Literacies in Times of Disruption: Living and Learning During a Pandemic

From the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, education figured prominently in many conversations, including everything from possible “learning gaps” to hampered social development. Yet, often overlooked in such conversations have been the voices of students, and their perspectives on the disruptive, sometimes traumatic, experiences of the pandemic. This book explores the experiences of a group of more than 30 university students over the first two years of the pandemic to understand the effects on them in terms of questions of affect and identity, place and technology, and their relationships to the university, both in terms of learning and as an institution. Through a series of interviews from April 2020 to January 2022, I both document and examine the practices, feelings, memories, attitudes, and responses to their lives as students, but also to their experiences in an extraordinary time of disruption and public turmoil. Such an in-depth analysis helps to illuminate the ways in which the experiences of the pandemic have shaped students’ ideas of themselves as students and writers, and the role of technology, place, and the university in how they perceive and feel about the ways they are engaging in their work and learning. Given the universal, and ongoing, nature of the pandemic, those of us who teach and research students and their literacy practices must realize that we will all be doing our work in the years to come in response, in some significant ways, to these experiences. The more we can look, in depth, into how students understood and felt about what was happening to them, the more varied ways we can imagine to respond to students in the years to come with innovative, nuanced, and empathetic approaches to learning and literacy. We are in a time in which trauma and disruptions of many kinds may very well continue to be part of students’ experiences in school. It is vital that we understand how these indelible experiences restructure lives, perceptions, practices, and ideas about the future.

Global Climate Change Education as Both Local and Global

I am involved with several international climate change and sustainability education projects focused on helping students and teachers from around the world to develop a greater understanding of the local and global impacts of climate change on culture and their lives. I’m particularly interested in exploring how we can use narrative, art, digital media, play, and other approaches to engage students with these issues across disciplines and as well as in their communities. I think we can find new ways to connect narrative/identity/history/memory into explorations of sustainability and climate change, particularly drawing on rhetorics of place. The newest collaboration I'm involved in is Ripple Effects International, a collaborative, cross-cultural initiative with the goals of helping people learn more the global and local effects of climate change, develop empathy for others, and appreciate and advocate on behalf of nature. In a Ripple Effects project, young people take photos of water in their world – of any kind - write reflections about the images and what they mean to them, and then those images and reflections are published or circulated some way in the local community. Then, through Ripple Effects International, there is also the opportunity to see and connect to similar images and writing by young people around the world. We also collect and provide access to resources for teachers and community members to support creating their own Ripple Effects projects, as well as resources for environmental and literacy education. Other climate change education projects I have been involved in include working with middle-school students from South Africa, the Philippines, Austria, Australia and the US toward exploring climate change locally and then talking about it globally through digital and other media.

Literacy Practices and Perceptions of Agency: Composing Identities

This book, just published by Routledge Press, explores how people perceive their abilities and opportunities to read and write successfully when they perform literate identities. The perception of agency, not just whether a person is able to read and write but whether she or he perceives and feels able to read and write in a given context, is crucial in terms of how people respond to writing situations. Though some may consider agency difficult to define, it is a goal often articulated in research, on course syllabi, and in learning outcomes. It is important to investigate how individuals perceive agency, and what factors they regard as enabling or constraining their actions. At any moment there are many factors shaping agency and literate identities from social forces – history, material conditions, institutions, social roles, semiotics – to internal conditions – motivation, emotion, narrative, and memory. This book draws on interviews and observations with students in several countries to explore the intersections of the social and personal in regard to how, but also crucially why, people engage successfully or struggle painfully in literacy practices. If we can identify such patterns and moments we can, as teachers and researchers, rethink our approaches to teaching as well as intervene in the learning of individual students to help facilitate a sense of agency as writers and readers. I am following up on the work of the book with an article about how current national political discussions of education and writing influence students' perceptions of agency.

Writing Centers, Enclaves, and Creating Spaces of Change within Universities

Writing center scholarship often high-lights the ways in which their distinctive, less directive, nongraded, and individualized instruction can make them distinctive social and pedagogical spaces. There is a simultaneous argument, however, that writing centers are often institutionally vulnerable and may be unable to engage in or promote such differences within the larger college or university. Yet, despite their size and possible vulnerability, the daily practices and institutional positioning of writing centers can help change conversations and work toward a different vision, political approach, and institutional presence. Drawing on Victor Friedman’s concept of “enclaves of different practice” and Brian Massumi’s theories of affect, this article explores how writing centers can adopt a theory of institutional change grounded in social fields and relationships. If, as Friedman advocates, institutions can be changed from the “inside out” through attention to empowering relationships and reconfiguring social fields, writing centers can adopt dispositions and practices to create the environments from which futures can emerge that sustain their values. The article provides brief examples of how a writing center can explicitly frame and promote pedagogical and participatory values to work toward larger institutional and political change. This article has recently been published in Writing Center Journal.