Biography of Lucille McCarthy

Lucille McCarthy, Ph.D.
Board Member

Lucille McCarthy is a professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She is concerned about the nursing profession not only because she is a citizen who needs good health care but also because several of her family members are nurses. In particular, her daughter has just begun a career in nursing, and this fuels Lucille's commitment to work with the Center for Nursing Advocacy on its important mission.

Professor McCarthy began teaching at UMBC in 1988. Since that time, her primary passion has been and remains classroom teaching, more specifically her determination to explore with students the nature of effective writing and provocative and socially aware literature. This same passion for teaching lies behind her long career as a researcher. At the center of her many articles and books is her desire to know more about the pedagogies that best promote student learning and writing. Four of her five books and many of her articles focus on student classroom experiences and have won her recognition from her colleagues. This recognition includes two James N. Britton Awards for Research in the English Language Arts, the first in 1993 for a study of Writing in the Disciplines and the second in 2000 for her book John Dewey and the Challenge of Classroom Practice (coauthored with philosopher Stephen Fishman). Professor McCarthy's latest book, Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations? (2002), explores the struggles of "underprepared" student writers at the university level and the teaching approaches that helped them.

In addition to studying learning and writing in academic settings, Professor McCarthy has conducted research in medical settings. Her publications in this area include a 1984 article titled "Why Nurses Hate to Write" (coauthored with nurse Kathleen McCarthy) and a 1988 book, The Psychiatry of Handicapped Children and Adolescents (coauthored with psychiatrist Joan Gerring). For Dr. McCarthy's 1994 study of the revision of psychiatry's "charter document," the DSM-IV, the National Council of Teachers of English awarded her its prize for Research Excellence in Technical and Scientific Communication.

Professor McCarthy received her BA from Stanford University, her MA from the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives with her husband Ed in Baltimore. They have two grown children, Aubin and Gavin.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books

Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations? Learning to Teach Underprepared Writers Across the Curriculum, with Stephen M. Fishman. Logan UT: Utah State University Press, 2002.

Unplayed Tapes: A Personal History of Collaborative Teacher Research, with Stephen Fishman. New York: Teachers College Press (Columbia University), co-published by the National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.

John Dewey and the Challenge of Classroom Practice, with Stephen Fishman. New York: Teachers College Press (Columbia University), co-published by the National Council of Teachers of English, 1998.

Thinking and Writing in College: A Naturalistic Study of Students in Four Disciplines, with Barbara Walvoord. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1991.

The Psychiatry of Handicapped Children and Adolescents: Managing Emotional and Behavioral Problems, with Joan Gerring, M.D. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988.

Book Chapters

"When Writing-to-Learn Is Not Enough," with Stephen M. Fishman. In V. Zamel and R. Spack (Eds.), Crossing the Curriculum: Teaching and Learning from Multilingual Students. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (in press).

"A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing Across the Curriculum." Reprinted in C. Bazerman & D. Russell, (eds.), Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1994, 125-159.

"A Psychiatrist Using DSM-III : The Influence of a Charter Document in Psychiatry." In C. Bazerman & J. Paradis (eds.), Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press (Rhetoric of the Human Sciences Series), 1991. 358-378.

Articles

"An ESL Student and Her Discipline-based Professor: Making Progress Even When Goals Don't Match," with Stephen M. Fishman. Written Communication 18 (April 2001): 180-228.

"Revising Psychiatry's Charter Document: DSM-IV," with Joan Gerring, M.D. Written Communication 11 (1994): 147-192.

"Is Expressivism Dead? Reconsidering Its Romantic Roots and Its Relation to Social Constructionism," with Stephen M. Fishman. College English 54 (1992): 647-61.

"Boundary Conversations: Conflicting Ways of Knowing in Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Research," with Stephen M. Fishman. Research in the Teaching of English 25 (1991): 419-68.

"Why Nurses Hate to Write," with Kathleen McCarthy, B.S.N. Medical Communications 12 (1984): 111-116.

"Why Too Many Physicians Can't Write Very Well," with Edward McCarthy, M.D. Medical Communications 12 (1984): 17-20. Reprinted in Pathologist 34 (1985).

Contact

Click here for Dr. McCarthy's email address,