The 2025 CCCC Annual Convention brings together composition instructors from across the country for pedagogical sessions and best teaching practices they can use immediately in the classroom. This year’s Convention, chaired by Kofi J. Adisa, revolves around the dynamic theme: Computer Love: Extended Play, B-sides, Remix, Collaboration, and Creativity. Learn more about our presence at CCCC here.   Bedford Party  – Join us on Thursday, April 10, at 7 PM at the Historic Lord Baltimore Hotel for an evening of food, fun, and friends. Beverage Break!  – Stop by the booth on Friday, April 11, at 3:15 PM for a refreshing Black-Eyed Susan mocktail—on us!  Platform Challenge  –  Play along and get prizes, plus a chance to win a Yeti cooler. Explore & Discover  – Request samples of our popular titles and get a sneak peek at exciting new releases like A Writer's Reference, Models for Writers, and more. Be sure to stop by Booth 111. Can't wait to see you in Baltimore!     Michael Garcia, Teaching & Learning Strategist Bedford/St. Martin's  ... View more

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 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