Saturday Workshops
Saturday, March 16, 2019 – 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. (unless otherwise noted)
(SW.01) Community Writing Mentoring Workshop
Sponsored by: The Coalition for Community Writing
Level: All
Cluster: Community, Civic & Public
Abstract: Sponsored by the Coalition for Community Writing, experienced scholar-practitioners will provide resources and offer individualized mentorship and feedback on community-based writing projects.
Full description:
Background
Community Writing, a growing subfield within Rhetoric and Composition, studies and implements writing about, with, for, and by local and global communities. Popularized by genres such as service-learning, community-based research, community literacy, ethnography, community publishing, public writing, and advocacy and activist writing, community writing locates its work within the broad, historical traditions of rhetoric and composition, literacy studies, and related disciplines.
In October 2017, the second Conference on Community Writing (CCW) took place at the University of Colorado Boulder, attracting 450 scholars, activists, and community members representing 48 states, three countries, 207 colleges, universities, and community organizations. This large group was drawn to a vision of higher education that connects with local, national, and international communities by using writing for education, public dialogue, and social change.
The overwhelming response to the conference underscored a desire by those working in community writing—as community organizers, students, teachers, and researchers—to have opportunities to network, share best practices, and receive mentoring. Attendees at the conference expressed a specific desire for mentorship from scholars, teachers, and activists with more experience in designing, implementing, sustaining, and evaluating community-based writing practices and the scholarship that emerges in concert with them. Additionally, at the conference, a group of leading scholars in the field began steps toward the creation of the Coalition for Community Writing.
This workshop responds to the desires expressed by the hundreds of attendees at the CCW conference for a hands-on opportunity for teachers, scholars, and community writers and organizers to dialogue with and receive feedback from senior scholars in community-based writing.
The Workshop
This proposed workshop, which will be sponsored by the new Coalition for Community Writing, will serve as the first mentorship event since the organization’s launch. The workshop will offer mentoring and feedback on community-based writing projects. It will be led by twelve scholars in rhetoric and composition, a diverse group of faculty who have deep experience with community projects and who have published many books and articles in community writing. Our group can offer advice related to project design, ethics of community work, ways to evaluate projects, questions related to scholarship, as well as job and tenure evaluation strategies.
This workshop will also showcase two mentorship projects associated with community writing. The first is a national online network of community writing practitioners through the Map of Community Writing, which we will launch at the workshop. The MCW will function as a mentorship and resource visualization tool for users to search and upload data to a national repository of community writing people, projects, and programs. The second project is a compilation of resources and mentorship opportunities, created by the CCCC Strategic Action Task Force over the last year in response to the threats against engaged scholars in the National Association of Scholars report and from other right-wing groups.
We invite participants at any level of experience with community-based writing who would like an opportunity for individual mentoring: those with early ideas and emerging projects, or those with long-term projects.
The workshop will open with each of the workshop facilitators giving a 3-minute account of their current research and the areas in which they can offer mentorship. We will then break into smaller groups of 5-6 at tables, with two facilitators at each table. Each participant will have the opportunity to share their research project, course, or program idea and receive feedback. Each participant can expect to present to the table for about 5 minutes and receive about 5-7 minutes of feedback, minimum. The timing will, of course, depend upon the number of attendees. While the senior scholar facilitators at the table will offer mentorship, others at the table may function as both mentor and mentee, based on experience. Participants will have the opportunity to switch tables once, providing them two sets of feedback and invaluable face-to-face communication with some of the leaders in the field of community writing.
In the last 45 minutes of the workshop, the Map of Community Writing (MCW)’s web developer will demonstrate the map’s capabilities and affordances and will guide participants in uploading their contact information and any materials they would like to share to the map. Finally, one of the workshop facilitators will share results and resources from the CCCC Strategic Action Task Force.
Afternoon Schedule, 1:00-4:30
1:00-1:30 Welcome and Facilitator Introductory Presentations
1:30-2:30 First Round of Mentorship Networking and Workshopping
2:30-2:45 Break
2:45-3:45 Second Round of Mentorship Networking and Workshopping
3:45-4:10 Introduction to the Map of Community Writing and Participant Input of Information
4:10-4:25 Discussion of CCCC Strategic Action Task Force resources
4:25-4:30 Closing Remarks and Plan for Follow-up Mentoring Meeting at the Conference on Community Writing in October 2019
(SW.02) Join the Cypher of Hip Hop Pedagogy and Practice!
Level: All
Cluster: Community, Civic & Public
Abstract: Come share your skills, pedagogies and practices in the cypher, to discuss Hip Hop in academia and the English composition classroom.
Full description:
Join the Cypher of Hip Hop Pedagogy and Practice!
The facilitator is a pioneering B-Girl from the early eighties Hip Hop scene in Seattle Washington, but she is still active in the Hawai’i Hip Hop community today. She has taught B-Boy/Girl workshops at several local YMCAs, B-Girl Be (Minneapolis), Girl Fest Hawai’i, Girl Power Hawai’i and many more. She is also an adjunct lecturer, graduate assistant and English instructor who incorporates Hip Hop “ways of seeing” into her curriculum.
This workshop invites Hip Hop pedagogues and practitioners to join a discourse about Hip Hop and its place in academia and English composition. The session includes empirical examples combined with a b-boy/girl dance lesson and a discussion or cypher for the co-performers.
2:00-3:00pm: In the first hour of this workshop the facilitator will demonstrate how to incorporate the five elements of Hip Hop (b-boying, emceein, djing, beatboxing, graffiti) into the college classroom with a focus on first year writing composition courses. Attendees will be asked to identify traditional literary forms that can be established within all the five elements such as repetition, format and style. We will then discuss how the five elements present a challenge to the Eurocentric epistemologies of argument and rhetoric.
3:00-4:00pm: The facilitator will then invite other Hip Hop pedagogues and practitioners to join the cypher and show their skills in the sixth element: knowledge, which for our purpose will be a collaboration between academics and emic experiences within Hip Hop Kulture. If the cypher calls for it, the facilitator will incorporate an example of the heated exchange between KRS One and what he calls “rap historians” to ruminate over the questions of who has the authority to teach, preserve and document Hip Hop. I expect the facilitator and co-performers to engage in a serious discussion about how professors can draw from Hip Hop to reform education without the risk of appropriation. The facilitator is open, however, to follow the flow and go wherever this discourse may lead us.
4:00-5:00 Finally, as a b-girl practitioner and teacher, the facilitator will lead the co-performers in a dance class to teach the foundations of b-boying/girling. Other practitioners in the cypher are welcome to assist in the instruction. The lesson will last about thirty minutes and it will be followed by one final discussion question, which is to consider the relevance of implementing a similar type class in the English classroom and consider how it could be implemented. The session will conclude with the co-performers experiences, final words and final cypher.
What I expect the facilitator and the co-performers to leave with is our shared experiences in the cypher.
Please come prepared with your kicks and active clothing attire.
(SW.03) Theater as Antiracist Pedagogy: Audience, Empathy, and Privilege
Level: All
Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition
Abstract: Theatrical exercises to foster empathy, examine privilege and place, and train students to engage in audience awareness, textual conversation, and form.
Full description:
As theater makers who have each taught First Year Composition for over a decade, we see the dramatic arts as both a theoretical and practical way of thinking about writing pedagogy and difference. In particular, we are inspired by playwright Tony Kushner’s (1995) essay about the power performance has for training us to have empathy for The Other; by our lights, acting or directing or playwriting or even watching theater can encourage a kind of code-meshing (Canagarajah, 2006) in which the theater maker/watcher incorporates multiple codes, multiple languages, multiple performed selves. The empathetic practices inherent in theatrical performance thus give rise to the kind of anti-racist pedagogy Innoue (2015) argues for when he asks teachers to construct assessment ecologies where students and teachers are “connected in explicit ways” (p.289); theater demands connection, performance creates interdependent ethos. In addition to empathy-fostering exercises, workshop attendees will explore how theater practices can train students to engage in audience awareness, textual conversation, and formal invention. Which is to say that we position theater as part of the Teaching for Transfer movement (Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014). Continuing the work we presented in Portland (2017’s CCCC), in which a series of short presentations were each followed by a drama-fueled pedagogical exercise, we will explore both the ways performance can become source text and the ways it can inform student decisions regarding form, mode, genre.
Act 1. “Removing Privilege from the Parlor: Hip Hop and the Burkean Oar”
Philosopher Kenneth Burke imagines a scenario where people are in a room having a conversation that continues indefinitely. Situating his reader as “you,” he famously writes “Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come in late…You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.” Burke’s metaphor encourages thinkers to contribute to an ongoing discourse; Burke can be an excellent tool for teaching students how to engage their own performative rhetoric in relation to that of others’. Yet what if the conversation is not accessible to all listeners? This workshop aims to remove privilege from Burke’s parlor by utilizing hip hop to teach students about their own potential “oar.” Diving into Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and Jay Z’s “Hard Knock Life,” Performer 1 will experiment with performative rhetoric and lead participants to consider their own relationship to this music. What aspects of the discourse can we access easily? What seems far away from our own experience? How does that inform our individual voice’s relationship to this material? Together, we will ponder difficulty in teaching this material to privileged students and the wonders of prompting some of those without privilege to feel more grounded in a discourse than their peers.
Act 2. “Performing for Transfer: Site Specific Theater as Metaphor and Method for Teaching Audience and Genre Awareness.”
Performer 2 will mine a play, The Sublet Experiment, as a case study for the relationships between performance, audience, genre, and space. The play, which had ran for over 6 months, was performed in a different New York City apartment every weekend. Interrogating Miwon Kwon’s (2002) binary of integration/intervention in site specific art, Performer 2 will work with participants on an inductive process students can use for mapping the ways in which the play’s performances were changed by their sites and by their audiences. The key concept this work introduces is Audience Closeness. How close is the audience to the performers, and how does that proximity change the choices the performers focus on? Workshop participants will experientially explore this concept by writing a short theory of audience awareness and then “acting” out that theory in front of other participants in three sitings: near-audience, circular-audience, and far-audience. These performative metaphors of interdependence will then be transferred back into skills and processes connected to audience awareness in writing (e.g. how can students alter their writing depending on how “close” to themselves they imagine their audience to be, etc.). In this way, the workshop will extend the Teaching for Transfer work of Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak (2014). We will examine the TFT terms of audience and rhetorical situation in the setting of site specific performances and help students imagine different physical settings of audience as a way of understanding formal choices such as diction, exposition, citation requirements, and other generic demands.
Act 3. “Memoirs of Place: The Geographies of the Self”
As we walk down the street we can acknowledge that other people have inhabited this space before us, but can we imagine what they were thinking? What their values and preoccupations were? What kept them up at night? One of the most intimate ways of understanding the performance of everyday life is through diaries and first-person accounts. This presentation and performance, based on a seminar taught at our home institution, will explore how a wide range of narratives can help give us multiple perspectives of a single place. Performer 3 will train participants to read diaries as performance: the New York of 1704 that greeted Sarah Kemble Knight, the perspective of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the debates of Wong Chin Foo (one of the first naturalized Chinese immigrants). These diaristic modes will be contrasted with “personal” place-centered performances that take the form of art, such as Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror. Performer 3 will argue that a survey of first-person accounts provides students with many opportunities to engage in the varieties of lived experience from the bottom up. The workshop will then lead participants through a multi-modal exercise, in which they will create an online map that highlights places where they have experienced something important, as well as excerpts from the experiences of others (found in poems, diaries, photos). In this way, participants will create a “geography of the self,” a collaborative composition that is built in relation to what others have experienced. This workshop will be an enactment of performing and constructing place through an integration of the self and The Other.
(SW.04) Building and Running an Academic Journal: A Behind-the-Scenes Workshop in Independent Publishing
Level: All
Cluster: Institutional and Professional
Abstract: This workshop demystifies journal editing to prepare new people to run established journals and support the creation of new journals.
Full description:
Building on the call to embody composing knowledges, this workshop offers performative/experiential learning for folks interested in explore how to create and manage academic journals, whether print-based, open access, hybrid, scholarly and/or pedagogical, or specialized (sometimes referred to as “niche”) journals. Working editors from Across the Disciplines, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, and Literacy in Composition Studies will offer practical advice and purposeful activities based on our experiences as editors of diverse independent journals in rhetoric and composition. Our workshop is pitched to participants at various career stages: advanced graduate students, junior and midcareer faculty, as well as senior faculty seeking to contribute to the discipline in new ways. Our goal is to empower more field members to be actively involved in the knowledge-making process, encourage the creation of new publication venues that prioritize under-represented issues and voices, and to share the tools and practical know-how necessary to take an idea from conception to reality. Finally, as a supportive community of editors, we will continue the dialogue with participants after the workshop, offering advice, materials, and contacts, as appropriate. This workshop takes up the conference’s call to perform possibilities by opening up the often-closed world of journal editing with the goals of both preparing new people to participate in running already-established journals and supporting the creation of new journals.
Half-Day Workshop (1:30-5:00)
1:30-2:00: Introductions.
We will begin with a brief overview of the workshop facilitators’ experiences running and/or creating academic journals. Depending on the number of attendees, participants will introduce themselves and foreground their interests or purposes in this particular workshop (if attendance makes this untenable, participants will have similar opportunities within breakout sessions). We will then explain how the workshop will proceed, deriving our breakout session topics from the narrative we have shared about our own process and struggles. The introduction period will conclude with a few moments for participants to decide their “breakout menu” for the day.
2:00-2:50: Session One: What To Expect When Becoming an Editor
This session leads participants through activities designed to help them explore what to expect from journal editing. All participants will do this activity. Participants read and discuss material from journals, including mission statements, tables of contents, and editors’ introductions. The purpose is to explore what these artifacts demonstrate about audience, expectations for the journal, and the journal’s “persona.” Session activity will primarily be table-based, but the whole room will share discoveries in last 10 minutes.
2:50-3:00: Break
3:00-3:50: Breakout Session One
Participants choose one of the session foci, all of which will be made available to them in advance of the workshop.
A. Starting a Journal: In this breakout session, participants will start building a mission statement for a journal and explore the decisions they would need to make about their new journal. These include who to approach as potential members of the editorial board and how to pitch the journal to these people; editorial processes and structures; publishing platform and frequency of publication; budget and funding; training and staffing.
B. Infrastructural Technologies of Independent Journal Publishing: Participants will explore issues related to online publication, including the affordances and limitations of various platforms for academic publishing. Discussion of software for web and print layouts will also be considered. A special emphasis will be placed on open access (OA) technologies and CreativeCommons licensing schemes for authors and journals.
C. Stabilizing and Preserving Content: Print frontloaded the costs of publishing, but once the print object was created, stocking it on library shelves ensured its accessibility to scholars and preservation in the history of disciplinary knowledge. The free access to online publishing obscures the ephemeral nature of published digital content and shifts the costs of stable access and preservation to the back end, where editors must ensure a link to their authors’ work that is not reduced to “page not found.” This breakout establishes the importance of a strategic plan for ensuring scholarly content remains accessible to future readers and identifies the organizations and possibilities for doing so.
3:50-4:00: Break
4:00-4:50: Breakout Session Two
Participants choose one of the session foci, all of which will be made available to them in advance of the workshop.
A. Peer Review and the Role of the Editor: In this breakout session, participants will read reviewer letters and an initial draft of a subsequently published article (all with permission). Participants will strategize how to synthesize reviews, make decisions about submission, and decide on next steps. Discussion will address how to build a diverse group of reviewers who have the expertise necessary to fulfilling the journal’s publishing mission.
B. Starting a Journal: In this breakout session, participants will start building a mission statement for a journal and explore the decisions they would need to make about their new journal. These include who to approach as potential members of the editorial board and how to pitch the journal to these people; editorial processes and structures; publishing platform and frequency of publication; budget and funding; training and staffing.
C. Copyediting: Participants look at examples of manuscripts before they have undergone copyediting and develop a process for addressing the copyediting needs evident in the texts. This breakout foregrounds the ways that style decisions influence both the presentation of knowledge and larger practices in the field (citing student work, providing access to archival and other source material, etc.).
4:50-5:00: Whole-Group Discussion.
Participants reflect on workshop and articulate their next steps. For those interested in continuing dialogue, contact information may be shared.
(SW.05) Performing Curriculum in the Classroom: Designing Teaching for Transfer (TFT) Courses for Diverse Campuses
Level: All
Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes
Abstract: In this design workshop, we will create adaptations of the Teaching-for-Transfer curriculum to help students perform in multiple scenes–classes, co-curriculars, workplaces, and personal writing.
Full description:
From a pedagogical perspective this understanding of rhetoric and performance becomes a valuable way of acknowledging that texts, experiences, and writing are always given meaning according to time, place, and context, and that this requires an attentiveness to the way developing writers come to view and produce meaning through shared performances, by those who value the progressive possibilities of rhetoric and writing instruction.
—David Green
How to design writing coursessupporting transfer of writing knowledge and practice has garnered considerable attention in Composition and Rhetoric, with scholars researching it and designing courses to facilitate it. Performing this work in a half-day workshop, we will focus on two goals: (1) acquainting participants with the research on the Teaching for Transfer curriculum; and (2) assisting them in designing writing courses, appropriate for their campuses, using the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curricular design.
Articulated initially in _Writing across Contexts: Composition, Transfer, and Sites of Writing_, and now formally expanded through the 2017 CCCC Research Initiative-sponsored Writing Passport Project (http://writingacrosscontexts.blogspot.com/), the TFT curriculum is offered in first-year composition, upper-level writing, internships, and graduate TA preparation. In this CCCC Research Initiative-sponsored expansion, one of the goals has been to keep the integrity of the curriculum while adapting it appropriately for different purposes and student populations.
Each of the 8 locationshas a unique profile, and thus a unique situation for adapting the curriculum:
—University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College is an open-admissions, two-year, regional college in the UC system, with a highly diverse student population. The adaptations included a shift in readings and reductions in page lengths for assignments.
–Centralia College is a small, rural community college with open-admissions. The student population is predominantly first generation, with most students also working at least part-time. There are also numerous students above the age of 25 who have come to the college as part of worker-retraining or after a major life change. The adaptations for Centralia College were similar to those at Blue Ash, with an additional concern about time for reflection outside of class.
Bristol Community College, a mid-sized, urban, public comprehensive, two-year college, contains a population very much like that of Blue Ash and Centralia. In addition, Bristol has seen a remarkable growth in minority enrollment since the early 2000’s. Adaptations to the TFT curriculum included readings that speak to that diversity.
At UC Santa Cruz, an HSI, R1 university, student demographics have shifted significantly in the past five years, with a growing number of multilingual, international, and first-generation college students. Curricular adaptations have also included a shift in TFT readings, but to meet the campus GE outcomes of the course, the adapted curriculum included sustained inquiry with seven weeks devoted to the study of a self-selected topics over the course of a ten-week quarter.
The University of Denver, a private RU/H on the quarter system, is committed to interdisciplinarity, and students are encouraged to major in more than one area. This site focused on key terms and on the impact of visual mapping of key terms on the development of students’ theory of writing.
The University of Massachusetts Boston, a public, 4-year, majority-minority university in the Northeast, is home to a version of TFT adapted to an upper-level professional writing course that also serves as an introduction to the English major.
–At William Paterson University of New Jersey, a suburban, public 4-year HSI just outside New York City where students are often first generation college learners, more than 70% are commuters, and many are non-traditional students, the TFT curriculum was adapted to an upper level course in Technical Writing, with enrollment from across disciplines.
At Florida State University, a large public residential flagship with an increasingly diverse populationstudents often take internships: the question the research considered was how a condensed introduction to TFT might help these students succeed in their internships.
Given these diverse campuses, their sites of instruction, and the purpose of the TFT curriculumthe central question focusing this workshop is how adaptations of the TFT curriculum can help all students perform as writers in multiple scenes–including in classes, in co-curriculars, in the workplace, and in personal writing. Working toward that end, participants in the workshop will begin creating a TFT curriculum, or revise their existing curriculum with TFT concepts and practices, with feedback and reflection opportunities to continue after the conference.
Our schedule includes 8 segments.
–One: Setting the Scene
1:00
• Introduction of participants to each other
• Icebreaker activity
• Overview of workshop
• What participants want to know: collection of guiding questions from participants
• Exercise: What already works in your course/program?
–Two: Performing Transfer, Performing TFT
1:20
• Definition: transfer of writing knowledge and practice
• Implications of transfer research for classroom practice
• TFT: Key Terms, Systematic Reflection, Theory of Writing
• Key terms: the 8
• Systematic Reflection: definition/student examples
• Theory of Writing: definition/student examples
• Overview of assignments: major and minor examples, with readings
–Three: Remix: Bringing Together What Already Works with TFT
2:00
• Discussion at tables
–Four: Adapting TFT to Various Scenes
2:15
• Kinds of adaptations (e.g., readings)
• Community colleges: major adaptations
• Upper level writing: major adaptations
• Internships: major adaptations
–BREAK
2:45
–Five: Design/Curricular Drafting Session at Tables
3:00
● Basic writing
● FYC at 4-year schools
● FYC at 2-year schools
● Upper level writing
● Internships
–Six: Critical Friends Activity
4:00
● Promising aspects of the draft curriculum
● Aspects of the curriculum to be revised
–Seven: Notes to Self
4:30
• Remix: participant questions and TFT
• Next steps for individual curricular designs
–Eight: Closing Reflection/Staying Connected
4:50
(SW.06) Revision as REmix: Hip Hop Instructional Practice & the Art of Revision
Level: 2-year
Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes
Abstract: In this workshop, teachers will explore hip hop instructional practices to help students overcome the common struggle of revising their work.
Full description:
In this workshop, teachers will explore hip hop instructional practices to help students overcome the common struggle of revising their work. By exploring the core elements of hip hop, participants will learn to guide a hip-hop infused lesson on revision for their students. To explore these core elements, participants will write, learn about hip hop sampling and practice revision. This interactive workshop incorporates elements of music, movement, and art.
Teaching students about hip hop sampling, helps connect the act of essay revision to an art form with which many students interact daily: the art of sampling. Getting students to realize how different samples are from the original makes clear the expectation for revision. The other elements I will employ while sharing this lesson are a “meta” presentation on how instructors might embrace hip hop culture overall. Through practicing additional elements throughout the course of workshop, attendees will gain a greater sense of how having a hip hop sensibility might impact their instruction beyond discussing hip hop sampling.
Inter-contextually, rhetorical theory itself encompasses oral and written communication. In a 1992 4Cs position paper, Casaregola argued eloquently that “generation by generation since the Renaissance and the development of print, moved further away from the origins of rhetoric origins that lie in the art of oral rhapsodic composing” (2). He furthers that “ the single most important aspect of ancient rhetoric was its oral performative nature–ancient rhetoric was an art of oral performance, even before it was derided by Plato or described by Aristotle” (4).
This presentation honors the performative nature of rhetoric by incorporating spoken word. The teachers will practice spoken word as a means to become more empowered educators through spoken word. Embodying spoken word will in turn help them to connect with the writing exercise in a performative manner. Though the main instructional component for students will be the discussion of sampling evident in the song clips shown, the main pedagogical component for attendees of the conference will be an embracing of hip hop culture through the use of practicing spoken word. The spoken word component is a means by which teachers may open themselves up to other components of hip hop, such as rap music. I will begin by showing a spoken word poem by Taylor Mali. Then, I will lead teacher-attendees through a series of prompts to create their own spoken word piece.
The questions that I will use for the writing prompt include the following:
1. When did you find your voice as an educator, and how did it impact your identity as both an educator and a person in the world?
2. How has (or might) this identity helped (or help) to increase access to the promise of education for Black and brown students?
3.Use the first letters of your name (first, last, or a combination) to write an acrostic poem that captures your responses to questions 1 & 2.
Then, I will share with them a lesson for teaching revision that I have found to work well with my students. This technique is performative in nature as well, as it involves a lesson on hip hop sampling. Once attendees engage with the lesson, they will then revise their work using the “sampling” technique introduced. I will play clips of songs that have later been sampled and have attendees note the differences between the two songs. This discussion about the practice of sampling will lead into a definition of revision. After this discussion, attendees will consider how they might write a new poem in the same way the hip hop song created a new song from sampling a previous musical arrangment. Teachers will have time to “sample” the first drafts of their poems by using the first draft written to create a new poem.
From there, we will prepare for an open mic session where they share their work. There will have been emphasis placed on “embodying” the poem, as an important component of spoken word. During the time allotted teachers attending the workshop will have the opportunity to perform the spoken word pieces that they create during the writing and revision process. Thus, the workshop will transform into a performative open mic space.
By using an open mic format, this session will flip the traditional conference model on its head by asking attendees to embody the teaching practice they are learning rather than sit down and soak up information. It is meant to be audience-oriented and performative. The teachers will be engaged as co-performers after they have revised their spoken word pieces. We will all gain knowledge of what helps us find voice as teachers.
We will also gain a new way of thinking about the connections between teaching composition and hip hop culture. Attendees will benefit by gaining a new sense of voice and a way to make marginalized centered in their classrooms.
This approach is inclusive and aimed at providing greater access to composition to students historically marginalized in these courses, including African-American and Latino students. Many of these students have to repeat composition. Teaching students to constructively revise their drafts is one way to ensure they become more successful writers. As an African-American female, hip hop educator, I feel that my own voice is underrepresented. I have been in the shoes of my students and am offering a way for my colleagues to uncover what makes those of us who are underrepresented in the academy feel more connected to the space.
(SW.07) DBLAC Writing Workshop
Special note: This workshop will run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 16.
Sponsored by: Digital Black Lit and Composition (DBLAC)
Level: All
Cluster: Institutional and Professional
Abstract: This Writing Workshop is an extension of DBLAC’s goal to foster a learning community where members are able to present their ideas, research, and writing amongst emerging scholars as a means of professional support and development. During this workshop, participants will be encouraged to share writing goals and writing activities.
Full description:
On the final Saturday of the conference, DBLAC will host a Writing Workshop for DBLAC members (graduate students and supporting faculty and community members).
DBLAC is an online and in-person network of Black-identified graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in fields related to the study of language. Our goal is to provide spaces and opportunities for our members that support their success. In doing so, we work diligently to uplift, support, and highlight the work of Black graduate students. You can read more about our mission and some of our work on our website: dblac.org.
Though many of our programs are tailored to Black graduate students, we are increasingly aware of the collective and universal need for community, especially in intellectual pursuits. That considered, we strive to share our methods and also to promote supportive communal interactions when possible. Our Writing Workshop is an extension of our organization’s goal to foster a learning community where members are able to present their ideas, research, and writing amongst emerging scholars as a means of professional support and development.
During the Writing Workshop, participants will be encouraged to share writing goals and work through individual projects and writing activities.
(SW.08) “Power to the People, No Delay.” The Transformative Force of Hip-Hop as Social Justice Catalyst
Special note: This workshop will run from 9:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on Saturday, March 16.
Level: All
Cluster: Community, Civic & Public
Abstract: This workshop explores Hip Hop’s roots in social justice and how this artistic, social and cultural movement has and continues to open up spaces for oppressed peoples’ voices, experiences, and resistance.
Full description:
This workshop explores Hip Hop’s roots in social justice and how this artistic, social and cultural movement has and continues to open up spaces for oppressed peoples’ voices, experiences, and resistance. Facilitators will highlight ways that Hip Hop is an important site of interrogation, especially in current times, and how youth and organizers worldwide are using hip-hop to re(construct), maintain, and negotiate their local situations and identities. A performance and lyrical deconstruction by a Hip Hop artist will be an interactive part of this workshop, as well as open times for discussion, questions and contributions from workshop participants.
In our Saturday Hiphop workshop, participants will:
- interact with a live performance and Q&A session with Hiphop artists K. Freshh and Dr. Hollyhood
- learn how Hip-hop inspired artists, activists, organizations, and coalition work can bring awareness to the need for criminal justice reform, ending state-sanctioned violence of unarmed people of color, as well as movements for environmental and educational justice
- view protests, performances, and news video clips to generate dialogue to enhance approaches to Hiphop Education in Composition and Rhetoric courses, Secondary and Community College English courses, as well as community outreach
- consider how Hiphop artists exhibit organic intellectual moves connected to social justice in their lyrics, words, interviews, music videos, performances, speeches, etc. and how the ideas these artists explore can prompt questions or actions to take with social issues, policies, etc. in the community of Pittsburgh
- apply an organic intellectual approach from Hiphop to identify individuals or groups of people in communities and/or schools that may be forgotten about or marginalized in some ways and generate ways to make communities and/or schools inclusive and welcoming to all
- discuss Hiphop intellectuals’ use of language to promote social justice and then identify how language is used/could be used in local (Pittsburgh) and state (PA) government to promote positive policies, laws, or any social issues
