Esther Boucher-Yip has taught in various capacities in many parts of the world including Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, China, Laos, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She has taught communication skills and writing courses at university level for over a decade. Her teaching approach is informed by her own experience in language learning and with theories of second language acquisition and their pedagogical applications. Both her studies and her experience have taught her that there is no one method or idea that guarantees successful language learning. ... View Profile
Chrysanthe Demetry
Associate Professor
Director, Morgan Teaching and Learning Center
Co-Director, Camp Reach
Co-Director, Professional Writing Program
Email: cdemetry@wpi.edu
Office: Gordon Library 302
Phone: 508-831-5195
As a college professor, I have the opportunity not only to excite students about my field of materials science and engineering, but to help them develop holistically as critical thinkers, lifelong learners, innovators, and effective and ethical communicators during an important formative period in their personal and professional lives. I was an undergraduate at WPI and really valued the project-based learning, the Global Projects Program, and the extent of contact I had with my professors. Those same values drew me back to WPI as a faculty member. View Profile
Jennifer deWinter has long been interested in how culture (which is local) moves internationally. She has spent a number of years analyzing anime, comics, and computer games as part of global media flows in order to understand how concepts such as "art," "culture," and "entertainment" are negotiated. In 2003, Professor deWinter joined the Learning Games Initiative, a group of scholars and game designers dedicated to the general study of games and the use of games to teach concepts and skills in particular. ... View Profile
Brenton Faber studies medical writing and the human factors that influence medical diagnosis, treatment, and patient care. He is a practicing paramedic who volunteers with a rural ambulance squad and at a free urban clinic. I am currently interested in the concept of "allostasis" and "allostatic load." The terms have been used to describe a continued activation of the body’s neural, neuroendocrine, and immune systems as an adaptive response to prolonged stress. ... View Profile
My field is rhetoric, and I teach writing as a form of inquiry and problem solving. One challenge in my teaching is to get students to see writing that way. It is not simply window dressing for ideas they already have; writing is a way to create and test ideas, to engage in a dialogue with a community of readers who need to know what they have to say and will likely have something to say back. Some students approach their first college writing assignment as an exercise in demonstrating they can quote from expert sources, organize paragraphs, and punctuate sentences. ... View Profile
My primary focus is technical and professional writing. However, I also teach general writing courses that are less technical in nature. Having spent over 20 years in industry as a professional writer, I tend to think about how I can help students become stronger writers in the workplace. I also believe that, in becoming stronger writers, students should enjoy the process. So I try to structure my classes in a way that allows students to improve their writing skills while writing about topics that interest them. As a professor of practice, I believe in learning by doing. ... View Profile
Ryan Smith Madan
Associate Teaching Professor
Director, Writing Center
Email: ryanmadan@wpi.edu
Office: Salisbury Labs 002
Phone: 508-831-6561
When new acquaintances find out I teach writing, it’s not unusual for them to lament a broad decline in the nation’s writing skills. How does it make me feel, they ask, that students, say, don’t know the difference between adjectives and adverbs? Or, can I believe it that people hardly even know what apostrophes do, let alone where to put them? As someone who treasures good, careful prose, I’m sympathetic to these worries. But as an educator, I think it’s important to steer the conversation in a different direction. ... View Profile
Ruth L. Smith
Associate Professor
Email: rsmith@wpi.edu
Office: Salisbury Labs 108
Phone: 508-831-5385, 508-831-5246, 508-831-5214
Ruth Smith works in the Philosophy and Religion group in the Humanities and Arts Department at WPI, and is also affiliated with Rhetoric and Writing programs. Interests in linguistics have shaped her attention to moral theories and practices as questions of grammar, taken as how we make ways around in the stream of life, yes, fragments of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. Smith’s courses include Questions of Evil and Good, Rhetorical Theory, and Religions of the East. ... View Profile
Associated Faculty
Since arriving at WPI in 1990, I have framed my role in the classroom as helping technically-minded students to become more cognizant and mindful of the complex human and behavioral dimensions of life in organizations. I have done this in a variety of ways from experiential exercises to digital storytelling to classroom-as-organization designs. ... View Profile
Angel A. Rivera
Associate Professor
Email: arivera@wpi.edu
Office: Salisbury Labs 016
Phone: 508-831-5779
Professor Rivera has been conducting research on 19th- and 20th-century Spanish Caribbean literature and theories related to the exploration of limits or borders (i.e., the edges or places where multiple cultures touch or come into contact). He has been exploring how Caribbean traditional modes of representation have been restructured to significant changes in cultural, literary, and historical contexts. ... View Profile
Scott P. Runstrom
Adjunct Instructor
Email: runstrom@wpi.edu
Office: Salisbury Labs 106
Phone: 508-831-5436
I am a graduate of the Professional Writing program at WPI, and have over 20 years experience in the technical communications industry. I am currently employed full-time as a Principal Technical Writer at MathWorks in Natick. I have been teaching technical and professional writing at WPI since 2000. I love technical writing because it combines two of my passions, writing and technology, and when done well, enables you to communicate complex technical information to the world. ... View Profile