Kathleen Inman Berens
USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Kathi Berens confesses that she is “the kind of teacher who loses sleep over her students’ grades.”
That said, this dedicated teacher has been losing sleep since 2000, when she joined USC’s Writing Program and began teaching advanced writing to upperclassmen in arts and humanities, social sciences and pre-law. Fortunately, the sleep deprivation hasn’t been for naught. In the intervening years, Berens’ peers have singled her out for an impressive array of honors, including the college’s General Education Teaching Award for advanced writing (2003), the university’s Teaching Has No Boundaries Award for her work as a mentor (2005) and a TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) Incentive grant (2006). She also is the first non-tenure-track faculty fellow at the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET).
Not satisfied with teaching just the mechanics of writing, Berens challenges her students to articulate themselves to the public, and to harness the power of technology to facilitate interdisciplinary problem solving. Toward this end, in 2003 she and colleague Norah Ashe-McNalley won a $10,000 CET Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Teaching Award to create an online journal that would be written, edited, designed and administered by USC undergraduates. AngeLingo, borne of this grant, was the first – and, thus far, remains the only – multidisciplinary online academic publication in the United States produced entirely by undergraduates. Additionally, in 2004, Berens created the Undergraduate Writers’ Conference, an annual event that invites undergraduates from all majors at USC to compete for writing prizes and present their work in academic colloquia.
As a participant in the Writing Program’s Technology Initiative, Berens is working to integrate blogs, wikis, and social-bookmarking sites into the college’s core advanced-writing curriculum. She teaches students how to formulate research questions within their specific academic fields, and then use Web 2.0 technologies to engage thought leaders in those fields via the blogosphere. She is also a member of the Digital Educators Consortium – an academic collective founded by USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy – which brings together faculty from throughout the Los Angeles basin to examine trends in the pedagogical applications of technology, review scholarship and share best-teaching practices.
Berens believes that enabling students to hone their complex thoughts into simple language will make them skeptical and robust individuals. “I have a profound commitment to raising the bar of public discourse,” she declares. “It’s why I do what I do.”