About the Awards

The McBride Teacher-Scholar Award honors Bill McBride, who taught for 45 years in Colorado schools, including Manzanola, Poudre and Fort Collins High Schools, and Colorado State University. Established when he retired in 1998, the endowment continues Bill’s legacy of ensuring quality English Language Arts teachers for secondary schools.

Thanks to the generous support of the McBride Endowment, the CSU English Education program is able to provide a limited number of awards to area teachers.

Eligible applicants should be employed, full- or part-time, as an English language arts teacher in a public school.

The Ruff Scholarship is a generous annual donation from Jim and Walta Ruff. This scholarship is awarded to students studying in the English department for up to six credits of graduate courses. Applicants must demonstrate how they will use the funds toward professional development or their degree.

Eligible applicants include individuals who are employed, full- or part-time, as an English language arts teacher in a public school, current undergraduate or graduate students who are within 30 credits of completing their degree and have financial need, or undergraduate or graduate students who will be student teaching in the fall or spring and in need of financial assistance to reduce the number of hours outside of student teaching that they would work to pay tuition.

We seek applicants with the desire to achieve any or all of the following goals:

• deepen and broaden their knowledge in areas relevant to their teaching
• critically engage with literacy studies, literary scholarship, academic and creative writing, and/or teacher inquiry
• revitalize their work with students, especially those from historically marginalized or underserved populations
• connect to a professional community with shared interests
• begin or continue a graduate degree in English

Because we seek to increase the diversity of our program, applicants who self-identify as members of marginalized populations are strongly encouraged to apply.

The award is effective starting Spring 2021 and covers tuition for one 3-credit, graduate-level English course at CSU. Candidates can reapply for future semesters. The application deadline is October 1.

Access information about graduate-level courses that might be especially interesting to you on our courses page.

We offer several graduate-level English Education courses in the late afternoons (starting at 4pm or later) once per week. Subject to change, some of these course offerings include:

Spring 2021

E 402: Teaching Composition

Thursdays, 4:30-7:20pm

Course Instructor: Kelly Burns

Writing is thinking made visible. There is public writing and private writing, and there is place in the world and in the classroom for both. The best writing teachers see themselves as writers. They understand the importance of not only knowing the what but also the why of their practice. They understand that there are various ways to approach both the teaching and process of writing, and they make informed pedagogical choices that suit their context. What about teaching writing? Process and product matter, and many times, we don’t bring a writing piece to full publication—does this still count as product? YES! Remember that writing, when taught as a process, is not simply a one shot product; instead, it is a complex reflection of a series of steps and metacognitive thinking opportunities that, when carefully woven together, help students create a piece of writing. It is our responsibility, as teachers of writing, to analyze the parts of the process that help students create writing pieces they are proud of, giving us a better insight into places where intervention can occur, thereby facilitating our students’ writing success.

E 503: Investigating Classroom Literacies 

Day TBD, Time 4:30-7:20pm

Course Instructor: TBD

Together, we will explore research methods and ethical issues in classroom-based inquiry using oral and written literacy practices. Students will design their own small-scale research projects (most often, teacher action research in their own classrooms) and learn about writing literature reviews, following a methodological approach, analyzing data, and reporting preliminary findings.

E 506A: Literature and History of British India

Thursdays, 4-6:50pm

Course Instructor: Dr. Philip Tsang

This course explores the complex history of British rule in the Indian subcontinent, roughly covering the period from 1857, when a large-scale rebellion forced the East India Company to cede control of the territory to the British government, to 1947, when British India was divided into two independent states: India and Pakistan. By examining major literary works (from both England and India) as well as a wide range of historical documents, we will investigate such issues as imperial governance, military power, global trade, cultural policy, education, religion, race, class, nationalism, gender, and sexuality. Authors may include: Edmund Burke, William Thackeray, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Toru Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Rudyard Kipling, Raja Rao, and Sara Suleri.

Fall 2021

(Applications for scholarships for this class will be open next year.)

E 402: Teaching Composition

Day TBD, Time 4:30-7:20pm

Course Instructor: Kelly Burns

Writing is thinking made visible. There is public writing and private writing, and there is place in the world and in the classroom for both. The best writing teachers see themselves as writers. They understand the importance of not only knowing the what but also the why of their practice. They understand that there are various ways to approach both the teaching and process of writing, and they make informed pedagogical choices that suit their context. What about teaching writing? Process and product matter, and many times, we don’t bring a writing piece to full publication—does this still count as product? YES! Remember that writing, when taught as a process, is not simply a one shot product; instead, it is a complex reflection of a series of steps and metacognitive thinking opportunities that, when carefully woven together, help students create a piece of writing. It is our responsibility, as teachers of writing, to analyze the parts of the process that help students create writing pieces they are proud of, giving us a better insight into places where intervention can occur, thereby facilitating our students’ writing success.

E 632:  Professional Concerns in English: Critical Approaches to Multicultural Young Adult Literature in the Classroom

Day TBD, Time 4:30-7:20pm

Course Instructor: Ricki Ginsberg

This course has two overarching objectives: a) to think about strategies for overcoming perceived challenges to the instruction of multicultural and/or young adult literature and b) to study and develop our own critical approaches for instruction. We will extend beyond traditional critical theoretical approaches and contextualize pedagogical approaches in community-based and student-centered ways. As is the philosophy of this course, all assessments will include a significant amount of choice for students to center the course content into their own goals and practices. Students from all perspectives are encouraged to enroll, including those who intend to teach or currently teach at the secondary or college level and/or those who are interested in thinking deeply about the opportunities that come with the inclusion of multicultural young adult literature in schools and colleges.