2014 Lindback Award Winner: Lee Talley

Lee Talley is a Professor of English at Rowan University. She has been working at Rowan for almost 12 years, but began demonstrating her deep commitment to teaching long before. She helped organize one of the first university-wide pedagogical training programs for graduate students at Princeton University. There, she also worked as Head Tutor and Coordinator of the Writing Center, where she helped undergraduates with their writing and facilitated workshops for the tutors and instructors affiliated with the Princeton Writing Program. At California State University, Dominguez Hills she was active in the Center for Teaching and Learning, serving on their Advisory Board and facilitating seminars for faculty on the scholarship of teaching as Coordinator of the Teacher Observation and Peer Support Program (TOPS).

At Rowan she has focused her energies on helping create a culture of pedagogical reflection and conversation within the English Department. Heading up the Department’s assessment plan, Talley has worked to refine the curriculum, hosted workshops for faculty, and brought in national experts to help facilitate discussion on grading standards (including grade inflation), how to respond effectively to student writing, and how to create writing assignments and exercises that hone students’ critical thinking skills. One of the Department‘s most significant accomplishments under her leadership was the creation and adoption of the Lexicon, a sheet provided to every English Major, Minor, and Sequencer listing and defining the terms all faculty use to discuss student writing. This common vocabulary has provided students with a more unified experience of the Major and helps them better understand and transport skills and knowledge across their classes. She also works extensively with Education, serving on many committees and being active in creating and teaching for the new Literacy Studies Sequence, a major designed to best prepare elementary and early childhood educators. She has been honored with six nominations to the Teaching and Advising Walls of Fame.

Committed as a scholar as well as a teacher, Dr. Talley recently published a peer-reviewed essay helping secondary school teachers work with the Common Core State Standards using WWII-era historical documents, as well novels and poetry. She is also a nationally elected member of the Children’s Literature Association Grants Committee and was elected to serve on the Children’s Literature Division’s Executive Committee (2013-2018) of the Modern Language Association (the MLA has 30,000 members in - 100 countries), where she helps set national debates in the field.