Faculty and Staff

Sean Molloy

Professor • Department of Language, Lit, Culture, and Writing

As a writing teacher and writing center person, I believe talking about writing, writing theory, and writing pedagogy can always produce two-way learning. Or maybe many-way learning.

Professional Interests

Over the last decade, we have increasingly recognized that writing assessments and course structures can perpetuate institutional racism. So, we have increasingly embraced not just fairness but justice as a central goal, understanding that writing is always complex, subjective, and unmeasurable by any timed test.

With the Writing About Writing course model, students can study composition and rhetorical theory in every college writing course.

These three developments together empower us to teach deep, sophisticated writing courses to all students. We can push back effectively against systemic barriers of injustice embedded in “basic skills” pedagogies and course/assessment systems. We can challenge students to analyze their writing, thinking, creating, and persuading processes on sophisticated and metacognitive levels.

Following Dewey, Freire, Bambara, Christian, Perl, Inoue, and many others, we can recognize that every student brings sophisticated knowledge, important experiences, and a powerful voice to every classroom.

Degrees

PhD English, City University of New York Graduate Center New York, NY

JD , University of Denver, College of Law Denver, CO

MPhil English, City University of New York Graduate Center New York, NY

MA English, Montclair State University Montclair, NJ

BA American History, Columbia College, Columbia University New York, NY

Specialization

Looking back, I've incorporated digital writing, critical rhetoric, and threshold concepts about writing into every course I have taught in the last ten years. This is an amazing time to teach writing because every college student now composes, collaborates, and publishes to the world from multiple devices.

Licenses and Certifications

Although I am retired from active practice, I remain admitted to practice law in New York State. 12/31/1988
Attorney at law, New York State Bar Association State

Representative Publications


“Basic Writing and White Innocence.” ; Journal of Basic Writing; Volume 41.1-2, 2023
https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/jbw/v41n1-2/molloy-bennett.pdf


Retooling the OWC: Offering Clients Online Platform Choices During a Pandemic; WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship; Volume 46.9-10, 2022
https://www.wlnjournal.org/archives/v46/46.9-10.pdf


Classmates, Family, Friends, Followers, Allies, Opponents, Enemies, Bosses, Trolls, Haters, Users, and Google: Understanding Digital Audiences On YouTube; 2021
https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/classmates-family-friends-followers-allies-opponents-enemies-bosses-trolls-haters-users-and-google-understanding-digital-audiences-on-youtube/


"Root and Branch": Resisting a Basic Writing Legacy System; Volume 39, 2020
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1284374.pdf


“Human Beings Engaging With Ideas”: The 1960s SEEK Program as a Precursor Model of Ecological Writing Assessment and a Sociocultural View of Validity; Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity; University Press of Colorado/WAC Clearinghouse; 2018
https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/assessment/

By appointment