Charles Bazerman of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School has been awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa – the highest distinction granted by the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. The National University of Entre Ríos, the National University of Río Cuarto, and the National University of Villa María in Argentina share in giving Dr. Bazerman this honor. The National University of Córdoba presents the award to honor Bazerman’s outstanding and prestigious academic and scientific career internationally, his studies and research and the valuable contributions to the field, as well as the significant contributions made to their university.
Bazerman will receive the honor at a ceremony to be held on October 19th. This ceremony precedes the International Congress Reading and Writing in Higher Education at which Bazerman will present the invited talk “Writing across the Curriculum: Experiences, Perspectives and Challenges for Teaching and Research.”
Charles Bazerman is a Professor in the Department of Education. His commitment to literacy and the teaching of writing started almost fifty years ago when he was teaching first and third grade in inner-city Brooklyn. Then he saw concretely how learning to read and write changed the dispositions and bearing of individual children, made possible a successful relationship to schooling, and improved life chances. A few years later, when he began teaching at City University of New York during the early years of open admissions, he found professional satisfaction in helping students enter into the literate discussion of the university. His research and pedagogic interests started from the teaching of writing to encompass the ways we make use of reading in our writing and then the ways in which academic writing is organized around the literatures of the several disciplines.
His book Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science examines the history and current forms of scientific research writing. In The Languages of Edison’s Light he examines how technical discourses and projects intersect with many other discourses of civic, economic, and cultural life. His recent volumes A Rhetoric of Literate Action and A Theory of Literate Action put together his understanding of writing developed over many years. Other books and articles consider aspects of academic and professional writing, writing across the curriculum, the role of writing in social organization, the lifespan development of writing skills, and the relation between writing and cognitive development.
He has also written many textbooks for teaching university reading and writing and the relation between them. He has edited the Handbook of Research on Writing and numerous other research collections and series. He has been Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and is founder and chair of the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research.