Position Title
Associate Professor
Research Areas:
Teaching Areas:
Biography:
Trish Serviss discovered her passion for writing education as an undergraduate writing tutor herself, an experience that propelled her entire career trajectory as first a high school English teacher and then university writing teacher and researcher. Ongoing research projects focus on: 1) the impacts of College Completion and Acceleration movements (legislation like AB705, AB1111, and the revision of the California Master Plan for Higher Education) on postsecondary writing education, 2) impacts of dual enrollment college writing courses and programming in California, 3) FYW syllabi as student genre via corpus study of syllabi to understand how grading is presented to student users, 4) partnering with trained undergraduate student researchers to learn more about California college students in their writing education after Acceleration via focus groups and interviews, etc. 5) genre conventions of effective CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) court reports and training interventions to bolster effectiveness.
Recent graduate student mentees: Jenn Burke Reifman and Stacy Wittstock
Education:
PhD, Syracuse University, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric
MA, Loyola Marymount University, English with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition
BA, University of San Diego, English and Anthropology
Some Publications:
Burke Reifman, Jennifer, Melzer, Dan, Pearsall, Beth, Serviss, Tricia, and Wittstock, Stacy. “A Constructivist Paradigm for Writing Placement: Moving Beyond DSP.” College Composition and Communication. February 2025 issue.
Serviss, Tricia, Burke Reifman, Jennifer, and Meghan Sweeney. Time as a Wicked Problem: A Study of Community College Faculty Experiences with State-Mandated Acceleration. Journal of Basic Writing. 43.1 2024: 24-57.
Voss, Julia, Tricia Serviss, and Meghan Sweeney. “A Heuristic to Promote Inclusive and Equitable Teaching in Writing Programs” WPA: Writing Program Administration. 44.2. 2021: 13-39.
Serviss, Tricia and Julia Voss. "Researching Writing Program Administration Expertise in Action: A Case Study of Collaborative Problem-Solving as Transdisciplinary Practice.” College Composition and Communication. February 2019.
Serviss, Tricia and Sandra Jamieson, Editors. Points of Departure: Rethinking Student Source Use and Writing Studies Research Methods. Utah State University Press. 2017. 266 pages.
Serviss, Tricia. “Creating Faculty Development Programming to Prevent Plagiarism: Three Approaches.” Handbook of Academic Integrity. Edited by Tracey Bretag. Springer Publications. 2016
Serviss, Tricia. “Using citation analysis heuristics to prepare TAs across the disciplines as teachers and writers.” [Special issue on TAs and the teaching of writing across the curriculum]. Across the Disciplines, 13(3). September 2016.
Serviss, Tricia. “Learning to Write Against the Law: Community-based Learning and Notions of Justice.” Peace and Social Justice Education on Campus: Faculty and Student Perspectives. Edited by Kelly Concannon Mannise and Laura L. Finley. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2015, 113-132.
Serviss, Tricia. “American Rhetorics of Disappearance: Translocal Study of Feminist Activist Rhetorics in Latin America.” Crossing Borders/Drawing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines Across America. Edited by Patricia Wojahn and Barbara Couture. Utah State University Press, Rhetoric and Composition Series. 2015
Serviss, Tricia. “Femicide and Rhetorics of Coadyuvante in Ciudad Juarez: Valuing Rhetorical Traditions in the Americas.” College English 75.6 (2013).
Serviss, Tricia. “The Emergent Life and Times of the Community Writing Center of Auburn: Developing Scholarship in Action at Auburn University.” Scholarship in Action: Communities, Leaders and Citizens. Edited by Giovanna Summerfield, Kathleen Hale, and Barbara Baker. Common Ground Publishing, 2013.
Serviss, Tricia. “A History of the New York Literacy Tests: Historicizing calls to localism in writing assessment.” Assessing Writing 17 (2012) 208–227.
Howard, Rebecca Moore, Tricia Serviss, and Tanya Rodrigue. “Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences.” Writing and Pedagogy 2.2 (2010): 177-192.
- Developmental writing, academic source use, writing placement & assessment, feminist rhetorical practices, writing program design and administration,
- hybrid research methods.