Bonnie Sunstein
Nonfiction Writing; English Education & Literacy Studies; Ethnography
Bonnie Sunstein teaches courses in non-fiction writing, ethnographic research, folklore, and methods of teaching English, as well as directs undergraduate nonfiction writing and English Education. For over twenty years, she taught English in Massachusetts public schools and at colleges throughout New England. She has taught in summer writing institutes in California, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Utah, Louisiana, and is on the faculty of the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Writing Institute. She has been visiting professor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Tampa FL, and an NEH fellow in folklore and narrative theory in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. In 2000, she received an “Imagining America” grant from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to develop an interactive website “FieldWorking Online,” a virtual community where student researchers gather to share their actual community-based projects. She is a Trustee of the National Council of Teachers of English’s Research Foundation, and has served on several of its executive boards and commissions. She is past president of the National Writing Centers Association.
Bonnie’s book, FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research (Bedford St.Martin’s, Third Edition, 2006), is an introduction to ethnographic research methods, folklore study, and reflexive writing. Her book What Works: Designs for Teacher Inquiry (Heinemann 2006) is a guide for teachers, instructors, and professors who want to study the questions they ask about their teaching. She is also the author of Composing a Culture (Boynton-Cook, 1994). She has co-edited three widely read collections of articles about portfolios; one with Donald Graves, Portfolio Portraits (Heinemann, 1992); one with Julie Cheville, Assessing Portfolios: A Portfolio (NCTE 1996); and one with Jonathan Lovell, The Portfolio Standard (Heinemann, 2000). Her chapters, articles, and poems appear in many professional journals and books. Bonnie is a frequent keynote speaker, guest professor, and workshop leader for writing colloquia and teachers’ groups throughout the US, Canada, and English speaking schools abroad.