaching college composition in the fall of
1989 while working on her M.A. in English at Southern Illinois University in
Carbondale. She earned her B.A. in English from The University of West
Alabama in Livingston.
Research and Teaching
Here at UTC, Dr. Beech teaches courses ranging from
first-year composition to sophomore level courses, like Writing for the
Social Sciences. She has over the years taught a range of undergraduate and
graduate courses in Rhetoric and Composition.
Her most recent research focuses on:
- Collaborative
Learning Theory and Practice
- Southern,
Working-Class Literacies
- Situated
Practices for Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies
Dissertation: “Writing as/or Work: Locating the Material(s) of a
Working-Class Pedagogy”
Dr. Beech’s qualitative dissertation involved community,
classroom, and case studies with students from rural, Southern working-class
backgrounds. She examined how community definitions and procedures for work interact
and tend to compete with how teachers often define and direct work to proceed
in composition classrooms. Interviews with students from Alabama revealed
that family work stories, in which college-educated bosses are figured as the
antagonists, help construct definitions of work and create for community
youth oppositional identities to those with college degrees or to people who
employ what is perceived as “feminized” middle-class discourse. Classroom and
case studies conducted at a state university in Mississippi suggested that
working-class students are more engaged in writing and better able to
conceive of it as valuable work when it is collaborative and when it involves
fieldwork. Dr. Beech argues that we need to derive with working-class students
pedagogies of repositioning that take into account student instrumentalism
and that incorporate and authorize knowledge brought from students’ home
communities.
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