Patricia English-SchneiderFaculty

I arrived on the Gustavus Adolphus Campus in the Fall 0f 2002 excited about teaching at the college one of my friends from High School attended. She constantly talked about the "community" of Gustavus and the wonderful professors she had the opportunity to work with. That was 18 years ago and my friend was right. I have loved my time here working with excellent faculty and students. My teaching has much improved, I hope, since then due to the opportunity to work in a place that truly values teaching, mentorship and community. I am constantly reflecting on my teaching with colleagues and students to make my classroom the best it can be. I try to meet my students where they are and to get them to appeal to their own uniqueness and interests rather than comparing themselves to others. Given that I have a great deal of continuity with students and alumni, this endeavor has been possible and very rewarding. I have taught a wide variety of courses in the Department of Communication, in GWSS, and over the Interim Experience in January. My colleague, Phillip Voight, and I teach the course, "War, Memory and Identity in Cambodia and Vietnam". It is such a thrill to see a place I have traveled to in the past in a new way through the students eyes. In the classroom, I make every effort to inform my teaching with current scholarship. My research relates to the  intersections between performance, intercultural adaptation, collective and individual memory, and identity. Specifically, I focus on the lived experience of identity through a performative lens. My latest article, "Reading Raymond Carver: The Before and After", chronicles how the experience of recovery from addiction reconstitutes identity through the engagement of new ways of performing play and work. In May 2023, my edited volume, Narrative and Grief: Autoethnographies of Loss, was published by Lexington Books. The book chronicles the experiences of grief through personal stories. 

I look forward to teaching new courses and getting to know students on a personal level in classes and through advising. 

Courses Taught