Grit Is Not It: Reckoning With Resilience in “Post”-Pandemic First-Year Composition
In Person; Mar. 7-Mar. 9
Facilitation Team:
 |
 |
 |
|---|---|---|
| Emily Rónay Johnston | Eileen Kogl Camfield | Samantha Tetangco Ocena |
Abstract: 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.
What Draft Deliverable will be Presented at the Conference Showcase? The final-day deliverable will be a handmade concept map of resilience that represents our group’s brainstorm of resilience from Day 1. This map will be accompanied by a digital archive of flash prompts for FYC that activate agency and resistance for students, teachers, and administrators alike. Our vision is for the concept map and digital archive to lay the groundwork for a longer-term collaboration with workshop participants around building a resilience-promoting FYC curriculum that is readily transferable across institutional contexts.
Who Should Apply to Participate? We are looking for participants with specific interests and backgrounds in FYC with a range of relationships to this subfield (e.g., contingent faculty, graduate students, tenured/tenure-track faculty, administrators, etc.). We are especially interested in participants coming from HSIs and MSIs who work with multilingual students and underrepresented minoritized students. Folks with technical skills in web design are particularly welcome!
What Do Participants Need to Prepare? [Note: The facilitation team will email all materials and instructions once all participants have been selected] To prepare us for our opening discussion of what is/isn’t resilience and how the concept of resilience shows up in academic contexts, we ask that participants:
- Find and bring in a shareable form of a resilience artifact(s), which could be a text(s) or object(s) representing resilience, resilience thinking, and/or resilience rhetoric in higher education.
- Read these two texts (the co-facilitators will provide digital copies to participants):
- Sebah et. al's (2021) article, “Evaluating the REP-S Brief Resilience Intervention for Students in Higher Education: A Multi-Study Mixed-Methods Programme of Research"
- Introduction to Tricia Hersey’s (2022) book, Rest As Resistance: A Manifesto
What Happens After the Conference? Following the conference, participants will have the opportunity to contribute to any or all of the projects described in the full proposal (Q11, p. 8): a website, white paper, and book on promoting resilience in FYC.