Wrench is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Writing and Humanities at MIAD, and has been teaching here since 2008. She has taught sections of Writing 120: The Word and the World, Humanities 121: Human Thought an Action, as well as creating Humanities electives “Gender, Sex, and Society” and “The Victorian Era” and sections of the Service Learning class, “Education in America”.
Wrench is currently working on her PhD at Marquette University in the Educational Policy and Leadership program. She is studying the history of education and her dissertation subject is a history of Milwaukee Girls’ Trade and Technical High School. Primary concerns in research relate to women’s secondary education and extracurricular activities prior to Title IX. Her secondary areas of research are in educational technology, online learning, and instructional design. Wrench’s master’s degree from Marquette University is in modern European history with a focus on gender studies. Her master’s thesis, “1914: Through the Eyes of Women,” was a study of women’s leisure magazines and newspapers in London and their coverage of the events that lead up to World War I. Wrench also received her bachelor’s degree from Marquette University where she majored in History and Secondary Education and qualified for her state of Wisconsin history and social studies teaching licenses.
Besides her work on her dissertation, Wrench has also recently worked on papers regarding Milwaukee Girls’ Athletic Association in the 1930s, the Milwaukee Chicks Womens baseball team, a member of the All American Girls’ Professional Baseball League, and recently published her co-written article on “Using Cognitive Apprenticeship to Provide Faculty Development in the Use of Blended Learning.” Her paper on Elizabeth Black Kander and the founding of the Milwaukee School of Trades for Girls, “Uplift This Downtrodden Multitude’: Lizzie Black Kander and the Purpose of the Milwaukee School of Trades for Girls,” has been presented at multiple conferences.
Wrench, a Milwaukee native, resides in Greenfield with her husband Dan and their 3 children.