Adelay Witherite

Adelay’s interests in critical pedagogy and cross-cultural communication extend from her experiences as an EFL teacher, program coordinator, and teacher educator in South Korea. In the Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s M.A. TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) program, she discovered her passions for rhetoric, composition, social justice, and writing center tutoring: all of which became cornerstones of her qualitative research thesis.  Adelay returned to the United States in 2017 to pursue graduate studies in the University of Michigan's Joint Ph.D. Program in English and Education.  Her current research interests include:

• students' perceptions of campus and classroom in/accessibility,
• identifying and avoiding counterproductive rhetorical strategies in social justice-oriented arguments, and
• composition educators' methods for facilitating critical discussions of sociocultural issues.

As of the fall semester of 2020, Adelay has completed coursework in Critical Discourse Analysis; Discourse & Rhetoric; Digital Rhetorics; Organizing for Learning [in Institutes of Higher Education]; Disability Studies; Queer Ecologies; Creative Nonfiction; Theories of Writing and Embodiment; Pedagogies of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and Queer, Crip, and Disability Pedagogies.  She is currently enrolled in a Qualitative Research Methods course taught by Dr. Michelle J. Bellino while preparing her dissertation prospectus with the mentorship of Dr. Megan Sweeney.

Adelay is in her sixth semester of teaching for the University of Michigan's English Department Writing Program.  She is currently teaching her second section of English 225: Academic Argumentation; she has previously taught four sections of English 125: Writing & Academic Inquiry.