Dr. Foley

Dr. Ashton Foley-Schramm is the Associate Director of the OU Writing Center and Lecturer of Writing. She earned her PhD in English literature with a focus in 19th century British fiction at the University of Rhode Island. She also earned an MA in English from Simmons University in Boston, MA and a BA in English and Secondary Education from Stonehill College in Easton, MA.

Dr. Foley has always had a love of reading and writing. Her doctoral research focused on depictions of male intradiegetic readers in periodicals; in other words, she studied male characters who read inside of fictional texts that were originally published in installments. Dr. Foley has participated in several rhetoric and composition projects. One project focused on ethically training and incorporating graduate students into university assessment processes, resulting in the co-authored publication “Preparing Graduate Students for the Field: A graduate Student Praxis Heuristic for WPA Professionalization and Institutional Politics,” published in WPA: Writing Program Administration (Foley-Schramm, et al., 41.2, 2018). The NSF-funded project SciWrite@URI emphasized the need for rhetorical training for graduate students across all STEM disciplines, and Dr. Foley helped train and professionalize graduate writing center tutors.

Writing center work combines all of Dr. Foley's passions: reading, writing, and helping students. She has worked in several writing centers with writers of all disciplines across all degree programs at all degree levels. From 2018 to 2020, Dr. Foley served as the first coordinator for a graduate writing center at the University of Rhode Island.

Dr. Foley's research interests include supporting graduate student writers as well as improving tutor education in relation to generative AI. Dr. Foley recently introduced a self-paced learning module on generative AI for consultants as part of this effort. Outside of the center, Dr. Foley serves as a member of the university’s AI Education Working Group and the group’s Student Learning Outcomes subcommittee. She contributed a module on citations for the group’s co-authored student learning course, Generative AI 101. The named co-authors of the course were awarded the 2026 Oklahoma Online Excellence Award in Innovation by the Oklahoma Council for Online Learning Excellence. 

Beyond OU, Dr. Foley is also the Oklahoma state representative for the South Central Writing Centers Association, a regional affiliate of the International Writing Centers Association. Her co-authored article with Dr. Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison, “Designing and Delivering: Improving Writing Center Administration through Consultant Feedback,” is forthcoming in WPA: Writing Program Administration.

Previously taught courses at OU: Academic Writing for Multilingual Graduate Students; Expository Writing: Revising Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice