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 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 2019, 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; and Theories of Writing and Embodiment.  She is currently enrolled in courses on Pedagogies of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (taught by Maren Oberman) and Queer, Crip, and Disability Pedagogies (taught by Melanie Yergeau).

Adelay is in her fifth semester of teaching for the University of Michigan's English Department Writing Program.  She is currently teaching English 125: Writing & Academic Inquiry.  In the fall of 2018, she also taught English 225: Academic Argumentation.