Responsivity: Defining, Cultivating, Enacting

The 2014 Watson Conference aims to foster ongoing conversations about how to be responsive to communities in and beyond the academy and how to foster the conditions that make these visions a reality.  Avenues for exploration include:

• Forwarding innovative scholarship that is responsive to our expanding definitions of literate practices, particularly as our methodologies, partners, sites and tools continue to expand
• Articulating innovative teaching, perhaps especially for groups struggling in higher education today (e.g., veterans, first generation, underprepared students, English language learners) whose voices may be underrepresented or unacknowledged
• Examining the field’s thinking about the purpose of writing and a writing citizenry, perhaps especially within current rhetorics of responsivity, such as those surrounding the Common Core or those from foundations championing educational innovation (e.g., TED, Kauffman Foundation, MacArthur Foundation)?
• Broadening our partnerships (e.g., community-academic partnerships, global partnerships, grantors/corporate sponsorships) in ways that foster new approaches, such as those between community-based, feminist, and business approaches?
• Sharing our work in ways that mark new iterations of being a pubic intellectual, perhaps with particular attention to how digital media can better circulate our work
• Attending to the material conditions, such as the availability of technology, savvy teachers, and time for groups to work together, needed to facilitate these goals

Mary P. Sheridan, Watson Conference Director, Professor of English, University of Louisville