Tisha Turk directs the Writing, Reading, and Speaking Center at Grinnell College: she trains students to work as Writing Mentors, leads the Writing Center's professional instructors, and consults with faculty across campus about how best to assign and respond to writing in their classes. Prior to joining Grinnell, she was Writing Center Director and Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Morris, Minnesota's public liberal arts college.
Tisha studies writing and other composing processes, including multimedia composing. Her main research interest is fan-made music videos, or vids: short videos that combine clips from movies or television with carefully chosen music to celebrate, interpret, critique, refocus, or rewrite elements of the original texts. She studies why fans vid and watch vids; how fans learn to make and interpret vids; and how vids contribute to fans' conversations about media texts. Understanding how and why vidders and vidwatchers learn to critique, create, and evaluate multimedia texts can help us see what purposes, social contexts, and tools promote and enable the development of digital literacies.