Eileen Kogl Camfield

Grit Is Not It: Reckoning with Resilience in "Post"-Pandemic First-Year Composition

Eileen Kogl Camfield is a Teaching Professor in Writing Studies at the University of California, Merced where she also serves as Acting Director of the Center for Engaged Teaching and Learning. She is also a former Writing Program Director. In all of those roles, with over 35 years spent as an educator, interest in the ways student self-efficacy develops has centered her research (perhaps due to her own imposter syndrome in college). This focus has landed on resilience as an essential tool for disputing harmful self-beliefs. Currently, she directs the interdisciplinary Resilience Research Group at UC Merced, collaborations from which have generated two articles that have relevance for the Watson Conference. Sifting Through Gen Z Stereotypes: Using Critical Empathy to Assess Writers’ Invisible Learning (2020) details the ways common ‘beliefs’ about today’s students undercut their resilience and demonstrates how alternative assessment strategies might better serve. Cultivating Student Resilience to Resist Institutional Replication (2022) voices the worry that resilience is not always well-defined, despite the word being ubiquitously used, and sometimes is unfortunately messaged in ways that might simplistically force student assimilation. Instead, much as resilience must be seen as the capacity of individuals to bounce back from adversity, so, too, must institutions develop a capacity to change in ways that allow students to flourish, especially those most unfamiliar with the norms of the Academy. Most recently, From Antagonist to Protagonist: Shifting the Stories to Support Gen Z Students (2023) argues for an expanded view of student assets that might allow educators to become more resilient teachers.