Bryan Partridge, Ph.D.

Teaching philosophy:

My teaching philosophy has always consisted of challenging students to find their own literary voice.  I want students to actively participate in their education, rather that sit back and passively learn. As an avid reader of Edward Abbey's work, I find myself relating his message in Desert Solitaire about Industrial Tourism threatening our national parks to my job as a professor.  With regards to the increasing number of tourists, Abbey stated, "They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while".  It is my goal to give students the tools to help explore the "treasures" of their literary voice and encourage them to take an active role in the writing process.

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Bryan Partridge is pursuing a Ph.D. in Humanities and is focusing his research on the role that instant messaging plays in the writing and social skills of college students and has started a novel on the subject. He is working on a number of scholarly essays on the evolution of the English language. His poetry has been published in the Henniker Review and several fictional essays have been published online. He is currently seeking to publish two novels in addition to a collection of short stories that were drawn from his work with a child with Asperger’s syndrome.