composition

I started my doctoral program at the ripe age of 22. I was only 2 years out of college. Because of my writing center experience, I was fast-tracked to act as a senior consultant and to teach an English class immediately. Needless to say, I was nervous. The only picture from teaching ever, and it's awful, but I loved this class. I was especially nervous about being respected by my students. They were not that much younger than me, and I knew I would have to earn their trust. I was worried about being labeled a "novice" and being excluded from professional conversations and opportunities. I also had some skeletons in my closet. Facebook came out my freshman year of college for college students only. I was a freshman learning to use a new technology, and the ramifications of this technology were still years away from really being considered. Not to say that I ever really did anything that bad during my college years, but I didn't want my students or colleagues to see my ...

I just returned from the 2014 IWAC (International Writing Across the Curriculum) Conference at the University of Minnesota, and I have to say it was one of my best conference experiences yet. The presentations were engaging, the people were open and friendly, and Minneapolis was a great city. During my brief two days there, I managed to sit in on 5 panels, one in which I presented, a keynote, and an incredible plenary session. In truth, it made me a little sad that I'm not a WAC WPA because I would have loved the opportunity to implement some of the ideas that were discussed at the universities where I am involved in writing pedagogy. The Panels Here is a brief overview of the titles of the panels that I attended: Role Reversal: When Students Teach Faculty in WAC Programs - Deanna Daniels & Brandy Grabow, Kate Ronald & Lucy Manley, and Greg Skutches Writing Beyond the Curriculum - Nicole Papaioannou, Dan Reis & Caroline Klidonas, and KaaVonia Hinton & Yonghee S...

I am proud to announce that I am beginning my dissertation research! I am looking for undergraduates/recent grads to participate in a qualitative study on writing through the classroom and beyond. Do you know a student who used class writing-- no matter how formal or informal-- to springboard to a larger project beyond the class without being required to do so? I would love to talk to them! Seeking nominations and/or interested parties.  Please feel free to forward or share this call for participants. Thank you!  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K0xbY8lSemh9WothJ59sb40WRje59q18jHfwHmqWVs0/edit?usp=sharing

Today, I went back through my folders of research, trying to get back in the swing of the semester. I picked up the article "Composing for Delivery" by Kate Kessler. The article was initially published in the November 2005 edition of The English Journal.  In this article, Kessler makes a fairly convincing argument for doing what she calls "composing for delivery" or creating "a call to write" for students in a Composition course. Building off the fifth canon of classical rhetoric, delivery, she implements a curriculum that forces students to write for purposes beyond the classroom (which, may I add, she never denotes as "real world"). She finds that as a result of this method students learn to compose with their own purposes in mind while also considering audience and effective rhetoric. In this particular article, Kessler observes how students develop rhetorical sensitivity through letter writing (actually mailed to the intended audience) and pr...

I return to my post about the Aurora shooting because some new information has recently come forth. From the beginning, law enforcement said that they believed the attack was premeditated, and last week, Fox News published that law enforcement found a massive notebook that had been mailed to a university psychiatrist on July 12, days before the attack. In other words, had it been delivered and had someone taken it seriously, the attack might have been prevented. This leads me back to some of the things I have been thinking about over the past two years: How do we judge if someone is simply being creative with a dark edge, or sincerely needs help?  How do we deal with traumatic/confessional writing?   Who gets heard in a world covered with writing?   Why do we make students write about the "purely academic" and separate themselves from the real world?  These questions immediately lead me back to Chris Anson's short piece, "What's Writing Got to Do With Campus Te...

(just for the record, I really don't care for the new Blogger layout) Tomorrow is a big day for me. I will be presenting at the State University of New York Council on Writing ( SUNY COW ), which will be held at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in Manhattan. While I don't want to give away my entire presentation, I do want to take some time to reflect on the reading and thinking I've been doing lately about public writing and engaged Composition programs because I think this is the way that Composition is headed or should, in some ways, be headed. At the conference, I will presenting on a panel called "Radical Ideas for the Composition Classroom." My piece in particular is "Ethnography and Activist Writing: Sustainable Inquiries for First Year Writing," which I hadn't considered being very radical, but now I suppose it may be. My pedagogical philosophy really aims at giving writing meaning beyond a tool for academic assessment.  I have seen ...