Every student will have an opportunity to have their work published in The Limestone Review. The top submissions are granted a $100 Alpha Award, and entered in the Delta Epsilon Sigma national undergraduate writing competition.
ALUMNI CAREERS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS
English is a valuable and marketable major. Students learn to write and speak well, to think critically, to collaborate with others and to understand diversity. These skills are important in any career, and Loras English graduates work in a wide range of fields.
Career preparation flexibility is also enhanced by the ability to combine English with other majors and minors in a four-year program. Loras English graduates’ accomplishments include the following:
- Nationally acclaimed, Tony-Award winning playwright
- Correspondent for Los Angeles Times; head of National Public Radio News; Dean of Columbia Journalism
- School Founder and executive director of Posada Community Center, Pueblo, Colorado
- Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, John Carroll University
- Nationally acclaimed, Shelley Memorial Award-winning poet
- Vice President for Advancement, Lewis University
- Principal, Johnsburg High School, Johnsburg, Illinois
- Head of Legal Services, Dubuque, IA
- Science Editor for msnbc.com
- Earthforce, a nonprofit devoted to environmental education
- Professor of English, Marietta College
- Public Relations and Social Media Manager, Loras College
- Content Producer at NogginLabs; Founder and Fiction Editor of Knee-Jerk literary magazine
- Production Director and Managing Editor with Guerrero Howe Custom Media; Contributing Writer for
- Paste Magazine and Alarm Press
- National Fulbright Scholar; International Student and Scholar Advisor, UW-Platteville
- Developmental Editor, McGraw-Hill
Other common careers: Law, business, advertising, teaching, academia, publishing, journalism, magazine writing and editing, public relations, library science, technical writing, and many more.
ENGLISH MAY TERM CLASSES
May Term offers unique opportunities to focus exclusively on a single course for a three-week term. May courses are particularly experiential, taking students out into the community or engaging them in other hands-on activities. Some May Term courses travel internationally or domestically, and some stay right here in Dubuque, IA.
Sample English May courses include:
- Writing the Midwestern Landscape: Students combine digital photography with nature writing in Midwestern winter landscapes. The instructor leads students on snowshoeing hikes at Mines of Spain and Swiss Valley nature reserves as part of the writing process. Students’ photo-essay projects have included environmental issues related to the Mississippi River, historical studies of Native Americans and miners in the area, and more.
- Poetry in Performance: An in-depth study of lyric poetry for students who want to approach the subject in an experiential way. Students develop their understanding and appreciation for poetry by doing close readings of poems, writing creative and critical essays based on these close readings, and making poetry physically part of themselves through memorization and performance. They learn to read aloud and recite poems in a way that develops their expressiveness and other public speaking skills. Topics include the application of fundamental topics in poetics, including imagery, trope, lineation, syntax, tone, sound, prosody, and the concepts of speaker and addressee.
- Native Voices, Native Lives: This experiential learning course engages students in reading, writing and reflecting upon a variety of Native American voices and experiences (Cherokee, Navajo, Lakota, Dakota, Ojibwe, Pah-Ute, Spokane, Ho-Chunk, etc.). Students immerse themselves in the novels, short stories, myths, poetry, and oral histories of Native American people, in order to expand and deepen their understanding of cultural voice. Students spend the second week learning directly from native people as the class travels to experience tribal history and culture first hand. Students’ final projects integrate the texts and experiences of the course into a researched and reflective product. Daily discussions, journaling, and mini-service projects in the community are part of the overall on-site learning experience.
- Witchcraft in Early Modern British Literature: This course immerses students in the literary and cultural depiction of witchcraft and those accused of it in early modern Britain. Students read and discuss primary texts (ranging from Shakespeare plays to early modern tracts on witchcraft) and secondary texts (historical research). The course’s experiential component is a witch trial reacting game.
- Ireland in Film: This course surveys a wide-range of Irish-themed films in order to develop a deeper understanding of modern Irish cultural identity. Major thematic areas explored in the course include representations of the Irish West, the political struggle for independence, the role of Catholicism in Irish society, and the status of minority groups such as the Irish travelers and the urban working class in Ireland. Students debate the selections for, and plan, an Irish film festival.
- Bleak House in Context: An in-depth study of a major British novel and author: Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Students read the novel in context: in the installment form (available in the Special Collections of the Loras College library), alongside other Victorian publications and cultural artifacts, and through “contact” with the Victorians via role play. The course simulates the Victorian methodology of reading narratives in serial format. Students generate a class e-periodical which involves assuming the “roles” or voices of particular Victorian figures as found through their wider reading in the Special Collections resources of All the Year Round and Household Words (both journals edited by Dickens), the Newgate Journal and other Victorian texts. They also present their research, role play, and reading experiences in the display cases outside the Special Collections room.
ENGLISH MAJORS EARN FOUR AWARDS IN DELTA EPSILON SIGMA NATIONAL WRITING COMPETITION
Loras College English majors continued their long history of success in the Delta Epsilon Sigma National Undergraduate Writing Competition. Loras writers have won or received Honorable Mention for 27 straight years.
ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDENTS PRESENT AT ASSOCIATION OF TEACHER EDUCATORS CONFERENCE
Loras College students Anna Speltz (’15) (Minneota, Minnesota), Nora Zerante (’15) (Chicago Heights, Illinois), Holly Klein (’15) (Dubuque, Iowa), Megan Redmond (’15) (Bernard, Iowa) and Molly Cain (’14) were the only undergraduate team accepted to present at the 2015 Annual Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) conference Phoenix, Arizona in February 2018.
The students presented “ Rooted in Collaboration: Engaging Middle School Students through Poetry,” a collaborative poetry unit that they planned and taught at Washington Middle School in Dubuque, Iowa in the fall of 2013 as a part of their English Methods course, taught by Hilarie Welsh, Ph.D., assistant professor of education.
“The conference was an incredible opportunity to be inspired by some of the most accomplished thinkers and leaders in the education field,” said Speltz. “I came away from the conference with new ideas to apply to my current student teaching experience and better understanding of some of the discussions that are currently relevant in the education field. Presenting in and attending other sessions at the conference helped me to see myself as a contributor in those discussions.”
The team’s presentation shared how they used a required pre-service teachers’ course to collaboratively create and present a six-lesson poetry unit to a middle school honors class, showing the advantages of student-centered strategies and social justice themes, as well as the motivation created through the use of classroom texts and theories. An important component of the presentation was the students’ desire to encourage questions and discussion about the strengths, limitations and potential implications of their collaborative project.
“Dr. Welsh encouraged us to submit a proposal to the conference. Without her support and encouragement, we never would have even considered the opportunity,” explained Speltz.
The Association of Teacher Educators was founded in 1920 and is an individual membership organization devoted solely to the improvement of teacher education both for school-based and post-secondary teacher educators. ATE members represent over 700 colleges and universities, over 500 major school systems, and the majority of state departments of education. The ATE office is located in the Washington DC area where it represents its members’ interests before governmental agencies and education organizations. In addition, ATE has representatives on the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP).