English Professional Studies
Kuyper College’s English Professional Studies major is distinctive in that we recognize that the skills learned while earning an English degree prepare students for diverse professional/vocational settings. To that end, Kuyper College’s English Professional Studies major is a praxis-oriented major, requiring our students to complete internships consistent with their career goals.
Upon completion of the English Professional Studies program, students will be able to:
- Employ conscious and sophisticated stylistic choices which demonstrate knowledge of standard English grammar and linguistics
- Assess and evaluate audience requirements in spoken and written formats
- Utilize creative and imaginative communication techniques
- Critically reason through tasks and challenges logically and creatively
- Proofread and edit for quality and clarity
- Identify appropriate research requirements and use information to enhance projects
- Demonstrate how to read literature for thematic meaning, analyzing what each piece says about us and the people of God’s world
- Analyze literature by genre, showing specifically how each genre imparts meaning
- Use primary and secondary research to advance complex arguments about literature
Students will choose a career track for their studies from Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), writing, or editing. English majors will develop competence in skills required in many different vocational settings, including communication, interpersonal skills, critical thinking and analytical skills, creativity and imagination, and incorporation and expression of a biblical, Christian worldview.
Dr. Lisa Bouma Garvelink began at Kuyper in the fall of 2005, after finishing her Ph.D. in American literature and a one-year doctoral fellowship that funded archival work on the letters of novelist Willa Cather. She began her career by teaching English and German at Creston High School, taught composition part-time at Calvin College while being mostly a stay-at-home mother, and taught literature at Western Michigan University while earning her Ph.D.
In her first years at Kuyper, Dr. Garvelink taught Introduction to Literature, Children’s Literature, American Literature, World Literature, Literature of American Women, and Composition. She looks forward to teaching these courses again, as well as adding other classes, such as Russian Literature, British Literature, and The Literature of Willa Cather. Her other academic work is research writing for presentations at academic conferences and for publication in academic journals. Whether working on Willa Cather or other writers, Dr. Garvelink finds her own academic writing to be an energizing intellectual activity, which brings additional knowledge and enthusiasm to her classroom.