Happy Summer CWS! As Spring 2019 fades into the rearview, we want to reflect on a semester of possibilities and progress.
CWS Administrative Team Update
We are pleased to announce Logan Middleton as incoming CWS Assistant Director. Logan is a PhD student in English/Writing Studies and a former Assistant Director of the Writers Workshop. Logan is an active and engaged member of the CWS community, having served in multiple capacities, and we look forward to the contributions he will make as AD. We want to thank Autumn West, who has served as AD for three semesters and will be transitioning into the realm of dissertating. Bruce Kovanen will return as AD and Paul Prior will continue as CWS Director.
We’re hard at work planning for next semester and beyond. If you have comments or suggestions for programming, please let Bruce Kovanen (kovanen2@illinois.edu) or Logan Middleton (lpmiddl2@illinois.edu) know. In the meantime, be sure to keep an eye out for announcements on social media and on our listserv.
Ongoing Initiatives
Reading/Working Groups
Members of the CHAT Chat reading group and Social Justice Education Praxis Working Group met regularly throughout the semester. These ongoing affinity groups continue to be cherished spaces for critical engagement with theory and practice among colleagues. If you’d like to know more about these groups, please contact Bruce Kovanen (kovanen2@illinois.edu). Please also feel free to contact Bruce if you have an idea for a group that you would like support facilitating (you can see some earlier groups here and check out our earlier blog post here).
Brown Bags
Our Spring 2019 brown bags were well attended and we are so grateful for the continued engagement of presenters and participants. Our topics included Digital Rhetorics (Dr. John Gallagher and Bri Lafond), Bridging Scholarly Advocacy and Community Activism (Dr. David Cisneros, Logan Middleton and Niki Turnipseed), Gesa E. Kirsch Symposium Prep (CWS grad students), Developing Collaborative Academic Relationships (Dr. Anna Smith, Illinois State University) and Job Market Experiences (Evin Groundwater and Annie Kelvie). Brown bags continue to be a critical space for sustaining community, sharing scholarship and supporting professional development. If you have an idea for a Fall brownbag, please contact Bruce Kovanen (kovanen2@illinois.edu) or Logan Middleton (lpmiddl2@illinois.edu).
Symposia
Issues of equity, diversity and inclusion are ever-present and underscored in this current climate. Following our Fall 2018 symposium on Circulation and Mobility and our workshop on Language Ideologies, CWS is planning a symposium on Language Ideologies, Race and Writing Studies for Fall 2019. The goal of this symposium is to amplify voices that call attention to the writing and languaging experiences/practices of marginalized individuals, groups and communities. The 10th Annual Gesa E. Kirsch Graduate Student Symposium was also held on April 26th this semester. That’s a decade of Kirsch! Gesa Kirsch (Bentley University) and CWS alum Michael Burns (West Chester University) were keynote speakers. Graduate students shared their brilliant work and were able to participate in a research “working” workshop with Michael Burns. The graduate committee (Bri Lafond, Logan Middleton and Paul Beilstein) worked tirelessly to plan this wonderful event.
WAC/WID
Our WAC Seminar for TAs this semester focused on responding to students and their writing in ways that encourage revision and learning. We are looking forward to our Fall 2019 WAC seminar, which will be held on August 22nd and 23rd. CWS also has ongoing work with the College of Engineering’s Strategic Instructional Innovation Engineering Writing Project, whose objectives continue to be to improve students’ written communication skills by empowering engineering faculty to effectively and efficiently incorporate or refine writing instruction in their classes and to provide a structure for vertical integration of writing across the Engineering undergraduate curricula. In addition, CWS continues to work with instructors across disciplines to support meaningful and effective writing/response practices. The Center is currently designing a resource to revise the campus policy on plagiarism to reflect meaningful, theory-based and learning-oriented perspectives on writing, authorship and citation.
WAM
Our WAM staff meetings this semester were restructured to focus more on professional development. In addition to sharing amazing student projects and updates on teaching/learning, we engaged with scholarship around multimodality and the senses. As a group, we read Steph Ceraso's book, Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening and Sarah Pink's book, Sensory Ethnography. These texts encouraged rich in-depth conversations about the possibilities of pedagogy. In addition, we had the rare opportunity to participate in a conversation with Professor Todd Taylor from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Professor Taylor shared his approach to multimodal composing in the writing course he helped design at UNC. In partnership with Adobe, Professor Taylor demonstrated the potential instructional advantages of Adobe software programs. Bri Lafond, Alexis Kapczynski and Niki Turnipseed will return as veteran WAM instructors for Fall 2019. We are also excited to welcome aboard Megan Mericle, who will be a new WAM instructor in the Fall. WAM continues to evolve each semester, challenging us to think about the fluidity of modes, the importance of senses and dis/abilities.
Next 20 Years
The next 20 years event on May 6th (open to faculty and graduate students) challenged our community to think boldly and bravely about the future of CWS. Changes in university and departmental structures mean that the future of CWS is uncertain. However, we believe that CWS will expand and continue to grow if our institutional mission can be sustained/transformed. During this meeting, we discussed what the evolution of CWS might look like. We examined other programs across institutions to see what we might learn from their approaches. Future collaborations with units across campus, including the new Seibel Center for Design were discussed. This conversation will be revisited in the Fall with the goal of moving CWS forward strategically. If you were unable to make the first event, we would love to have your input at the next one. Please check for announcements about this event in the Fall.
Finally, we really want to thank the CWS community as a whole for your continued interest, support and engagement.
We wish you all a happy and productive summer,
Paul Prior, Autumn West and Bruce Kovanen
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Twitter: @UofIllinoisCWS
Web: cws.illinois.edu