Every year during Convocation, UW-Platteville highlights the excellence of its faculty and staff through UW-Platteville and Universities of Wisconsin awards. These honors recognize those who exemplify dedication in their work. This year, we’re going beyond titles and achievements, bringing forward the personal stories of those who shape our campus and community.
Thomas Pitcher, senior lecturer with the Department of Humanities, has been selected as a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow. The Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars (WTFS) program offers UW faculty and teaching academic staff a unique opportunity to collaborate with other exceptional teachers from across the Universities of Wisconsin and from various disciplines.
Q: For those who don’t know, what does your work involve with the Department of Humanities?
I'm a senior lecturer in the English program. In my role, I primarily teach college writing classes, but I also serve on the Rhetoric and Composition Committee. The committee assesses our college writing program, develops prompts to determine placement of students into College Writing I or II and reads the essays that students write for placement. We also collaborate with Katie Kalish, the director of First Year Writing, to create professional development opportunities for our colleagues.
Q: What do you bring to this role that others may not see?
It's not much of a secret that I'm an avid table-top role player, but I don't think most people know how that informs my scenario-based writing assignments. I think there's a lot of similarities between prepping and running roleplaying games and prepping and running a class. Both involve a lot of flexible planning that must respond to the people you are running the game for or teaching, because you can't always predict what they'll bring to the table. That's what's fun and challenging about both role-playing games and teaching; in both cases, you do your best work when it feels like collaborative play rather than a script you wrote that you are trying to force others to follow. When things go wrong in both cases, you do the same thing: you improvise, you start over, you come to the next session with an idea about how to collaborate with your group to make things interesting and worth the time.
Q: How long have you held this position?
I think I've been a senior lecturer for about five years now. I've been teaching for 12 years in my role as a composition teacher.
Q: Tell me about your project/work for the Wisconsin Teaching Scholar.
I am excited to be working with the UW-Platteville delegation to Faculty College to develop a study of UW-Platteville students' literacy with Large Language Models. Our team, which represents faculty from across the university, is planning on submitting a proposal to survey students on their understanding, which is a first step to deciding how instructors should approach the topic in their respective classes. I haven't narrowed down what I want to do for my personal project, but I'm very inclined to collaborate with colleagues in a similar way.
Q: Where were you born and raised?
Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin.
Q: What is your favorite book and why?
Usually, it's the last book I enjoyed. Recently that would be Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. If I had to choose one of them, it would be Wizard and Glass because it's a great mashup of Western, Sci-fi, and Fantasy genres. It's a fun story and has some great world building and a variety of archetypes to draw on for my own table-top role-playing games.
Q: What is your favorite movie and why?
Star Wars VI, the Return of the Jedi. I have a lot of nostalgic appreciation for it from a childhood spent rewatching the original series (IV, V and VI) multiple times, and I appreciate how it's about trusting your heart, being confident in the goodness of others (and yourself) and the possibility of redemption. There are also some pretty cool light saber duels, space battles and militant teddy bears. What's not to like?
Q: What do you like to do in your spare time?
I like to play role playing games with my friends, worldbuild for those games, spend time in nature with my dog and my wife and lose myself in a story whether in company or alone.
Q: If you weren’t a teacher, what career path do you think you might have pursued instead, and why?
I think I would have become a therapist. Psychology has been an interest of mine since high school and helping people navigate their mental health seems like a rewarding vocation. Though I can be a bit of a talker, I also like to listen and understand people, so I'd probably be at home in that role too. I might have taken that path if I had more of a growth mindset in high school and believed that I could succeed in a probability and statistics class.