Currently a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow (2017-Fellow (2017-2021) and the Assistant Director of Assessment in the Writing and Communication Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, McKenna earned her PhD in 2017 at Emory University, and her MA and BA degrees at the University of Nevada. Her research and teaching interests in early modern literature, environmental theory and rhetoric, antiracist assessment, and digital pedagogy enable her to communicate across disciplines and industry. So that her students can produce lasting partnerships and write for live audiences, McKenna’s environmental rhetoric and technical communication courses regularly include community engaged learning with local, nonprofit organizations such as the Greening Youth Foundation and Groundwork Atlanta. This communication instruction strategy, which uses discourses such as sustainability and environmental justice as vehicles to convey workplace genres to student practitioners, also guides her work in adult education and assessment data analysis. You can find her published work in Shakespeare, Early Modern Cultural Studies, and forthcoming in the edited collection, Watery Thinking, published by Amsterdam University Press. Please find a selection of her research, teaching, invited and organized speaking engagements, and instructional design below.

“Rose said some students conceptualize the problem by thinking about issues such as carbon emissions from Bitcoin mining. In the class, students work to produce deliverables such as websites, grants and project proposals, and reports on the topic, with ample freedom to structure projects around their interests.”

Sustainable Development in the Ivan Allen College Classroom