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CCCC 2019: Wednesday Afternoon Workshops

Afternoon Workshops

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 – 1:30 to 5:00 p.m.

(AW.01) “Grantwriting and Community Engagement Pedagogy: How to Create and Adapt a Course for Your Particular Milieu”

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Facilitators will introduce grant-writing pedagogy through the lens of ethics and social justice, then move participants towards designing a course adapted to their particular communities.

Full description:

In this workshop, facilitators will share our experiences with grantwriting pedagogy, then move participants towards considering how to design a course within the particular context of their communities at two and four year colleges and universities. The workshop will engage participants at every turn in relation to pedagogy, social justice, and the ethics of community engagement; we will aim to expand their expectations of what student writing can accomplish.

In “The Community Grant Writing Project: A Flexible Service-Learning Model,” (Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 2014; 18:1), Courtney Stevens lays out one potential structure for grantwriting pedagogy based on her work at Williamette in writing intensive first year seminars (263): her students in a Poverty and Public Policy themed course volunteered 12 hours a semester with Habitat for Humanity and Farmworker Housing Development Corporation while then providing “grant writing materials…[and] research and narratives for prospective grant proposals (267). The community engagement office at Williamette helped Stevens identify and interview partners, then partners visited three times: first, to present an assignment description to students, second, to present drafts, and third to finalize and reflect. Students also wrote in other genres related to the course and wrote a “traditional term paper.”

While Stevens’ model worked well for her, we recognize that because each university and each instructor differs so greatly from one to the other, we want to extend the range of possible manifestations of a grantwriting course. For this reason, we will offer a workshop that encourages participants to construct a model that is unique to the specific needs of their communities and that takes into consideration the teaching of cultural competence as a necessary core to this pedagogy. Some of our workplaces, surprisingly, still don’t have the support of a community engagement office. In other contexts, grantwriting works better as a component in an upper level or graduate course. In others still, service learning where students travel to sites just isn’t feasible with the constraints of the curriculum.

Grant writing also provides composition instructors with a unique intersection between the twin themes of performance rhetoric and composition. Because grant readers (reviewers, awards committees at nonprofit organizations) represent a finite, specific, knowable audience, the grant application is a tangible rhetorical act. Additionally, the grantwriting process is an embodied performance intended to persuade an audience to act on the presented idea–to award the proposers a sum of money to enable them to perform specific actions. A culminating performance is often when students get the chance to lead work meetings with outside contstituents or when guest speakers, who present on content that reflects their writing, embody the research they’ve been working so hard on.

The multi-institutional and interdisciplinary work of this workshop takes the stance that privilege is meant to be shared, and that this act of sharing takes a lifetime of effort; thus, we believe that not only students–but we must also position ourselves in relation to the “other” or to those who have less privilege than we do (urban middle-schoolers in the City, refugees, etc.). The work of grantwriting pedagogy is centered around the historical and contemporary connections between university and community in the sense that writing is practiced as a way to advocate for full and equal participation of all groups. We acknowledge the legacies of injustice in our regions, we acknowledge our privileges, and we see how the work we do can have a positive impact on our collective futures. The curriculum ideas we discuss balance the practical aspects of workplace writing with theorizing and reflecting specifically on the social and cultural climate of our homes, what NPOs do there, why they do it, and on writing in relation to our communities, advocacy, and altruism. We believe in partnering with at least 50% organizations that not only serve people of diverse backgrounds but that are led by those folks as well.

Facilitator One created and runs a project at Towson University called Grantwriting In Valued Environments (G.I.V.E.), a university supported project of the English Department, that advances students’ professional writing goals by connecting their coursework to the writing needs of small non-profit organizations in the Baltimore/Washington region. Students so far have raised $173,530 all going directly to NPOs; we just submitted our largest grant of $300,000. Regularly, students also participate through internships, independent studies, and part-time paid employment. Facilitator One also leads Intergroup Dialogue workshops and is a vocal advocate for racial and social justice on campus.

Facilitator Two began teaching grant writing at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in 2005. Originally offered as a special topics class, Grant Writing developed into a stand-alone course and is taught at the undergraduate level and at the graduate level in both the English and Masters of Public Administration programs. It also was the genesis of a Writing for Nonprofits certificate program in the English department. Grant Writing is offered in both “face to face” and in online programs. Students and faculty have partnered with a variety of nonprofit agencies and have written funded grant applications totaling more than $700,000 on behalf of various agencies.

Facilitator Three, a renowned Disability Studies scholar, will model that relative newbie experience in terms of grantwriting pedagogy and talk about teaching a hybrid grant-writing and creative writing course.

(AW.02) Handcrafted Rhetorics: DIY and the Public Power of Made Things

Sponsored by: Handcrafted Rhetorics SIG

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Work with local artist-educators at a Pittsburgh makerspace to reconsider activist and pedagogical practices in composition.

Full description:

Attention to makerspaces and interest in leveraging their energy and practices are now well-established in Rhetoric and Composition. In these open, community-based production facilities, members not only share machines, rooms, and materials, but also work under an ethos of distributed knowledge and cooperatively-taught skills. Such DIY spaces are now commonplace in many US cities, including Pittsburgh. Having run locally-attuned workshops at CCCC in 2015 (Tampa) and 2017 (Portland), in 2018 (Kansas City) we left the convention space and ran the Handcrafted Rhetorics workshop (handcraftedrhetorics.org) at Print League (https://www.printleaguekc.com/), a community print shop. After successfully navigating the logistics of an off-site workshop—and hearing from our participants about how important such a change in venue was—we propose to again take participants into our host city, to a Pittsburgh makerspace.

Over the last several years, scholars and practitioners in our field alike have turned to histories and theories of craft, making, multimodal rhetoric, cultural rhetorics, and (post)process-oriented pedagogies to consider the ways that 21st century composers create/make/labor under particular conditions and with/in particular environments (Farmer, 2013; Prins, 2012; Palmeri, 2012; Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel, 2012; Shipka, 2011; Brown & Rivers, 2013). As part of that conversation, DIY and craft must be understood as concepts that have the potential to circulate through streams of radical and entrepreneurial rhetorics; that is, as a form of risk that is deeply embedded within capitalism, DIY and handcrafted composition can be scripted as acts of free-market logic or as transgressive—even revolutionary—public performance. Sometimes these two scripts get entangled within each other.

As such, we are teaming up with area makers, including Dr. Melissa Rogers, a local educator and artist who works with Pittsburgh arts organizations and nonprofits like Assemble (assemblepgh.org), Prototype (https://prototypepgh.com), and the Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse (http://pccr.org/), to structure a workshop that uses handcrafted rhetorics as a means for attention seeking (Mueller), embodying composition for public spaces in ways that challenge the dominant institutions that often seek to standardize, shape, and direct them (Richardson). In Pittsburgh, for instance, artists have been fighting union-busting tactics from area museums, struggling to challenge traditional positions that nonprofits don’t have money to pay artists. As such, teaching artists are an underpaid, overworked, and often feminized pool of labor that many cities rely on to fuel their culture industries and, concurrently, gentrification.

This hands-on workshop will present participants with an opportunity to engage with a cross-section of DIY practitioners—compositionists, artists, teachers, feminists, activists, and librarians—to address the inequalities perpetuated by the neoliberalization of the arts and humanities. In this way, this workshop brings members of our field together with teacher-artists to engage in craft activism — through yarnbombing, banner hangings, subversive cross-stitch, or zine creation (to name just a few possibilities). Our previous workshops have taught us that such participation engenders important dialogue through the act of making in response to local and national exigencies; in this case, we will use handcrafted rhetorics to address specific injustices but also as a means for thinking through broader questions such as:

-Are arts or other maker-approaches education recognized as a performance of labor? Likewise, how could performance render such labor more visible?
-How might we, in DIY fashion, compose new social and political movements in real time with what we make with our hands?
-How could we compose against, perform against, the exploitation of our own and other people’s arts and activist labor?
-How can we help to change the rhetoric of making/teaching art as a “labor of love,” or what critical librarian Fobazi Ettarh (2018) has dubbed “vocational awe” (http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/)?

Schedule:
1:30 p.m. – Meet at space; introduce people and tools
2:15 p.m. – Making
3:45 p.m. – Break
4-5:00 p.m. – Discuss the questions above, and also how to take these conversations back to our institutions and communities.

Our goals for this workshop include:
-developing a better understanding of DIY crafting, art, and making practices as labor, and of the work that community arts leaders do in cities like Pittsburgh, articulating some of the ways in which educators, craft practitioners, artists, and makers might productively balance activism and complicity within neoliberalizing cultural institutions
-exploring the relationships between performance, rhetoric, and composition as they are enacted within some of the communities of practice that comprise maker and/or making cultures
-fostering local, participatory crafts activism and political dialogue through hands-on activities that engage Pittsburgh’s built environment and physical spaces.

(AW.03) Bridging the Semiotic Channels: Teaching Discussion and Oral Performance in the Writing Classroom

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: This half-day workshop will offer new strategies for encouraging students’ oral participation and for creating more complex and recursive relationships between writing and oral performance.

Full description:

Noting the ways that performance studies can inform rhetorical studies, Bernadette Marie Calafell asserts that performance, “works against dominant conceptions of knowledge by locating itself in and theorizing through the body. […] It embodies and drives a sustained critique of discourse” (116). Building on the potential that Calafell observes, this workshop will consider the methodologies behind the most literally embodied form of discourse that students undergo in our courses: oral classroom participation.

Such a consideration is long overdue, given the enormous role that oral performance plays in students’ classroom experience. In terms of the day-to-day labor we expect students to perform in our classrooms, time spent speaking and listening likely exceeds everything else, including writing. However, relatively few instructors teach students to think about oral participation in the same nuanced terms that we think about writing. Instead, we expect students to teach themselves the genres and objectives of oral discourse and to develop their methods of engagement reflexively, rather than reflectively.

In this workshop, we will examine students’ oral participation as a category of classroom performance that is separate from, but related to, performance in text. Among the key questions we will examine together are:

• How can we teach students to develop and deploy a nuanced set of oral skills in the classroom?
• How can we use textual performance to inspire new kinds of oral performance?
• How can we use technology to change the way students’ written and oral discourses intersect in the classroom?
• How can we use oral performance strategically to engage and accommodate all students, especially students who have been resistant to or uncomfortable with traditional classroom discourses?

The workshop will be structured in three segments, each designed to highlight a critical issue in student oral participation and model pedagogies that presenters have developed to address these issues. In corresponding breakout sessions, participants will have a chance to discuss these pedagogies and offer suggestions of their own. Participants will complete the workshop with new ideas about strategies and assignments that encourage successful oral performance in the writing classroom.

Workshop Agenda

Opening Free Write: 10 min
We will open the session by asking participants to jot down their responses to three questions:
1. What forms of oral performance do you expect student to perform in your classroom?
2. How do these forms of oral performance serve the objectives of your course?
3. What particular skills do students need to participate successfully in these activities?

Session 1: Locating Oral Performance in the Curriculum

Presentation 1 (20 min):
Speaker 1 will discuss the existing scholarship on students’ oral participation, with special emphasis on the disparity between the purposes that students and teachers assign to oral participation and the means we use to teach and assess it. Survey data indicates that both students and faculty define oral participation in complex, multi-genre terms, but instructors rarely teach discussion skills in this way, and both teachers and students tend to evaluate oral participation purely in terms of how many students speak and how often. Speaker 1 will conclude by suggesting a curriculum for teaching oral skills that parallels the methods of the Teaching for Transfer curriculum in FYC.

Breakout 1 (30 min):
In this session, participants will discuss the particular ways that students’ oral participation manifests in their classrooms and the particular skills that students need to participate successfully. This session will also model a game-based approach to class discussion developed by Presenter 1.

Session 2: Using “Social Annotation” to Connect Writing and Speech

Presentation 2 (20 min):
Presenter 2 will introduce “social annotation” as a practice that can bridge the gap between “classroom discussion” and formal academic prose. Beginning with the oft-cited Burkean metaphor of “the [scholarly, academic] conversation,” they will pose a series of questions: Can we make that metaphor more concrete by making the text’s margins a place where multiple student voices enter into dialogue? What happens to “conversation as performance” when we work online, where contemporary students’ experience of the self as performed is most acute? How can the mediating stage of social annotation help transfer the skills addressed by presentation #1 to more formal student writing?

Breakout 2 (30 min):
The technology of choice for this session, hypothesis.is, generates shared “margins” via a server where annotations keyed to specific elements of a text are hosted, turning anything from readings on a course website to articles on the open web into annotatable texts. Working in groups, participants will be introduced to social annotation technologies; they will then model an annotation-as-discussion exercise that proposes ways the particular moves characteristic of social annotation can inform face-to-face discussion.

Session 3: Multimodal Arguments, Performance, and Student Engagement

Presentation 3 (20 minutes):
Informed by Andrea Lunsford’s argument that Everything’s an Argument, Speaker 3 will address student performance of argument in alternative, nontraditional, and multimodal formats. Oral performance not only works to help scaffold student skills toward particular writing goals, but also functions as a culminating point in a writing course when students use it to demonstrate what they have learned from/about argument writing. Students first translate and then perform, as part of an oral presentation, an argument in a format other than a writing assignment. Additionally, providing all students an opportunity to create and perform argument in a non-traditional format is an inclusive strategy that invites students who may not write well, who might not enjoy writing, or who experience writing as anxiety producing, a way to demonstrate their understanding of how to construct and support an argument in a format they can perform well. Incorporating such performative strategies, formats, genres, and modalities opens argument up to a wide array of cultural influences and forms representative of all students’ backgrounds and experiences.

Breakout 3 (30 minutes):
Speaker 3 will share digital assignment and representative student projects that perform arguments, and invite participants to share examples from their teaching, Participants can begin, individually or collaboratively, to imagine non-traditional, oral, performative versions of writing assignments they assign in their courses as non-written ‘texts’ that perform the same functions as written essays, and that better demonstrate commitments to inclusive pedagogies.

(AW.04) Performing Anti-Racist Practices at the Writing Program, Departmental, and Institutional Levels and Beyond: Combating Linguistic Racism

Sponsored by: The Language Policy Committee

Level: All

Cluster: Language

Abstract: This workshop will develop a course of action that will embolden the participants to combat linguistic racism at different levels, within and outside academia.

Full description:

Language diversity, language attitudes, and multilingualism are at the center stage of students’ performance as writers, rhetoricians, and communicators in higher education and in a global market. Faculty and writing program administrators play a role in this performance as well. We see the need of supporting and honoring students’ home languages and recognizing the value of linguistic differences as a resource in students’ learning. Lovejoy, Fox, and Weeden (2018) remind us of the underlying values of policies such as “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” when they address the importance of understanding “that the diverse linguistic experiences and abilities students bring with them to writing courses represent a strength, a resource, not a deficit or a barrier” (326). Language differences are a resource, and we must not only create awareness of this but also seek and apply anti-racist practices within and beyond the writing classroom. Performing the teaching of rhetoric and writing requires the performance of anti-racist teaching practices. Discriminating against people for their language is linguistic racism. Only until changes are made at the program, departmental, and institutional levels and beyond can we indeed claim to value language diversity as performers/rhetoric and performers/composition. Only until we work towards these changes can we ensure that what we value in education will be sustained, and only then can we conquer linguistic racism.

In this half-day workshop, we have a major purpose: To work together with participants in discussing how as performers/rhetoric and performers/composition we can combat linguistic racism. We will seek answers to questions such as: What can we do as faculty to transform perceptions of cultural and linguistic literacies and language differences? What can we do as writing program administrators? As university and college administrators? As community members? What are specific anti-racist practices that we can apply in the classroom, the writing program, the department, the institution, the workplace, and the community?

Part I: Performing Anti-Racist Practices at the Program, Departmental, and Institutional Levels
This part of the workshop will focus on the need of performing anti-racist practices at the writing program, departmental, and institutional levels. We will begin by having participants share with us what their institution is like, their institutional context, and what their writing programs consist of. We will address how a multilevel approach can include aspects such as language policies within departments. Others could be: first-year experience programs, writing certificate programs, learning communities, the Writing Center, service-learning projects, and university events. From this discussion, we will move to a group activity. If possible, a short video will be presented, showing educators/scholars performing some type of linguistic justice work.

Activity 1 (small groups): Participants and LPC (Language Policy Committee) members will work in groups and brainstorm possible practices that can be implemented in First-Year and other Writing Programs and at the departmental and institutional levels to stop linguistic racism. Large Post-It Sheets will be used to list these practices. These will be placed on the wall, and each group will present their findings.

Part II: Performing Anti-Racist Practices in the Workplace and the Community
This part of the workshop will center on presenting strategies for combating linguistic racism in the workplace and the community. Examples could include community events, policies, and trainings. A group activity will follow. If possible, a short video will be presented, showing community members performing some type of linguistic justice work.

Activity 2 (small groups): Participants and LPC members will work in groups and brainstorm possible anti-racist linguistic practices that can be implemented in the workplace and the community. Large Post-It Sheets will be used to list these practices. These sheets will be placed on the wall, and each group will present their findings.

After having a discussion of all the listed practices, we will summarize the major findings. We will conclude our workshop with one final activity that will be shared with the group as a whole.

Activity 3 (individual): Each participant will write down ONE practice or strategy he/she will implement in the next year to combat linguistic racism at any of the levels discussed in the workshop. The goal is to create a course of action, a plan that will embolden the participants to combat linguistic racism at different levels, within and outside academia.

Proposed Schedule:

1:30-1:45 p.m. – Introductions, Purpose of Workshop, Overview

1:45-2:10 p.m. – Part I – Performing Anti-Racist Practices at the Program, Departmental, and Institutional Levels
2:10-2:30 p.m. – Small group activity (Activity 1)
2:30-2:50p.m. – Groups report on their findings/proposed practices and strategies
2:50-3:00 p.m. – Large group discussion on anti-racist practices at the program, departmental, and institutional levels

3:00-3:10 p.m. Break

3:10-3:20 p.m. – Part II – Performing Anti-Racist Practices in the Workplace and the Community
3:20- 3:40 p.m. – Small group activity (Activity 2)
3:40-4:00 p.m. – Groups report on their findings/proposed practices and strategies
4:00-4:15 p.m. – Large group discussion on anti-racist practices in the workplace and the community, leading to last activity
4:15-4:25 p.m. – Individual Activity (Activity 3)
4:25-4:45 p.m. – Participants share their proposed practice(s)/course of action for the coming year

4:45-5:00 p.m. – Wrap up and conclusion

(AW.05) Staying woke on campus: Promoting social justice for multilingual students

Sponsored by: Second Language Writing Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: Language

Abstract: Discuss practical strategies and theoretical approaches to breaking down monolingualism in understanding multilingual identities, campus conversations, learning outcomes, and pedagogy.

Full description:

Vershawn Ashanti Young has called us to explore how performance-composition can “keep us woke bout our responsibilities to antiracism, to practicing class, gender, and social justice.” The Second Language Writing SG takes up this call by focusing on how we as educators can work towards social justice for multilingual students through classroom practices, campus-wide advocacy, and administrative choices. In particular, we recognize that conversations on college campuses around linguistic difference tend to carry “an undercurrent of racial distinctions” (Shuck, 2006), and to be predicated on outdated ideas of multilingual students as no more than “imitation monolinguals” (Gramling, 2016). To bring about social justice for multilingual students, we must shift the conversations to ones that recognize multilinguals’ unique competencies in moving across languages and cultures (Canagarajah, 2013; You 2016).

Our proposed half-day workshop is intended to bring together writing teachers and tutors, administrators, and graduate students to explore questions such as:

• How can we identify our multilingual student populations?
• What aspects of multilingual student identity might we be misunderstanding? How might our labels for multilingual students be harmful?
• How can we take advantage of rhetorics of diversity and globalization at the university level to advocate for our multilingual students?
• What pedagogical practices can we adopt to break down notions of correctness in ways that create spaces for multilingual students to negotiate?

Our workshop will open with remarks from Shanti Bruce of Nova Southeastern University, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Deirdre Vinyard of the University of Washington, Bothell. Drawing on their experiences conducting a cross-institutional language survey funded by a CCCC Research Initiative Grant, their keynote address will examine how the language terms or labels at our disposal sometimes flatten or hide the complexity of language experiences students bring to campus. Their keynote address, “The Complexity of Institutional Language Surveys,” will take participants through the process of designing a survey that aimed to understand the varied linguistic experiences and identities of our students. The keynote will conclude with an interactive activity in which workshop participants consider together how they might shape their own institutional surveys to capture data that best represents what they believe their campus stakeholders need to know.

Next, our roundtables will offer practical strategies for advocating for multilingual students in both classroom practice and administration, through attention to our assumptions about student identity in teaching and campus conversations, the structure of learning outcomes, plagiarism policies and the adjudication process, and our classroom assessment practices. The workshop will conclude with individual and group reflections on how these strategies can best be implemented in our individual contexts.

Participants can expect tangible “take aways” from this workshop, including:
• How to raise faculty and administration awareness of multilingual students’ issues and perspectives
• How to develop localized learning outcomes that push back against monolingual ideologies, and how to develop teaching materials and assessment criteria that stem from and support those learning outcomes
• How to design pedagogical activities that help students themselves investigate and critique the myth of linguistic homogeneity, ranging from single lessons to major assignments
• How to read between the lines of official plagiarism policy documents, talk to students about plagiarism, and support multilingual students through the adjudication process

Roundtables

1. Complicating Multilingual Writer Identities Within and Beyond Institutional Contexts

Based on an analysis of multilingual student narratives collected as part of a broader study in a university context, facilitators will complicate notions of the multilingual student writer identity. These student narratives shed light on various assumptions that are peer-based, instructor-based and institutionally based. Facilitators will invite discussion that addresses these unproductive (and sometimes unexpected) assumptions about multilingual students. Together we will explore how instructors and administrators across different institutions can find opportunities to better understand their local and international multilingual students’ experiences.

2. Toward Socially-Just and Anti-Racist Student Learning Outcomes

Participants of this interactive roundtable session will explore strategies for promoting linguistic and racial justice through advocating for and teaching student learning outcomes that contest monolingualist ideologies. Together, we will examine ways in which speakers who are visually marked as other—including many ELLs, documented and undocumented students, international students, and domestic students of color—are particularly positioned to benefit from pedagogical practices that confront the racist politics of language. Participants will also explore and co-develop localized learning outcomes (and correlating teaching practices) that aim to work against monolingualism.

3. Engaging Students in Conversations about Multilingualism and Correctness
In our roundtable session, participants will discuss several examples of assignments (including readings, class activities, and major writing projects) that the presenters have used to actively counteract the “myth of linguistic homogeneity” (Matsuda, 2006) in foundations writing classes, thus engaging students in conversations about multilingualism. Next, the presenters will introduce an activity in which students critically engage with their own ideas about “correctness” by analyzing grading rubrics and creating their own. Finally, participants will be invited to share and discuss their own ideas for class activities that can serve to address multilingualism.

4. Broadening Campus Conversations to Include Multilingual Students
This roundtable focuses on raising awareness about the presence of our multilingual students through linking them to prominent conversations on campus. Participants will (1) see an example of such a conversation that emerged from racial incidents at one campus, a conversation that both affected and marginalized international multilingual students, (2) discuss a project that brought these students’ voices and experiences to the campus response, and (3) identify conversations and potential projects at other institutions.

5. Academic Integrity as Institutional Imperative: Navigating the Plagiarism Reporting Process With/For Multilingual Students
This roundtable creates space for SLW specialists, administrators, and others to learn how to better advocate for multilingual students by analyzing official academic honesty/plagiarism policies from a variety of institutions, and by developing talking points for use with deans, honesty committees, and others. We will discuss policy evaluation criteria like generality, specificity, and flexibility. We will share strategies for clarifying expectations and articulating the complexities that multilingual students encounter as they learn to write from sources and avoid plagiarism.

(AW.06) Performing Corpus Analysis: Putting Corpus Findings Into Pedagogical Practice

Level: All

Cluster: Language

Abstract: Offers practice and principles for bringing corpus-based studies of academic discourse into writing instruction, including use of corpus insights for better understanding “academic” language.

Full description:

A great deal of writing research in recent years has used tools from corpus linguistics to identify patterns of language choices that are meaningful in discursive contexts, ranging from Biber et al.’s research on academic registers, to Hyland’s research on stance and positioning in disciplinary discourses, to Aull’s examination of language patterns in first-year students’ writing, to Lancaster’s corpus analysis of templates from Graff and Birkenstein’s textbook They Say, I Say. Despite this outpouring of research, however, writing practitioners need further assistance in (a) translating corpus findings into meaningful principles and tasks for writing students and (b) conducting their own corpus investigations, including principles for creating databases, or corpora, of writing and tools for carrying out analysis. This half-day workshop will offer participants a range of practiced perspectives for using the insights into language that corpus studies grant us, including how they can change our understanding of language, and for applying those insights to the writing classroom.

Speaker 1, in “Moving from corpus findings to teaching of ‘hedging’ and rhetorical positioning,” will discuss ways to bring into the classroom corpus-based insights into the language of academic writing without further perpetuating prescriptive, decontextualized (“good/bad”) views of writing—which is a real danger. The case study pursued here is that of “hedging,” defined as expressions of stance that reduce writers’ commitment to claims. We know from corpus studies that hedging is important for positioning arguments, and we have evidence that experts use more hedges than certainty expressions (Hyland), that upper-level students use more than first-year students (Aull & Lancaster), and that high-graded papers use more than lower-graded ones (Lancaster). Such findings, when presented without sensitivity to genre and situation, could fuel a prescriptive view that “hedging is good.” Working against this, the speaker will explore tasks on stance that help foster reflection and targeted inquiries, and will model activities that help students explore rhetorical functions of hedges in specific rhetorical contexts.

Speaker 2, in “Exploring tools for analyzing small corpora,” will demonstrate how free, online text analysis tools can be used to investigate the linguistic features of small researcher- or student-created corpora, and will invite participants to apply these tools to a small corpus that will be provided. (Participants must bring laptops.) Speaker 2 will describe two examples of pedagogical applications of small corpus analysis. The first is a current research project that compares end-of-semester portfolio reflections written by students at different stages in the FYC sequence at one institution. The second shows how students gained genre awareness by conducting corpus analysis of texts from different disciplinary genres. Finally, workshop participants will brainstorm ideas for using corpus analysis to address a range of research questions and classroom applications.

Speaker 3, in “Using corpus tools to identify expectations for student writing,” will show how corpus analysis of published work and student work can provide tools to illustrate expectations and diagnose where students fall short in meeting those expectations. Using data from Lancaster’s article on concession and counterarguments, we will compare those findings to students’ Researched Argument papers. After I briefly introduce AntConc, participants will work with a subset of argument papers to identify places where students perform or misperform the needed rhetorical moves for acknowledging and responding to other voices. The participants and presenters will analyze why those features exist and brainstorm ways the corpus tools can help students recognize those patterns and improve their arguments.

Speaker 4 will explore “Demystifying academic language: Myths vs. reality.” One of the functions of public education is to provide all students with access to academic language—the language of schooling. This construct, however, is often presented in abstract, general ways that become a barrier to students’ academic reading and writing. Using corpus findings (as presented by Biber, Gray, and the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English), Speaker 4 will demystify academic writing through a description of its unique patterns (compression, elaboration, explicitness). Considering the fact that academic writing is the polar opposite of conversation/speech, the speaker will also suggest ways of bridging this gap between the two through the use of “popular” research/academic texts which include features of both registers.

Speaker 5, in “Functionally driven language patterns in narrative and newswriting,” will also draw heavily on the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written Language (Biber et al.), the first comprehensive corpus grammar of English, in describing differences in language patterns between narrative and news writing. Both are called “stories” in everyday speech, but the differences are substantial, including lexical density (information density), noun to verb ratios, tense and aspect, and types of subjects. Corpus studies give us substantial quantitative information about differences in texts, but they can’t by themselves provide qualitative explanations. Are these just surface differences, or are they motivated by the different work these genres enact? We will examine texts that seem prototypical, ask whether the patterns show up in those texts, and consider ways in which they are functionally motivated. Through group work and conversation, we will consider implications for teaching.

Speaker 6 will explore “Raising language awareness through hands-on exploration of COCA.” Teachers’ demonstrations or lectures on differences between informal conversational and scholarly written language can be a passive experience for students that may not translate into their making more effective choices in their own writing. Speaker 6 will take workshop participants through some simple hands-on exercises using COCA where students can explore sub-corpora in different registers such as soapies, fiction, and academic to find out for themselves whether prescriptive rules such as those against using contractions, personal pronouns, colloquial words like “kids,” and dialectal variants like “off of” are supported by the facts of real-world usage. Students can also upload a small sample of their own writing to measure the “academic strength” of their vocabulary choices against an academic sub-corpus. The aim of these exercises is to capitalize on our students’ familiarity with computer-based technologies, and spark their curiosity about the role of vocabulary and grammar in language.

(AW.07) The Choreography of Collaborative Coding

Level: All

Cluster: Research

Abstract: This workshop first offers an overview of the theory and practice of collaborative coding. Participants will then gain hands-on experience using the software program MAXQDA.

Full description:

As collaborative researchers on the Upward Project and co-authors of several publications on undergraduate research processes and perceptions, the leaders of this workshop will offer hands-on practice in collaborative coding through the lens of performance. In The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, Johnny Saldaña explains why qualitative researchers sometimes choose to code collaboratively: “Multiple minds bring multiple ways of analyzing and interpreting the data . . . Provocative questions are posed for consideration that could possibly generate new and richer codes” (27). Yet one of the major challenges of coding collaboratively is coordinating the efforts of multiple researchers, what might be thought of as a “choreography” of collaborative coding. It is work that involves the (hopefully graceful) coordination of many moving parts. Specifically, one or more choreographers must conceptualize and develop plans and protocols for how the performance will be carried out and why: What questions does the group bring to the project? What do they wish to explore? Why a group rather than a solo performer? What approaches to coding and kinds of codes best meet these aims and purposes?
As a research method, collaborative coding also allows for interpretive dissensus and a method for achieving a quantitative result. The speakers will first share their own experiences of reader dissensus through the lens of Louise Rosenblatt’s “poem as event,” (10) which posits the reader as the performer of a text and the performance itself as an event in time. This theory of reading typically applied to literature focuses our attention on stance; in this way participants will examine the stances they take when cued by a writer of any text and share their performances with their collaborators. In reflecting on their stance toward writerly cues, readers as researchers can better define the scope of agreement for a collaborative decision.
Conceiving reading as an event in time and the coding project as a choreographed performance, the result of collaborative coding is ideally like a troupe’s dance, combining individual interpretation and expression within a meaningful whole. As Elaine Richardson observes, though, performance is nonstandardized and irreplicable. If these attributes adhere to the idea of collaborative coding as a kind of performance, where does that leave collaborative coding in the tradition of RAD research? The workshop will end by addressing the implications of collaborative coding as performance.

Organization
Before the workshop, participants will be asked to download a free trial of MAXQDA software and watch the video tutorials. The workshop will begin with an intro to collaborative coding as performance and an exploration of the kinds of research questions it can answer. The next section will apply the lens of performance and provide an overview of a project’s stages and procedures. It will move to practice with sample texts and increase in complexity until participants are coding both individually and collaboratively using MAXQDA. Because coding is cognitively demanding, coding sessions will be short and a break will be scheduled between the coding blocks. Participants will leave the workshop with an understanding of collaborative coding’s goals and processes, its theoretical and technical applications, and the organizational demands it puts on a research team.

Schedule

1:30-2:00: All: Introduction to Collaborative coding as method: What kind of research questions can it answer?
2:00-2:30: Speaker 1: The choreography of collaborative coding: stages and procedures
2:30-3:00: Speaker 2: Reading as event: Participants code sample text; Intro to MAXQDA
3:00-3:15: Break
3:15-4:00: Speaker 3: Participants individually code using MAXQDA
4:00-4:30: Speaker 4: File sharing and collaboration in MAXQDA
4:30-5:00: Implications and Wrap-Up

Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994.

Saldaña, Johnny. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. London, UK: Sage, 2009.

(AW.08) Pedagogical Strategies for Increasing Student Self-Efficacy: Turning “No Can” into “Can Do”

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Participants will learn how to implement pedagogical strategies to increase student self-efficacy in the writing classroom.

Full description:

Many of our students come into the writing classroom with an attitude of they “can’t do writing.” While many instructors understand where the belief came from (poor prior performance, commentary from the past, an inadequate understanding of the tools and techniques required for success in writing, among others), the study of self-efficacy in the college classroom until recently has been slow. In fact, it wasn’t until 2010 that the first big data research was conducted in the FYC college classroom that determined that raising self-efficacy was possible and how that was accomplished. Even if an instructor knows what self-efficacy is and the role it plays in writing success, he or she may not have the tools with which to increase student self-efficacy. This workshop aims to fill that void.

This workshop brings together seasoned practitioners in the field of student self-efficacy to assist participants in developing pedagogy that enhances their own classroom practices and pedagogy and enables students to experience a rise in their own efficacy. The proposed layout of the workshop will begin with a description of self-efficacy from each presenter who will characterize agency/self-efficacy as they understand and activate it in their classes so that a range of ways to understand what self-efficacy is provided. Students need to be made overtly conscious of their own agency and self-efficacy demonstrating multiple viewpoints and techniques is paramount to success. Furthermore, each participant will offer context for the kinds of classes that they teach and the activities that are performed in the classes. Each discussion will be followed with breakout sessions to enable participants to share their own classroom pedagogies. Each breakout group will include one facilitator who will provide feedback. After each “round,” the groups will reconvene to report out and share what was discovered. The following is representative of the proposed schedule:

1:30 to 2:00 This introduction to self-efficacy will be hosted by each of the facilitators. Focus will be on self-efficacy: what it is; why it’s important; how it’s best used in the writing classroom. Theory will be emphasized with a working bibliography provided to all participants via Google Docs. This introduction will serve as a grounding for student self-efficacy and what it looks like in each facilitator’s classroom. (All Speakers, 30 minutes total)

2:00 to 3:00 In this section of the workshop, the facilitators will discuss practice and pedagogy. A Collaborative Activity Breakout Section or Learning by Doing where each facilitator will work with breakout groups to design small assignments and activities that are portable and sustainable. The facilitators will begin with a focus on what types of “small teaching” will best help students to increase their self-efficacy. Thereafter, the participants will be placed into small groups to share ideas and meet as collaborators and then reconvene with the larger group to report out. Facilitators will assist with this breakout session by rotating through the groups to ensure that attention is given to the topic. The purpose of this activity will be to provide “small teaching” moments that can be employed in daily classroom activities. (60 minutes)

3:00 to 3:15 Break (15 minutes)

3:15 to 4:15. In this section of the workshop, the facilitators will discuss the development of writing assignments with student self-efficacy in mind: What assignments work best; how to present assignments, etc.. This section of the workshop will feature a collaborative Activity Breakout Section or Learning by Doing where each facilitator will work with breakout groups to assist in the design of writing assignments and classroom activities that not only support the writing assignment but also are designed with student self-efficacy in mind. The facilitators will begin with a focus on what types of information raises student self-efficacy through the use of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (among other modalities). Thereafter, the participants will be placed into small groups to share ideas and meet as both collaborators and brainstormers and then will reconvene with the larger group to report out. Facilitators will assist with this breakout session by rotating through the groups to ensure that attention is given to the topic. The purpose of this activity will be to have the participants leave the workshop with a series of writing assignments that will assist students in building their self-efficacy. These assignments can then be employed by the participants in future courses. The participants’ take-away will be a collection of assignments that will help to build student self-efficacy. (60 minutes)

4:15 to 5:00 Wrap-up, “town hall” discussion, question and answers. (All Speakers, 45 minutes)

Participant requirements:
We recommend attendees bring laptops/tablets and a working syllabus. Participants will receive access to all documents and activities via Google Drive.

(AW.10) Quilting Composition: Performing Composition Pedagogy through Critical Quilt Making

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Participants in this hands-on workshop will quilt to explore its pedagogical usefulness for performing composing processes, encouraging cooperative argumentation, and doing social justice work.

Full description:

As rhetoric and composition continue to recognize critical making as useful to performing composition (Haas; Ratto and Boler; Shipka and Sheridan), how might we, as scholars and teachers in the field, practice pedagogy that critically engages these ideas? This workshop answers that call by challenging participants to reimagine composition through the practice of quilting. In this hands-on workshop, the Quilters will first introduce their experiences as part of an upper division undergraduate writing course that tasked students with performing composition, cooperative argumentation, and social justice through quilting. They will then lead participants in break-out groups where each person will make their own quilt block. These individual blocks will spark discussion about the composition process, collaboration, and group work in the rhetoric and composition classroom, and quilting composition as social justice.

Quilter One, an Assistant Professor of Composition Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), will open the workshop with an overview of her upper division composition course, “Cooperative Quilting.” In this class, Quilter One uses quilting to introduce students to cooperative argumentation, deliberative inquiry, and research and writing in the humanities and social sciences. Building on the work of Sonia Arellano, The Migrant Quilt Project, and Sewing for Social Justice, Quilter One argues that quilting is uniquely positioned as both an individual and collaborative method for performing composing processes and is conducive to individual and group dialogues about social justice and advocacy. Quilter One will discuss her experiences as the instructor of the course, including reactions from students and fellow faculty, and critical and pedagogical considerations. Finally, Quilter One will challenge assumptions about which bodies and whose bodies perform quilting by linking her approach to quilting as composition to rasquachismo (Ybarra-Frausto) through her identity as a Chicanx woman who had no experience as a quilter before this project.

Quilter Two, Quilter One’s student, discusses her role in the quilting project and creating her own quilt piece, or “block.” She reflects on how making the quilt is both stimulating and insightful as it asks individuals who have similar and different opinions to come together to create new ideas. Through her observations, she notes that quilting challenges thought processes as participants work to figure out how to best represent ideas important to them. Quilter Two will summarize her experiences and observations before leading a quilting group. Quilter Two expects that participants in this workshop will most likely change their ideas multiple times before choosing a representation, and as they quilt they will see that the outcome may not become an exact replica of what they imagined. She will use this to help spark a conversation about the composition process and encourage workshop participants to think critically about quilting as composition.

Quilter Three, also a student of Quilter One, will speak about her experience quilting in class. She will focus on her initial impressions of the project, including doubts and fears from the student perspective of being tasked with such an undertaking. Her discussion will cover her success despite not having any prior sewing experience to help make the quilt, and the challenges she faced along the way while sewing. Apart from the individual sewing tasks, she will also cover group and class dynamic and how disagreements about the quilt were settled. She will use these observations to discuss how the quilt helped develop her dialogic and ethical communication and cooperation through group quilting. Once the introduction concludes, she will help participants in her group sew, cut, measure, and fuse textiles, teach them the different dimensions of the quilt (front, back, batting), and help with questions participants may have about the project.

Quilter Four will approach the project as a researcher and respondent. She will provide a deeper understanding of how textiles function as technical documents (Haas; West-Pucket), and the history of textiles as testimonio in indigenous communities across Latin America. This connection helps ground Quilter One’s project as a decolonial Latinx feminist approach to teaching composition, especially in the context of CSUMB, a Hispanic Serving Institution. Using her experience as a farmworker to connect embodied practice to performative research, Quilter Four will show how innovative pedagogies which respond to the lived experiences of the student population encourage students to value the historically undermined epistemologies they bring into the classroom. Quilter Four will argue that quilting composition, reimagined as decolonial Latinx feminism, goes beyond traditional multimodality to connect bodies and lives through performance and production.

Workshop Schedule (half-day Wednesday afternoon session):

1:30-2:30: Introduction to Critical Quilting
In the first hour, Quilter One will give a theoretical and pedagogical introduction to critical quilt making as composition. Her discussion will include an overview of her experience designing and instructing an upper division composition course that engages quilting as pedagogy. Handouts which include a sample syllabus, quilting resources, and bibliography will be provided. Quilters Two and Three will speak about their experiences as students of the course, and the impact it had on their scholarly development. Quilter Four will discuss the project from a researcher’s perspective, focusing on how performative projects require performative research practices.

2:30-4:00: Critical Quilting Groups
After introducing the project, each Quilter will host a break-out group of participants in creating individual quilt blocks that represent their scholarly identities. All materials will be provided by the Quilters, who will lead participants in a variety of quilting practices to help them produce their quilt block, including an introduction to measuring, cutting, stitching, fusing (the no-sew method!), and other quilting considerations. No quilting experience necessary! Quilters will share their expertise and assist participants in creating their quilt blocks.

4:00-5:00: Discussion and Reflection
The last hour will ask that participants reflect on the process of creating their own quilt block and how they connect their critical making to composition theory and practice. It will also include a discussion of the challenges, risks, rewards, and other considerations of engaging quilting as composition pedagogy.

(AW.12) Teach it Like We Mean It: Helping Students Perform Their Power in Peer Review

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: This highly interactive workshop will disrupt standard peer review practice with a goal to support participants’ design or revision of one peer review assignment.

Full description:

Since the social turn in composition studies, asking students to engage in collaborative peer review and response has become standard practice in the writing classroom. We require it. We praise it. We believe in it. And we should. Many composition scholars (Bruffee, Gere, and Nelson, to name a few) have illustrated that peer review can be a meaningful collaborative learning activity for students. In fact, Reid claims that peer review “is not just an assignment in a writing class; it’s the assignment that best encapsulates what we want writers to do after they leave our class” (219). Despite our assumed belief in the value of peer review, the practice is often ineffective and unimaginative. Our experience as writing instructors and WPAs has shown us that while many instructors claim to value peer review, few utilize the process to its full potential.

The problem, as we see it, is that students often act as inauthentic performers–they write, critique, and revise in a way they think will impress their instructor. Further, students often have a complicated relationship to their own authority in their writing and review habits (Walvoord and McCarthy; Schneider and Andre). We understand why—peer review is a complex series of tasks, of giving and receiving, of critiquing and responding, that have become problematically simplified and teacher-centric, and in negotiating those expectations students often default to pleasing the instructor—but this isn’t a fait accompli. Together, we can rethink how peer review is presented, and make it the heart of the composition classroom rather than an add-on.

This highly interactive workshop will help instructors disrupt standard peer review practice. We will start the day with a group discussion of the ways that students perform peer review, considering the following questions together:

-How do students perform peer review?
-How do teachers perform peer review?
-On what assumptions/beliefs do students and teachers base this performance?
-How does this performance help or hinder student feedback and revision?
-How do we know if our peer review performances are working?

This discussion will set the foundation for the question that will guide the rest of the workshop: How do we help students move beyond their current performances to develop agency and authenticity as peer reviewers?

Using participant peer review assignments to ground our work, we will rethink how to teach peer review as a genre that is rhetorically situated. We will discuss different models for peer review, such as teaching peer review as a genre of writing with a particular purpose, audience, and rhetorical work, using full-class workshops to make the work of feedback public and open, and how to assess student learning through peer review. The goal is of our conversation is to support participants’ design or revision of one peer review assignment.

Finally, we will put our discussion of peer review methodologies into context with current research trends, and discuss the potential for new publications that could arise from the new peer review activities our participants will have developed. We will ask participants to think through assignment goals, how they might collect evidence of whether or not they accomplished that goal, and how they might report what they find to their programs or to the wider field.

Workshop Outcomes

1. Participants will identify ways to introduce and contextualize the work of peer review for student writers and develop strategies to situate peer review within the academy.

2. Participants will be introduced to models of peer review that go beyond the in-class activity, including teaching peer review as a genre, full-class workshops, and assessing learning through peer review.

3. Participants will develop and problematize peer review strategies that prioritize effective and inclusive classroom practices.

4. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop and revise at least one existing peer review assignment with their peers, or create a new assignment that can then be implemented in their classes.

5. Participants will design assessments of their new peer review assignments that will help them know if peer review is doing the work they want it to do in the classroom.

6. Participants will leave with a brief bibliography overviewing peer review scholarship and a shared group-created list of possible areas for peer review research and collaborations.

7. Participants will receive handouts and links to videos and other multimodal peer review resources.

Workshop Schedule

1:30-1:45: Introductions

1:45-2:30: Discussion: Unpacking Student Performance in Peer Review
How do we characterize student performance in peer review? How does it affect peer review? Where does it come from?

2:30-3:00: Introducing Students to the Work of Peer Review: Contextualizing and Sharing
How do we introduce students to the work of peer review? How do we frame this work? How do we establish the importance? How do we model this work? In this section, we present participants with peer review models derived from our own classroom practice and research. Participants will also engage in annotating and roleplay to explore and critique these models.

3pm: Short Break

3:15pm-4:15pm: Transforming our Peer Review Practice: Considering New Models
What are different models of performing peer review in the classroom? How can we revise our peer review activities to align with our expectations of students? How can we create peer review assignments that are more accessible and inviting to students? In this section, participants will share peer review assignments they bring to the workshop with a small group and will workshop them with input from one of the panelists.

4:15-5:00: Discussion: Implementing, Assessing, and Studying Peer Review Practices
How can we sustain an intentional peer review pedagogy? How can we assess our peer review practices? What peer review resources are available to instructors? How can our peer review work contribute to research?

(AW.13) Shut up and Listen!: Speaking truth to power (2-hr Ignite Talk Workshop)

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Programs

Abstract: This workshop intends to generate both theory and pedagogy to undo systemic educational injustice and devise strategic plans for implementation at varying institutions.

Full description:

As writing center scholars begin to look at ways to make writing centers a more inclusive space for historically marginalized people, and also include more historically marginalized people in writing center scholarship, they must recognize that the goal of inclusion is not sufficient. Directors, tutors, and staff, then, must also work to actively dismantle the normalized systemic oppression (white supremacy), which still continues to silence, ignore, and delegitimize certain groups of people as well as their experiences. They must learn to listen to the experiences of these underserved people and see those experiences not only as valid, but also true and not in need of (whitesplaining). As such, this ignite talk is invites people who are willing to share their stories as historically marginalized people in the writing center in an effort to: 1) bring insight to the ways the writing center pedagogies and theories have both included historically marginalized people and—perhaps unwittingly—excluded them; 2) highlight the ways allyship fails; 3) emphasize the need for accomplices and 4) create plans of action buttressed by accomplices, mentors and like minded supporters. This ignite talk is in five parts:
Part I: Voices from the margins (20 minutes)
In Part I, scholars from historically marginalized populations, i.e. race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. share their experiences working a writing center. These experiences include but are not limited to stories of racism, sexism, homophobia, bureaucratic red tape, hiring practices, etc.
After Part I, there is a ten-minute break where those identifying as from the dominant culture or as writing center directors, etc. reflect and write down their thoughts and questions in response to Part I (10 minutes).
Part II: Power has a say (20 minutes)
In Part II, writing center directors and scholars identifying as from the dominant culture share their experiences with historically marginalized students in the writing center, as well as discuss the ways in which the have consciously attempted to make a more (or less) inclusive writing center. These experiences could include but are not limited to hiring practices, tutor pedagogies, tutor preparatory class, etc.
After Part II, there is a ten-minute break where historically marginalized participants reflect and write down their thoughts and questions in response to Part II (10 minutes).
Part III: Responding to shared stories (30 minutes)
In Part III, participants will break into groups and share their questions and responses to the stories each person shared. These questions and responses function not only as a way to value stories and the experiences of those who work in the writing center, but also as an exchange of ideas where we begin to form ways to implement tangible change in the writing center.
Part IV: Tangible Change (30 minutes)
In Part IV, groups will share what they learned listening these stories and discuss the types of tangible changes they decided to attempt to implement within their own writing centers, writing center scholarship, or writing center pedagogy. This activity also works as an exchange of ideas as more groups share their plans for tangible change.
Part V: Forging Bonds (10 minutes)
This work is hard, but the road can be less bumpy with accomplices providing encouragement, support and a voice when yours isn’t loud enough. In Part V, individuals will be prompted to one more force of action. Participants will be asked to truly commit to actively demonstrating their accompliceship by connecting with, and exchanging contact info with those they relate to. The hope here is to foster supportive relationships that help keep the work going, and get it done.

CCCC 2019: Wednesday Morning Workshops

Morning Workshops

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 – 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

(MW.01) Performing Prison: Intentional Teaching, Research, and Writing Inside & Out

Sponsored by: Teaching in Prison: Pedagogy, Research, and Literacies Collective Standing Group

Level: 4-year

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: We engage in interactive discussions of prison teaching, group activity and reflection, and a session in which we engage with the voices of incarcerated writers.

Full description:

Scholars of writing pedagogy have been using performance studies as a way to rethink what it means to write, to teach and to learn writing, and to engage in classroom discussions, as well as to refocus our understanding of positionality. Applying work in performance studies to our scenes of writing enables us to destabilize not only our understanding of grammar, form, and “English” but also of classroom and institutional hierarchies and of modes of learning. As teachers and students of writing, we are challenged to reconceive our understandings of what is “correct” and what is “complete,” to rethink pedagogy’s power relations and modes of discourse, and to recognize the roles of empathy, Kairos, and spontaneity in the classroom. Students too are increasingly more willing to challenge our modes of engagement with them and our understanding of best practices in pedagogy; they often perform various kinds of resistance to our texts, our assignments, and our disciplinary (in all senses of the word) processes in ways that previous generations of students were less likely to do.

In carceral situations, however, pedagogical performance works differently. The power to enable and engage in play, spontaneity, and disruption of forms and hierarchies is to a great extent taken out of the hands of instructors and students and used by the institution as a way to control instructors and students. The prison system itself has control over all essential elements of the classroom: entry into the space, writing and researching materials, the length of the class, the texts, and even the content of student work; furthermore, prison administrators may have very different ideas from teachers and students of the learning outcomes and the use value of a writing course, and they may choose to disrupt, control, or curtail the course in various ways. This absolute power combined with the banality of bureaucratic processes means teachers and students are subject to the chilling effects from this control and must thus find ways to perform obedience while also engaging each other in more covert forms of play, disruption, and kairotic spontaneity. Our workshop will examine the range of ways that writing and rhetoric scholars and their students perform prison work, along with the theories (of prison pedagogy, performance, and writing studies) that inform those performances. Through a combination of engaged table talks, discussions, and interactive activities, we hope to invigorate and stretch our understanding of prison pedagogy and research and reinsert resistance.

Our workshop participants are typically a combination of those new to prison teaching and those who have engaged with it both inside and outside of prison walls, including the following:
• inside: teaching SAE and credited composition courses, sponsoring artistic and theatrical performance, facilitating creative writing, tutoring, offering courses and workshops grounded in texts and social concerns, etc.
• outside: performing and circulating writing and art, hosting community dialogues, circulating public and scholarly narratives that challenge stereotypes of prisoners, prison workers, and material conditions, etc.

In previous workshops, we have used more traditional formats to promote what have always been fruitful discussions of the ways in which we design and follow through on this work, its successes and its failures. Our 2019 workshop will use a much more interactive format as we consider the challenges of our performances within the system of justice in the United States. Participants will join three small group table talks, perform a prison solidarity dance and reflection, and offer feedback to currently incarcerated writers. In using this new format, our goal is to transform prison work through the immediate actions of those in the room and to engage directly with the work of our incarcerated students.

Schedule & Meeting Space Requests

We request a medium-size meeting room; we also request a morning time slot for this Wednesday half-day workshop.

Schedule of Events:

9:00-9:30 Welcome, introductions, and opening collaborative dance built from movements and gestures of those who cannot be in the room and based upon work developed by dance faculty who work with prisoners.

9:30-9:40: Active Listening & Reflecting: Participants hear recorded voices of writers in prison and respond on feedback postcards

9:40-10:15: Table Talk Session #1: Prison Writing/Rhetoric Research (3 five minute presentations on topic followed by table talk)
• Speaker 1: If You Knew Your History: Performing Historical Research in Carceral Contexts
• Speaker 2: “Participatory Action Research from the Inside-Out”
• Speaker 3: Incarcerated Activists and the Available Means of Literacy

10:15-10:45: Table Talk Session #2: University-Prison Partnerships (3 five minute presentations on topic followed by table talk)
• Speaker 4: How Can I Imagine Where Have You Been?
• Speaker 5: Preparing to Go Inside on the Outside: Cultivating Allies and Advocates
• Speaker 6: “Clearing the Path, Creating Change”

10:45-11:00: Break

11:00-11:30: Speaker 7 leads a session featuring her Inside-Out course on Protest Writing and Rhetoric, a course in which student study and create protest speeches, zines, fiction and poetry, and group manifestos. By having workshop participants engage with and respond to speeches, zines, and manifestos at their tables, this session will help us rethink ways we perform traditional and alternative pedagogies and enable cross-cultural dialogue about protest, solidarity, and the rhetoric of performance itself.

11:30-12:00 Table Talk Session #3: Prison Pedagogy and Teaching (3 five minute presentations on topic followed by table talk)

• Speaker 8: “English Professor or Poetry Coach?”
• Speaker 9 and 10: “Notes Toward an Inside Writing Clinic”
• Speaker 11: “Envisioning Justice: Writing and Art”

12:00-12:15 Bringing intentional practice to inside/out prison work (Respondent)

12:15-12:30 Performing Prison: a closing reflection activity and group action plans

(MW.02) Transforming Failure into Effective Advocacy: A Workshop on Performing Community Leadership

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop offers an opportunity for participants to develop strategies and a support network for more effective advocacy, leadership, and community-engaged work.

Full description:

This workshop offers an opportunity for participants to develop strategies and a support network for more effective advocacy, leadership, and community-engaged work. Our workshop draws from key concepts in community literacy studies to offer a performative space for rethinking “failed attempts” at advocacy and community leadership.

Community literacy theory calls for rhetorical action, for rhetors to not simply describe what it means to be a leader or advocate, but to perform rhetorical work that is accountable to a community’s needs and interests. When engaging in such performances, especially for the first time, failure is often inevitable, and failed attempts are easily cast aside. This workshop invites participants to reflect on their failed attempts at advocacy in a collaborative, performative space of inquiry. We welcome participants who have experience—or hope to gain experience—doing advocacy in university settings, in community organizations, in professional organizations, and more.

Our inspiration for this workshop comes from composition pedagogy, which acknowledges that students’ failures provide rich tools for their growth and development as writers. This stance, we maintain, is equally or even more important in our own leadership and advocacy work, where the stakes of rhetorical performance are high and where there are typically fewer opportunities for “revision.” Just as our students need supportive environments through which they can experience and process failure, this workshop offers a space for instructors, WPAs, community leaders, and scholars doing community-based work to “set up a dialogue with failure” (Daloz Parks). We foreground failure in an effort to demonstrate how less-than-successful advocacy performances can reveal opportunities for intercultural inquiry and transformative learning.

Goals for this workshop:
-Offer theory and research that can serve as a heuristic guide for more effective leadership and advocacy.
-Provide scenarios of “failed advocacy” that can be used as instructive case examples.
-Create a space for participants to reflect on their own experiences and practice performing new styles of leadership and advocacy.
-Connect participants to a support network of others who are facing leadership and advocacy challenges.

The workshop will focus on three common challenges in community-based work and include short presentations, performances of “failed attempts,” and breakout discussion sessions with skilled facilitators. For each challenge, a speaker will first talk about their experience with that problem, illustrate a “failed attempt” to address it, and show how they used a concept from community literacy studies to process that failure productively. Following each presentation, there will be breakout sessions with participants to share their own cases and have the opportunity to get feedback from facilitators and other participants.

Challenge 1: Making change when you do not have institutional authority.
This speaker will present a case study of a group of graduate students who lead a strategic planning effort at their university in the city of Pittsburgh. Speaker 1 will analyze some of the student group’s early, failed attempts at community engagement in order to show how a distinction between holding formal authority and performing “adaptive leadership” can be used to lead more effectively (Heifetz). One finding from this case study is that strategic planning in higher education often invites technical solutions that can obscure more complex institutional problems; such efforts thus require a better understanding of how to identify and define adaptive challenges. By offering concrete examples of technical versus adaptive problems, this presentation invites participants to analyze their own failed cases through the lens of adaptive leadership and look for new ways to understand that went wrong.

Challenge 2: Leading diverse groups when people have conflicting goals for the cause or organization.
Speaker 2 will present on how they used the concept of “rivaling” as a tool for intercultural inquiry in their work with a summer literacy program that aims to empower rural Appalachian girls through digital storytelling (Flower, Long, and Higgins). One of the main challenges this program faced was negotiating the diverse perspectives and competing goals of its leadership team and the Appalachian community members they were striving to serve. Speaker 2 will show how using the concept of rivaling helped to reveal that stakeholders in the program were operating from different, and sometimes conflicting, understandings of “empowerment.” Ultimately, Speaker 2 will show how rivaling allowed them to examine how a literacy initiative situated in the tradition of the Foxfire books and Stephen Gilbert Brown’s work with Athabascan students supports the rhetorical performances of rural girls and the key challenges it faces in doing so.

Challenge 3: Advocating effectively when your community’s needs are unfamiliar, unclear, or complex.
Speaker 3 will present on the obstacles they faced when supporting the rhetorical work of parents who advocate on behalf of their disabled children within the public education system. One of the challenges the speaker encountered was that parent faced unique rhetorical challenges, which current community literacy and advocacy models seem less able to describe. Speaker 3 will demonstrate one approach for listening to/for communities whose advocacy needs are not well-known using the “story behind the story” (Flower, Community Literacy) strategy as a form of both engagement and support. While the speaker initially used this strategy to build a foundation for a local public that might draw people into dialogue, parents’ stories and the logic behind them called into question the extent to which “public dialogue” could support and meet their advocacy needs. Speaker 3 will show how the story behind the story strategy illuminated complex challenges, transforming this “failed” advocacy attempt into an opportunity to develop more inclusive approaches to advocacy and community engagement.

Since a main goal of the workshop is to provide space for participants to reflect on their own leadership and advocacy efforts, we invite participants to come prepared with their own stories of “failed” attempts to workshop. Through our breakout sessions, facilitators will provide collaborative planning support for processing those experiences. At the end of the session, we will introduce an opportunity for participants to stay connected as part of an ongoing network of support.

(MW.03) Responding to Anti-Intellectualism in the Classroom: Developing Positive Emotions and Facilitating Student Engagement

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop provides strategies for mitigating anti-intellectualism in the classroom by enhancing student engagement, fostering positive emotions, and cultivating a culture of learning.

Full description:

In this Rhetoricians for Peace SIG workshop, we provide strategies for rhetoric and composition scholars and teachers to address the rise of anti-intellectualism sentiment and public mistrust of expert opinion within and beyond the classroom. The 2016 United States presidential election result is the most recent case study of anti-intellectualism sentiment that has far-reaching consequences: a 2016 Pew Research poll found that 64% of Americans believe “fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events” (Barthel, Mitchell, & Holcomb, 2016). Anti-intellectualism, through propagation of fake news and misleading rhetoric, had played a significant role in the outcome of the election. Post-election, it seemed like society would have embraced intellectualism and education as an informed response, but this did not come to pass. As teachers, we have now two choices: to avoid the problem entirely or to engage it head-on through activities and conversations focused on promoting meaningful student engagement through dialogue across difference, critical inquiry, rhetorical analysis, research skills, and information literacy. This work is not without its difficulties: encouraging a culture of learning in the classroom starts with student engagement, developing student agency, and fostering positive student emotions (Laverghetta, 2015). To that end, our workshop will be driven by the following questions that we ask: (1) How do we help students see education as a means to intellectual activity? (2) How do we foster learned agency (as opposed to learned helplessness) in the classroom? (3) How do we develop activities and assignments that encourage positive emotions among students?

9:00-9:10: Welcome to the Workshop

9:10-9:40: Keynote: Suspecting Expertise: Anti-Intellectualism and Rugged Individualism in American History

To frame our understanding of how American anti-intellectualism impacts present-day composition and communication curriculum and pedagogy, we begin our workshop with an American historian whose research focuses on the cultural authority of expert knowledge in popular, medical, and legal contexts. This talk moves beyond ideas about anti-intellectualism to highlight the power dynamics underlying expertise, who defines it, and who can claim its mantle in a culture that privileges cultural values, such as the self-made man, rugged individualism, and economic self-interest (Hofstadter, 1966; Jacoby, 2009). These cultural values undermine the authority of learned experts and their institutions in favor of self-knowing in ways that contribute to enduring suspicion of professors and learning in present-day classrooms. These historical contexts inform roundtable discussions by (1) revealing a longer history of anti-intellectualism in the US and the cultural values underpinning it and (2) providing participants with a longer historical foundation for constructively problem-solving and addressing these beliefs through assignments and class discussions.

9:45-10:15: Keynote: Understanding Engagement: Attitudes, Assumptions, and Anti-intellectualism in the Classroom

In light of the history of anti-intellectualism presented by our first keynote speaker, a rhetoric and composition scholar will engage workshop participants in an activity designed to help them better understand their students’assumptions about intellectualism and anti-intellectualism in a contemporary context. Participants will be asked to draw visual representations of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, as they define the terms. After a brief analysis of participants’ drawings, the speaker will show a few representative examples of her students’ drawings and share how an understanding of students’ assumptions about literacy and learning can inform classroom practices and curricula (Bradbury, 2016). The conversation that ensues will inform the roundtable discussions by (1) helping participants better understand contemporary beliefs about intellectualism and anti-intellectualism and (2) aiding participants in recognizing the important differences between their own and their students’ experiences regarding learning and education.

10:15-10:25: Break

10:25-10:30: Brief orientation to the roundtables

10:35-11:00: Roundtables: Fostering Positive Emotions and Student Engagement in the Composition and Communication Classroom

Participants will further develop ideas from the morning session in thematic roundtables, specifically focused on conversation and strategies about how to facilitate positive emotions and student engagement within course curriculum, curriculum design, faculty development, and community engagement. Drawing inspiration from Seligman et al.’s (2004) character strengths and virtues, Well-Being Theory (2011), and the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (2011), participants should leave with ideas for an activity or assignment that helps students in diverse settings foster PERMA: (1) positive emotions, (2) engagement, (3) positive relationships with others, (4) finding meaning, and (5) developing accomplishments. In particular, this roundtable will generate ideas and conversations about using a strengths-based approach to critical discourse and its connection to writing and well-being in resisting learned helplessness, encouraging student engagement and building positive emotions through community-based experiences in the two-year college and other environments, and assessing the history of American anti-intellectualism and expert authority and its impact on building positive emotions. This roundtable will provide participants with the tools needed to lead local faculty through professional development. After 20 minutes of small group roundtable discussions, participants will return to share ideas with all workshop participants.

11:00-11:20: Reporting out on roundtable discussions

11:20-11:30: Break

11:30-11:35: Brief orientation to the second roundtable

11:35-12:00: Roundtables: Students’ Identities, Instructors’ Personalities, and Building Community in the Classroom

Building on the takeaways from the keynotes and first roundtable, participants will further develop their ideas to address classroom practices that consider how students’ identities and instructors’ personalities should be considered to cultivate classroom community, to facilitate mutual respect across differences, and to overcome the resistance to pedagogy that may stem from anti-intellectual attitudes. The root causes of anti-intellectualism, such as class background and estrangement from academic discourse, must be accounted for when developing critical classrooms. However, many of the attempts to usher in critically-informed discourse further entrench students into beliefs and stances that support anti-intellectualism. In these roundtables, participants should leave the roundtable with strategies to talk about and teach transformative classroom practices, such as game-play, discourse patterns, identity construction, classroom management, and dialogue across difference to initiate rhetorical listening and create a more engaged and trusting classroom culture. While developing strategies, participants will also consider and practice ways they might ask faculty at their local institutions to engage in similar activities. After 20 minutes of roundtable discussion, participants will return to share ideas with all workshop participants.

12:00-12:30: Reporting out and concluding workshop

(MW.04) Engaging the Global: Performing Translingual/Transmodal Pedagogies in Writing Classrooms

Sponsored by: Transnational Composition Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: This workshop provides participants with specific pedagogical strategies to help leverage students’ home literacies as learning resources and to foster translingual disposition and performance.

Full description:

In the 2019 CCCC call for proposals, Vershawn Ashanti Young calls for the field to consider how performance can foster a “translingual orientation” to language and literacy. In response to this call, the Transnational Writing Workshop will bring together participants–writing teachers, researchers, and program administrators— from an array of institutions and regions of the world to explore ways of theorizing and enacting performance-based pedagogies with a translingual focus. For the past four years the workshop has “engaged the global” and transformed composition studies through the cultivation of professional relationships, conversations, and partnership among teachers/scholars of writing in the US and around the world. In the fifth edition of this workshop, we propose to continue working towards these aims in our exploration of innovative approaches that incorporate students’ translingual (or multilingual) and transmodal (or multimodal) performances as resources in writing classrooms, programs, and higher educational structures.

Central to the translingual focus is a challenge to monolingual norms and orientations in an effort to shift multilingual students from deficit positions. This move towards an asset-based approach leverages students’ home languages and literacies as key resources for teaching and learning. Critically, while a growing body of scholarship increasingly focuses on this area, there is still a need to understand how to enact such pedagogies as more embodied, holistic, and performance-based approaches. In order to work towards these aims, this workshop will engage participants in hands-on activities, assignments, and ideas led by a broad range of teacher-scholars from diverse regions of the world, including Turkey, China, Hungary, India, and the US. In total 27 facilitators (note: a number of projects are collaborative) at six different tables will ask participants to engage in workshop activities focused on translingual approaches to teaching writing. In particular the workshops will be organized around the following four areas:

1.First Year Writing (FYW). Activities in this area will focus on translingual pedagogies in FYW classrooms.

-Examining code meshing and the ways translingual texts “do” a different kind of literacy, as a set of performative moves motivating students to negotiate meaning differently.

-Exploring strategies for fostering meta-awareness and reflection on translingual and transmodal literacy practices (e.g., the creation of visual maps and drawings to foster reflection).

-Engaging in “translation” assignments in which students are asked to translate texts in their home languages into other languages and for other audiences.

-Examining contrastive and comparative approaches to global rhetorics: comparing gender representations and differing perspectives on women’s veiling through studies of popular media in other languages and cultures; comparing rhetorical tropes and styles in American and Chinese blog posts.

-Exploring ways that producing and performing creative writing pieces (e.g., poetry, autoethnography) can be used to teach and foster translingual dispositions and practices.

-Creating e-portfolios for translingual students.

2. Multimodality. This area will attend to transmodal performances grounded in the conception of language as one resource in a wider rhetorical repertoire.

-Exploring activities focused on translingual mobile gaming practices.

-Examining community engagement and service learning in multilingual communities (e.g., conducting oral history interviews and spatially mapping the narratives using Google maps).

-Incorporating “remix” and multimodal assignments into classes with multilinguals (.e.g. remixing literacy narratives into videos).

-Designing multimodal children’s story books for translingual readers.

3. Transnational Writing Program Administration/Curriculum Development. This area will focus on developing translingual workshops, learning communities, and training sessions in transnational contexts.

-Examining the ways that complex local institutional, linguistic, and cultural logics mediate the implementation and design of an English curriculum in a Turkish university in Northern Cyprus and a university in Southwest China.

-Creating a bilingual learning community and curricula in a Hispanic serving institution (HIS) in which students’ home languages (i.e., Spanish) and English are deeply interwoven throughout the courses and program.

-Facilitating collaborative online learning projects between North American and international partners, including at the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico.

-Designing a faculty learning community that promotes translingualism and community engagement, incorporating examples of work with local organizations in the Rio Grande Valley to respond to linguistic realities and foster language awareness and academic engagement.

-Designing materials and translingual writing workshops for teachers and tutors at a community college.

4. Professional Writing. This area will attend to professional writing and communication projects and activities that involve writing in globalized professional spaces.

-Engaging students in redesign of an American product and design for a “foreign market” with which they are unfamiliar.

-Responding to job advertisements and developing resumes for opportunities outside the United States, while looking at conventions of CVs written in Spanish, Korean, and French to surface linguistic and cross-cultural frames.

-Examining a transnational collaboration in a technical communication course between universities in the U.S. and Hungary focusing on the creation of professional personas in cross-cultural contexts.

The workshop is organized in three stages: (1) a brief introductory session, (2) table rotations, and (3) full group reflection. The table-rotation format includes two major rounds of concurrent, activity-focused sessions at six tables with 4-5 facilitators each. During the final reflection, participants will highlight their key takeaways relevant for their local contexts.

In the weeks leading up to the workshop, the participants will be able to preview the workshop by accessing facilitators’ activity-based workshop materials shared in a web repository. The four co-chairs, as active users of social media platforms, will engage facilitators, registered participants, and other members of the profession in promotion and conversations about the workshop and its theme before, during, and after the workshop.

By bringing together writing teacher-scholars from various locations, the workshop is intended to promote dialogue across institutional, geographic, and linguistic borders. Our proposed workshop will provide a space for this exchange through hands-on learning activities that will enable participants to walk away with specific teaching and administrative strategies to challenge monolingual perspectives and foster translingual dispositions and performances in the context of 21st century globalization.

(MW.05) What Happens After Kansas City?: Anti-Racist Activism in Composition

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: This workshop uses exercises from Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed to examine white supremacy in composition.

Full description:

When the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication decided to forge ahead with its conference in Kansas City, Missouri last year, there were some members who chose not to attend. Some people argued that the NAACP’s travel advisory was a strong argument to cancel or move the conference from Missouri where Michael Brown was killed by police in 2015; student protests against the racist culture at the University of Missouri, Columbia forced the resignation of the president; and, most recently, a new law would require the plaintiff to carry the burden of proof for a case of racial discrimination.

Some faculty members of color decided that traveling to Missouri was too physically and emotionally risky, and they boycotted. Some racially privileged members decided that they would stand in alliance with the Black Caucus, Latinx Caucus, American Indian Caucus, Asian/Asian American Caucus, and Queer Caucus, and they boycotted. Others chose to attend and stand in alliance with local activists who were fighting racism and police brutality. The online wiki Four Days in Kansas City gave many academics a space to discuss what they chose to do last year and why (fourdaysinkansascity.org).

However, in the wake of this rupture in academic culture, we still need to grapple publically and bodily with the web of white supremacy in composition: at CCCCs, in our institutions, in our departments, and in our classrooms. This workshop goes to the very crux of inequity: the pervasive and persistent white supremacy that plays out – often agent-less, but occasionally with clear agents — in higher education. We will use exercises from Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO) to step into this potent moment.

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed approaches are rarely presented at CCCCs, but they allow for surprising insights and unusual connections to happen while combining the traditions of intellectual engagement with kinesthetic learning and reflection. We will set this up as a call-and-response. The call involves the workshop leaders sharing their stories; the response involves some performative task asked of the participants. Together, workshop leaders and participants will reflect on the exchanges and risk telling many truths. Several of the leaders of this workshop are new and underrepresented voices and have not presented at CCCCs before, but they have many years of teaching experience and much to say about white supremacy in composition.

This workshop will bring the outrage about where we are into a space where we can share stories, listen with open hearts, and organize for future change in our discipline.

This workshop will create an unsafe space for the performance of white supremacy and rupture the smooth masculinist narratives of collegiality and elitism.

This workshop is not interested in where you earned your degree/s, but wants to know if you are down for the revolution.

This workshop will get you out of your mind full of grading and to-do lists and into your body–with its beauty, its emotions, and the wounds from white supremacy.

This workshop will have you doing as much movement as writing, as much talking as listening, and as much dancing as planning.

This workshop will cut through the treacle of progressive narratives of education and “workforce development” while refusing to support mythologies of noblesse oblige.

This workshop will crack you open to the stories of the violated and dispossessed within our discipline and our classrooms.

You’re already doing the work, right? So join us.

Schedule
9-9:30 Introductions and warm up exercises
9:30-9:45 First performance by facilitator one
9:45-10 Group PTO exercise
10-10:15 Second performance by facilitator two
10:15-10:30 Writing exercise
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45-11 Third performance by facilitator three
11-11:15 PTO exercise
11:15-11:30 Writing exercise
11:30-11:45 Fourth performance by group on the lure of whiteness
11:45-12 Small group work
12-12:30 Groups perform/act out/read out

(MW.06) Podcasting in the Composition Classroom

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: This workshop:

* Explores the benefits of creating sound artifacts in composition classrooms;

* Modifies used assignments for new (your!) contexts;

* Creates meaningful sound artifacts.

Full description:

Are you or your students avid podcast listeners? Are you addicted to The Moth, Serial, 99 Percent Invisible, Radiolab, or This American Life? How about Alice Isn’t Dead?

This workshop unearths the ways that translating text into sound allows students to heuristically examine their scholastic work from both new production and new audience perspectives.

There is significant research (for example the 2010 work of Ambrose, S.A. et al., and the 2006 work of Anderson, Atkins, Ball, Homicz Millar, Selfe and Selfe, among others) showing that multimodal activities in composition classrooms are a strong tool for teaching, reinforcing rhetorical skills and an understanding of genre/disciplinarity, and increasing student motivation; however, student-created audio is still relatively rare in composition classrooms, despite the surge in popularity that podcasts are currently experiencing.

This workshop aims to bring the multimodal design lessons found in the production of audio essays to a significantly broader audience by demonstrating how to use Audacity, (a free, open-source, cross platform audio editing application that allows users to manage large audio projects) to guide students through the audio production process in composition classes. While Audacity has a full suite of audio editing and production tools, its user interface facilitates significant production with just a few minutes of guided introduction. By focusing on the structure of assignments and the utilization of free and open source software and audio resources, this workshop is not only useful but applicable by anyone with access to a computer and internet connection. While we understand that this may not be the case for all students, all the time, the standardization of computer classrooms across most schools does afford some level of audio essay incorporation.

In this workshop, participants will brainstorm benefits to creating sound artifacts in writing classrooms. The artifacts that will be examined and discussed in this workshop include audio postcards, essays, and sound pieces as well as the “translation” work of turning text essays into sound. The session will demonstrate how these tasks are achieved in the classroom by discussing how students develop their competencies through short, sound-based narratives (“audio postcards”), focusing on such elements as voice, non-verbal sound, and interviews. Presenters will also demonstrate how, while using the creative nonfiction genre as a model, students synthesize their rhetoric, language, and technology skills by producing an original audio essay.

We will work through the process of crafting assignments, topics, and techniques to give to students. We will also, “get our hands dirty” by editing and remixing a set of provided audio files in Audacity in order to create an audio artifact. By hosting this workshop, we expect to learn along with the other participants, by sharing and reflecting on experiences in integrating sound into composition classrooms.

Presenters will also share sample student audio essays and student responses to their experiences in an audio essay course. Throughout the session, participants will be prompted to think about ways to integrate podcasts and other sound-based activities into their courses. Participants are also encouraged to bring in sample sound and/or textual essays to explore how to translate text into sound and vice versa. All levels of technical proficiency are welcome to attend.

(MW.07) Performance-Teaching, Performance-Policy: An Action-Planning Workshop for Times of Crisis

Level: All

Cluster: Institutional and Professional

Abstract: This workshop session intends to help participants generate responsible strategies and policies for responding to hate speech and coercive behaviors, especially in policy gray areas.

Full description:

This workshop will extend perplexing conversations teacher-scholars had at the Southern Regional Composition Conference in March 2018 about our roles in managing classroom behavior violations (especially ones that involve discriminatory or morally coercive behaviors) that are not blatant. Indeed, some behaviors and speech acts may not be welcome in our classrooms, but they may not truly violate a written policy. This workshop session intends to help participants generate responsible strategies and policies for responding to hate speech and coercive behaviors, especially in gray areas of policy, in classrooms where faculty and graduate students are expected to manage a safe educational atmosphere. Recognizing the situatedness of institutions in their local contexts, this session’s activities will prompt participants to reflect on ambiguity in local policy and forethink ways of responding to controversy in order to meet our ethical and professional responsibilities while protecting our students’ rights.

Gray areas created by gaps in policy and increasingly surprising student behaviors leave us uncertain how to approach controversial situations we may find ourselves in. We are also curious as to how students’ experiences with these types of situations affect their engagement (enjoyment, attendance, participation, creativity, etc.) in classes after these experiences. As we develop an agenda for this workshop, we are guided by our commitment to ensure our classrooms are safe spaces and places where students can exchange ideas freely. Some lingering question for us, then, are what are the responsibilities of teachers in protecting these safe spaces? What are the rights of our students to free speech? What spaces and places are our responsibility? What can program administrators, writing center directors, teachers, TAs, tutors, do to promote (secure?) social justice as a prerogative? What are these stakeholders’ roles in preserving democratic ideals? How can directors and tutors maintain an atmosphere free of blatant policy violations, such as hate speech, but also of more subtle coercive behaviors, such as ridicule or offensive sarcasm, in regard to controversial opinions? Complicating these issues further is the fact that one proposer’s state has passed legislation allowing concealed carry guns on college campuses. Will that sarcasm be more harmful or intimidatingwhen there’s a possibility of a student having a gun on their hip? And open the can of worms.

As engaged and responsible citizens, participants in this workshop will develop practices or heuristics for managing controversial situations in their classrooms, programs, and institutions. We expect this discussion and activity will lead to thoughtful and pragmatic approaches to cultivating responsible students, tutors, teachers, and administrators through our collective effort.

(MW.08) Cripping Performance in the First-Year Writing Classroom

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: This workshop provides several strategies and activities for supercripping the first-year composition classroom.

Full description:

We have several breaks built into this workshop because if we do not enact accessibility and crip the space, then there is no point to our workshop. With that in mind, we will require a space that leaves room for participants who may use mobility aids or who may have service animals with them. In order to provide a low-stimulation environment, a room without windows is preferred, although we can make do with a curtained room. Each introduction, save the beginning introduction to cripping and supercripping, which will be a bit longer, will be around ten minutes, followed by a 20-minute activity with discussion.

Facilitator 1 will introduce the workshop participants to the idea of cripping, as it is not widely known. Claire McKinney writes in “Cripping the Classroom: Disability as a Teaching Method in the Humanities,” that, “Cripping the classroom entails developing a political understanding of disability as a socially constructed category that focuses attention on questions of accessibility as central normative concerns for interpersonal, intellectual, and social relations” (114). For this workshop, we are amplifying the idea of cripping and engaging with the theme of CCCCs 19 by centering the activities of the workshop on the performance of supercripping the first-year writing classroom. After the introduction, Facilitator 2 will report on two ongoing “cripping” syllabi: participation policies and technology policies. Participants will then engage in an activity wherein they crip something of their choice.

Facilitator 2 will then introduce the idea of supercripping feedback. One of the most time consuming and laborious things we do as educators is providing students with personalized feedback. Yet, one of the best skills we teach students is how to review feedback and revise strategically. This portion of the workshop aims to encourage and re-kindle our love for feedback through providing a foundational praxis that takes an agile approach, as well as demonstrating how utilizing techniques and technologies can engage students, making feedback motivating and accessible. This facilitator discusses a transformational coaching approach while also exploring synchronous (in the classroom, one-on-one, conferencing technologies, greenlining markups) and asynchronous approaches (podcasts, video commenting, greenlining markups, etc.), and provides a resource list to serve a starter kit for those instructors who want to explore other kinds of approaches. After the introduction, the participants will have papers/projects provided, so that they may practice supercripping feedback.

Facilitator 3 introduces how we often perform ableist rhetoric in composition—both in our foundational works, our textbooks, and our classroom practices. James L. Cherney’s “The Rhetoric of Ableism” appeared in a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly that focused on rhetoric and disability, Cherney’s work examines the specific ways in which “rhetoric can shape the way disability is understood and (in)forms its political implications” (7) and Jay T. Dolmage’s Academic Ableism casts a wider net and examines the myriad ways in which academic structures enact ableism. For the activity, participants will be given a variety of (anonymous) works and they will identify potential ableist rhetoric in the works.
Facilitator 3 will discuss a method of supercripping via radical inclusivity. She will introduce how Nel Nodding’s ethics of care helps serves as a model for increasing empathy in the classroom. Kristie Fleckenstein’s work Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching argues that “it [empathy] provides a starting point for transformation. Empathy enables not only the sharing of situations and perspectives, but also the changing of situations and perspectives. It is an agent of transformation” (101). Using the Digital Archive of Literacy Narrative (DALN) provides entry points for building empathy because there are literacy narratives about virtually every issue we face as humans—students can find a narrative that matches an issue they care about, which serves as fulcrum upon which students can become empathetic with the performer in the narrative. The focus then expands outward as student share their entry points with other members of the class, who then also build empathy for the performers. The activity for this section entails the participants finding narratives that interest them, watching/reading/listening to the narrative, and then writing about how these narratives change awareness and build empathy. The participants will be given example assignments, so that they can modify or use the practice in their classrooms.

Finally, Facilitator 2 will discuss User Experience (UX) and how to supercrip audience analysis pedagogy. By including UX methods, we foster better approaches to recognizing, understanding, and navigating difference. Audience remains the primary reason for producing communication, yet audience is substantially undertheorized, especially in terms of practical resources and steps to analysis, treating audience as cursory. Additionally, audience analysis is rarely approached in terms of accessibility. User Experience (UX) methods provide an approach to teaching audience analysis practically that provides concrete and actionable strategies increasing audience awareness, valuing the audience’s rhetorical and cultural context (St. Amant, 2017) thereby engendering “cultural humility” and sensitivity (Sun and Getto, 2017, p. 91). For the activity, participants will be view/listen to examples of clipping, captioning, and examining television and film to engage in accessible thinking.

(MW.09) Creating a Performative Syllabus Using “You-Attitude”

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Speakers will provide tools for writing and presenting syllabi that are more active, inclusive, and memorable to better mirror the pedagogy of our classrooms.

Full description:

Syllabi represent an important contact point between instructors and students; these documents shape first impressions of our courses and indicate our pedagogical approach. Therefore, they are a logical place to begin a discussion of the performative nature of the processes and pedagogies we value in the classroom.
Important scholarship on the work of the syllabus has discussed using Universal Design (Passman & Green 2009, Womack 2017), the “Promising” Syllabus” (Bain 2004), challenges in EFL/ESL contexts (Tabari 2013), and applications for reflection and assessment (Roberts 2013). This workshop builds from these non-traditional views of syllabi but asks participants to see the syllabus not as a static document but as performance rhetoric.
Studies of syllabi in writing courses suggest it is much more than content that matters. The language choice and tone in syllabi can affect how students perceive both themselves and the instructor (Román-Pérez, 2007 & Bowers-Campbell, 2015). Therefore, syllabi are powerful. Because of the complex position of the syllabus as a document, situated between the instructor and student, reflective of the institution and discipline, and constituting both product and process of the course, syllabi are also constrained (Afros & Schyer 2009). Looking at the syllabus as performance rhetoric instead of a static document creates space for challenging these constraints and creating documents that reflect a class and pedagogy dedicated to meeting student needs in terms of language, design, and modality. Therefore, speakers will discuss best practices in syllabi production as well as tenets of “You-Attitude” from business writing to provide participants with practical ways to reshape their syllabi documents to more performative, that is, more active, engaging, and non-traditional. In so doing we can create syllabi that are not only more accessible and inclusive to the needs of diverse learners but also more engaging.
Attendees will evaluate sample syllabi and compare/contrast language/design choices. They will also be encouraged to perform/share their own sample documents for feedback. Speakers will provide creative ideas for presenting syllabi in non-traditional ways and will discuss how the “Power of Moments” can be used to make course presentations of syllabi more memorable (Heath & Heath 2017). Ultimately, participants will gain tools to create course documents that model the inclusive and engaging pedagogy we perform in our classrooms.
Schedule & Activities:
The workshop is divided into three segments: 1) introduction of core principles of the workshop, including best practices in document design, “You-Attitude,” and creating “moments,” 2) practice with core principles introduced, 3) application of workshop principles in the participants’ own teaching contexts. Opportunities for participant engagement are included in and increase with each segment. The first segment asks participants to share their thoughts and experiences on various introductory prompts about syllabi and includes participants in interactive presentation and discussion of key concepts; the second segment encourages participants to engage workshop concepts in more depth through presenter-facilitated activities within break-out groups and in reflection on the findings shared with the whole group; the third segment provides individual and small group innovation and sharing stations for participants to choose from according to their own needs and interests as they begin to apply and experiment with workshop concepts in their own syllabi. Time is allotted for a short break between segments as well as reflection in the end on what participants are carrying from the workshop, with attention to ideas for syllabus revision and sustaining momentum for syllabus reconsideration in the future.
9-9:20: Introductions: A brief overview of activities will be introduced. Presenters 1 and 2 will facilitate group activities related to experiences and understandings of the syllabus as a document in order to establish a framework for workshop activities and outcomes.
9:20-10:20: Interactive Presentation of Core Principles with Examples: Presenter 1 will present an overview of “You-Attitude,” highlighting its 5 basic principles. Presenter 1 will answer common questions about “You Attitude,” provide specific examples of how it can be applied to syllabus creation, and link it to important discussions of best practices in syllabi creation, such as Bain’s “Promising Syllabus” (2014) and Womack’s “Teaching is Accommodation” (2017), among others.
Presenter 1 will show participants small sections of syllabi to discuss as a large group. Participants will be asked to read samples as a student would to infer the effects of certain types of language and design choices. Participants will be asked to discuss how the samples could be improved based on tenets provided so far in the workshop.
Presenter 2 will discuss performance rhetoric and the “Power of Moments” and accompanying strategies (Heath & Heath 2017). Presenter 2 will lead an interactive discussion on ways in which this philosophy can be applied to make meaningful and memorable presentations and course documents.
10:20-10:30: Break
10:30-11:20: Practicing with Core Principles: Presenters will provide syllabus samples (or participants may share their own) and participants will be given specific prompts to perform the pieces as instructor/student pairs. The participants will follow the “think, pair, share” method for discussion. Presenter 1 and 2 will circulate among the groups to help aid discussion and answer questions. Presenters will ask for “think, pair, share” groups to reflect upon their discussions and report back to the large group.
11:20-11:30 Break
11:30-12:10: Application/Performance of Core Principles: Presenters 1 and 2 will provide several stations that participants can visit to experiment with new strategies, practice innovative presentations, and brainstorm/share innovations related to their own course materials.
12:10-12:30: Wrap up, final reflections, next steps, and questions. Presenter 1 will discuss practical strategies towards ongoing syllabus revision and reconsideration (Lang 2006, Roberts 2013). Presenter 2 will facilitate reflections and wrap-up.
Meeting day and space requirements:
We could complete this workshop as a Wednesday morning or afternoon workshop. We could also do this workshop Saturday afternoon. We would need a projector for notes and examples that is able to hook up to a computer or is already hooked to computer. Small tables (preferably round) would be nice for group activities.

(MW.10) Co-Performing and Transforming the Labor of Feedback

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Informed by a question-based pedagogy that promotes writerly agency by teaching students to solicit feedback, participants revise their syllabi and practice/perform six classroom activities.

Full description:

The prevailing pedagogical roles in the feedback process usually break down in this way: I, the instructor, perform the role of omniscient director telling students what to do, and students perform the role of novice actor, incorporating my authoritative, privileged voice and advice. But, what if performing composition privileged a different role for both the student and instructor, creating a student-centered space where students initiate a dialogue for feedback? Performance composition means that students take a director’s role in the feedback process, allowing us as instructors to hear our students’ individual, diverse voices and creating a space for students to request and receive the feedback they need.

We have developed a pedagogy teaching students how to develop their directors’ roles. Students learn how to solicit feedback about their writing that actively engages them in revision. With this model, the charge to “Get feedback” becomes a dialogue, not a command. In so doing, the performance of feedback rhetoric, in the words of Andrea Lunsford, “gets up off the page and marches out” and off the margins of students’ papers into deep revision.

At last year’s conference in Kansas City, we presented our question-based pedagogy research and practice to an engaged audience from a range of institutions and institutional types, and they asked for more. In response to their clear request, we propose a workshop that will enable instructors to perform this pedagogy in partnership with their students.

We came to this project by asking the following question–How can inquiry-based learning be applied to the writing classroom? Most inquiry-based research is in scientific disciplines (Edelson, 1999), and existing writing research on feedback focuses on the instructor to writer exchange. Almost no research provides pedagogical help aiding student-initiated feedback. What does exist only encourages students to “[g]et feedback” but does not say how (Formo and Stallings, 2014). Thus, we began an innovative pedagogy research project in an effort to fill these gaps.

We created a pilot program that teaches students how to solicit feedback about their writing. In our question-based courses, students must ask 1-3 questions for feedback about their early and final drafts. Students, then, reflect on the responses to their questions throughout the semester. Using grounded theory, we analyzed 162 end-of-semester reflection essays in which students analyzed the questions they asked about their writing, the feedback they received, and their overall experience in the process. Our findings suggest students
1. Improve their ability to ask questions about their writing
2. Incorporate feedback from both peers and instructors
3. Transfer their question-asking from this course to others (self-reported)
Taken together, the findings suggest that this question-based pedagogy promotes investment in performative dialogue between writers and readers which in turn engenders writerly agency.

This workshop actively engages participants in a series of activities that invites them to think pedagogically and metacognitively about the feedback they provide the writers in their classrooms and the ways in which they teach writers to solicit feedback about their writing. Together the workshop facilitators and participants will perform question-based pedagogy.

Half-day workshop schedule:
1:00 pm: Speaker 1 asks participants to provide feedback on a student essay as they normally would. Then, Speaker 1 facilitates a large group discussion about the feedback participants provide on the student’s essay.
1:20 pm: Speaker 2 presents our project’s genesis, including an interactive “useful/useless feedback” exercise that nods to the research on feedback. She then contextualizes the need for question-based pedagogy
1:40 pm: Speakers 1, 3, and 4 provides a brief presentation of this question-based research project.
2:00 pm: The speakers facilitate a large-group discussion to field any questions.
2:05 pm: Speaker 3 asks participants to go back to the student essay from the beginning of the workshop. Then, participants answer the student’s questions about his or her essay. Participants conduct question-based feedback. Speaker 3 follows this activity with a large-group discussion.
2:20 pm: Speaker 4 walks participants through a guided syllabus revision activity. Speaker 4 explains how to revise a syllabus so that it reflects a question-based pedagogy.
2:45 pm: Speaker 3 walks participants through a question-based thesis workshop. Participants perform the workshop as if they were students.
3:10 pm: Speaker 1 facilitates a question-based online paragraph workshop. Participants perform the workshop as if they were students.
3:35 pm: Speaker 4 facilitates a question-based classroom activity where participants formulate critical thinking questions about a text.
4:00 pm: Speaker 3 elaborates on the Question Log and Reflection assignment and participants modify the assignment to integrate it into their courses.
4:20 pm: This activity happens behind the scenes of the workshop. Speaker 2 will gather questions the participants ask during each activity. The speaker records participants’ questions in a Google Doc in order to illustrate the types of question banks students generate in the speakers’ courses.
Through these six activities, participants learn how to transfer this question-based pedagogy into their own classrooms.
4:40 pm: Q and A

At the conclusion of this half-day workshop, participants will have revised one of his or her writing course syllabi informed by a question-based pedagogy. They will have also engaged in six activities that they can include in their own question-based pedagogy courses. This workshop acts as a rehearsal for the question-based pedagogies they may choose to perform in their own classrooms.

(MW.11) Beyond Grammar Hacks: Resources for Play and Performance

Sponsored by: The Linguistics, Language, and Writing Standing Group

Level: 4-year

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Introduces the grammar knowledge and practices that help writers perform their voices in specific rhetorical situations.

Full description:

The study and practice of grammar includes learning about and manipulating the resources in language for creating meaning in specific rhetorical situations. Building on work in linguistics this workshop presents concrete, practical classroom activities that offer participants key concepts and activities for incorporating grammar awareness and practice in the writing classroom.

Wednesday, 9:00 am–12:30 pm
Schedule
9:00 Welcome, introduction, logistics (10 mins)
9:10 Speakers 1 and 2 (5 mins)
9:15 Concurrent activities (35 mins) & small group reflection (5 mins)
9:55 Short break
10:00 Speakers 3 and 4 (5 mins)
10:05 Concurrent activities (35 mins) & small group reflection (5 mins)
10:45 Long break
10:55 Speakers 5 and 6 (5 mins)
11:00 Concurrent activities (35 mins) & small group reflection (5 mins)
11:40 Short break
11:35 Speakers 7 and 8 (5 mins)
11:40 Concurrent activities (35 mins) & small group reflection (5 mins)
12:20 Whole group reflection and conclusion

Speaker 1. “Performative Grammar”: Grammar gives us choices in how to express ourselves, and this brings risks and opportunities. This workshop considers the risks and opportunities we face in expressing disagreement, and demonstrates how the grammar of negation is a resource to negotiate those challenges. Exercises will highlight the ways that uses of negation have consequences not just for the logic of an argument, but also for things like tone, tempo, and writerly ethos.

Speaker 2. “Tools, Not Rules: Grammatical Choices, Performative Effects”: Not only do writers construct and perform sentences, readers also construct and perform readings of those sentences. The intonational rhythms in the reader’s mind, which provide focus and meaning, begin with the writer’s sentences. In this workshop, participants will explore ways to help students see their sentences as grammatical constructions and intentional performances with an audience. We’ll develop practical ways to equip students with the vocabulary of grammar and an awareness of the rhetorical context of certain rules, and to help them see grammar as a set of tools that we can name, describe, and use to perform intentional sentences.

Speaker 3. “Other People’s Grammar”: Speaker 3 invites participants to consider the writing classroom as a contact zone for dialogue about diversity in grammar. Examples from the Code-Meshing Pedagogy website (dslab.lib.rochester.edu/code-meshing) will be used to model such a discussion. How do the examples reveal ways in which grammar performs and effects actions? What role does the audience play? Participants will then explore how, depending on the demographics of their classes, code-meshing might be employed in course materials or writing projects to heighten student awareness of and appreciation for multiplicity and social equity in grammar (Young, Barrett, Young-Rivera, & Lovejoy; Royster; Gees).

Speaker 4. “Playing with and Performing Punctuation”: Speaker 4 will demonstrate a playful, performance-based pedagogy for punctuation. Participants will be asked to perform, using their voices, different ways of punctuating a text, along with the contexts that make those punctuation choices meaningful. We’ll play with both “straightforward” and “wild and crazy” ways of punctuating various texts, each time asking: “Can we make this mean something? And what’s the context in which this punctuation can make this meaning?” By using this approach in our own classrooms, we create opportunities to discuss not just grammar, but the myriad ways in which meanings are created in context.

Speaker 5. “The Sentence Act”: By its nature, the sentence performs its meaning for the reader. Wonderfully flexible–with its intrusive interruptions (or whispered asides)—the sentence invites the writer to play with rhythm and stress, to create meaning through voice. Through such play, the text becomes a vocal performance, something heard and felt by the reader (Elbow). In this workshop, participants will learn about and experiment with end-focus (Halliday), sentence flexibility, and parentheticals (Palacas) as ways to connect meaning and voice in writing. Participants will experience the sentence as a resource for performing meaning and leave with activities that they can bring into their own classrooms.

Speaker 6. “Constructing Paragraphs Inside Out”: Illustrating the use of Cognitive Construction Grammar, speaker 6 shows how linguistic attention can aid larger argumentative goals. For example, the construction [by X, I mean Y] redefines a shared concept (X) using a narrower meaning (Y) imposed by the writer. Other constructions include [It’s like X], a simile construction, and [While X, nevertheless Y], a counterargument construction. For any of these constructions to work, writers have to build specific kinds of content before and after their usages, making them ideal tools for building paragraphs for different purposes. Audience members are encouraged to develop their own paragraphs using these constructions.

Speaker 7. “Revealing our Tacit Knowledge of Grammar”: Participants will perform the role of actively engaged students who demonstrate their tacit knowledge of grammar with guidance from an instructor (the presenter). Using meaning and our everyday experience, we will connect the syntactic fluency we share with the terminology we need to discuss ways to play around with our sentences to achieve different effects. During this process, we will identify and resolve ambiguity, consider rhetorical and stylistic factors, and examine options for sentence-level punctuation. Note: Sentence-level units (which need not be sentences) are preferred here to avoid problems with lexical ambiguity.

Speaker 8. “Extending Grammar-Power through Chekhovian Technique”: Speaker 8 focuses on the benefits of teaching grammar-power through stylistic imitation in the context of crafting a moving short story. Following the speaker’s analysis of a specific Chekhovian technique, participants will examine student efforts (both early drafts and revisions), learn about revision exercises informed by grammatical theory, and discuss ways of adapting imitation assignments to their own teaching contexts. Among other things, the choice of author to imitate is not a negligible matter; one of Chekhov’s main themes being how human communication works and how it breaks down, his stories are an apt choice for a communication classroom.

(MW.12) The Art of Performing “This is Fine”: Addressing the Impact of Trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) on Students, Teachers, and Programs

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Programs

Abstract: This workshop will provide theoretical and practical approaches for incorporating trauma-informed practices in the writing classroom.

Full description:

Despite the challenges and limitations we face as non-mental health professionals, first-year composition teachers often bear witness to troublesome mental or behavioral health issues. Regardless of their own personal comfort level in dealing with the messy realities of their students’ lives, there is much that a caring educator can do to support students as they manage their mental health in the college classroom. This workshop will coach participants in developing such approaches for their unique classrooms, programs, and campuses using trauma-informed practices and structures that employ the central tenets of this emerging field.

Students today are often are anxious, agitated, and seemingly fragile in ways folks love to debate (see, for instance, “Why Are Today’s College Students So Emotionally Fragile?” and Yahoo columnist Liz Goodwin’s April 2015 feature article on Tulane University’s emerging mental health crisis for examples). As Universities worldwide start to raise awareness about student mental health (see the U.K.’s #stepchange campaign aimed at universities “adopting mental health as a strategic imperative”), many instructors in the U.S. are worried about their students and about themselves; they are overwhelmed and underprepared when hearing trauma narratives, drying office hour tears, or from wondering why only four students can make it through an entire semester of composition even after they’ve softened just about every policy, deadline, and conversation they ethically can.

In Mad At School, Margaret Price describes the “theoretical and material schism” between mental disability and the academy. “Academic discourse operates not just to omit, but to abhor mental disabilityadversity and all–to our institutions every day. Writing teachers, in particular, see the impact of the toll of performing “this is fine,” like the popular meme dog sipping coffee in the middle of a burning inferno, nearly every day. Given intense pressures to “perform well,” the quiet and pervasive effects of adverse childhood experiences and trauma not only go unnoticed but are perhaps inflamed by the academy’s valuation of reason.

This proposed workshop seeks to counter tendencies in the academy to willfully ignore, deny, or minimize the impact of ACEs and trauma on our students, our institutions, and on ourselves. While innovating trauma-informed approaches to pedagogies, curriculum, and program design using a range of interdisciplinary theories from mindfulness studies to neurobiology, we reject tropes that cast the problem as a “touchy-feely” approach to the writing classroom. We see performances of “this is fine” as symptomatic of the pressures placed on people and programs to rationalize these problems as more appropriate for a clinical context.

We take action on this issue by helping participants better understand the mental health needs of their students. Specifically, this workshop will introduce attendees to the emerging concept of trauma-informed practice–a social service approach that seeks to account for and assist individuals who are dealing with the aftereffects of trauma. These aftereffects, according to neuroscientist Bruce Perry, can include Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptomatology, such as dissociative reactions (appearing “out of it”), aggression, absenteeism, and trouble meeting deadlines. However, even reactions that don’t meet diagnosable PTSD criteria impact learning significantly. Perry notes that such learners are often, at baseline, farther along the fight-or-flight continuum than their non-traumatized peers, making it more difficult for them to commit information to long term memory or effectively process sensory information.

Workshop participants will gain a general understanding of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) science and research; clinical definitions of trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); and information about vicarious traumatization. More specifically, the workshop will focus on how individual instructors and writing programs at a variety of institutions can draw on research and an emerging set of guidelines to develop their own institution- and classroom-specific models for implementing trauma-informed education.

Because writing programs are only now becoming aware of ACEs research and Trauma Informed (TI) approaches, we will also provide an overview of what TI-aware organizations look like in clinical contexts, and the implications of clinical contexts for writing classrooms.

The workshop will include:

–An overview of the extant research on ACEs, trauma, and college student populations;
–Clinical definitions of trauma, trauma-informed, and PTSD;
Information about vicarious traumatization;
–Intersectional identities and ACEs science, addressing awareness of ACEs in terms of raced, classed, gendered, [dis]abled, and “othered” bodies;
–Understanding your limitations as a non-mental health professional; and
–Sharing specific challenging classroom and campus scenarios, and brainstorming potential TI approaches to address these scenarios.

Additionally, participants will engage in at least four activities:

Activity One: Use what you’ve learned about ACEs science and trauma-informed approaches to analyze the “Habits of Mind” document. Ask yourself: Are any of these approaches potential barriers? Which approaches might already be “trauma-informed?”

Activity Two: Identify rhet/comp/WPA theories, practices, and pedagogies you believe are (perhaps without stating it) already trauma-aware. What makes them so?

Activity Three: Thinking of ACEs and TI-approaches to designing rhet/comp programs and/or courses might be understood as a matter of universal design. Redesign your first-year composition course as a mash-up experience of UD principles and TI-approaches. What has changed? What has stayed the same?

Activity Four: How can your assignment design and assessment practices use TI approaches to create a classroom space that holds compassion at its center and allows students to participate from a variety of perspectives? Please note, this does not mean developing trauma-focused assignments.

These activities will offer participants opportunities to adapt TI-aware approaches to educational systems, writing programs, and their classrooms.

(MW.13) Soundwriting in the Composition Classroom: Why and How

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Come make some noise with us! Create aural representations. Explore how and why soundwriting (re)invigorates writing classrooms and increases access.

Full description:

Sound is getting more and more attention in rhetoric and composition. Scholars in our field have recently documented a “growing body of scholarship on digital and sonic rhetoric” (Rodrigue et al., 2016) that has created “an emergent scholarly community in rhetoric and sound studies” (Stone, 2015). They note such work is “a complement to the field’s interests in visual rhetorics and multimodal composition” (Hocks & Comstock, 2017), in large part because work in digital and sonic rhetoric is committed to both “thorough explorations of sonic rhetorical strategies and a presentation of a new digital pedagogical approach” (Rodrigue et al., 2016). This workshop invites participants to understand why work in sound fits so well with what we do and how to compose and teach with digital audio.

We know that performance is inherent in all rhetorical acts, but we sometimes forget that audio is a modality that shines a spotlight on the performative aspects of rhetorical communication, for students and teachers alike. When we soundwrite, we can hear what we cannot readily see. Writing becomes not just a series of assignments students complete for the teacher-audience-of-one, but rather rhetorical performances that students plan, perform, produce, and publish for audiences well beyond the classroom. In many cases, students assume new voices and roles as they experiment with the rhetorical flourishes and identity-play especially suited to the sonic mode.

Though it may seem that this workshop requires hearing, we welcome participants who do not hear or see and faculty who anticipate teaching students for whom audio and photographic content are unavailable. The workshop will directly address accessibilities for a variety of learners.

In this workshop, participants will join our growing community of sound scholars who teach students to compose with audio through a series of hands-on activities that will include: understanding the affordances of sound and the constraints of the aural mode, guided sound-editing, discussion of best practices for teaching audio, consideration of the value of sound for teachers and students who do not hear, and reflection on the value of soundwriting for the writing classroom.

Throughout the morning, we will be guided by and return to five questions:

Why try a given writing activity in audio?
Why use sound to teach writing and rhetoric?
What are the best practices for teaching with audio?
Where can teachers and students find audio assets for soundwriting?
How can we develop and improve audio-editing skills with Audacity?

The workshop facilitators are all editors or authors of a forthcoming volume of new work on the theory and praxis of soundwriting instruction. In their own writing classrooms, these facilitators regularly integrate soundwriting, and they are thus teacher-scholars fully immersed in the “why” and “how” of bringing audio into writing instruction.

In preparation for the workshop, participants should do the following:

1. Download the free audio editing software Audacity and the LAME MP3 encoder (Audacity will give instructions on how to do so) onto your personal computer.

2. Bring this computer with you to the workshop, along with headphones.

3. Also bring a personal photograph (or have one easily accessible) for a sonic activity.

Workshop Schedule Overview

9:00 – 9:20 am
Introduction to the Value of Audio in Rhetoric and Writing Classrooms
Definitions and Examples of “Affordances” and “Constraints”
Introductions, Goals and Experiences We Bring to the Workshop

In addition to offering participants an introduction to sonic rhetoric and writing, we want to expand the community of soundwriting teachers by giving time for participants to share how they currently use sound in their writing classrooms and/or their soundwriting pedagogy aspirations.

9:20 – 9:30 am
Workshop Overview: Sonic Activity & Examples

Facilitators will describe the workshop agenda and goals and introduce the activity participants will engage in. The activity calls for participants to compose an alphabetic description of a photograph, then translate that description into soundwriting that uses music, voice, and sound effects. The facilitators will share a few examples to provide insight into the potentials of the activity.

9:30 – 9:45 am
Alphabetic Translation of a Visual Artifact (Photograph)

Drawing on all five senses, create an alphabetic representation of this photograph. Use as much detail as possible.

9:45 – 10:30 am
Audio Editing Skills Introduction and Guided Practice

Facilitators will circulate as participants experiment with Audacity (audio editing software). Please note that the workshop does not presume knowledge of the software; we will accommodate participants at many levels of audio editing experience. Our goal is to show how accessible this program is for students and teachers alike and to share some of our favorite tricks and features.

10:30 – 10:45 am
Finding and Ripping Audio Assets

We will share our favorite strategies for finding assets and including them in soundwriting. We will also address best practices for the ethical use of others’ creative work.

10:45 am – 12:00 pm
Create a Sonic Representation of a Visual Image

This time is for guided “making” and “creating.” While participants work on their own computers, facilitators will circulate, offering advice, answering questions, and sharing insights.

12:00-12:10 pm
Alphabetic Reflection on Sonic Activity

Participants will write for ten minutes responding to these questions: What did this activity teach you about the affordances and constraints of sound? What kinds of insights, questions, or challenges emerged as you created your sonic representation? What did this activity teach you about what you need to do to support your students in composing with sound?

12:10 – 12:30 pm
Share and Discuss

Facilitators will invite participants to present their reflections and will facilitate a larger discussion about sonic rhetoric in the classroom.

Ultimately, soundwriting opens new space for bringing the creativity and unpredictability of student work, student identity, and student performance into the writing classroom. Join us for a morning of teaching and learning together.

FORUM–Individual Issues

FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty is a peer-reviewed publication concerning working conditions, professional life, activism, and perspectives of non-tenure-track faculty in college composition and communication. It is published twice annually (alternately in CCC and TETYC) and is sponsored by the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Faculty and scholars from all academic positions are welcome to contribute.

Fall 2023
Volume 27, Number 1

Spring 2023
Volume 26, Number 2

Fall 2022
Volume 26, Number 1

Spring 2022
Volume 25, Number 2

Fall 2021
Volume 25, Number 1

Spring 2021
Volume 24, Number 2

Fall 2020
Volume 24, Number 1

Spring 2020
Volume 23, Number 2

Fall 2019
Volume 23, Number 1

Spring 2019
Volume 22, Number 2

Fall 2018
Volume 22, Number 1

Spring 2018
Volume 21, Number 2

Fall 2017
Volume 21, Number 1

Spring 2017
Volume 20, Number 2

Fall 2016
Volume 20, Number 1

Spring 2016
Volume 19, Number 2

Fall 2015
Volume 19, Number 1

Spring 2015
Volume 18, Number 2
Fall 2014
Volume 18, Number 1

Spring 2014
Volume 17, Number 2

Fall 2013
Volume 17, Number 1

Spring 2013
Volume 16, Number 2

Fall 2012
Volume 16, Number 1

Spring 2012
Volume 15, Number 2

Fall 2011
Volume 15, Number 1

Spring 2011
Volume 14, Number 2

Fall 2010
Volume 14, Number 1

Spring 2010
Volume 13, Number 2

Fall 2009
Volume 13, Number 1

Spring 2009
Volume 12, Number 2

Fall 2008
Volume 12, Number 1

Spring 2008
Volume 11, Number 2

Fall 2007
Volume 11, Number 1

Spring 2007
Volume 10, Number 2

Fall 2006
Volume 10, Number 1

Spring 2006
Volume 9, Number 2

Fall 2005
Volume 9, Number 1

Spring 2005
Volume 8, Number 2

Fall 2004
Volume 8, Number 1

Spring 2004
Volume 7, Number 2

Fall 2003
Volume 7, Number 1

Spring 2003
Volume 6, Number 2

Fall 2002
Volume 6, Number 1

Spring 2002
Volume 5 Number 2

Fall 2001
Volume 5, Number 1

Fall 2000
Volume 4, Number 1

Spring 2000
Volume 3, Number 2

Fall 1999
Volume 3, Number 1

Winter 1999
Volume 2, Number 2

Fall 1998

Volume 2, Number 1

Winter 1998
Volume 1, Number 1

Call for FORUM Manuscripts: Contingent Faculty Activism

Submission deadline: January 17, 2020
Note: Submissions will not be returned.

The editor of FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty seeks articles exploring contingent faculty activism.

Nationwide, we have seen a surge of activism in response to the continued corporatization of education–high school teachers walking out in Virginia and California, graduate students unionizing, and adjunct faculty organizing in Florida and North Carolina. This special issue is inspired by this latest surge in action. Composition and English studies has significant scholarship dedicated to documenting and theorizing labor problems and conditions. This special issue concerns what happens next.

Recent anthologies like Composition in the Age of Austerity (2016), Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity: Labor & Action in English Composition (2017), and Labored: The State(ment) and Future Work in Composition (2017) do some of this work. The editorial board of Forum invites authors, especially contingent, non-tenure-track, and adjunct faculty in English studies, to contribute to this growing body of scholarship. We are interested in movements, actions, and policies small and large, concerning single departments or entire systems. Where possible, pieces should be framed by or connect to the work of writing and English department faculty.

Writers may approach the theme in a variety of ways, including but not limited to the following:

  • Where has contingent faculty action or activism worked, and in what contexts? What made these initiatives successful? What was learned through these successes?
  • Where has contingent faculty activism not worked, and in what contexts? What caused these initiatives to fail? What was learned through these failures?
  • How might our disciplinary knowledge in Composition, Rhetoric, and English studies best be employed in our activism?
  • How do geographic location, state laws, and institution type affect progress in contingent faculty activism?
  • What possibilities remain for contingent faculty activism in various contexts?

Due to FORUM’s space limitations, essays should be between 1,500 and 2,700 words. While authors should reference current professional/scholarly discussions, extensive literature reviews are not required. Submissions will go through peer review. For further information please contact Amy Lynch-Biniek at lynchbin@kutztown.edu.

Submit your work electronically to lynchbin@kutztown.edu. Put the words “FORUM article” in your subject line. Submissions should include the following information:

  • your name
  • your title(s)
  • your institution(s)
  • home address and phone number; institutional address(es) and phone number(s)
  • if applicable, venue(s) where submission was first published or presented previously

Thank you for your interest!

FORUM Editor: Amy Lynch-Biniek

FORUM Editorial Board: Natalie Dorfeld, Steve Fox, Jes Philbrook

FORUM Submission Guidelines

Forum welcomes you to submit essays related to the teaching, working conditions, professional life, activism, and perspectives of non-tenure-track faculty. Faculty and scholars from all academic positions are welcome to contribute. Of special interest are research, analyses, and strategies grounded in local contexts, given that labor conditions and the needs of contingent faculty vary greatly with geography, institutional settings, and personal circumstances.

Essays should address theoretical and/or disciplinary debates. They will go through the standard peer review and revision process. For further information please contact the Forum editor at Kimberly_Bain@pba.edu.

Submit your work electronically to Forum by emailing Kimberly_Bain@pba.edu. Put the words “FORUM article” in your subject line. Submissions should include the following information:

  • your name
  • your title(s)
  • your institution(s)
  • home address and phone number; institutional address(es) and phone number(s)
  • if applicable, venue(s) where submission was first published or presented previously

CCC Podcasts–Heather Lindenman, Martin Camper, and Lindsay Dunne Jacoby

A conversation with Heather Lindenman, Martin Camper, and Lindsay Dunne Jacoby, coauthors (with Jessica Enoch) of “Revision and Reflection: A Study of (Dis)Connections between Writing Knowledge and Writing Practice” (14:01).

 

 

Heather Lindenman is assistant professor of English at Elon University, where she teaches courses in first-year writing and community writing. Her research, which has appeared in Composition Forum and is forthcoming in Reflections, focuses on ways that students connect their academic and non-academic writing experiences and on the consequences of community-engaged writing partnerships.

 

 

 

 

Martin Camper is assistant professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland, where he teaches courses in rhetoric, writing, argumentation, and style. He is the author of Arguing over Texts: The Rhetoric of Interpretation (2018) and is working on a second book tentatively titled How the Bible’s Meaning Changes: Argument and Controversy in the Christian Church.

 

 

 

 

Lindsay Dunne Jacoby is adjunct professor of writing at the George Washington University, where she teaches academic writing courses about climate change and environmental justice. Her research explores the rhetoric of the national parks movement.

 

CCC Podcasts–Todd Ruecker, Stefan Frazier, and Mariya Tseptsura

A conversation with Todd Ruecker, Stefan Frazier, and Mariya Tseptsura, coauthors of “‘Language Difference Can Be an Asset’: Exploring the Experiences of Nonnative English-Speaking Teachers of Writing” (15:19).

 

 

Todd Ruecker is an associate professor at the University of New Mexico. His work focuses on investigating the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of education worldwide and ways to transform education systems and institutions. He has published four books as well as articles in venues such as TESOL Quarterly and Writing Program Administration.

 

 

 

 

Stefan Frazier is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Language Development at San Jose State University. His research interests include composition pedagogy (first and second language), functional grammar, and the pedagogy of pragmatic competence. He is also active in university governance at the local and state levels.

 

 

 

Mariya Tseptsura is a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on second language writing, WPA, and online instruction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2017

Downloadable PDF of the full report.

Introduction to the 2017 Annual
Clancy Ratliff

The conversation about copyright and intellectual property has grown and changed since the formation of the CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus over two decades ago. When it began, many of the scholars interested in the issues of authorship, copyright, and intellectual property were techies who were also deeply concerned about internet privacy issues such as security, surveillance, and corporate overreach — reflecting the topics that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has always monitored (and continues to). Read on (full report).

Table of Contents
1 Introduction to the 2017 Annual
Clancy Ratliff
5 Net Neutrality Repeal Creates Dark Cloud Over Student and Researcher Internet Access and Equity
Wendy Warren Austin 
10 Going Bananas Over Copyright: Monkey Selfies and the Intersections of Rhetoric, Intellectual Property, and Animal Studies
Amy D. Propen
14 Twenty Years of Turnitin: In an Age of Big Data, Even Bigger Questions Remain
Traci Arnett Zimmerman 
23 Contributors

Copyright

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