John Bean

Professor of English
Department of English
Seattle University jbean@seattleu.edu

Phone:206 296-5421

Background Information

John C. Bean is a professor of English at Seattle University, where he holds the title of "Consulting Professor of Writing and Assessment." He has an undergraduate degree from Stanford (1965) and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington (1972). He is the author of Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 1996), which has been translated into both Dutch and Chinese. He is also the co-author of three widely-used composition textbooks—Writing Arguments, The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing, and Reading Rhetorically . He has published numerous articles on writing and writing-across-the-curriculum as well as on literary subjects including Shakespeare and Spenser. In 2001, he presented a keynote address at the first annual conference of the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. Since 2003 he has researched and written on the development of institutional assessment strategies that promote productive faculty conversations about teaching and learning. He is particularly interested in pedagogical strategies for accelerating students' growth in critical inquiry and argument and in teaching undergraduate research. Most recently, he has been working with faculty from Carleton College on quantitative literacy using writing assignments that ask students to think critically about numbers. In September, 2008, he and his wife Rosalie (Kit) Bean conducted six two-day workshops on critical thinking for BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Related Pedagogical Projects

I am the PI of a $300,000 Teagle Foundation Grant titled "Using Embedded Assignments to Create Communities of Assessment in the Majors and the Core Curriculum of Seattle University and Gonzaga University."