Anne Bliss (MLing'88, EdD'93), center, retired from the Program for Writing and Rhetoric this year.

This year, Anne Bliss (MLing’88, EdD’93) announced her retirement from CU’s Program for Writing and Rhetoric (PWR).  Within the cozy environment of the program, Bliss is a kind of walking history.  She is most certainly not, though, historical: after her decades as an educator, she is as energetic as ever.

 ”There’s very little difference between theory and practice for me,” Bliss says in a view reflecting her overall perspective. “Writing and rhetoric are part of life, and life is a rhetorical experience.  So, theories and life tend to mesh in interesting ways in and out of my classroom.”

She grew up in Fort Collins and began her college life at Seattle University where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1965.  Returning to Colorado, she was a charter member in 1986 of the fledgling University Writing Program, for which she developed curriculum for at-risk students.  One might think that she stuck fast to life in Boulder, but that would be highly inaccurate.

Her academic journey has arguably been as global as is possible for someone in her field.    During the 2005 fall semester, Bliss was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to serve as a professor of English as a Foreign Language in Chile, where she also consulted with the Ministry of Education and conducted teacher-training programs in several young post-Pinochet regional universities.  Over the last decade or so, she also has taught variously for local migrant groups and in China, Vietnam, and Siberian Russia.  But Boulder and CU have always been her home base.

The PWR has been described as CU’s “front porch,” and Bliss has been front and center both to greet and challenge students. 

“Teach the students to think by asking ‘why?’ ” she remarks about her approach to the classroom. “It is a question that continually leads to deeper reasoning.  My approach also involves trust-building and developing a sense of community in the classroom. I firmly believe that if students are motivated and they trust their teacher and their classmates, they want to and can learn almost anything and any skill.”

“Anything” for Bliss has meant a cornucopia of subjects for her courses.   While English as a Second Language has been her mainstay, she has taught and presented widely on pedagogy, applied linguistics, cultural issues, environmental issues, business, teaching with technology, and, in a completely different direction, cowboy poetry.   

More than anything about her position, she has taken a true delight in watching how teaching not only can change a student’s academic success but, sometimes even life.

 ”I see myself as a coach more than as a teacher who delivers knowledge,” she says.  “I want my students to learn how to teach themselves, to question and answer and support those answers logically and substantively.”

The results speak for themselves, with the anecdotes piling on top of each other.

 ”One Korean student who groaned a lot when I ‘made’ him work on commas,” Bliss relates, “will tell you that his position as a VP in one of Korea’s major insurance companies came on account of those commas!” 

From mastering commas to running companies, the power of education is the very air Bliss breathes. 

The PWR is at a crossroads, and an important part of the moment means that teachers embrace the tradition of rhetoric part and parcel to the program’s name. Rooted in previous versions of the program but  welcoming new ideas, Bliss sees such curricular topics as technology and globalization as increasingly important to how students engage the world.

 ”I know that I, like many others in the writing program, am approached as a source of personal advice, or as one of my internationals students once said, ‘as the key to understanding America,’” she says.

Bliss might be stepping away from the semester-to-semester work of conducting writing classes and grading papers, but she has no intention of slowing down. 

 No doubt about it: the fun is far from over for Anne.  To start, she is bound again for Chile where she will consult with professor Carlos Vignolo who will be a visiting scholar at CU next term with the School of Education. And she will work with the Ministry of Education, the Fulbright Commission and  regional universities to set up a doctoral program in education. 

During her stay, Bliss will also visit Easer Island and touch foot in Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, and various spots in Patagonia ― and kayak the Straits of Magellan.  Returning to help in China and an invitation to work with English teachers in Pakistan are etched on her fall agenda. 

All that for her first semesters “off.” 

Peter Kratzke is an instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric.