Collaborative Projects to Join

Participants will create a guide to building collaborations between two-year and four-year writing programs within an ecology that supports equity and access in educational attainment. The proposed guide will offer evidence-based strategies to collaborate toward increasing success for students and supporting literacy educators in building professional knowledge of reading and writing instructional contexts. The guide will be available online for writing studies experts, postsecondary literacy educators, and program coordinators. The content and structure of the guide will emerge from collaborative, synchronous workshop activities. Possible topics include (but aren’t limited to): placement processes; curricular alignment; transfer articulation policies and practices; partnerships for research and scholarship across institutions; internships, apprentice programs, and models to support graduate instructors who work across campuses; and model successful collaborations. After completing the guide, the group will identify other ways to continue the project and disseminate results through publications, online webinars and workshops, and/or conference presentations.

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Instructors who use non-traditional grading are often limited by institutional learning management systems and forced to engineer complex workarounds. The goal of this collaboration is to design a standalone web application to support assignment submission, feedback exchange, and final grade calculation according to grading schemes customized by the instructor.

By the end of the conference, our group will deliver app specifications, preliminary wireframes, and a justification statement which we will later expand into a co-authored publication. After the conference, we intend to pursue app development, starting with a proof of concept. As a group, we will decide how far we want to take the app and how to distribute it.

We seek collaborators with entrepreneurial spirit, obsessions with assessment, and experience programming or coding. Those who want more experience with user-interface design or ungrading are encouraged to apply along with those who already have deep knowledge in these areas.

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The endorsement of English-only teaching and learning practices in countries where English is a second language has become popular. The question, therefore, remains if the exclusive use of English in teaching and learning in ESL countries can be reconsidered from translingual perspectives to achieve not only linguistic competence but also academic success. We invite participants to question the normative assumptions that define languages as fixed and what such assumptions mean for a monolingual English speaker in an English as a second language country. Also, what does destabilizing this normative monolingual status of English-only teaching and learning practice in ESL countries mean for effective academic writing performance? Finally, in what ways do indigenous languages serve as a vehicle for translingual practices in teaching and learning in ESL countries?

The purpose of this project is to develop an edited collection featuring timely conversations about the ways to approach transcending monolingual assumptions of English-only teaching and learning practices in ESL countries.

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The presence of the teaching-track position within the field of Writing Studies has sharply increased. However, the supply of teaching-focused jobs currently outweighs the available resources for ethical hiring and retention practices, networks of support and care, and the potential to organize across institutional contexts to argue for better working conditions, pay equity, and more. Our project brings together full-time faculty in instructional titles (Lecturers, Instructors, Professors of Practice, Teaching Professors, etc.) and allies to create resources that resist common deficit narratives around teaching-focused jobs (Willard-Traub, 2012) while informing this audience of the realities of the current differences between these positions and positions on the tenure track. We welcome people who are already in teaching-track jobs, job seekers, and research-track faculty who work with graduate students on the market.

Connections between high school and college writing are fraught for researchers, teachers, and students. The purpose of this project is to develop an edited collection featuring timely conversations about the ways to best serve writers within and across writing contexts.

Topics may include: increasing standardization of curricula; students developing different skills than they need (esp. underrepresented students in historically under-resourced schools); teacher development and training challenges in both English Ed and FYW contexts; dual credit and time to degree; effects of technological change on writing and writing expectations; public discourse (de)valuing school writing and literacy, in general.

We seek to include teacher voices from a range of institutional (secondary, community college, etc.), professional, and personal positionalities. By including a range of genres, voices, and pedagogical ideas, we hope this collection will find a broad audience among teachers and administrators across institutional contexts.

As researchers and writers, within the liberal arts context in the Global South, we are tasked with sense-making, of being attuned to difference and otherness in our teaching and practice. What we heed to, how we heed to, and why we heed to specific bits of the content determine how we comprehend the world around us. Taking cue from scholars like Gopal Guru, Stuart Hall, and David Scott, we will look at how reading and writing can be reflexive tools. The workshop will meander to the margins to understand how note-taking can be a radical act of attunement to difference. More broadly, the workshop attends to the ethos of receptive generosity, especially, as the world increasingly becomes polarised and violent, attempting to add to conversations on not why we should care about difference but how we may do this work recurrently. The intended audiences for the workshop are individuals who work across disciplinary and methodological boundaries and are interested in intersections of reading, reflexivity and modes of attunement. It will culminate in a proposal for a special issue on modes and vocabularies of reading and reflexivity.

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Handcrafted Rhetorics is launching “Aca(diy)mia: Making Zines, Remaking Worlds,” a project in which collaborators will make their own manifesto zines for working “in but not of” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 26) universities, and build a community of support among practitioners across all positions and positionalities within higher education. Participants will not only (a) learn how to make zines, but also: (b) discuss how to utilize zines and other DIY (do-it-yourself) modalities in our various roles in academia, (c) reckon together with the violent and exclusionary histories of the university (and our own, specific universities), and (d) build community and solidarity networks to continue to engage in justice work within and beyond the university. Our core question across these four aims is: how can we, as full human beings, engage with the dehumanizing machinery of higher education in ways that are restorative, radical, and just?

Our project is to begin work on an interdisciplinary conference concerning the state of the emergent field of trans studies. Because trans studies is an "interdiscipline,” its scholars come to similar questions from vastly different methodological and disciplinary orientations. At the Watson Conference and beyond, we hope to provide space to (re)orient these disparate approaches around questions of field formation, animated by a commitment to trans life. We’re looking for participants who share this commitment to trans life and situate their work within trans studies. At the Watson Conference, we plan to co-create a statement of purpose and values for our trans studies conference, panel ideas and CFPs, plans for conference infrastructure and funding, a leadership structure and division of labor for continued work after the Watson Conference, and a projection of future work beyond our proposed trans studies conference, tentatively slated for Summer 2025.

Update, 1/22/24: Since our project went live, the Center for Applied Transgender Studies (CATS) has announced a conference for Fall 2024 with the theme “State of the Post-Discipline.” Their conference looks extremely exciting, and we encourage anyone who is interested in our project to apply to the CATS conference as well. Because the CATS conference’s theme is so similar to the one we had envisioned for our eventual trans studies conference, we will devote some time at the Watson Conference to brainstorming a new theme for our eventual trans studies conference, still slated for Summer 2025.

Speakers of the Chatino language in Oaxaca, Mexico, perform prayers and speeches—composed with parallelism, repetition, and metonymy, typical patterns of pre-Columbian poetic traditions—in all aspects of daily life. The performance and transmission of these art forms is quickly declining due to migration of youth to Mexican and US cities and because public schools in the region only teach Spanish. Twelve of these prayers were published by anthropologist Carmen Cordero Avendaño de Durand in her 1986 book, “Stina Jo’o Kucha (Our Sacred Father Sun).” The Chatino texts were presented in blocks of texts, written by hand in an orthography that contemporary Chatinos cannot read. Chatino language activists, faculty, and students will come together to translate these Chatino prayers into English and Spanish so that Chatinos can incorporate them in their daily rituals as well as allowing larger society a window to these magnificent oral traditions.

In Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose’s “Using Rhetorical Analysis and Trauma-Informed Pedagogy,” she argues for “the powerful ideological role that story telling plays” in the healing process of those who have suffered trauma. It is beneficial, she argues, to “become active participants in disrupting the narrative monopoly so long held by the oppressors” (p. 45). With that in mind, and with Aja Martinez’s (2020) Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory and Condon and Faison’s (2022) Counterstories from the Writing Center as models, this workshop will gather Indigenous people, scholars of Indigenous rhetorics, and anyone interested in counterstory methodology to participate in what will eventually become an edited collection of counterstories from the reservation that speak back to the dominant narrative told about indigenous peoples in both the academy and other professional settings.

This collaboration centers on the examination of genres of activism to construct a public-facing syllabus that explores the role of writing in activism. Public-facing syllabi have been a prominent form of political education seeking to engage communities outside of academia (Dillon, 2018). Our public syllabus will consist of three units that we argue are invaluable for social justice movements: technical communication, multimodal communication, and oral communication. All three contribute to the narrative strategy of movement-building. In a moment where movements for social justice are recognizable, prevalent, and constantly evolving (e.g., #BLM, #MeToo, #SayHerName, Indigenous Land Rights movement, Environmental/Climate Justice, etc.), this project highlights how various forms of communication contribute to the strategies and tactics of activism. It will provide organizers, activists, community members, and teachers ways into studying, teaching, and enacting writing for movement-building, activism, and social justice.

As graduate students acclimate to highly specialized disciplinary practices, they need to develop an array of equally specialized ways of reading (Geisler; Haas and Flower). Yet, graduate students often gain these skills more through happenstance than through direct instruction or metacognitive attention. The Graduate Reading Exchange—a collaborative, digital website—will support graduate students and instructors of graduate readers by making perceivable the processes and practices graduate students use to engage texts and to wrestle with their acclimatization to disciplinary literacy. The website has 3 parts: an exploration of disciplinary challenges (and suggested readings); an archive of process narratives to materialize reading practices; and a toolkit of practical resources, activities, and assignments. Published as a team-authored website, we invite participants from any discipline to contribute by providing their own experiences as readers, developing resources, and by offering feedback and critical thinking on emerging ideas and materials.

Resilience has taken center stage in higher education since March 2020. However, its connotations of personal grit do not account for the structural inequities and material constraints that make perseverance beneficial for some and downright harmful for others. Our “post”-pandemic era is an optimal time to reckon with what resilience means and whose resilience matters in first-year composition (FYC). This workshop asks: How can we approach resilience relationally and intersectionally? And, how can we harness the potentials of FYC to amplify relational, intersectional resilience? This workshop seeks to bring together folks teaching and administering FYC across different contexts to explore these questions and to create an open-access digital archive of flash prompts that activate resilience for FYC students, instructors, and administrators. This archive is intended to initiate a longer-term collaboration with workshop participants in creating resilience-promoting curriculum and assessment methods that are transferable across the field of FYC.

This project launches a large-scale, multi-institutional study of graduate student writing development, responding to the increased presence of underrepresented domestic and international students on US campuses.

Using mixed-methods research across multiple institutions, we aim to provide a high-level view of student writing experiences in graduate school to answer the following questions: How do graduate students learn to write, and what kinds of writing assignments do they encounter in coursework? What affective experiences do they report? What resources do they use to support their writing? How do multilingual and BIPOC students navigate programs where racist linguistic ideologies continue to hold sway?

At Watson, our project group will collaborate to hone these research questions, identify methodological approaches best suited to those questions, and plan for future presentations and publications. At the conclusion of the conference, we will deliver a synthesis of our conversations and share our proposed study.