Judith Summerfield

Judith Pearl Summerfield is an American scholar, teacher, curriculum and program developer, and writer. She is Professor Emeritus of English at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She served as University Dean for Undergraduate Education (2003-2009) at CUNY, and Dean for General Education at Queens College from 2009 until her retirement in 2015. Author or editor of ten books, she has received a number of awards for her work, notably the 1987 Modern Language Association (MLA) Mina Shaughnessy Award for the best book on pedagogy and the New York State Professor of the Year award by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1998). In 2018, Summerfield was named a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Pittsburgh School of Education.

Early Years and Education

Summerfield was born Judith Pearl in 1941 in Fredericktown, Pennsylvania, a small coal-mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania to an immigrant father, who, as a teenager, escaped the Pogroms during the Russian Civil War against the Jews in Ukraine during the Russian Revolution. Her father was a storyteller, who wanted her and her sister to know the stories of the people and the world he had come from. Her mother was a first-generation daughter of Hungarian immigrants. In 2011, Summerfield traveled to her father's village in Ukraine, and wrote A Man Comes From Someplace (2nd Ed. 2018) about her extended family’s emigration to the United States and South America in the 1920s.

Summerfield earned a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude) with an English and History double major and an M.A. in English from the University of Pittsburgh (1960, 1963). She completed her teacher certification and began teaching English and history at Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She later worked as a research assistant in Robert Glaser’s Learning, Research and Development Center at Pitt. As a graduate teaching assistant in the English Department at Pitt, she taught composition and literature.

College Teaching

Summerfield began teaching composition and literature in New York City in the 1970s, first as a part-timer at Bronx Community College, and then, at Queens College, CUNY, at the start of the Open Admissions plan that guaranteed every New York City high school graduate a place in CUNY, tuition free. If they did not meet entrance standards, Open Admissions students were required at some of the colleges to enroll in “remedial” courses to improve their proficiencies in reading, writing, and mathematics.

Summerfield played a central role in the Queens English Project, a federally funded program that brought high school and college teachers together to build pathways for student success, while offering free tutoring in writing, reading, and math. Leaders of the project included Robert Lyons, who was Director of Composition at the time, and a key figure in the national writing movement. His essay on City College professor Mina Shaughnessy in The Journal of Basic Writing details Shaughnessy’s seminal role in the development of the CUNY writing programs. Also teaching in the Queens English project was the celebrated poet and scholar, Marie Ponsot, a professor at Queens , who led writing workshops for all who were teaching or tutoring in the project. Ponsot insisted that for faculty to teach writing, they, themselves, had to write.

Summerfield was hired first as a part-time lecturer in the Writing Skills Workshop (a tutoring program) at Queens College, and eventually became the full-time director of the Workshop. Using qualitative research methods drawn from sociolinguistics, particularly the work of William Labov, Summerfield began to investigate why students made the choices they did in language use (speaking, reading, and writing). Out of the exercises she created for her research, she co-authored her first textbook, The Random House Guide to Writing, with a colleague, Sandra Schor. The book was published in three editions and led to her becoming a participant in the emerging national writing debates and projects.

As she moved into the professorial ranks, and became Director of Composition at Queens College, she worked with graduate teaching assistants to develop an expansive writing curriculum, influenced by the London Schools Council, particularly the work of James Britton. During this time, while raising two daughters with her husband, Ross Fishman, she continued her research on language use, and began doctoral studies in English Education at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University. (She and Fishman later divorced. She married Geoffrey Summerfield, a British educator and poet, who died in 1991.) Her dissertation, Narrative Compositions: An Exploration of Narrative in the Teaching of College Composition (1986), is an exploration of the rich storytelling cultures that students bring to the classroom, and the importance of narrative in our daily lives. She entered the ranks of the tenure-track faculty at Queens College and was promoted to Full Professor in the English Department in 1994.

Program Development

In the 1990s, Summerfield designed and developed the Freshman Year Initiative (FYI) at Queens College, bringing together college faculty from across the disciplines to teach first-year students, and to critically examine liberal education requirements. The Queens College Freshman Year Initiative, which was supported by the U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), received the 1996 TIAA Theodore Hesburgh Award for enhancing undergraduate education.

Her success in building faculty-student communities led to her being named University Dean of Undergraduate Education at the Central Office of The City University. She developed projects with faculty and administrators from the twenty-four CUNY colleges to strengthen the undergraduate experience. Her two co-edited collections of essays, written with CUNY colleagues, grew out of the project. She became a CUNY project director in Lee Shulman’s Carnegie Scholarship of Teaching (CASTL) national network of college reformers. After a change of administration at CUNY in 2009, she returned to Queens College as the Dean of General Education until her retirement in 2015. During those years, she continued her work on building community among faculty to strengthen a liberal education.

Publications and Influence

Summerfield’s first textbook, The Random House Guide to Basic Writing, foregrounds the teaching of narrative in varied contexts, from telling stories to writing them. Several textbooks followed:

Responding to Prose: A Reader for Writers, where Summerfield opens the door to seeing reading, as well as writing, as a generative activity.

Negotiations: A Reader for Writers is a revision of Responding to Prose, where Summerfield makes explicit the varied theories underlying the practices of reading and writing she encourages. Writers who write about writing are brought into the conversations: Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and others. Summerfield encourages writers to “experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words,” as Virginia Woolf suggested.

Summerfield wrote three books with her late husband, Geoffrey Summerfield:

Frames of Mind: A Course in Composition, promotes audience and purpose, as well as writing in different roles, in the teaching of writing. They begin with “writing for ourselves” and end with “writing as a member of an academic community.”

Reading(s) widens the work, bringing readers into varied cultural contexts and interpretations, and includes text and image, prose, poetry, and fiction.

In reviews of Texts and Contexts: A Contribution to the Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition, the Summerfields are applauded for moving away from the “process approach to composition,” by focusing on writing within multiple roles, perspectives, and forms. The Summerfields were awarded the 1987 MLA Shaughnessy Prize for the year’s best book in the field of teaching English language and literature.

As the University Dean for Undergraduate Education, Summerfield engaged faculty representatives from the CUNY colleges to review their undergraduate programs, particularly in general education. Two volumes of the participants’ writings were published. With Crystal Benedicks, now Professor of English at Wabash College, Summerfield edited Reclaiming the Public University: Conversations on Liberal & General Education. And with Cheryl C. Smith, now Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, she edited Making Teaching and Learning Matter: Transformative Spaces in Higher Education.

Over her career, Summerfield wrote several dozen articles and chapters in various journals and collections of essays:

Her early articles were on the development of tutoring programs and writing centers.

• “The Tutor as Messenger.” The Writing Center Journal (1981): 7 - 13.
• “The Writing Center: What Is Its Center?” Writing Lab Newsletter (December 1980): 1 - 2.

Summerfield’s challenge to the University-wide writing assessment test was a seminal article in the case that many colleagues were making against such standardized exit exams in freshman composition courses. This type of exit exam at CUNY was eventually eliminated.

• “Do You Agree or Disagree: The Epistemology of the CUNY Writing Assessment Test.” WPA (Writing Program Administrators) (1984): 17 - 24.

Her articles on narrative advanced the arguments for seeing the importance of stories across the curriculum.

• “Enclosures: The Narrative Within Autobiography.” Journal of Advanced Composition 2 (1981): 23 ­- 31.
• “Framing Narratives.” Only Connect. Ed. Thomas Newkirk. Montclair, New Jersey: Boynton/Cook, 1986.

Summerfield argued that keeping a journal/notebook was foundational for writers:

• “Golden Notebooks, Blue Notebooks: Rereading.” The Journal Book. Ed. Toby Fulwiler. Montclair, New Jersey: Boynton/Cook, 1987.

These articles with her husband, Philip M. Anderson, speak to the importance of sound methods for evaluation, and frameworks for success in college writing.

• Summerfield, Judith and Philip M. Anderson. Symposium: On the Framework for Success in College Writing. College English, Vol. 74, No. 6, July 2012.
• Anderson, Philip M. and Judith P. Summerfield. “What We Don’t Know About Evaluation.” In S. Steinberg and J. Kincheloe (Eds.), What You Don’t Know About Schools. New York: Macmillan. 2007.
• Anderson, Philip M. and Judith P. Summerfield, “Why is Urban Education Different from Suburban and Rural Education?” In S. Steinberg and J. Kincheloe (Eds.) 19 Urban Questions: Teaching in the City New York: Peter Lang, 2004.

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Mina Shaughnessy’s book, Errors and Expectations, Summerfield led a program with six CUNY colleagues at the annual symposium of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The participants reflected upon the need in the 21st century to confront questions that Shaughnessy had raised about literacy and democracy.

• “Today’s Scholars Talk Back: The Shaughnessy Legacy Thirty Years Later.” The Journal of Basic Writing, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall 2007), 5-29.

Current Scholarship and Writing

In 2015, Summerfield published A Man Comes from Someplace, which she introduced at the International Jewish Festival sponsored by the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, Poland. The book, now in a revised and expanded second edition (2018), documents the stories her father told of Ukraine before emigrating to the U.S. in 1920, his journey to America, and his experience as an immigrant. Summerfield also narrates her trip to the village of Novokonstantinov, Ukraine in 2011, to meet with local people and investigate the landscape of her father’s memories.

She has been invited to present on her recent books and offer writing workshops at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, a World Health Organization conference in Stockholm and in Buenos Aires, and at the Holocaust Educators Network in New York City. Her alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh, honored her with a Distinguished Alumnus Award from its School of Education (2018) and the Pitt English Department Composition Program invited her to speak on her career in 2016. Out of those experiences, Summerfield was inspired to write Compositions, A Life: An Autoethnography (2024), a narrative and ethnographic examination of her experiences as a student, and her teaching and research career in higher education.

Summerfield continues to offer writing workshops, in particular, coordinating one at a local synagogue for the past eight years. She remains active in her home community of a half-century residence and continues her collaborative writing and research with her husband of three decades, Philip M. Anderson, Professor Emeritus of Education, Queens College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York.

Publications

• Fishman, Judith [Summerfield]. Responding to Prose: A Reader for Writers. New York: Random House-McGraw Hill, 1983.
• Summerfield, Judith, and Sandra Schor. The Random House Guide to Writing. 3rd ed. New York: Random House, 1986. (Second Edition, 1981; First Edition, The Random House to Basic Writing, 1978.)
• Frames of Mind: A Course in Composition. New York: Random House, 1986.
• Texts and Contexts: A Contribution to the Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition. New York: Random House 1986. (Winner of the Modern Language Association Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize, 1987.)
• Summerfield, Judith, and Geoffrey Summerfield. Reading(s). New York: Random House, 1989.
• Summerfield, Judith. Negotiations: A Reader for Writers. New York: McGraw Hill, Random House, 1991.
• Summerfield, Judith, and Crystal Benedicks, Eds. Reclaiming the Public University: Conversations on Liberal and General Education. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.
• Summerfield, Judith and Cheryl Smith, Eds. Making Teaching and Learning Matter: Transformative Spaces in Higher Education, Springer, 2011.
• Summerfield, Judith. A Man Comes from Someplace: Stories, History, Memory from a Lost Time, Second Edition. Leiden: Brill/Sense Publishers, 2018. First Edition: Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2015.
• Compositions, A Life: An Autoethnography. Peter Lang Group AG, 2024. ISBN 9781433194641