Snapshot

Nicholas Preus, Associate Professor of English and Education, is one of our many close links to other departments.  He draws on his former life as a high school teacher in courses on pedagogical methods and ethical issues in education, but he also teaches Victorian literature, novels, and poetry.  Nick has a BA from Luther and a PhD from the U of Wisconsin-Madison.  His latest literary interest is studying how insights from evolutionary psychology help us re-see literary texts, particularly Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  A highly skilled woodworker, he builds beautiful furniture and makes a great artisanal beer. 

Research Interests

Teaching in both the English and education departments allows me to keep up my research interests in both fields and even to be involved with students' practical experiences as they go out into the area schools to become teachers of English. Currently, I am working on an article on Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century novelist, focusing on the cultural and political construction of manners in the Palliser novels. This research stems from my dissertation on the British novel of manners. I have also recently published a chapter in Teaching Academic Literacy dealing with the kinds of adjustments beginning college writers make as they move from high school to college. I am including a brief excerpt from that chapter below.

Thoughts on Teaching

Teaching is a conversation, as Mike Rose suggests, and what teachers do is provide students with access to the language, ideas, and issues that make up the world in which we live. It is important, therefore, that young people become knowledgeable and competent participants in that conversation so that they acquire the power to shape a just and sustainable future.  View Nick Preus's spotlight video about teaching and learning.

Writing Sample

Introduction: "The Legacy of Schooling: Secondary School Composition and the Beginning College Writer."

In this chapter, I attempt to extend our understanding of the legacy of schooling by analyzing the responses of students to protocols and interview questions during a paper-writing assignment. I gathered the data from my section of English 101, a basic writing course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These data revealed not only the components of a legacy of schooling, but also students' efforts to move beyond them to new understandings. The writing strategies identified here arise from a still common, highly validated practice in secondary schools, even in the post-process writing era. This practice is not limited to the schools, however; colleges also inadvertently, sometimes explicitly, underwrite the strategies enacted by students such as these.

Analysis of students responses for this study revealed the presence of three powerful constituents of the legacy of schooling: the demand for quantification, the deployment of the generalizing commonplace, and the insistence on a distinction between opinion and material that can be evaluated as either right or wrong. These are components of the standard repertoire on which many first-year college writers, and especially basic writers rely.