Kathryn Alexander is putting a positive spin on moving away from her close-knit family and friends in her native Vancouver.
“When you’re an academic, you have national colleagues,” she explains. “Many of them have ended up in southwestern Ontario…I’m alone here but I’m not alone. I have this group of people who care about me.”
The newest faculty member in The University of Western Ontario’s Writing, Rhetoric and Professional Communication program says the chance to be a part of the program was a “tremendous opportunity.”
“In Canada, there is a new resurgence of developing the area of writing studies and Western has positioned itself to be a leader in that,” she says.
Alexander specializes in teaching writing studies. The premise of this stream is all about writing being taught according to the structures of the field being written about. For example, the writing of an organic chemistry student would develop once the student is taught the essence of chemistry.
“Many students love a particular subject but can’t crack the code,” she says.
In an attempt to fix the problem, Alexander created writing-intensive workshops for faculty at Simon Fraser University, where she had earned both her MA and PhD in writing. She designed workshops there to help instructors learn how to engage students in what they were learning. Her courses were taught across a wide range of fields – from dance to inorganic chemistry.
Kathleen Fraser, acting director of the writing program at Western, is impressed by Alexander’s ability to reach out to different departments and faculties.
“Although Dr. Alexander has only been here for a couple of months, she is…. making links to the scientific and medical communities at Western, already delivering a lecture to a core course in Health Sciences,” Fraser says.
Alexander never saw herself as university-bound.
After high school, she began working in corporate communications. But when Alexander was 28, her mother’s death led her to reconsider where her life was going.
“(There’s always been) a value in my family that you follow your deep interest,” she says.
Her passion for writing led her to enroll in the writing program at the now defunct David Thompson University in Nelson, B.C. There, Alexander crossed paths with some of Canada’s cultural icons, such as Alice Munro. It was also there that she met her husband, Michael.
Alexander recalls how her husband’s jazz band found a fan base at The Bagel Street Café, a Port Moody coffee shop just down the road from the housing co-op in which she lived for 10 years.
“I used to just marvel,” Alexander recalls. “There would be people from eight months to 80 (years old) there … It was a really rich experience … (It showed) how powerful communities are.”
Alexander says the experience also demonstrates how important it is to cultivate your obsessions.
“You look at what moves you in the world. Do you foreclose on something or do you explore it?”
It was in 2002 when Alexander chose to explore an occurrence that ended up being a prominent point in her career.
Alexander was working at Simon Fraser’s Centre for Writing-Intensive Learning and noticed that people slowly stopped referring to her as “Dr.” Over the course of the year, students also began to refer to Alexander and the rest of the all-female staff at CWIL by their first names or as “the writing ladies.”
Her exploration of this occurrence and how it devalued their academic accomplishments received an overwhelmingly positive response from Alexander’s fellow faculty and staff.
“We’re researchers, we’re PhDs; we’re exemplary in our fields …. We’re not writing ladies,” she says.
It’s only one example of how central a role academia plays in Alexander’s life.
“When you look back over your life you see that you’re always developing … There’s never an endpoint. I think that’s really powerful and that’s something I work for in the way that I approach my teaching and my career and, fortunately, I’ve chosen a career where you’re never done,” she says.
Factbox:
Childhood nickname: “Kicks”
Recent movie seen: Fugitive Pieces
Latest kitchen creation: Mediterranean ratatouille
Favourite London spot: Covent Garden Market
Just read: Christopher Dewdney’s Soul of the World
The writer is a graduate student in Journalism. This feature profiles faculty members hired over the past two years.