2 December 2018

To the English Department:

I’ve had the great pleasure and good fortune of working closely with Professor Kati Lewis
throughout her years at SLCC, first in her role as ePortfolio Coordinator, and then when she was
hired as a full-time faculty member within the English Department. During that period, I’ve had
the chance to present at local, regional, and national meetings; redesigned curriculum;
observed and given feedback on her teaching; and collaborated with her in any number of
ways. Because I have worked closely with Kati, I can attest to the ways that she has always
conceived her work as faculty work—teaching, certainly, but also assessment, professional
development, and service above and beyond the limits of her job description(s).

SLCC was lucky to have Kati as the first ePortfolio coordinator, since the way she took up the
position elevated and articulated the necessary bridge between classroom practice—
pedagogy—and the ePortfolio. This work—embodied in her teaching practice and her work
with faculty—was continuous with her leadership on defining and promoting high impact
practices. At this remove, it might be tempting to gloss over the challenge of laying this crucial
groundwork, but we shouldn’t—ePortfolio at SLCC was built bit by bit, and many of those bits
were carefully, thoughtfully, and knowledgeably put into place by Kati Lewis, as she worked
closely with faculty members, collaborated on signature assignments, and tirelessly developed
the many mediums and modes that allow students to digitally present their work that have
become a hallmark of SLCC’s ePortfolio program.

When I think of Kati’s work here at SLCC, though, I think most of the experience she and I had,
rethinking the ways we approached English 2010, before she became a full-time faculty
member in the English Department. Our work together stemmed from a comment Stephen
Ruffus had made: he noted how we think of student writers as exhibiting authorship when they
write in imaginative writing settings, but that we typically imagine student writers differently in
our composition courses. Kati and I talked about how we might reimagine some of the writing
practices in the composition course, to encourage students to try things, to use imaginative
writing strategies to invent, develop, and revise their work in the composition course. The set
of prompts we developed to do this, in an ongoing ‘side-writing’ practice called the notebook,
has remained a feature of my 2010 course, and I have built it into subsequent redesigns carried
out with eLearning, including the Online Plus redesign, and the most recent redesign Benjamin
Solomon and I did of course’s online and face-to-face Canvas shell. It’s durable curriculum, in
other words, which invites students to range widely and experiment as writers, and it bears the
mark of Kati’s fearlessness and inventiveness as a teacher and as a faculty member.

What I’ve said above doesn’t cover the half of what Kati is and has done as an educator at SLCC,
but I hope that it points to the ways that Kati’s accomplishments, her commitments, and her
contributions speak to how she identifies professionally, which is as a faculty member. I can
attest that her years of experience at SLCC amply demonstrate her strengths, promise, and
achievements as a teacher, as a scholar, and as a member of the academic community, and that
these years of experience are equivalent, in terms of effort and range of accomplishments, to
those of a tenure-track faculty member. I warmly support her application for early tenure, and
recommend that the department likewise offer its support.

Many thanks,

Lisa Bickmore
English