Another semester is in the books!
CWS Administrative Team Update:
We are happy to announce that Autumn West will begin her position as CWS AD in the Spring! Autumn is a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction and has really great ideas for strengthening CWS’s position as a multidisciplinary unit. We thank María Carvajal, whose tenure as AD is over this semester, for all her hard work as AD over the last three semesters, and the lasting impact we know she’ll have on this program and the people in it. Niki Turnipseed will return as AD and Paul Prior will continue as CWS Director.
We’re hard at work planning for next semester, including an exciting change in structure to our brownbags. If you have comments or suggestions for programming, please let Niki Turnipseed (turnips2@illinois.edu) know. We would love your input for next semester and will also be sending a call for ideas for Fall 2018 Symposia! In the meantime, keep an eye out for announcements on social media and on our listserv.
We hope you’re all ready to enjoy down time with loved ones. In the spirit of celebration and reflection, here’s a look back at what we all accomplished together this fall:
Ongoing Initiatives:
Members of the CHAT Chat reading group and Social Justice Education Praxis Working Group continued to meet regularly. As members of both groups, we are ever-grateful for the opportunities they present to delve deeper into our varied interests with affinity groups. If you’d like to know more about these groups, or have an idea for a group you’d like support facilitating (you can see some earlier groups here), check out our earlier blog post here, or shoot Niki an email!
Symposia
We also held two symposia this semester, hosting four plenaries and eleven speakers between the two. The Trans {language, literacies, modal, national}: A Prefix to Unfix Theory Research and Practice put scholars with broad-ranging interests in conversation around the theme of moving across. The Social Justice Education Symposium was inspired by our Social Justice Education Praxis Working Group and sought to engage a larger local audience in conversations about social justice.
WAC
We led two WAC seminars this fall--a two-day intensive seminar for TAs before the semester began and a focused seminar series for TAs and Faculty members over three days in October. The TA and faculty seminar focused on how to structure response systems for student writing and was inspired by Dana Ferris’ visit last March.
In addition, over the summer the administrative team wrote a white paper regarding the current plagiarism policy and educational practices on campus with the hopes of beginning discussions that will lead to revision of campus plagiarism policies and create space for responses to student writing that, grounded in writing studies scholarship, are pedagogical, rather than punitive. We met with writing program administrators and other interested parties from across campus to share this white paper and discuss future possibilities in September. We look forward to picking up these discussions in the Spring.
WID
We are continuing our work with the College of Engineering’s Strategic Instructional Innovation Engineering Writing Project. Following last year’s exploration of curricular and instructional practices regarding writing in the CoE, this semester, the team, comprised of Engineers and Writing Studies faculty and grad students, ran a weekly series of informative workshops for our first cohort of Engineering faculty. We are excited to continue more hands-on work with faculty from the WAE cohort wishing to implement changes to their spring courses. This fall, we also jointly hosted Susan Conrad, who delivered impactful talks for various Engineering and Writing Studies groups.
WAM
In our WAM staff development meetings this semester, we worked on putting together an IRB application that would allow instructors to conduct research on WAM. We have received IRB approval and will begin to do research in the Spring. We also have a few instructor changes for next semester: this was Logan Middleton’s and Autumn West’s last semester teaching the class. We’re going to miss Logan and Autumn, but we look forward to applying and improving on the ideas you brought to the course. We also welcome María Carvajal and Alexis Kapczynski to our teaching community in the Spring. We are incredibly thankful for all our WAM instructors and the innovative work they do in their classrooms.
Finally, we would like to give a big thank you to each and every one of you. You help make our community a welcoming and intellectually engaging one!
Happy Holidays from the CWS Admin Team,
Paul Prior, Niki Turnipseed, and María Carvajal
Facebook: UofIIllinoisCWS
Twitter: @UofIllinoisCWS
Web: cws.illinois.edu
