Introducing Jackie Kauza
Jackie Kauza joined the Sweetland Center for Writing in Fall 2025—or perhaps rejoined the Sweetland Center for Writing would be more accurate. Jackie first worked for Sweetland as a peer writing consultant while earning her B.A.s in English and Anthropological Archaeology at the University of Michigan. After graduating from U-M in 2011, Jackie earned an M.A. in Written Communication from Eastern Michigan University and Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy from the Ohio State University. Jackie tries not to let the cognitive dissonance of being both a U-M and OSU grad get her down.
Jackie’s scholarly interests include writing center theory and practice, composition pedagogy, and Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines (WAC/WID). Her research explores how instructors across the disciplines use writing to help students cultivate field-specific values and habits of mind. She serves as chair of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum’s Mentoring Committee and as chair of the East Central Writing Center Association’s Outreach Committee. She was also a member of the two teams that created and launched the WAC Repository, hosted through the WAC Clearinghouse, and the ECWCA Journal, on which she continues to work as a Mentoring Editor.
As a teacher, Jackie loves designing courses that incorporate a mix of traditional writing and multimodal design. She also loves working with new and experienced educators to help them develop their pedagogical craft and incorporate best practices for writing instruction into their classrooms. She draws on genre theory and transfer theory to inform her own pedagogy. Outside of academia, Jackie is a lover of travel who has visited all 50 U.S. states and over 50 countries. When she is not traveling, look for her haunting the nearest Panera, as she insists she is able to get more work done there than anywhere else. When not overseas or at Panera, you can find her reading, sketching, watching The Lord of the Rings for the trillionth time, playing Dungeons and Dragons, or looking for more model dinosaurs to add to her already robust collection.
Introducing Sunshine Passwater
Sunshine Passwater holds a PhD in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric from Syracuse University and has long standing commitments to justice-focused pedagogy and research. Sunshine has been plugging into the local community as they and their dog, Sammy, transition to living in southeastern Michigan, joining local community choirs, hosting board game events, volunteering at warming shelters, and making connections with ongoing community organizing projects that they hope to bring to bear in their teaching and work for Sweetland.
As a new lecturer III at the Sweetland Center for Writing, Dr. Sunshine Passwater spent their fall teaching Writing 200 and 201, focusing their teaching on topics of community organizing and activism, game design, and multimodal theories of making meaning. In each of these classes, they developed teaching methods for providing experiential, active, student-led pedagogy. Sunshine has also been working with the Minor in Writing committee and assisted with supporting fellows in the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative.
Outside of the classroom, Sunshine has sent off poetry for publication, started a collection of essays, and continued working on a novel; additionally, they have submitted research papers to conferences and started a new research project they are hoping to work on in the winter semester. Across all of their projects, themes emerge of asking how queer people’s lived experiences allow us to name history as a rhetorical force shaping the available means, and to relate to that force differently to imagine new futures together.
