Sondra Perl is a Professor Emerita of English at Lehman College and director of the Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
She student-taught at Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side, the inspiration for the book by Bel Kaufman, Up the Down Staircase.
Perl's Ph.D. program at NYU was influenced by Louise Rosenblatt and the transactional theory of reading, or how readers bring meaning to the text in front of them.
Perl's dissertation, inspired by her own teaching experience and the work of composition theorist Janet Emig, consisted of a series of case studies on the writing process.
In 1978, Perl moved to Lehman College, where she co-founded the New York City Writing Project, of which she also served as co-director, with John Brereton and Richard Sterling.
[4] As Professor Emerita of English at Lehman College and director of the Ph.D. program in Composition and Rhetoric at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Perl's research interests include writing, teaching, creative nonfiction, ethnography, women's studies, holocaust studies, cross-cultural dialogue, urban education, collaborative projects, and writing across curriculum.
[5] Along with her studies of composition theory & rhetoric, felt sense, embodied knowing, digital composing, new media, creative nonfiction, memoir, Holocaust, and genocide studies, she specializes in autobiography, biography & life-writing; composition theory & rhetoric; digital humanities, textual & media scholarship; and pedagogy.
[8] Her involvement with The Olga Lengyel Institute yielded her roles as founder and director of the Holocaust Educators Network and creator of the New York City Summer Seminar.
These schemes represent codes of behaviors students exhibited as they wrote, allowing Perl to study how the writing process unfolds over time.
The patterns of composing involves going backward to go forward and to constantly pay attention to how a piece feels to a reader and a writer, where it has the potential to go, and what can be discovered through the writing.
As a Jewish woman faced with teaching descendants of Nazis, Perl reflects on how education can overcome hate bred from any perspective.