Robert F. Peltier teaches courses that introduce students to college-level writing, courses that require research and argument, and courses that ask students to engage with and write about the community beyond Trinity's borders. He asks students to write essays, arguments, profiles, biographies, memoirs, analyses, diaries, journals, and more. The theme that extends through all his classes, all his assignments, is that reading and writing create knowledge.

Students often come to college believing that to write is to produce a text that will be graded. Peltier shows them that writing serves multiple purposes, the most important of which is to create new ideas, new knowledge, to lift the intellect to new and higher levels of understanding. This new knowledge may be about themselves, as they write personal essays, diary or journal entries, and reflective pieces, or it might be about the larger world as they venture beyond Trinity's gates to write--and learn--about Trinity's neighborhood and the people who work and live there.They may also write about the even larger world, where decisions of great moment are made, and take part in the debates swirling around those decisions, arguing from an informed point of view.

Peltier's goal, beyond helping students to become better writers and readers, is to provide students with new reading and writing strategies and methods that will help them to learn during their college years and throughout their lifetimes.

• Dramatic Reading of Gabriel's Garden by Robert F. Peltier. Hole in the Wall Theater, New Britain, CT, March 8, 2008.
• Peltier, Robert F.  “Wrath and Envy: The Leisure Class in My Class(room).” Paper presented at the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (AEPL), National Council of Teachers of English, June 2007.
• Peltier, Robert F.  Moderated a panel on “Crime and Violence.” Conference on Active Citizenship for the 21st Century: The 2002 New England Conference of the Intercollegiate E-Democracy Project, University of Massachusetts.
• Peltier, Robert F.  “Whose Neighborhood Is This? Going Beyond ‘Privileged’ and ‘Underprivileged’ in Defining the Boundaries of Community Learning.”  Paper presented at Breaking the Mold: Experimenting with Nonfiction, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, September 2002.
• Peltier, Robert F.  “Evaluating the Internet.” Paper presented at Democracy in the Age of the Internet, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, June 2001.
• Peltier, Robert F.  “A New Participant’s Perspective on the Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project.”  Presentation at Conference on College Composition and Communication, Spring 2001.
• Peltier, Robert F.  “Dancing in the Dark: How Students Reveal Social Class Across the Electronic Chasm.”  Presentation at Conference on College Composition and Communication, Spring 2002.
• Peltier, Robert F.  “Writing Skills of Students of Non-traditional Age.”  Presentation at the New England Writing Center Association Conference, Western New England College, and at the “Writing Across the Curriculum” program, sponsored by Trinity College and the University of Hartford, April 1990.
• Fiction readings, Trinity College, Hartford, CT (1988, 1991) and the Catskill Literary Society's annual festival (1990).

• Peltier, Robert F.  “Playing for the Last Shot” (short story). Frigate, Spring 2001.
• Peltier, Robert F.  “Rushing Computer Literacy Does Nothing for Literacy.” Hartford Courant, April 2, 2000.
• Peltier, Robert F.  Chapter on Liam O’Flaherty, including a critical essay on his “The Wave.” In Stories for Students, Vol. 4, edited by Jerry Moore.  Gale Research, 1999.
• Peltier, Robert F.  Chapter on John Updike, including a critical essay on his “A&P.” In Stories for Students, Vol. 3, edited by Kathleen Wilson. Gale Research, 1998.
• Peltier, Robert F.  Critical Essay on Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.”  In Stories for Students, Vol. 2, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 124-125. Gale Research, 1997.
• Peltier, Robert F.  Critical Essay on Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill.” In Stories for Students, Vol. 2, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 138-141. Gale Research, 1997.
• Peltier, Robert F.  Critical Essay on Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.” In Stories for Students, Vol. 1, edited by Kathleen Wilson, 236-238. Gale Research, 1997.
• Peltier, Robert F., with Beverly Wall. “‘Going Public’ with Electronic Portfolios: Audience, Community, and the Terms of Student Ownership,” Computers and Composition: An International Journal for Teachers of Writing 13 (1996): 207-217.
• Peltier, Robert F.  “Story for a Beer” (short story). Trincoll Journal, February 1996.
• Peltier, Robert F.  “Making M1s” (short story). The Wittenberg Review, Spring 1991.
• Peltier, Robert F.  “Waiting” (short story). Outloud, Spring, 1991.

• Arthur H. Hughes Award for Teaching Achievement, 1998
• Alpha Delta Phi Literary Prize
• Trinity Alumnus Prize in Prose Fiction