General Education Featured Faculty

Maggie Frozena
Department of English

●  What General Education course(s) are you teaching? In what Element?

I teach ENG 101/R and ENG 102/R – both of these courses are our first year writing classes for incoming freshmen. ENG 101/R is a course that focuses on college writing and rhetoric and ENG 102/R focuses on doing college level research.

●  Why do you enjoy teaching in our General Education program?

I love working with new students. They are just starting their journey in college when I meet them, and I love being part of their earliest days on campus. I get the chance to know so many students and they teach me so much about writing and reading. They know so much and are so interesting. It is wonderful to work with each of my students, even if it is just for a short time. I treasure their words and their efforts.

●  As a faculty member, what is your role in teaching students in General Education courses?

In my courses, it is my job to convince my students that what they have to say matters and that folks on campus actually want to know and understand how they think. So often students come to class expecting that I am more interested in how they write, but in reality, the how is merely the means by which I begin to understand how they see the world. Writing is a spell they get to cast and language is the medium they use. I help them understand what sort of magic they want to work in our world, and how to get the spell to come out correctly. What matters most of all is what my students think and what they understand. We can all benefit from trying to articulate our ideas for ourselves and others. Therefore, reading student work is the most humbling and wonderful part of my job.

●  How do you facilitate connections with students in your General Education courses?

I try hard to be a sensitive listener to each of my students. I design classroom experiences to be interactive and allow students to flex different intellectual muscles to figure stuff out. For example, today we read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a start to our module on rhetorical analysis. Each student drew what they saw as they read the Allegory and then we all worked together to create a class drawing. From our combined drawing, we were able to name all of the elements and begin to figure out what Plato was trying to tell us about the world. Most students are embarrassed or ashamed to share their writing and drawing. But I try to remind everyone in my classes that we are all just a bunch of imperfect human beings in a room together– and our job is to work to understand each other and the world around us through reading and writing. They were put off by Plato at first, but once we started to work the spell, to use language to name unseeable ideas, my class was really engaged and excited. It was so shocking and reassuring to learn that many of the things we struggle with on a day to day basis, things like the pain and loss of knowing anything new, are things that human beings have struggled with for a very long time. 

Published on October 13, 2022