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February 2013 To the Search Committee: Im writing to recommend Kati Lewis for the tenure-track position in English. I have worked extensively with Kati for the last two years, and I feel Im in a good position to speak to her strengths as a teacher, scholar, and colleague. Kati excels in all of these areas; her work at SLCC provides a very detailed and exciting brief for the kind of work the English Department would be able to expect should she be hired. Let me be specific. Kati is an active scholar in the fields of writing, ePortfolios, and activity-based and experiential learning. She has presented widely, both at conferences and as an invited speaker at many college campuses, on the General Education ePortfolio initiative still unfolding here at SLCC. I call her a scholar, because she has vigorously engaged with the existing literature and practice surrounding ePortfolios, but also has added to the larger conversation. She has been a tireless advocate for student portfolios as not only a evidentiary repository (the assessment perspective) but also as an expressive and flexible instrument for self-development and discursive identity. I have observed her work closely with individual students and faculty on their own ePortfolios. She is a responsive and thoughtful mentor in those settings. Since Ive presented with Kati on several occasions, I can also attest that her own perspectives change and develop, and that she brings to bear her training as a writer and her experience as a writing teacher as she helps others to understand the ePortfolio as, simply, writing, and thus susceptible to adaptation, invention, play, metacognition, and revision. This past summer and fall, Ive worked closely with Kati in co-developing an approach to English 2010 that draws from creative writing, as well as rhetoric/composition, practice, with the goal of giving students a wider battery of tools and practices as they approach their writing opportunities. The course is rich in a wide variety of texts, and encourages students to consider diverse media and modes as potential uptakes of the assignments. I found the experience of working on this course with Kati to be very rewarding. She brought a great deal to the collaboration, including ideas for supporting readings, innovative writing assignments, and approaches to teaching concepts that I hadnt considered. In other

 words, my work with Kati gave added strength to our revisiting of this most familiar of courses. I worked with Kati as a colleague who had a lot to bring to the project. Ive been in and out of Katis classrooms in various roles, but recently sat in on a whole class period at her invitation. What I observed was very impressive. Students working on a short memoir came to class prepared with notes from a brief field trip to SLCCs community garden. The idea was to work with the characteristic moves of a memoir: the scene-creation that gives a memoir immediacy, interspersed with reflection and musing. She drew on an excerpt from Terry Tempest Williams Finding Beauty in a Broken World, which the class had read. The class did what I would call guided opportunistic reading, in which the instructor helps the students to see certain features of the text (without implying that those features are all there are to see). In this case, Kati helped the classfully engaged in the readingto see the ways that Williams thematized the order-making of mosaic, which paralleled the order-making of a writer in assembling a text. Kati invited the class to think about the ways that they might do the same. I found the class session to be ambitious and well designed. She moved them through material they had prepared for discussion, writing exercises and prompts, more discussion, more writing, and by the end, the students had some very specific ways to engage with the writing assignment at hand. She was able to get students to think about the genre, the peripheries of any genre uptake that allow for invention and adaptation; habits of attention and engagement with the world that lead to richer, more specific writing; the ways that their own experiences connect with larger issues; and the ways that, at the level of the sentence, they could enact writing that would connect that experience and those issues with a reader. It was a class session full of ideas and energy, both from the instructor and from the students. I want to add that Kati has served the College and the English department in ways I havent outlined here. For instance, she participates with the creative writing faculty in working on the concerns of that program. She was more than helpful as we did a targeted assessment of the creative writing curriculum with respect to critical thinking. She participated in developing the assessment questions and the rubric, and set up the assessment session so that we could look at the ePortfolios of our target sections. She has also been an active participant in the Publication Centers activities, and serves on its Steering Committee. She also co-chairs this years Writing and Social Justice conference with Charlotte Howe. I have appreciated every opportunity Ive had to work with Kati Lewis. Ive worked with her in many settings, and have observed her in many more, and always, she is thoroughly professional, an excellent collaborator, and a wonderful colleague. She would be an ideal addition to the English Department, and I urge you to look carefully at her portfolio. I think youll find it as impressive as I do.

 Sincerely,

Lisa Bickmore Associate Professor, English Department Salt Lake Community College