Biography
I’m Philip Montgomery (he/him/his), Graduate Assistant Director of the Writing Center. I am also a doctoral student in Second Language Studies, where I am developing my research capacity related to language policy, teacher agency, collaboration, language ideologies, and L2 writing. I grew up in Murray, Kentucky and then moved to Ohio, where I completed a B. A. in Spanish Language and Culture at the College of Wooster. I taught EFL as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan and then completed an M. Ed. in Educational Policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with a concentration in Global Studies in Education. I spend the bulk of my free time exploring our neighborhood with my wife, daughter, and dog!
I joined MSU during the height of the pandemic in 2020, and since then I have worked as a Program Assistant for the Master of Arts in Foreign Language Teaching, a Curriculum Developer for the Online Teaching Initiative at the Center for Language Teaching Advancement (CeLTA), a Leadership Fellow in the Graduate School, and a research assistant for Dr. Peter De Costa. I joined the Writing Center as a Graduate Coordinator in 2021, where I helped navigate the Center’s transition back to in-person consulting. Through each of these roles, I have gained an appreciation for important behind-the-scenes work that make an organization work.
In the last year, I have had several enriching experiences that energize and motivate my work in the Center. I was chair of the Multilingual Writers Committee, which conducted training workshops for consultants working with grammar-related issues. Throughout those conversations, I saw how our consultants were thoughtfully and critically engaging with the Center’s Language Statement and the needs of their clients. I took WRA 889 Writing Center Theory and Administration with Dr. Trixie Smith, where I collaborated with my classmates and a writing center director at a university in Qatar to continually reconsider the role of language in the writing center, especially in relation to linguistic, racial, and social justice. Finally, I co-taught WRA 395 Writing Center Theory and Practice with Sharieka Botex, which ushered six new consultants into the shared values and practices of our community. That course highlighted for me the importance of relationship building, thoughtful reflection, and academic inquiry in the Writing Center. In the coming year, I am excited to further explore the relationship between language policies, professional development, and consulting practices through my dissertation and administrative work.
You can find my published research work in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes, the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, and the European Journal of Applied Linguistics (TEFL). I have also presented at conferences for the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL), Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), and the East Central Writing Center Association (ECWCA), with plans to attend the International Writing Center Association (IWCA) and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in 2022-2023.