Dana DriscollProfessor of English

Office: 203-B Stabley Library (inside the Jones White Writing Center)
Email: ddriscol@iup.edu

Education

  • PhD - Purdue University - English: Rhetoric and Composition Program, 2009.
  • MA - SUNY Stony Brook - Linguistics, 2005.
  • BA - California University of Pennsylvania - English, 2003.

Academic Interests

Transfer of learning, research methods (mixed, qualitative, quantitative, longitudinal, multi-institutional), writing center research and administration, learning theories, composition pedagogy, writing assessment, writing program administration, writing across the curriculum, community service learning, grant writing, scholarship of teaching and learning

Profile

Dana Driscoll serves as the Jones White Writing Center director at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Dana is committed to supporting student writing for the IUP community. In this role, she oversees all aspects of the writing center, including tutor education, writing center research, budgeting, writing center assessment, and day-to-day operations. Learn more about the Jones White Writing Center.

Dana Driscoll's research focuses primarily on two aspects: how people learn to write and transfer that knowledge to a wide range of circumstances, and how we can support research-based writing center practices.

Her first research focus surrounds students' long-term development as writers, their ability to use and adapt what they learn to new circumstances, and how we can better support that learning. Specifically, Dana examines how students develop as writers and "transfer" that knowledge from high school to college, course to course, or the university to workplace settings. This research has lead her to an interest in studying students' dispositions, or individual qualities that help foster writing success, as well as students' metacognitive awareness. She is part of the Writing Transfer Project, a multi-institutional team of researchers supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She is also currently undertaking a decade-long study of 13 student writers as they move through a variety of college writing tasks and into the workplace and beyond. She has published on writing transfer in a variety of venues, including Composition Forum, Across the Disciplines, Teaching and Learning Inquiry, and Writing Program Administration as well as in several edited collections.

Dana's second line of research draws upon her long-term work in writing centers and her passion for research methodology. This line of research seeks to support writing center practitioners (tutors and directors) in developing research that are replicable, agreeable, and data-supported (RAD). Her co-authored 2012 article "Theory, lore, and more: An analysis of RAD research in the Writing Center Journal, 1980-2009" won the International Writing Center Association's Outstanding Article award. Her work on this topic has appeared in the Writing Center Journal, among other venues.

In addition to Dana's scholarly pursuits, she has also served the field in a variety of ways. She currently serves as a co-editor of Writing Spaces, an open source textbook series for first-year composition courses. She has also served a three-year term as a member of the CCCC Executive Committee; prior to this, she served a three-year term as the CCCC Connected Community editor. She is a founding editorial board member of the Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy series with Southern Illinois University Press and has served as a founding editorial board of the Peer Review, an IWCA journal dedicated to sponsoring new authors. Additionally, she serves as an article reviewer for the Writing Center Journal, Writing Program Administration, CCC, Present Tense, and Composition Forum.

Dana is passionate about fostering student learning and in helping students build connections in their learning to real-world contexts. Dana won a 2019 Teaching Award for her work on ENGL 835: Research Design and the Craft of Writing. At her previous position as an associate professor at Oakland University, Dana won two teaching awards: the 2014 Excellence in Teaching award, given to one tenure-line faculty member a year, and a 2014 College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Engagement Award.

Course Specialties

Composition and Applied Linguistics Doctoral Program

Dana primarily teaches in the graduate programs in Composition and Applied Linguistics. The courses she teaches are:

ENGL 830: Teaching Writing
ENGL 835: Research Design and the Craft of Writing
ENGL 881: Research on Writing Centers and Writing Program Administration
ENGL 820: Quantitative Research

Masters in TESOL Program

ENGL 649: Introduction to Research for Applied Linguistics and TESOL

Liberal Studies English Program

ENGL 100: Basic Writing

Curriculum Vita: View Dana Driscoll's Vita (PDF)