Kelly Ritter may not be teaching any classes right now, but she’s taken on a key role rethinking how students learn at Illinois. The English professor and current director of the Department of English’s Undergraduate Rhetoric Program has joined the Office of the Provost, helping to expand a new interdisciplinary course initiative in general education.
Following a campuswide call for applications, Vice Provost Charles Tucker III appointed Ritter as provost fellow. Since January 1, she has been working alongside Lauren Goodlad, professor of English and criticism and interpretive theory, who has held the fellow position for the past three years. Ritter will take over most of Goodlad’s duties at the end of the spring semester (Goodlad will be helping Ritter with select parts of the pilot, including new experimental collaborative courses called Critical Framings Modules.)
“I can’t think of anyone who is better able to grow what we’ve started,” Goodlad said. “Kelly has enormous energy and know-how. It’s a wonderful relief for me to be handing this over to somebody who has such extraordinary capacities.”
The Provost Fellows Program aims to appoint select tenured faculty who want to develop their leadership skills and participate in mentoring and administrative activities at a campuswide level. Ritter’s position will focus on undergraduate education; first and foremost, she will take charge of the recently implemented Grand Challenge Learning program, which kicked off in Fall 2015 with six brand new interdisciplinary courses for first-year students. It has continued into the spring semester with more than 20 additional courses.
As provost fellow, Ritter’s role in the Grand Challenge program is to maintain relationships and communication regarding general education across all colleges on campus. She will recruit faculty to teach the courses, and inform department heads, advisors and others about the program’s benefits to students.
Ritter describes the Grand Challenge program as a fresh take on general education that allows first-year students to fulfill their core requirements in an alternative, more hands-on fashion within smaller, interdisciplinary classes. For instance, a current course, Fictions of Sustainability, taught by English Professor Jamie Jones, combines literature and environmental sciences by teaching students about food, water and energy systems through selected novels that deal with human experiences of sustainability.
Ritter explained that these unique courses provide an alternative to the larger-scale lectures that characterize many general education courses. They also provide interdisciplinary perspectives on general education, in contrast to single-subject course offerings.
“I would like for people to look at the Grand Challenges courses and say, ‘I’m not restricted by current models of how we’ve done things in the past,’” Ritter said. “I want to show how we can take general education and change it from a perceived responsibility or a burden [for students and faculty] to an opportunity.”
Ritter, who came to Illinois in 2013, said her work in the Department of English’s Undergrad Rhetoric Program has made her knowledgeable of the types of concerns that students have regarding general education, and she expects her two positions—she will remain director of the Undergrad Rhetoric Program in addition to taking on the provost fellow position—to go hand-in-hand, especially since she believes rhetoric to be the core of general education.
“To me, writing is at the foundation of everything you have to learn,” Ritter said. “At some point you have to digest what you’ve learned. You’ll have to think it through, and to do so, you’re either going to talk it through or you’re going to write it through.”
