by Jenn Fishman This is a post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach held annually in Milwaukee, WI. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” On the 5th anniversary of the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), we held a series of conversations for a 2023 issue of Community Literacy Journal. In one of them, a dialogue about “Takeaways,” WIS Steering Committee member Aleisha Balestri describes the 5-minute flashtalk she gave at WIS ‘22. It was about her efforts to “vex” faculty-only conversations about students’ engagement with writing at the College of DuPage, where she teaches. Her strategy was as direct as it was elegant in its simplicity: she invited students to participate, resulting in “a very powerful conversation.”  Aleisha concludes her remarks by saying: “I would love to see WIS bring students to the forefront,” and all of us on the WIS Steering Committee agreed. Although undergraduate writers participated in the first three symposia (2018-2020), they did not return when WIS came back from a year-long, COVID-compelled hiatus. As a result, undergraduate writers were not part of the first hybrid symposium, “Writing As ______,” in 2022 or “Write it Out” in 2023. Likewise, they did not benefit from the company of the first two cohorts of Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows or the first international WIS attendees.  The literature on undergraduate research in writing studies helps explain what happened. In The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies, Sophia Abbot, Hannah Bellowoar, and Eric E. Hall discuss some of the many internal and external challenges that mentors of undergraduate researchers face. The list includes everything from lack of time outside the classroom to lack of material support. Writing instructors and administrators who organize course- or program-related showcases experience similar difficulties, even though the rewards for helping undergraduate writers go public are great. It’s no mistake that undergraduate research is one of the original high impact educational practices, and we’ve all seen students gain not only confidence but also intellectual and proto-professional insight when their writing circulates through publications or presentations delivered beyond the classroom With all of the above in mind, we committed to welcoming undergraduates back to the symposium in 2024. Full credit goes to Max Gray, a digital scholarship librarian at Marquette University and a WIS Steering Committee member, for the lightbulb moment that made it possible. Max suggested going digital and inviting undergrads to share pre-recorded, audio and video compositions, which could be featured both during and after each WIS. Running with that idea, Aleisha, Max, and I dreamt up a new program genre, the 3-minute flare, and the rest is WIS history. In 2024 the WIS theme was “Writing Human/s,” and the flares we received were a testament to how much humanness can be conveyed in 120 seconds of writing. Click through our digital showcase and find a love letter, a villanelle, and other poetry. Listen to ruminations on AI, COVID, and group communication as well as penmanship and writing in nature. Meet students who are haunted by writing and tormented by writer’s block. Their flares burn alongside those by students who are grounded and comforted by writing as “the light [they] turn to in the darkness.” Contributors span first-year students and super seniors. They are majors in everything from English to engineering and psychology, and they identify many ways, including as writers and readers-turned-writers. Together, the first cache of WIS flares confirms there may be no more powerful string of words than the declaration: “I am a writer.” Looking ahead to WIS ‘25, we invite you and your students to contribute. The importance of writing educators—teachers, mentors, and advisors—is legible in the flares we received as well as the shoutouts that authors gave to the teachers and mentors who supported their efforts, including Darcie Thoune at UW-La Crosse, Kat O’Meara and Laurie MacDiarmid at St. Norbert College, and Nila Horner at Michigan Tech.  The WIS ‘25 theme is mise en place, the culinary term for putting everything in place before starting to cook, especially in a professional kitchen. We’ve adopted this phrase as not only a metaphor for getting ready to write but also a pathway to exploring the interrelationships between writing and food. In addition, we have cooked up a second genre for undergraduate writers. To complement 3-minute flares we are also inviting 30-second sparks.  You and yours are cordially invited to join us. The prompts for flares and sparks as well as a proposal guide are available online, and submissions are due 12/13. Proposals for other WIS genres—flashtalks, workshops, posters, artifacts, displays, performances, and installations—are due 10/25. Registration opens in early November.  ... View more

by Darci Thoune, Kelly Blewett, and Kat O’Meara   This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that meets annually online and in Milwaukee, WI, led by Chief Capacitator Jenn Fishman. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”   As others have explored in previous posts about the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), part of its success has always been rooted in our commitment to the small. In many ways, we’re fortunate to be in a field that offers such a spectrum of professional development opportunities (flagship conferences, regional conferences, webinars, publications). And we imagine our small gathering, with its emphasis on writing innovation, community-building, and mentoring, as complementary to this abundance of opportunity in the field. Events like the WIS, because it’s small, can cater to particular needs, interests and whims of writing instructors in our corner of academia. We’re not the only ones doing this work though. Organizations like the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) have been successfully marshaling the small for decades with their regional affiliates program and, more recently, with their decision to hold one-day regional gatherings in summer of 2024 in lieu of holding a national conference. Glimpsing Regional Conferences and Affiliates within CWPA Kelly Blewett, WPA at Indiana University East and current president of CWPA CWPA’s decision to hold regional conferences in 2024 was informed by our commitment to the small. It’s so valuable for WPAs in a particular region to come together officially and under the banner of larger organizations to connect, trade information, and think together about the work we do. We modeled these regional events on a longstanding event hosted by the Carolinas affiliate called “Meeting in the Middle,” which, incredibly, just held its 18th annual gathering last February. Wendy Sharer, a current editor of WPA Journal who is a member of that affiliate, explained what makes that annual event work so well: it is affordable, interactive, has a social component built around ample breaks, shared meals, and people can attend within an easy driving distance. A small ad hoc regional conference committee, which included both Wendy and me, built these components into the call for the CWPA regional events in 2024. From Florida to Maryland to Wisconsin to Illinois to Texas, WPAs gathered, to learn, to connect. Connecting like this doesn’t have to require a lot of work. As Wendy pointed out, sessions built around a prompt like “Share a problem that your program is currently working on” often lead to rich, vibrant discussion that require little advance preparation.t is tremendously valuable to know the people who are WPAing around you, and I think that’s why we currently have 14 affiliates within CWPA. (Applications are always open for more.)  As a WPA myself, I’ve informally met several of my counterparts at local events and while there is some crossover among the Indiana writing programs, I am a firm believer that more crossover would be a good thing for everyone. When I think about the next chapter of my own career, fostering an Indiana affiliate program is on my list of things to do, and I’m grateful that such an affiliate could be endorsed and supported by the CWPA. Small But Mighty—A Regional Collaboration in Wisconsin Kat O’Meara, WPA at St. Norbert College in De Pere, WI   Darci and I formally established the Wisconsin Affiliate through CWPA in 2021, but our small but mighty collection of Wisco WPAs did not formally meet until the opportunity arose for regional conferences this summer of 2024. This event was super exciting to plan, and we decided to take a “less is more” approach, considering it was our inaugural session. We had two goals for the day: To establish a foundation for our Wisco Affiliate, and to use this precious time together to collaborate on WPA projects and issues. We coordinated a space at St. Norbert College utilizing our $500 WPA Affiliate start-up grant (offered to all new affiliates!), and we procured catering from a local sandwich shop in De Pere, Wisconsin. And perhaps the most exciting detail (for Darci and me) was the creation of a WI WPA t-shirt for all attendees to take home with them. To our surprise and delight, a solid dozen WPAs from all over Wisconsin heeded the call. We were a vibrant, interesting collection of administrators hailing from four-year public universities, mid-sized private universities, technical colleges, and small liberal arts colleges. The common threads, of course, were our ties to the Dairy State and the college student writers we all serve. After brief introductions, each attendee shared a WPA-specific project (or problem) to see where we could find through-lines and connections, and to offer initial strategies and support. The “projects and problems” brainstorm revealed some common woes: helping all faculty see themselves as writing teachers, rising numbers of students who need more foundational writing and academic support, balancing expertise and power with general austerity across changing institutional landscapes. But what also emerged were hopeful commonalities like our mutual desire for sharing resources (for placement, for teaching research skills) and how we can lean on one another across the state—even if we are each at our own institutions. While we have a long way to go before the Wisco Affiliate is on the level with a longstanding affiliate like Carolinas, the July meeting was an imperative first step toward some authentic statewide collaboration, and I’m so glad we did it. In hindsight, I’m proud of the foundation Darci and I were able to lay in July, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with fellow writing program administrators with the support of the CWPA.   The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

by Jessie Wirkus Haynes and Jenn Fishman This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach organized by a group of cross-institutional colleagues including Jessie and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”    It’s no secret that professional conferences can be inaccessible in myriad ways. Too often they cost too much physically as well as financially, and panels of 3 to 5 people reading 15- to 20-minute papers can be difficult—or impossible—to follow without a range of resources that are not always readily available. What so many of us want —and feel we need—are opportunities to connect with colleagues and share ideas. Whether online or onsite, we hunger to have the kinds of back-and-forths that spark on-the-spot aha moments, spur and deepen professional relations, and enable new teaching and research possibilities.    That’s what motivated us to collaborate with campus colleagues Elizabeth Gibes and Kelsey Otero to start the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) in 2018. At the time, Elizabeth was a digital scholarship and research librarian, and Kelsey helmed Marquette’s Social Innovation Initiative. Through our cross-disciplinary collaboration, we founded an event that features short talks, hands-on workshops, and multiple formal and informal opportunities to interact over the course of two days. For us, it was a recipe that worked, and participants over the years have described WIS as a respite, a space for reflection, a good venue for trying out new things, and a place where participants of all ranks, roles, and career stages can find inspiration as well as space for growth and change.    A key part of the WIS process is the post-symposium debrief, where the Steering Committee meets to discuss the immediate past WIS and look ahead to the next. One of the latest innovations to emerge from these discussions is the WIS satellite. The idea is to share the spirit of WIS beyond the annual 2-day symposium by inviting past participants to lead WIS-related happenings at their home institutions. As a group, we liked the idea of expanding access to WIS through additional events, and we were eager to find out how satellites could be tailored to suit different campuses’ and communities’ interests and needs. In particular, we hoped satellites might encourage interdepartmental and local cross-institutional collaborations around writing and writing education.    Thanks to Jessie’s initiative and leadership, her campus, Bellin College, hosted the first WIS satellite on March 18th, 2024. Bellin is a private college specializing in healthcare education in Green Bay, Wisconsin. As Jessie recalls:    When the WIS steering committee suggested an expansion into satellite events, I knew that Bellin College was the perfect place for this to happen. Often, in the STEM or healthcare settings, students and faculty can forget the importance of writing. As the lone English faculty member at the institution, I am highly invested in sharing the importance of writing for the healthcare professions to emphasize that writing isn’t just grammar or citation styles like APA; rather, it is an everyday practice, including charting, narrative medicine, professional research, literature reviews, research critiques, scholarly papers (and more). By effectively learning rhetoric and writing, students learn how to communicate successfully with a diverse set of patients, making healthcare more effective, compassionate, and equitable. My desire was both to innovate and to collaborate: I want students and faculty to think about writing as critical thinking, to see the humanities as a necessary part of healthcare, something that creates empathy and the ability to successfully interact with patients, caregivers, co-workers, and organizations.   Bellin College was extremely supportive of this idea, and Dr. Casey Rentmeester, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Academic Success, played a huge role in making this an interdisciplinary event as he spoke of empathy, philosophy, and the importance of the humanities in the healthcare field. In addition, I wanted to bring the satellite back to my WIS roots, so I asked Dr. Lilly Campbell, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and Director of Foundations Instruction, to speak on her recent research about empathy and working with simulations in healthcare settings. I also encouraged students to share their experiences with writing, focusing on how writing has affected them both as students and as current/future healthcare providers. Most importantly, I wanted the event to end with discussion, thought, and a collaborative sharing of ideas and ways to improve. My goal was to set up an event that focused on writing and the humanities in healthcare as ways to improve empathy, critical thought, and, as a result, healthcare outcomes.   The reactions to our satellite surpassed expectations, thanks, in large part, to the inspiring talks by Dr. Rentmeester and Dr. Campbell as well as the work done by our administrative assistant, Mary Roffers. The satellite allowed us to focus on the specific institutional needs of a college focused on healthcare during a 90 minute session, which could be attended live or virtually. The audience consisted mainly of students with several faculty and staff members, but it was a collaborative and energizing experience that will help change and shape our next generation of providers. Students talked about it for weeks afterwards, and I’ve had many students tell me that they thought they were merely healthcare students, but they realize now that they are also writers. "Blinn College in Bryan, TX IMG 1035" by Billy Hathorn at en.wikipedia is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. The Bellin College WIS satellite is just the beginning. Already, Jessie and her colleagues are planning the next one, and colleagues around the country have been considering how a WIS satellite might help them amplify ongoing efforts or jump-start long-time plans. There are many organizational offshoots that offer parallel opportunities, including National Writing Project sites, Rhetoric Society of America student chapters, and Council of Writing Program Administrators regional affiliates. We encourage Bedford Bits readers to connect with the organizations in your orbit and then dream big through small conferences, symposia, and professional meetings.   The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November.  ... View more

by Sonakshi Srivastava, Ashoka University This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that takes place annually online and in Milwaukee, WI. In 2024, Sona was a Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellow. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” In July of 2023, I made my debut as a teacher in a classroom. Up until then, I had been comfortable with my position as a writing tutor—looking at students’ scripts, working with them on polishing their drafts, completing their essays and the like but the summer of 2023 warmed me up to a different experience and experiment in my tutor life. My duty as a teacher, then, included teaching English to a cohort of some twenty students as a part of my university’s pedagogical programme, the Academic Bridge Programme (at Ashoka University). As the name suggests, the programme is intended to help students transition smoothly from school to college and places particular emphasis on English writing and speaking skills. With this particular intent in mind, I curated a curriculum that sought to invite the young minds to a world of curiosity and critical thinking. And, as a scholar of reading and attention, I dedicated a whole module to this specific strand with readings taken from the works of Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein) and Sandra Cisneros. In total honesty, I was supremely proud of my curation—the naïve thrill of a first-time curriculum designer was hard to contain, so much so that I had already pictured my students smitten with the select excerpts, awed by the creative spill of words on paper. I was so read-y for this! However, as much as I was prepared to teach, I was also anxious about the reception and to some extent, my fear was founded. I had misread the class. In their seminal pedagogical work How to Read a Book, pivoted around critical reading, Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler regard the reader as important as the writer. They compare this relational importance through the analogy of a pitch, a ball and the players. They compare the pitcher to the writer, the fielder to the reader, and the ball to the text. In that, the text as the ball is passive, and it is the sum total of the activity between the pitcher and the fielder that gives meaning to the receiving or the missing of the ball. What is implied here then is that the ball may be missed or received – the onus of this acceptance or rejection depends heavily on the reader as the fielder. And this is what the act of reading eventually condenses to. The text is a complex object set forth in action by the writer. It is the task of the reader to “catch” the writer’s intentions. What if Adler and Doren’s intention, set for the reader-writer relationship, were to manifest in a classroom? What if the writer exchanged places with a teacher in this analogy? These ifs found an answer through me. I, the teacher, had the ball rolling by prescribing the readings. My students, the readers, had failed to catch them—and this fault here was mine to claim. It was not them who had misunderstood or misread the texts. It was I, who had failed them and the texts in a classroom by misreading them. I can talk about this failure of mine because my being as a teacher stood challenged that particular day. This challenge is further fuelled by my reflection on Adler and Doren’s analogy which gracefully saves the writers from the act of reading or misreading the text by their readers. What possibilities would emerge if a teacher recognizes their shortcomings in a classroom? What if it is not the fielder’s error but an error by the pitcher? Since time was limited, and the course set, I had to come up with an alternative approach to the text. Over the course of a week, we worked together in different languages—switching between Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Khari, and English. We workshopped Cisneros’ story in our native tongues and connected it to stories that we had grown up listening or reading. Interestingly enough, the idea that the students are less “fluent” in English was also circumvented, prompting me to think if the assumption about their “fluency” was typecasted because of certain attributes (hailing from Tier-2 or Tier-3 cities, educated in state board schools etc.) that they had failed. The students were proficient in English—and where the vernaculars failed, English—no matter how “broken”, how “unpolished” brought our ideas and us together. Everyday, then, was a navigation through translation in that class, and that made all the difference. An initial challenge that channeled into a lesson for me not only as a teacher but also a translator. This was praxis. As I transition in my tutor role, from one ABP cohort to another, I cannot help but reflect how being in and reading with the classroom has influenced my perspective(s) on teaching. I think of it through the triad of the Cs—connect, correspond, and collaborate. To not think less of the students but to think with them and through them. A classroom is the most fertile field where a critical mind may flourish. And to think of it, perhaps this is what the pitcher and the fielder should do with the ball – approach it in the spirit of collaboration—one where we are not playing against one another but with one another. References Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Simon and Schuster, 2011. The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

by Saurabh Anand, University of Georgia This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that takes place annually online and in Milwaukee, WI. In 2024, Saurabh was a Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellow. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” "POETRY SOCIETY POSTCARD" by summonedbyfells is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Poetry and the topic of teaching poetry to multilingual writers are both very personal for me. As a poet and a person of color with an immigrant background, I often share my story with my students along with some of the poetry that is important to me. Recently, for example, I enjoyed reading Postcolonial Banter (2019) by British Muslim poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan. I connected in particular with her narratives of white supremacy (in her case, the U.K.). For example, in her poems "This Is Not A Humanising Poem" and "British Values," Manzoor-Khan resists positivist ways of thinking by showcasing the multiplicity of voices, experiences, and truths. The multilingual students in my classes have found her poems especially relevant. I think of one student in particular, Sonam (a pseudonym). After reading Manzoor-Khan's works, including her poem “A Cold Funeral of the Authentic Muslim Woman,” and listening to her TED talk, "I'm Bored of Talking about Muslim Women," Sonam wrote about her own journey. In a resilient reflection, she centered what it is like to be a Brown Muslim woman who wears a Hijab in the U.S. South, explaining her experience is an American truth, too. As Sonam confided to me, Manzoor-Khan's work gave her legitimation and authority to write about her own experiences. I cherish such moments, and the power poetry can have for multilingual students in my writing classes. However, I recognize that inviting poetry into the writing classroom can require strategic thinking. In writing courses I teach, I refer to exercises from Mike Palmquist’s The Bedford Researcher (2021) to introduce poetry as part of brainstorming activities for literacy narratives and other story-based genres. For example, I have assigned poems such as “Dhaka Dust” by Dilruba Ahmed, “Birth” by Fady Joudah, and “The African Burial Ground” by Yusef Komunyakaa. Then, as they develop literacy narratives, I ask students to respond to the following questions about what they read: What/who prompted you to think about in your life or someone you know based on what is happening in the poem? If you have to summarize the poem about the genre we are reading, how might you do that?  Similar to the poem, who are some people who play a crucial (positive or negative, you decide) role(s) in interpreting/receiving your experiences? Were there situations/people in the external world who influenced your experiences, and how? Have you read anything (across other languages/cultures) that has had a similar (or entirely different) perspective to the genre we focus on? What perspective do you agree with and why? The results can be powerful. I remember one of my students, Pablo (a pseudonym), with Bengali as his first language. During the outline stage of his literacy narrative, he wrote about how others assumed him to constantly need "English coaching" just because English is not his first language. In his draft, he described how he took a stand for himself as someone who had AP credit for an introductory composition class at the university. Utilizing poetry as a compositional tool empowered Pablo to express his resistance to native English fallacy and allowed me to better understand his challenges and triumphs. At times, at the beginning of a first-year writing or teacher education course, when I explain the overarching theme and the kinds of poetry-based activities and resources I’ll be using, I encounter resistance. I have had students who assume they cannot read or produce poems, and the prospect of doing so can be especially daunting for multilingual writers. To make my case, in such scenarios, I discuss the power of poetry and how reading and writing about it can help develop critical thinking skills. Providing students accessible ways to give poetry a try becomes even more crucial in such scenarios. In general, I have noticed that reading poems such as “March” by Ye Chun and “Poem for When You Want to Remember” by Mia Ayumi Malhotra can do more than enliven class discussion. Such poems can ignite brainstorming about personal storytelling and also influence students’ word choice and attention to details in their own writing. To enhance these effects, I often supplement poetry with the narratives of creative writers who write in a second or other language. Teaching “Embracing Imperfection: On Writing in a Second Language” by Kaori Fujimoto and “Born Again in a Second Language” by Costica Bradatan, I have seen my students' confidence grow along with their motivation to be future agents of the critical world. Sonam’s and Pablo’s stories are just two of the many examples I have collected of the power of poetry in writing classes. Again and again, it helps my students, especially the multilingual college students I teach, bring their own cultures and experiences into their writing. As a result, poetry fosters their sense of belonging in college and in English. It also strengthens their understanding of language and of themselves, including their cultural identities. The latter, in particular, is something I want to ensure I preserve as a multilingual writer and a writing teacher. Teaching Resources I Recommend Chamcharatsri, B., & Iida, A. (Eds.). (2022). International perspectives on creative writing in second language education: Supporting language learners’ proficiency, identity, and creative expression. Taylor & Francis. Link Palmquist, M. (2021). The Bedford Researcher with 2021 MLA Update (4th ed.). Macmillan Higher Education. Link Starkey, D. (2022). Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief: Four Genres in Brief (4th ed.). Macmillan Higher Education. Link For Further Reading Ahmad, D. (2011). Dhaka Dust. In Dhaka Dust. Greywolf Press. Link Ayumi Malhotra, M. A. (2018). Poem for When You Want to Remember. SWWIM. Link Bradatan, C. (August 04, 2013). Born Again in a Second Language. New York Times. Link Chun, Y. (2005). March. The Bitter Oleander Press. Link Fujimoto, K. (January 27, 2021). Embracing Imperfection: On Writing in a Second Language. Literary Hub. Link Garcia, D. (October/November, 1995). Italicized Writings. The Writer’s Chronicle. Link Joudah, F. (2013). Birth. In Alight. Copper Canyon Press. Link Komunyakaa, Y. (March, 2014). The African Burial Ground. Poetry Magazine. Link Manzoor-Khan, S. (2017, November). I'm bored of talking about Muslim Women [Video]. TEDxCoventGardenWomen. Link Manzoor-Khan, S. (2017, October). Suhaiymah Khan performs at TedxYouth@Brum 2017 [Video]. TEDx Talks Link Manzoor-Khan: please add citations for works referenced, including TED talks. Sailer, T. (2021). Why Write in English? Non-Native Speakers and Their Love for a Language. Tinted Journal. Link Smith, S. (January 28, 2019). Writing in a Second Language. Common Thread: Stories from Antioch University. Link Warner, M. (March 13, 2012). English that's good enough. The Guardian. Link The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

by Christina Davidson, University of Louisville This post is part of an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that takes place annually online and in Milwaukee, WI. In 2024, Christina was a Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellow. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT) became widely available in November of 2022. Since that time, students have been exploring their use and are eager to learn more. As a veteran composition teacher and member of a WPA team, I was hopeful to find a way to address student GenAI curiosity in my own classroom. AI and Writing (2023), Sidney I. Dobrin’s classroom-friendly text, was exactly what I needed . In the second half, which focuses on “opportunities and applications,” Dobrin borrows a powerful metaphor from GenAI expert Cath Ellis. He compares approaches to writing to ways of summiting Mt. Everest. For Ellis, writing is akin to climbing just as GenAI is to riding a helicopter to the mountain top (60). Each option leads to the summit or goal, yet they provide contrasting experiences—and very different opportunities to learn. Together, Dobrin’s book and Ellis’s metaphor gave me an idea for getting writers to think about GenAI and the writing process. The 75-minute workshop I designed, “Process, Post-Process, and GenAI,” starts with a focus on writing. In fact, I don’t even mention GenAI until the closing discussion. Instead, I start by asking participants to use materials I provided (i.e., blank paper, markers, colored pencils) to draw any task they perform in which several paths could lead to the same result. Here are a few memorable examples from my first workshop which occurred at the 2024 Writing Innovation Symposium, held at Marquette University. Thoughtful participants drew multiple ways to learn a new language, different methods for preparing rice, and various paths to explore inside an open-world game, just to name a few. Wesley Fryer - EdTechSR Ep 308 Exploring AI in Education After drawing, participants share in small groups to kick off the discussion. This is a great time to “work the room” and see which drawings might be best shared with the entire group. The resulting conversation opens a dialogue in which participants analyze their own writing process and how it might compare to one of the “paths” in the drawing. The conversation is not meant to imply a favoritism for a certain method or path (helicopters are certainly useful machines, as is Duolingo), but to increase the critical way students consider the writing process. It’s the first step toward engaging with the most essential question at the close of the workshop–What might happen if change my writing process to include GenAI? On my campus, most FYC students are familiar with process-oriented pedagogy from prewriting and drafting, to revising, editing, and finally “publishing” or submitting their work. Our students might imagine each of the steps the hiker must complete before the summit is reached, just as they might imagine the work that is placed into completing a final draft. However, we know the hike to the top of a mountain is rarely, if ever, a straight line–and our writing processes aren’t straightforward either. Just as the hiker may need to navigate a blocked trail, so, too, the writer must negotiate struggles in completing a draft. As we close our discussion, I return to one of my favorite examples. At my first workshop, one participant drew the creative choices players make in open world games. He charted several “mini-bosses” and side quests, which we might imagine as rounds of peer revisions, writing center visits, or conducting additional research while writing a large paper. If a GenAI tool could take the gamer straight to the credits, clearly much would be forfeited. Similarly, there’s much to be lost when a writer uses ChatGPT to create a “final” draft. The example also illustrates how a post-process approach to writing is highly contextual and social, two areas where GenAI just isn’t as helpful. The workshop ends with reflective writing concerning our shared discoveries through discussion. I have been encouraged to hear how quickly FYC students identify the critical human element they wish to retain in writing. Most participants agree that LLMs can be useful for some writing tasks, but preserving agency over their personal writing often remains at the center of student concern. Are you interested in fostering conversations about process and GenAI tools in the classroom? I would encourage you to try my exercise in your own classroom and to let students discover for themselves how the most memorable processes are ones that meander and land in unexpected places. I often recall an exasperated FYC student that lamented, “It took forever to write this paper!” I quickly responded, “Lucky you!” because I knew this student had gained so much learning in that work. To follow C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka,” I reminded her of the opening line—“As you set out for Ithaka, hope your journey is a long one.” A writing process full of discovery, invention, and reinvention is one I encourage in my FYC course—and although GenAI can be helpful on a step of that iterative journey toward destinations unknown, the understanding of what “these Ithakas” mean is only known to the writer who writes them. The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

by Darci Thoune and Jenn Fishman   Since the inaugural  (WIS) in 2018, folks have been telling us that ours is an event where they feel seen, heard, and valued or, in a word, welcome. As Kaia Simon recalls in Community Literacy Journal, describing her experience at our first WIS: “It was my first year out of graduate school,” and “I remember feeling truly like a guest, likeI had been invited and that my presence mattered.” Comments like these are important to any event organizers, but all of us involved in the WIS couldn’t be more proud because of the priority we place on hosting. In fact, it’s a central part of the WIS mission, and we’ve worked hard to make it one of our hallmarks. In fact, when we started planning WIS ‘22, our first gathering of the COVID era, the importance of hosting was very much on our minds. After a year’s hiatus, we wanted to do more than simply reinstate the WIS. We wanted to amplify our hospitality, although we weren’t sure how. Enter our colleagues from Macmillan Learning. Thanks to Laura Davidson and Joy Fisher Williams, we were able to level up as hosts beyond our original capacity or our initial imaginings. Through our partnership with them, in 2022 we launched the Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows Program. It offers 3-5 early career colleagues mentorship and need-based financial support to attend the symposium as well as an opportunity to publish here on the Bits Blog. Over 3 years, the program has grown and grown, and in 2024, we welcomed our first international cohort of B/SM WIS Fellows. The roster includes: Abigayle Farrier, a lecturer in the English Department at the University of North Texas, who delivered the flashtalk, "Who Let the Dog Out?: Therapy Dogs and Trauma-Informed Pedagogy," and shared a poster, "Collaging Humans: Reflecting on the Writing Process." Christina Davidson, a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition and Assistant Director of Composition at the University of Louisville, who shared her workshop "Collaborative Writing with AI: Utilizing Design Thinking to Improve Classroom Outcomes." Emma Tam, a writer, interdisciplinary educator, and senior undergraduate at Minerva University, who joined the WIS from the UK as an online participant. Saurabh Anand, a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition and Assistant Writing Center Director at the University of Georgia, who presented his poster "My Queer Heart." Sonakshi Srivastava, a writing tutor at Ashoka University, Sonepat, India, who shared her WIS poster, "What's Attention Got To Do With It: On Reading and Notemaking as Writing Pedagogy," this was also the topic of her 2024 Watson Conference project.   This group attended WIS ‘24, Writing Human/s, both onsite and online, and they made vital contributions as writers, as writing scholars and teachers, and as colleagues. Highlights include the synergy that developed between them and their mentors, all members of the 2024 WIS Steering Committee, including Gitte Frandsen, Jenna Green, Max Gray, Patrick Thomas, and Seán McCarthy. Today, the Macmillan-WIS partnership is one of the brightest spots in the WIS sky. You’ll see what we mean via forthcoming posts by 2024 Fellows Christina Davidson, Saurabh Anand, and Sonakshi Srivastava. We also invite you to follow the tags for WIS and writing innovation, where you’ll find additional insights from past B/SM WIS Fellows and others. Early career colleagues—undergraduates, graduate students, recent graduates, and others who have recently joined the profession—will find information about the latest fellowship opportunities in the WIS ‘25 CFP.  In all, we hope the B/SM WIS Fellowship is a beacon that shines alongside WIS program opportunities, which include workshops, posters, small-scale performances and displays, and large-scale installations as well as flashtalks, flares, and sparks. The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

by Jenn Fishman This is the first post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach that Jenn leads as Chief Capacitator. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.” OpenAI went public with ChatGPT not even two years ago on November 30, 2022. It’s worth pausing to think about how we, as writers and writing educators, have been affected. For old times’ sake, find a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper, and make a list. Don’t stop to correct yourself or sort the positives from the negatives. Just tell yourself all the ways that AI and GenAI have had an impact on you. Some version of this exercise might be a good question of the day or freewriting topic. It makes me think about how quickly Facebook spread twenty years ago, extending from Harvard to Columbia, Stanford, and Yale in 2004; to other colleges, universities, and high schools in 2005; and to anyone with an email address and access to the internet by the end of the next year. I was a graduate student when Facebook launched, and two years later, while I was navigating the changing face of writing and writing instruction as an assistant professor, Facebook registered its 12 millionth user. The velocity of writing change, both measured and felt, prompted the cross-institutional group of us involved in the Writing Innovation Symposium or WIS to make 2024 the year of “Writing Human/s.” For us, and perhaps for you too, writing is fundamental to our human being. So we practice it again and again, and we build lives around it. We have favorite writing tools, spaces, and snacks, and if we are lucky we have writing groups that sustain us. There is writing that stays with us, writing we feel compelled to write, and writers it is our privilege to advise, mentor, and teach. To echo Donald Murray (with a dash of Elizabeth Bishop), writers write or (say it!) writers must write, and students and teachers of writing must write, too. With a sense of imperative as well as a sense of play, we gathered online and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at Marquette University in the first days of February to affirm, explore, question, and contend with the complexity of being writing human/s in the mid-2020s. The WIS program featured workshops about AI and collaborative writing, autoethnography, mail art, and post-ChatGPT assignment design as well as shimmer stories, the social stakes of peer response, teaching in times of crisis, and ‘zines as sites of radical possibility. We also offered a series of 5-minute flashtalks on topics as varied as robot peer review, climate change, critical making, and the embodiment of emotions, problems, and solutions in writing classrooms. In addition, along with research posters and displays, WIS ‘24 featured more than two dozen flares or 3-minute audio- and video-recorded thinkpieces by undergraduates. The opening workshop, “Multimodal Writing, Drawing, and Listening” led by Tracey Bullington set the scene. Tracey joined us from the doctoral program in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At WIS, she began with a simple lesson. Observing it is difficult, if not impossible, to learn something if we believe we cannot do it, Tracey led us in a series of drawing exercises inspired, in part, by her teacher, Lynda Barry. Following Tracey’s instructions, we drew breakfast (bacon and eggs) without looking down at our index cards or felt-tipped pens. We drew self-portraits and pictures of ourselves as animals. Then, flush with evidence of our ability, we listened to one another tell stories, and (coached by Tracey) we drew our takeaways. The results were a combination of documentary-style notes, impressions, and embellishments that inscribed what and how we heard what others were saying. We were writing human/s, and we had the pictures to prove it! Our closing activities also featured the writing arts, starting with a spoken word performance by Donnie McClendon, a PhD student in English at the University of South Florida. Through “When 4 is 6,” Donnie taught a complex lesson about remembering and forgetting by telling the story of Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware. They were murdered the same day in 1963 that the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed, killing Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. We listened to their story, and then, we ended the way we began: by drawing our takeaways along with our gratitude.                       In the same spirit, the blogs that follow offer a coda to WIS ‘24 as well as a bridge to WIS ‘25. We hope you’ll join us here on the Bits Blog and in Milwaukee next year. The theme for WIS ‘25 is mise en place, a culinary term for putting things in place before cooking, especially in a professional kitchen. For us, it’s a metaphor for getting ready to write as well as a pathway to exploring the interrelationship between writing and food. Join us online or in Milwaukee, WI, January 30-31, 2025. Proposals are welcome through 10/25 and, for undergraduate writers, through 12/13. Registration opens in early November. ... View more

by Jenn Fishman and Darci Thoune This is the fifth post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  Professional meetings are a mixed bag, whatever we call them: conferences, conventions, institutes, seminars, or workshops. On one hand, they give us chances to share work, learn from each other, and network beyond our home programs, departments, and campuses. On the other hand, conference-going can seem obligatory (i.e., just another CV line); attending can present real hardships, financial and otherwise; and too often professional meetings reinforce institutional biases. So, how do we make choices about what to participate in, how, when, and why?  Some of us involved in the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) recently asked ourselves these questions thinking about our own, much beloved annual event. The WIS just turned 5, and 29 of us celebrated with an article that appears in Community Literacy Journal (17.2). Our conversations were free-ranging reflections on our upstart event, a local meeting with national reach that usually registers about 100 onsite and online participants, all writers and writing educators. Talking with each other confirmed our sense that the WIS is a “happening,” which Geoff Sirc defines as “a space no one wants to leave.” That feeling was shared by one-time attendees and regular participants. It even inspired some colleagues, including Jessie Wirkus Haynes at Bellin College and Barb Clauer and Melissa Kaplan at Lansing Community College, to plan WIS satellite events that will take place on their campuses later this year.    Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin hosts the annual Writing Innovation Symposium     But what happens at the WIS or any other professional meeting to make it a “happening”: to make participants feel drawn to stay or, in our case, to return from year to year and even to extend their experience in some way?  While we don’t have a single answer or recipe to share, we have some ideas. We notice, for example, that the WIS centers us as writers as well as writing educators, and the event itself centers on interactivity that is rooted in relations. For example, in 2023 when our theme was “Writing As_____,” plenary presenter Melissa Tayles did more than talk to us about trauma-informed writing pedagogy. She got us writing and helped us develop what she described as “sustainable plans for instructor well-being and regulation in the writing process.” The next day at the plenary workshop, Barb and Melissa invited us to write collaboratively, and we spent 2 hours immersed in the collective creativity of their Community-Generated Poetry Project. Before and after these sessions, we talked to each other. We talked about the plenaries and the courses we were teaching. We talked about our students, our writing research, and our families. We swapped references and recipes. We connected as writers and writing educators—and as people. At the closing session, when a student group called The Comet Project performed some of our poems (from the plenary workshop), we were rapt. Together, we laughed at the humor they found in our words, and we were moved by the depth and emotion they discovered in our drafts. When they finished, as we applauded and applauded, it sure seemed like no one wanted to leave.  We draw from this set of observations a sense of how important it is for conferences and symposia to welcome us as we are and wish to be, both professionally and more broadly, more personally. We see how glad WIS participants are, including ourselves, to reciprocate: to offer things we know about writing and to glean new knowledge—and not just by listening. WIS taps into a shared desire for something that might be comparable to the hands-on learning that many of us like to incorporate into our classes. WIS also cultivates a robust “underlife” by giving participants so many opportunities for the exchanges they wish to have over and above–as well as before, during, and after—formal programming.  As we and our WIS colleague Jennifer Kontny embark on more formal inquiry into what makes a professional meeting a happening, we wonder how you would describe the conventions, seminars, workshops, &c. that have meant the most to you.   If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here. ... View more

by Holly Burgess, Ph.D candidate, Marquette University This is the third post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  On January 7, 2023,  Tyre Nichols was murdered by officers of the Memphis Police Department. Tyre Nichols was a father, son, photographer, friend, skateboarder, and so much more. His life mattered. Twenty-one days later, the police footage of Nichols’s death was streamed via the media. On January 28, 2023, unable to sleep, I debated whether to write to my students about Tyre Nichols. I began to draw comparisons between Tyre and myself; we are both twenty-nine years old, Black, and enjoy Memphis. As an avid Elvis fan, I’ve visited Memphis, TN, three times in my life; Graceland became a sacred place to visit and spend time. I remember the first time my mother brought me to Memphis for my fifteenth birthday; I was excited to be in a predominantly Black city. Residing in Wisconsin, I was raised in a predominately white suburb, my heart yearning to be amongst Black people and culture. When we left the gates of Graceland, I cried. Looking back, I realize why Memphis is so special to me—Memphians treat you like family and welcome you in with their southern hospitality. I knew Tyre Nichols’s death would leave Memphis in civil unrest, hurting and longing for change. I knew that my students would also be hurting. I emailed my two English classes my thoughts about Nichols. I told my students that I would open space for them to discuss their feelings and grief regarding Nichols. I drafted a call-to-action to the English Department, demanding they release a statement about Tyre Nichols’s death. My call-to-action resulted in other Black students and faculty members expressing their demands to the department, which led to the formation of a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) steering committee that aims to: promote Black faculty/students' work, creating more Black-oriented events like celebrating Black History Month, hiring and retaining Black faculty and students, creating more curriculum based upon African American literature, culture, and rhetoric. While these initiatives are a great first start for confronting the anti-Blackness that lies in society and academia, one thing I learned is that even in times of trauma and hurt, white colleagues assume that Black faculty and graduate students have all the answers, that we have ready-made lesson plans about how to teach police brutality, institutional racism, and violence in our classrooms. The fact is that we’re people first, and we are hurting. We’re not immediately ready to develop and steer curricula based on our identities and emotions. We need time to process the grief as a community before we are tasked with guiding white academics who wish to do better. In February, I attended the 2023 Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) at Marquette University. This year’s theme of the WIS is Writing as ____, wherein the presenters were tasked with filling in the blank. I chose to fill my blank with “Writing as a Black Scholar.” At the WIS, I presented a poster titled “The People Are Rising”: Revolution and Violence in African American Social Movements and Literature.” My poster was an overview of my forthcoming dissertation; I have created a literary genealogy of four generations of Black social movements. I trace how each generation reacts and responds to police brutality and violence. During my poster presentation, a few audience members were interested in my dissertation and academic work; however, most wanted to make a spectacle about my statement on Tyre Nichols and my accidental activism within the English Department. My name was now attached to Tyre Nichols and the departmental change that it sparked rather than my dissertation or scholarly work. I’m a Black Ph.D. candidate and know the cost of activism. Accidental activism results in white colleagues looking to you for readings, guidance, lesson plans, and workshops; it places a heavier burden on you to steer a department into anti-racist pedagogy and social progress. I have been dubbed the “girl in the Tyre Nichols email” rather than an emerging Black scholar. I recognize why more experienced BIPOC faculty members feel jaded about the prospect of change within English departments. It requires extra work from them, a minority tax. Social progress relies on BIPOC faculty rather than white colleagues self-educating. I’m unsure what can be done to change the English literature canon or anti-racism, but I can suggest incorporating more Black authors and texts into your classes—reaching beyond the standard of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Incorporate Black musicians, poets, and rappers, and your students will thank you.   If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here. ... View more

by Darci Thoune and Jenn Fishman This is the second post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  As Jenn and I explored in our last blog post on the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), putting our finger on how this modest symposium makes so much magic is challenging. But with some reflection it’s easier and easier to see that part of what makes the WIS special is collaboration—and we mean collaboration on every level. Yes, there are the regulars who serve on the Steering Committee and those who faithfully travel to Milwaukee when she is at her least hospitable, but there are others as well. We’re thinking about the graduate students and early career folks who join us as active participants in a symposium that works with and against the expectations of a traditional conference. As we entered our 3rd year of the WIS we wondered how we could manifest more of this—more support for a wider range of participants and more opportunities for them to be meaningfully involved in the WIS magic making. As writing administrators, we’re accustomed to being scrappy and opportunistic when it comes to funding. Knowing that we wanted to find more ways to support (in travel funding, in mentoring, in networking opportunities) WIS participants from a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds, we approached the amazing Laura Davidson at Bedford/St. Martin’s with a wild request--namely, would they support the travel expenses of two to three WIS Bedford/St. Martin’s (WIS B/SM) Fellows? Our hope was that a WIS B/SM Fellow’s Program would especially prioritize participation by first-gen, BIPOC, and multiply marginalized undergraduates, graduate students, contingent faculty, and early career scholars. We were delighted that Laura (and the rest of the B/SM team) enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity to work with all of us involved in the WIS. This program has become a source of reliable funding and support for--at this point--five WIS B/SM Fellows. Over the first 2 years, the Fellows have been an illustrious bunch. In 2022, the inaugural fellows were Amy Patterson and Ulisa Blakely, who both joined us remotely. Amy Zoomed in from Boston where she was a postdoctoral associate at Northeastern University, teaching multilingual writing and advanced writing in the disciplines. Ulisa, at the time, was a graduate student at Northeastern Illinois University, studying multimodality, technology, and literacy. The following year, we welcomed three fellows, although only two were able to attend. The 2023 cohort included Holly Burgess and Shiva Mainaly, who were able to attend in person, and Abigayle Farrier, whose attendance onsite and online was foiled by the winter storms that turned much of Texas into a no-fly zone just as the WIS was getting underway.  In addition to supporting our WIS B/SM Fellows with travel funding, Laura’s team also offered an opportunity for the WIS B/SM Fellows to contribute to the Bedford Bits blog. Our first two incredible blogposts are forthcoming from Holly and Abigayle. In Holly’s upcoming post, “Writing as a Black Scholar: Teaching Black Activism, Hip-Hop, and The Cost of Activism,” we learn about the many ways one Black teacher does activist work in and out of the classroom at a primarily white institution. In Abigayle’s post, “Today Is Kindergarten Day!” we are encouraged to remember that writing is a hands-on activity and that we sometimes need to create spaces in our classes for students to play. In both posts, we’re inspired to reflect on our identities and our relationships in our programs and in our classrooms. With the continued support of the superheroes at Macmillan, we look forward to the submissions from this year’s WIS B/SM Fellows. Interested in becoming a WIS B/SM Fellow? Follow this link for the WIS 2024 CFP! We also invite you to learn more about the WIS via the latest issue of Community Literacy Journal, which includes look back at the symposium’s first five years, coauthored by 29 WISters including Holly and Abigayle. If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here.   ... View more

In 1996, Lisa Ede and Cheryl Glenn began imagining a conference that would bring together rhetorical and feminist scholars, groups that heretofore had not had much to do with one another. There were feminists aplenty among rhetoricians, but feminists across other disciplines seemed reluctant to cross the border into rhetoric. Lisa and Cheryl aimed to begin some cross-disciplinary conversations, and so they invited two keynote speakers: Jackie Royster from rhetoric and writing studies and feminist philosopher Nancy Tuana. We all gathered in Corvallis in late August 1997, excited and expectant. The conference more than lived up to expectations, and by the time the first day of the meeting concluded, people were asking Lisa and Cheryl when the next conference would be. Since they had only planned a one-time conference, they had no answers to this question—but conference goers soon took matters into their own hands, and Lillian Bridwell Bowles and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota volunteered to hold the next “fem/rhets” conference, as it came to be called, two years from then, in 1999. The conference was soon “adopted” by the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, a fairly new organization at the time (founded in 1989)—and it has been held every other year since 1997 (in 2013 my colleagues at Stanford and I had the great pleasure of hosting the conference). I’ve attended most of the fourteen conferences, and I was determined to make this year’s, especially because it was being held at Spelman. And indeed, I made it there for the second and third days of the conference, and I came away impressed and inspired by the scholarly projects I heard described. In fact, I wished that every teacher of writing and rhetoric I know could have been there with me!   Spelman College hosted 2023's FemRhets Conference   One panel, "Counter Storytelling: A Feminist Antiracist Approach to Dismantle Colonial Archival Logics," interrogated the archival logic at work in how and what we (are allowed to) remember, reminding us that archives are constructs, constructs that have great power and arguing that we and our students need to examine archives with this fact of life in mind, and to “re-story” archival records when necessary. Another panel on Rhetorical Consent and the Foregrounding of Intimacy in Qualitative Research asked us to reconsider the relationship between researcher and “subjects,” and to work toward a more capacious theory that would acknowledge and honor the “intimacy” that characterizes some of the best qualitative research studies. Yet another took a new look at the rhetorical canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery: Efe Plange demonstrated the ways in which a group of Ghanian feminists used invention in satirical and humorous ways to flip the script on all-male panels devoted to women’s issues; Sarah Flores looked at arrangement through the lens of the Mexican Cookbook for the American Home; Jordynn Jack reimagined style as she argued that weaving and not embroidery is the key textile. In embroidery, the stitches are added on to a fabric, but in weaving the pattern is woven in from the beginning to the end; it is evident from planning through completion and thus captures the rhetorical nature of “style” much better than embroidery ever could. Jessica Enoch examined feminist approaches to public memory studies and called for “commemorative accountability”; and Britt Starr explored the ways in which social media platforms both liberate and constrain young feminist activists’ access to systems of delivery (especially TikTok) today. Finally, a roundtable discussion on community-led digital archives featured descriptions of the Digital Transgender Archive (K.J. Rawson) as well as reports on Black ooral history projects (Rachel l McIntosh) and the Digital Archive of Indigenous Languages (Ellen Cushman), all of them tremendously important—and exciting. I came away from this conference thinking about how these and other sessions offered so many ideas for rethinking how we teach research and just what a “research” project can be. What a joy it is to introduce students to such a more broad and inclusive vision of research—and to show them how such research can and should be connected to who they are and where they come from. Bravo Spelman and the Coalition of Feminist Scholars for supporting and showcasing this wide range of groundbreaking studies. ... View more

by Jenn Fishman and Darci Thoune This is the first post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  Five years is and isn’t a long time, especially in higher education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 60% of college students finish their undergrad degrees in 5 years, while the Survey of Earned Doctorates reports the median time to PhD isn't much longer: just 5.8 years. For all of us involved in the annual Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), 5 years turned out to be just enough time for us to realize that we were really on to something—and to start putting it into words.  Since its founding in 2018, the WIS has been a regional event with national reach. Annually, in the dead of winter, the WIS lures writers and writing educators from all over North America to Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, for two days of writing activity. As co-founder and Chief Capacitator, Jenn leads the cross-institutional steering committee that brings each symposium to life. In 2022-2023, that group was helmed by Darci, Jennifer Kontny, and Patrick Thomas; it also included Grant Gosizk, Jackielee Derks, Jenna Green, Kayla Urban Fettig, Kelsey Otero, Lilly Campbell, Maxwell Gray, Sara Heaser, Shevaun Watson, and Tara Baillargeon.    Marquette University hosts the Writing Innovation Symposium   When we look back and try to put a finger on what, exactly, makes the WIS the WIS, a few concrete details come immediately to mind, starting with our modest size. Usually, the WIS registers about 100. Participants come mainly from across academic ranks, roles, and disciplines, though non-ac colleagues tell us they feel right at home. The weather is also a contributing factor. Together, we have braved both ice and snowstorms as well as a polar vortex, which dropped the temperature to -23! Yet, it’s always warm and cozy in the University Libraries, where on-site we hunker down, while off-site attendees click in and out of Zoom sessions and Slack channels to join us. In so many ways, the WIS is Brigadoon, and for the 48 hours we gather each year, we form something that feels like community. In many ways, COVID-19 amplified this sense. The 2020 WIS was the last professional event many of us attended before the global pandemic was declared. Likewise, the 2022 WIS was the first in-person conference for a lot of us—and not just because it fit our budgets and schedules. Just as magnetic objects create force fields that attract particular elements (i.e., iron, nickel), the WIS draws writers and writing educators in a powerful way. By inviting everyone to base their contributions on work they have done—writing, writing pedagogy, research, writing administration—the WIS affirms the expertise that each participant brings with them. The WIS also primes attendees to learn from one another, and in doing so it affirms that everyone, from plenary presenters to the newest graduate teachers, has something to learn.  Symposium themes help focus our collective energy. We have worked to “Connect!” (2019), and we’ve explored some of the many connotations of “Just Writing” (2020). We’ve also come together to “Write It Out” (2022) and to fill in the blank: “Writing as _____” (2023). However, we direct our word play along with our most serious efforts, our plenaries are interactive, and our programs always include workshops as well as a session that features posters and creative, digital and analogue displays. Last year, we introduced flash talks into the mix, inviting presenters to distill their WISdom into five-minute presentations accompanied by a single artifact (e.g., handout, bookmark, cookie). Inaugural examples prompted rich exchanges about everything from “Writing in Times of Hopelessness” and “Writing as Empathic Design” to “Composing in the Pool,” “Reinventing the Writer’s Workshop,” “Writing as Resistance,” and “Writing as Power,” and “Writing as Weapon/Antidote.”  The story of WIS continues to be written. Recently, twenty-nine of us talked about an article that appears in Community Literacy Journal 17.2, and we’re glad to be contributing to Bedford Bits. Macmillan has been a vital supporter of the WIS, hosting meals and sponsoring opportunities like the workshop on Tiny Teaching Stories that Chris Anson led one year. In 2022, working in collaboration with Laura Davidson, we launched the Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows Program. It provides WIS registration, travel monies, and mentorship opportunities to early career colleagues. To date, B/SM WIS Fellows include:  Abigayle Farrier (2023) Amy Patterson (2022) Holly Burgess (2023) Shiva Mainaly (2023) Ulisa Blakely (2022) Look for more from us as well as them in weeks to come—and consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our Call for Papers here.    Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Dr. Lockett is an Assistant Professor of English at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She deeply enjoys serving the oldest historically Black college for women, and is committed to teaching and learning about the relationship between composition, new media, sustainability, and collective intelligence. At Spelman, Dr. Lockett actively contributes to the English Department’s writing minor in the areas of professional and multimedia composition. She also provides leadership to the Comprehensive Writing Program in major curricular initiatives like First-Year Composition and Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines (WAC/WID). In 2015, she was awarded a $10,500 grant from the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) Grant to organize and lead a faculty development symposium on Integrating Wikipedia into Writing-Intensive Courses at ACS Colleges. She continued her work with Wikipedia in 2017, organizing Spelman’s first-ever Art+Feminism–Black Women’s Herstory Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Currently, Dr. Lockett is the proud recipient of the UNCF/Mellon Faculty Residence Fellowship (2017-2018) where she is a fellow at Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference. While in residence, she is working on her book project Overflow: Rhetorical Perspectives on Leaks.    Diversity and inclusion.  Equality.  Social justice.    These terms and concepts comfortably blanket educators asserting their desired vision of the world in a distant, cold, and bitter wasteland. Part of the mystery of such words lies in the major assumption that historically white institutions (HWCUs) need to be more integrated, or at least appear mildly interested in some kind of commitment to this effort. However, what exactly do these words mean to faculty and administrators at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and single-sex colleges?     In my own personal experience teaching writing and unofficially administering the Writing Intensive initiative at Spelman College—a historically black college for women in Atlanta, Georgia—I feel alienated from the framing of diversity discourses. Before I discuss certain aspects of my experience, I want to clarify those conversations may be very applicable to predominantly white contexts that are more or less typical for the majority of instructors and researchers participating in our discipline. However, black women faculty face major challenges in work environments where they are a highly represented demographic. Arguably, this educational space comes with significant risks that are sometimes muted by the nature of the college.    I didn’t start to notice the systemic silence surrounding faculty and student demographics at Spelman until I started developing and leading faculty development workshops about the teaching of writing at the college across and within disciplines. Faculty often did not explicitly discuss what it meant to teach black women, or what it was like for black women of various ranks to exchange teaching and learning. There was a kind of assumption that since we were mostly black women gathered in a space, we would know what to do.    And I thought I would know.   The allure of being part of the demographic majority when you are used to being represented as a minority is intoxicating. After living in some of the whitest towns in America from 2001-2013—Kirksville, Missouri; Norman, Oklahoma; and State College, Pennsylvania—the first week of working at Spelman felt unreal. Black women of every size, shape, color, hair type, hair style, and age moved through the space with smiling faces that lent sparkle to the sun and shine on skin that blinded me with the power. We saw each other, feeling that shared electricity of novelty and glimpsing hope. Potential filled me up like fresh fruit. Alive. Fleshy. Ripe. I moved more slowly than at Penn State where I needed to be small, dart fast, and move out the way. And those other places where I regretted being seen or taking up space, where I communed with the trees during breaks to avoid the concrete jungle of young white bodies shuffling about swiftly and completely enough to swallow me whole. In that small private college in Atlanta, I felt an indignant right to be there. Not to color the place, and not to sit on a margin, but to be at the center of its life.    But we weren’t *all* black women faculty, and the black women faculty there most likely had been teaching in predominantly white American college classroom spaces before coming to Spelman. Did we understand that we needed to talk about the meaning of teaching black woman somewhere? To talk about what it means to work with other black women? That we needed to know more about our assumptions about the meaning of our bodies to the students in those classrooms? In faculty meetings? How were students receiving our instruction and what did they expect?   After participating in first-year writing portfolio assessment with an interdisciplinary jury for the past few years, as well as several writing-intensive faculty development workshops on topics like “Integrating Wikipedia into Writing-Intensive Courses” and “Teaching Black Women Writers,” I strongly believe that we need to do even more research on several major issues facing HBCU faculty—including but not limited to:   Their attitudes and expectations towards their training and work environments. Their deliberate or unconscious reproduction of the field’s dominant discourses in writing instruction at HBCUs Their students' responses to an instructor’s demographic embodiment and social relationship to (and within) the black community Their scholarly knowledge of and/or production of research projects centered on Rhetoric and Writing programs at HBCUs—historically or present Their sociopolitical relationship to the HBCU and how it influences access of and distributions of resources both within and outside the college   Next week, March 28-31, I am thrilled to attend my first-ever HBCU Symposium at Howard University, sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin’s and the Howard University Writing Program. This event will be the second time that I have been to a professional development opportunity that organizes HBCU writing faculty representing various institutions in a single space. Two years ago, July 25-28, 2016, I attended a UNCF/Mellon Teaching and Learning Institute on Critical Hip-Hop Rhetoric and Composition led by Shawanda Stewart and Brian Stone at Huston-Tillotson University. This event enabled me to network with a number of passionate writing teachers operating under financial and pedagogical constraints. Although much of the institute’s focus was on teaching students, especially those in first-year composition courses, this event brought up some glaring issues about how the field does diversity in terms of faculty development. For example, Asao Inoue—2018 Program Chair of the CCCC and one of our featured speakers—offered a dynamic, memorable workshop on assessment. Inoue’s discussion about how we may be unknowingly institutionalizing whiteness through our grading practices at the expense of marginalized students resonated with many of us. The fact that HBCUs could be subject to white supremacy by its own instructors was hardly surprising, given some of our colonial histories. Moreover, some of the institute’s attendees were white, and seeking to leverage the most value from diversity and inclusion strategies.   But when we started talking about our institutional context, as scene and agency, the conversation uncomfortably shifted to unknown terrain. To prepare for Inoue’s visit, we were required to read his book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Feeling as if Inoue was not writing to underrepresented instructors, I asked him to explain how his theory of antiracist assessment applied to HBCUs after we were well over halfway through his planned workshop. Other instructors also wanted to discuss this problem. Moreover, I wanted him to help me understand how to get linguistically conservative instructors to manage “gradeless” classrooms. I recognized quickly that if we were going to have that conversation, it would deviate too sharply from the workshop he planned. I stopped pushing it, and Inoue gracefully and thoughtfully acknowledged the validity of my concerns. Nevertheless, the disconnect between Inoue’s antiracist aims and their relevance to HBCUs seemed jarring, given that he knew he was communicating with an audience of HBCU writing instructors.   Even at a workshop at an HBCU with HBCU faculty, I was compelled to engage “diversity” pedagogical hypotheticals about represented students we don’t teach and instructors whose bodies are not black like me. (For more info about this audience issue, see the endnote.)   At the upcoming HBCU symposium, I am looking forward to discussing some of the unique challenges of teaching writing in the HBCU space. Engagement with contemporary sociopolitical issues may be encouraged even as student deficiency is focused on more than the task at hand. The teaching of grammar is often believed to be the primary and exclusive duty of English departments and Writing Centers, which positions us as easy targets to blame for student failure during faculty meetings. We often lack examples of how to structure and administer our programs because our history and traditions have yet to be fully incorporated in our field’s dominant disciplinary historiographies, our most widely circulated First-Year Composition readers and Rhetoric textbooks, or our conference panel offerings at NCTE, CCCC, ATTW, RSA, NCA, Computers and Writing, etc. Certainly this was illustrated by the teaching and learning institute at Huston-Tillotson.   Moreover, I look forward to using the space of the HBCU symposium to collaboratively develop more resources that racially diverse HBCU faculty need to effectively serve our unique demographic. In this historical moment, I’d love to see conversations about the role of HBCUs in contemporary society take the lead on cultivating an empowered faculty. Without a culture of empathic and collaborative collegiality, black and brown women teachers are just as alienated as they are at PWI/HWCUs. How can we be expected to uplift our beautifully diverse students when it seems so socially unacceptable to mention, let alone critique, the environments we labor in?   Endnote   This audience issue is discussed at length in Sarah Banschbach Valles, Rebecca Day Babcock, and Karen Keaton Jackson, who argue that diversity scholarship about Writing Centers tends to assume that directors are “middle-aged White female(s) and the student, or in some cases the tutor, is the Other” (Writing Center Administrators and Diversity: A Survey, 2017). As their article demonstrates, scholarship about the field’s administrative leadership such as Writing Center Directors and WPAs is scarce, raising questions about the racial landscape of the field’s entirety of practitioners and those they serve. While Jill Gladstein’s National Census of Writing Project offers some sense of institutional writing program representation, it does not collect data about the bodies occupying them. One recent exception is "Race, Silence, and Writing Program Administration: A Qualitative Study of US College Writing Programs,” published by Genevieve Garda de Mueller and Iris Ruiz last year (2017).    References   de Mueller, Genevieve Garda, and Iris Ruiz. "Race, Silence, and Writing Program Administration: A Qualitative Study of US College Writing Programs." WPA: Writing Program Administration 40.2 (2017).   Fulford, Collie. "Hit the Ground Listening: An Ethnographic Approach to New WPA Learning." WPA: Writing Program Administration 35.1 (2011): 159-62.   Green Jr., David Frank. "Notes of a Native Son: Considerations when Discussing Race and Privilege in the Teacher's Lounge." The Journal for Understanding and Dismantling Privilege 4.2 (2014): 261-75.   Hocks, M. "Using multimedia to teach communication across the curriculum." WPA: Writing Program Administration 25.1-2 (2001): 25-43.   Howson, Emily, Chris Massenburg, and Cecilia Shelton. "Reflections on Building a Popular Writing Course." Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy 3.1 (2016).   Rose, Shirley K., Lisa S. Mastrangelo, and Barbara L'Eplattenier. "Directing first-year writing: The new limits of authority." College Composition and Communication (2013): 43-66.     Taylor, Hill. "Black spaces: Examining the writing major at an urban HBCU." Composition Studies 35.1 (2007): 99-112.   Valles, Sarah Banschbach, Rebecca Day Babcock, and Karen Keaton Jackson. "Writing Center Administrators and Diversity: A Survey."   ... View more