Wellesley College Writing Program: Faculty

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer's estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality.
-Annie Dillard

Writing Program Faculty

Esther Iwanaga
Lecturer
FND 35, Extension 2480
eiwanaga@wellesley.edu

web site

My principal role in the Writing Program is to serve students who speak English as an additional language. Currently I fulfill it in two ways: by offering a fall semester section of Writing 125 reserved for ESL students and by providing individual tutoring in the PLTC. In the spring, my Writing 125 course is open to all students, ESL and native speaker, and the topic alternates between “Writing about the Viet Nam War” and “Defining Asian American Literature”— a combined course that also counts as American Studies 125.

Whether I’m teaching an ESL or native speaker section, however, my goals for students remain the same--to help them to recognize that good writing is necessarily messy writing; to revise fearlessly; to take risks rather than offering up neat, pat answers; to value writing as a way of thinking; to learn that writing can be a source of pleasure as well as discovery. My ESL courses are not simplified, grammar-focused versions of the native speaker sections. In fact, one would be hard pressed to detect differences between the two.

Languages have always fascinated me. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in French language and literature and I’ve also studied German, Spanish, and Latin. To retool for another career after the birth of my son, I completed a master’s degree in Bilingual/ESL studies, still focusing on language, but this time with the added desire to help outsiders—newcomers to this country or to the academy—become successful.

I’m also passionate about such topics as the Viet Nam conflict, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the marginalization of minority/subaltern voices, the eternal estrangement of Asian Americans, the feeling of being an outsider, wondering where one belongs. These concerns, linguistic, socio-political, and personal, come together in the courses I offer. All are literature-based because, on top of everything else, I love fiction. These concerns, linguistic, socio-political, and personal, inform the courses I offer.

I have co-edited an anthology of Asian American literature, Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing (Rutgers UP, 2001).

For more, see my webpage at: http://www.wellesley.edu/Writing/esther

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Lynne Viti and Wini Wood
Wellesley College Writing Program
Created by: Karyn Lu '01
Date Created: June 29, 2000
Date Modified: August 4, 2008
Expires: July 31, 2009