Emma Miller Bolenius (May 3, 1876 â July 25, 1968) was an American educator and textbook writer.
Bolenius was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Robert Miller Bolenius and Catherine Mathiot Carpenter Bolenius. Her father wrote Germans in Pennsylvania (1906). She graduated from Maryland College for Women in Lutherville in 1896, earned a bachelor's degree at Bucknell University, and a master's degree at Columbia University.
Bolenius taught at Maryland College, and at schools in Ohio and New Jersey, and was a professor of English and History at Roanoke Women's College. She was known for promoting the "project method" of teaching spoken English: assigning students a real-life situation of "socialized recitation", for example, presenting an award or campaigning for office, to focus and motivate their composition and speech. Her pedagogy blended language instruction with "wholesome moral lessons" and the Americanization goals common in public education at the time.
Bolenius was best known as a textbook author. One journal reviewed her first book, The Teaching of Oral English (1914) as "a delightfully unique textbook that reads like a novel". Bolenius wrote a monthly column on language for McCall's Magazine; she also wrote a monthly column titled "Where Girls May Meet" for the journal American Motherhood, responding to the letters she received from girls. Her publications included the following titles:
Emma Bolenius married radio producer Edwin Morse Whitney in 1933. She lived in Pawling, New York, from 1945 to 1968, and died in 1968, aged 92 years, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.