Spring 2020 Reflection
As you might expect, this semester has been unlike any other term in CWS history, with COVID-19 disrupting programming through cancellations, delays, and the like. While we were sad to postpone some of our events to later dates—to Fall 2020 or beyond—we’re glad that we were able to host a handful of brownbags, seminars, and showcases before face-to-face meetings ceased for the semester.
CWS Brownbags:
We held three CWS brownbags this semester including:
- Multimodal Pedagogy, led by present and former Writing Across Media instructors Carrie James, Evin Groundwater, and Hannah Harris, a CWS alum
- Emerging Trends in Bilingual Education, led by College of Education faculty members Dr. Monica Gonzalez Ybarra and Dr. Giselle Martinez Negrette. Dr. Idalia Nuñez was also scheduled to participate in this event but unfortunately couldn’t attend; we look forward to inviting her back for a future brownbag.
We’re not quite sure what brownbags will look like in the fall, but we’re hoping to continue this dimension of CWS programming next semester with a range of cross-disciplinary scholar-teachers.
WAC / WID:
The Center had a busy few months for Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines work at the beginning of spring. After CWS’s annual Spring WAC TA Seminar, we facilitated three WAC-related initiatives:
- As part of ongoing work with the Strategic Instructional Innovations Program (SIIP)-granted funded Writing Across Engineering program, the CWS admin team facilitated a Responding to Student Writing workshop with TAs and instructors from Physics 280: Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control in January.
- In March’s Supporting Communicative Diversity: A WAC Workshop, Paul Prior, Bri Lafond, and Logan Middleton engaged workshop attendees in thinking through dimensions of communicative diversity—translanguaging, neurodiversity, multimodality, and genre / disciplinarity—as they relate to WAC work.
- Also in March, the CWS Admin Team led a WAC workshop on Negotiating Academic Writing Tasks and Voices with the Education Justice Project’s (EJP) Writing and Math Partners, an EJP tutoring initiative at Danville Correctional Center.
The Center is also continuing its Writing in the Disciplines work with the College of Engineering’s Writing Across Engineering (WAE) initiative thanks to the ongoing efforts of Paul Prior and John Gallagher as well as CWS graduate students Bruce Kovanen, Niki Turnipseed, Ryan Ware, and Megan Mericle. WAE’s work over the past year includes the following:
- The WAE team had their conference talk and conference proceedings accepted for the American Society for Engineering Education’s (ASEE) annual 2020 conference.
- The WAE team was also slated to present their research this summer at the International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference (IWAC). Though IWAC 2020 was delayed, they’re planning to share their work during next year’s rescheduled conference.
- The WAE team’s co-authored article, “A Collaborative Longitudinal Design for Supporting Writing Pedagogies of STEM Faculty” was published this year in Technical Communication Quarterly.
Writing Across Media:
Writing Across Media staff meetings this semester first focused on preparing for the WAM Student Work Showcase, then shifted to focus on how to effectively move the course online. On February 28th, CWS hosted the inaugural Writing Across Media Student Work Showcase which featured current and former WAM instructors sharing multimodal work that their students created in the course. Exhibits ranged from websites to videos to interactive Twine games and more.
We want to thank outgoing Writing Across Media instructor Niki Turnipseed, who just wrapped her fourth time teaching WAM, for all her hard work over the years. Niki will be cycling out of teaching WAM after she teaches an online section of the course this summer. Current WAM instructors Carrie James, Bruce Kovanen, and Megan Mericle will continue to teach the course next semester, and Lesley Owens—PhD student in English—will begin teaching WAM this fall.
Reading / Working Groups:
The CHAT Chat and Social Justice Pedagogy reading groups continued to meet regularly this semester. CWS graduate students also began a new working group this spring.
CHAT Chat continued to meet throughout the spring, focusing their readings around topics pertaining to perezhivanie, a cultural psychology term roughly translated as “experiencing.” Some members of the group were planning to present their work this summer at the International Society for Cultural Historical Activity Research (ISCAR) 2020 Congress in Natal, Brazil, but due to COVID-19, the conference has been delayed until 2021.
Members of the Social Justice Pedagogy group considered how other social justice-minded educators in the community approach issues of activism by attending the YMCA’s Friday Forum event featuring Professor Naomi Paik’s talk “Steal the University: Making Teaching and Scholarship Work for Publics” in February. Group members then considered how we as instructors can confront offensive language and writing from students, opening our discussion by considering Richard Miller’s piece “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone.” With the migration to virtual meetings, SJP members focused on how to foster just pedagogical practices and model self- and collective care in classes that were suddenly online.
In addition, CWS graduate students launched a Data Workshop Group in February, in which post-coursework grads met semi-regularly to share data excerpts and methodological instruments from their dissertation research. These meetings, which are styled somewhat after the methods workshops that have been part of CWS colloquia and symposia, provide a supportive, low-stakes environment for grads to work through—and provide feedback on—each other’s research-in-progress.
If you have an idea for a reading or working group that you would like support in facilitating, feel free to reach out to either of the ADs; you can see some earlier groups here. If you’re interested in learning more about CHAT Chat, feel free to e-mail Bruce Kovanen (kovanen2@illinois.edu) or Niki Turnipseed (turnips2@illinois.edu). To learn more about Social Justice Pedagogy, e-mail Bri Lafond (blafond2@illinois.edu). And if you’d like more information about the Data Workshop Group, feel free to e-mail Logan Middleton (lpmiddl2@illinois.edu).
Gesa E. Kirsch Graduate Student Symposium:
Our 11th annual Gesa E. Kirsch Graduate Student Symposium was slated to bring in alumna Eileen Lagman, currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as invited speaker. While we ended up postponing this year’s event on account of COVID-19, we look forward to resuming conversations with Eileen to deliver her keynote at a future Kirsch Symposium.
And even though this year’s symposium didn’t come to fruition, thank you to this year’s Kirsch Committee—Niki Turnipseed, Carrie James, Dan Zhang, and Savannah Block—for their work in preparing for the symposium.
Website:
Last fall, the Center began working with staff in Applied Technologies for Learning in the Arts and Sciences to revamp CWS’s website. We’re currently in the process of redesigning our site infrastructure as well as migrating and generating new content, and it’s our hope that a new, revised, no-longer-in-the-90s CWS site will launch by Fall 2020.
Celebrations/Announcements:
Last but certainly not least, we want to shout out the incredible work that our graduate students, alums, and faculty have accomplished over the past year! Below are a few of their accomplishments:
Graduate Students:
- Allison Kranek and María Carvajal Regidor’s manuscript “It’s Crowded in Here: ‘Present Others’ in Advanced Graduate Writers’ Sessions” won the Illinois English Department’s Honorable Mention in the Mary Kay Peer Essay Award contest.
- Dan Zhang was awarded a Winter 2020 Ben Rafoth Research Grant by the International Writing Centers Association to support her study, “Expanding the Discourse: Embodied Communication in Writing Tutorials.” This marks the second time in three years that IWCA has presented the Ben Rafoth Research Grant to a CWS graduate student, as Bruce Kovanen was awarded this grant in 2018.
- Evin Groundwater successfully defended his dissertation, “The Divergent Archive and Androcentric Counterpublics: Public Rhetorics, Memory, and Archives,” and graduated this spring. He’ll begin as Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication at the University of California, Irvine later this summer.
- Logan Middleton, along with Education Justice Project students Larry Barrett, Pablo Mendoza, Mario Rubio, and Thomas Stromblad, had their co-written article, “More than Transformative: A New View of Prison Writing Narratives,” published in a 2019 special issue of Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric.
- María Carvajal Regidor’s book Viva Nuestro Caucus: Rewriting the Forgotten Pages of Our Caucus, which she co-edited with Romeo García, Iris D. Ruiz, and Anita Hernández, was published by Parlor Press in Fall 2019.
- María Carvajal Regidor was also awarded a 2019 Future Leaders Scholarship by the International Writing Centers Association to recognize her leadership skills in writing center research and administration.
- Niki Turnipseed is currently co-editing a special issue of Literacy in Composition Studies titled “Against Autonomous Literacies: Extending the Work of Brian V. Street.” The issue is tentatively slated to be published in Fall 2020.
Faculty:
- Writers Workshop Director Carolyn Wisniewski—along with CWS graduate students Lisa Chason, Evin Groundwater, Allison Kranek, Logan Middleton and Illinois alumna Dorothy Mayne—had their co-written article, “Questioning Assumptions about Online Tutoring: A Mixed-Method Study of Face-to-Face and Synchronous Online Writing Center Tutorials,” accepted for publication in Writing Center Journal.
- At the beginning of the year, Assistant Professor of English John Gallagher published his book Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing with Utah State University Press. Additionally, John’s single-authored article “A Framework for Internet Case Study Methodology in Writing Studies” was published in the December 2019 issue of Computers and Composition, and his co-written article “Peering into the Internet Abyss: Using Big Data Audience Analysis to Understand Online Comments” debuted this year in Technical Communication Quarterly.
- And finally, per the update above, John Gallagher, CWS Director and Professor of English Paul Prior, CWS graduate student Niki Turnipseed, and other WAE team members’ collaborative article “A Collaborative Longitudinal Design for Supporting Writing Pedagogies of STEM Faculty” was published in Technical Communication Quarterly this year.
Alums:
- Kaia Simon (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire) had her article “Translating a Path to College: Literate Resonances of Migrant Child Language Brokering” published in the Sept 2019 issue of College Composition and Communication.
- Karen Lunsford (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Jim Purdy (Duquesne University) published their book The Effects of Intellectual Property Law in Writing Studies: Ethics, Sponsors, and Academic Knowledge-Making in December 2019. Also in 2019, Karen and Jim published an open-access article on the same large-scale study as their book project in a special issue of Kairos co-edited by Karen. Their article is titled “Mapping the IP Landscape: Reflections on Ownership, Authorship, and Copyright for Writing Instruction.”
- In January 2020, Karen Lunsford published a co-written article in Written Communication on collaborative research titled “Toward Wayfinding: A Metaphor for Understanding Writing Experiences” with co-authors Jonathan Alexander and Carl Whithaus. Karen, Jonathan, and Carl have a forthcoming article from the Wayfinding Project that should appear this summer in College English.
- Katherine Flowers (Mississippi State University) accepted a new position as an assistant professor of English at University of Massachusetts Lowell and will be moving there this summer.
- Kathie Gossett (University of California, Davis) has been appointed the Associate Director of Writing Across the Curriculum for Graduate Studies at UC Davis. This newly established position will include laying the groundwork for graduate level WAC/WID programming as well as developing and designing a writing center and writing tools specifically for graduate students and postdocs.
- Patrick Berry’s (Syracuse University) book Doing Time, Writing Lives: Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education in Prison received a 2019 Outstanding Book Award in community writing from the Coalition for Community Writing.
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Thanks to everyone—faculty, alums, grads, and you—Yes! You reading this!—for all your continued support and engagement. CWS isn’t CWS without you! Stay safe and healthy in the coming months and beyond.
Logan Middleton and Bri Lafond, CWS Assistant Directors