Alison Prindle
The following profile of Dr. Alison Prindle was printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Otterbein's Towers magazine.
Name: Alison H. Prindle
Title: Professor of English
Education: B. A. Radcliffe College, Ph.D. Cornell University
Hometown: Bloomington, Indiana
City of residence: Delaware, Ohio
What particular topic do you most enjoy teaching?
Shakespeare. It is a great privilege to read, view, and discuss nine or ten of the greatest plays in the English language with Otterbein English and theater majors. The plays continue to astonish and restore, and the students' discussions are rich and stimulating. I teach Shakespeare as both script and text, so we focus both on performance and on language and poetry.
Why should every person you meet want to know more about your area of expertise?
The discipline of English is not equivalent to the study of grammar, though surely grammar is one foundation block. But when told that I teach English, people sometimes say, 'Oh, I'd better watch the way I speak (or write) around you.' But English is so much richer. It is transformative literature, works like King Lear that live with you and in you for a lifetime. It is a window into cultures past and present. It is a set of values about empathy and understanding. It is an agent by which cultures are constructed and thus an object we should analyze and critique. And literature is always evolving, creating new forms and voices to let us see our worlds more clearly.
What is your favorite aspect of teaching?
I love the students. And there's nothing quite so satisfying as finding the right questions to allow a particular student to become excited by a book, a writing assignment, a piece of poetry, even a well-constructed sentence. I want my students to acquire skills but also to learn to trust their own truths as readers and writers.
Why do you teach at Otterbein?
I was educated at large universities, and know well their strengths and their weaknesses. In choosing to teach at Otterbein, I chose an institution that sought to be a community, and it is still that aspect of the College that I most value. In the many years I have been here, my teaching load has been primarily in our Integrative Studies core curriculum (once called the Common Courses, as some readers will remember). In the core curriculum, students from all majors come together to ask the great questions about life's meaning.
What are the best qualities you see in Otterbein students?
Willingness to work hard, respect for college-level work, openness and generosity.
What research are you currently conducting/projects are you currently working on?
I have done research on the lives and diaries of early modern women (e.g. Anne Askew, Lady Anne Clifford), on Shakespeare as presented to children (arguing for making Shakespeare an interactive play text, even in elementary school, rather than a picture-book story), and, in the early years of my career, on the Renaissance poets Francesco Petrarca and Thomas Wyatt. At the moment I am a member of an assessment team, with Regina Kengla and Niki Fayne; our project has been to assess student writing progress in the Integrative Studies required literature and composition courses. Our data from the freshman and the sophomore courses is in and shows clearly that our instruction has produced, at every level of ability, real improvement in student writing skills. I am also active in a Professional Learning Community (PLC) at Otterbein, in which we are examining writing pedagogies, with particular emphasis on structuring writing prompts.
If you were not an educator, what would be your dream job?
I would have loved to have the abilities needed to work in the theater: too late for that now! But when I'm retired, I hope to turn my pen to creative writing, perhaps humorous detective stories.