Wrye Sententia
Dr. Wrye Sententia has taught writing for over 15 years at UC Davis. She enjoys helping individuals of all sorts to improve their writing. By guiding students to a deeper understanding of their own writing process, in pursuit of their own goals, she is committed to helping her students cultivate lasting positive insights that can carry benefits well-beyond their writing for her course.
Dr. S. holds a Ph.D. in English and a Master's degree in Comparative Literature. She has benefited from additional training in the neuroscience of learning, motivational psychology, multilingual and cultural competency, to name a few areas of interest. In the college classroom, she regularly revises her own approach, to make learning accessible to all of her students, regardless of background or skill: recognizing that we each hail from a different past and see through different lenses.
She believes that you can make a positive impact to reduce the many, many problems of the world and that understanding how to leverage writing, helps. She values her ongoing relationships with mutually supportive colleagues, neighbors, parents, and people in her diverse communities. Currently she's challenging herself to learn how to sail boats and to sing. She deeply appreciates the Davis Chapter of The Threshold Choir, as well as the DMTC crew for the TITANIC.
In mentoring high school students, college students and advanced-degree candidates, Dr. Sententia advocates for equity and parity of opportunity. She has a background in supporting English Language Learners and their parents, and has represented immigrant families' interests to the DJUSD through DELAC and ELAC positions. She also volunteers for Upwardly Global, a program helping immigrant and refugee professionals with US career opportunities. Generally, she enjoys supporting hard work and learning--to overcome perceived obstacles in writing, or in life, through applied learning. Looking for bridges, she recognizes that not all paths are equal: when we take advantage of opportunities within our grasp, we help ourselves and our world to heal, one step (and one student) at a time.
Before joining the University Writing Program (UWP), Dr. Sententia co-founded a national nonprofit, and co-created the term "cognitive liberty." The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (CCLE) served as an educational law and policy center devoted to protecting core personal values (freedom of thought) at the intersection of cutting-edge neuroscience and 21st-century technologies. Innovative before its time, the CCLE was unable to secure long-term funding or academic validation. Since then, many have gone on to champion the principles of cognitive liberty, sometimes, regrettably, without accurate source attribution (this is one reason why it is important to attribute accurate sources). For the CCLE, she served as a principal director and spokesperson for five years. During this time, the foundations for cognitive liberty were socially, ethically, and legally established. For the CCLE, she addressed controversies in neuroethics, public policy, and protected mental freedom advocacy.
Dr. Sententia is married to Richard Glen Boire, Esq., who does increasingly less and less law, and more and more art. With her husband, she lives in Davis, California, and is a proud parent of their two curious children, Finn (UC Berkeley, Class of 2022) and Tesla (named for the inventor, not the car). Together, her family finds inspiration in nature, especially "off-grid" at the only undammed [sic] river in California, where they do what they can to practice what they preach to arrest global warming.
In 2016, Dr. Sententia was awarded the University of California's Excellence in Teaching Award, a campus recognition that she accepted with gratitude and the humble recognition that her award is paltry, compared with the devotion and excellence of so many of her deserving University Writing Progarm colleagues.