Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger joins the faculty this year as an Assistant Professor specializing in composition and rhetoric. She earned her BA in English at Truman State University, a liberal arts college in Missouri. Dr. Mecklenburg-Faenger completed her graduate work in English, with a specialization in composition and rhetoric, at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Ohio State University, where she recently earned her Ph.D.
While at UMKC and OSU, she taught beginning and advanced writing courses, including courses in writing and technology and business and professional writing. Her writing courses have addressed such topics as “Reading the West,” “Rhetorics of Documentary,” “Imagining and Imaging Family” and “Picturing US: History and National Identity.” This fall at the College she will be teaching English 101: Composition and English 305: Advanced Composition.
Dr. Mecklenburg-Faenger’s research addresses questions related to rhetorical education, both in and out of school settings. In particular, she describes her research as focusing on “the relationship between formal rhetorical education and education in alternative spaces like women’s organizations at the turn-of-the century. How does accepting women’s rhetorical practices invite us to alter traditional or canonical understandings of rhetorical theory or rhetorical terms (such as ethos, memory, or arrangement)?”
In her spare time Dr. Mecklenburg-Faenger enjoys cooking with her husband Chris and playing with her dog, Loki. “Like most English department people,” she says, “I like to read. I read a wide range of genres, but I do have a special fondness for sci-fi novels.” She is also interested in blogs and other areas of web culture. “I love how modern technology allows people to collect words, pictures, sounds, or videos and recombine them in new ways (i.e. a “mash-up”). In some ways, I think the mash-up is very similar to what scrapbookers were doing with printed media in the nineteenth century.”
Professor Chris Warnick interviewed Dr. Mecklenburg-Faenger in August 2007.
I know your research, in part, focuses on scrapbooks, particularly scrapbooks composed by members of nineteenth-century women’s clubs. How did you arrive at this project?
Early in my graduate career, I took a class on women in composition and rhetoric and was assigned an archival research project. I had just read Anne Ruggles Gere’s Intimate Practices, which focuses on the literacy education women received in women’s clubs between 1880-1920, and I was really impressed by the richness of women’s organizations as educational sites. I went to a local archive—Western Historical Manuscripts in Kansas City—and ordered materials on Missouri women’s groups, although I had no idea what I would find. I was going through a stack of minute books trying to find something interesting in all the crabbed handwriting and the dry accounts of meetings when little slips of paper—photos and newspaper clippings—kept falling out. I became more interested in the items falling out than the minute books themselves: Who would keep these items and why? What does it mean to keep scraps? I did further research and discovered that scrapbooking was just about as popular in the nineteenth century as it is today. I also discovered that clubwomen across the country often made scrapbooks to record their work for an imagined future audience. However, there has been very little written about scrapbooking as a rhetorical practice partly because, as I argue, scrapbooks acquired a very gendered and negative reputation in the nineteenth century.
What relevance do these historical materials have for current-day issues concerning the teaching of writing? In other words, how do these scrapbooks, and other materials you’ve looked at, inform your teaching?
Studying scrapbooking practices reminds me that the amount of time we spend writing and learning to write in extracurricular spaces far exceeds the amount of time we spend writing or learning to write in formal academic contexts. Historically, it is important to remember this when we try to characterize the kinds of rhetorical education different people received in particular times and places. For example, if we only examine formal education in rhetoric in the nineteenth century, which was provided to very few women, we miss the incredible richness of rhetorical education for women that occurred in extracurricular contexts such as temperance or suffrage organizations.
In terms of teaching, I think studying everyday writing practices helps me to remember that students bring a wealth of rhetorical knowledge with them to the classroom. I try to make use of that knowledge as much as possible to make connections between what students already know about writing and what they need to learn to write in academic settings. I have asked students to make scrapbooks in a composition course where we studied representations of family. Students made scrapbook pages and then wrote an essay explaining what rhetorical strategies they used to persuade a potential reader to accept the version of themselves they constructed from various bits of ephemera.
*The Department of English also welcomes this fall Senior Instructor Marguerite Scott*