Building Bridges: Extending the Work of Composition Beyond the Classroom
The Fifth Annual North Carolina Symposium on Teaching Writing
February 15-16 2013, NC State University
http://go.ncsu.edu/ncwritingsymposium
As a field, composition has a rich history of actively engaging with pedagogy. Learning and the work of the classroom are never far from writing instructors’ thoughts, conversations, and research. Institutions of learning have recently had to respond to increasing fiscal constraints and a variety of pressures for reform and restructuring, however, and working conditions for writing instructors have continued to either remain stagnant or deteriorate. In such an academic climate, writing teachers have had many reminders that the world outside our classroom walls and the perceptions of the work going on within them matter a great deal. While it may at times be convenient to be seen as grammarians or academic discourse “coaches” in service of other courses, this misperception can be dangerously confining and reductive for writing teachers, programs, and studies, as our field has much more to offer than the drills and basic formulae these roles imply. And although Louise Wetherbee Phelps and John M. Ackerman’s 2010 CCC report on The Visibility Project is encouraging, the story told through the data collected by The Adjunct Project is much less so. For our fifth symposium, the North Carolina Symposium on Teaching Writing would like to respond to calls like Doug Hesse’s, at last year’s symposium, for writing teachers to reach beyond their physical and virtual classrooms to participate in the community of their departments, institutions, and discipline, by exploring how writing teachers build bridges—bridges across classrooms, pedagogies, disciplines, institutions, levels, spheres, genres, media, technologies, modes, languages, cultures, time, etc. Proposals for papers and panels about partnership, collaboration, cross-fertilization, and synergy, as well as about dialogue, debate, translation, framing, and compromise are all welcome.
Related topics include (but are not limited to):
- Collaborating with colleagues/students/counterparts/administrators/others;
- Participating in administration and governance;
- Communicating between departments, colleges, institutions;
- Building bridges between faculty/instructors/administration;
- Advocating for programs/students/faculty;
- Fostering cross-institutional connections;
- Building K-16 connections;
- Connecting through service learning and extension;
- Communicating the work of composition to external stakeholders;
- Partnering the academic with professional, public with private;
- Translating the work of composition to the public sphere;
- Writing across/through/between disciplines;
- Developing vertical writing curricula;
- Engaging with alternative pedagogies/approaches/perspectives;
- Building bridges through/with technology;
- Transposing and engaging with alternative genres, modes, and media;
- Connecting within/without the classroom;
- Developing bridges between classrooms;
- Building international, trans-lingual, and trans-cultural bridges;
- Linking texts, pedagogies, problems, moments.
The keynote for this year’s symposium will be Tim Peeples, Professor of English and Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs at Elon University. While at Elon, Peeples has built many bridges on campus, playing a central role in the creation and administration of numerous programs, centers, and initiatives across campus, including Writing Across the Curriculum, the program in Professional Writing and Rhetoric, the Writing Center, the university’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, and Elon University’s School of Law. A leader in faculty governance and development, Peeples has also been a key figure in increasing the number of tenure-track faculty at Elon. Before coming to Elon, Peeples served in several administrative roles and taught a range of composition and professional writing courses at Northern Arizona, Purdue University, and West Georgia College. He also developed a summer writing program for first-generation Native American engineering students. Read more about Peeples at: http://www.elon.edu/directories/profile/?user=peeples
Specific Guidelines for Submission: Individual paper proposals should be 200-300 words in length. Panel submissions should not total more than 1000 words. Panels will be 75 minutes in length, including Q&A. All sessions will be held in rooms with Internet access and projection capabilities. Please indicate any other technology requirements. We encourage participation from all faculty ranks, and we particularly encourage contingent faculty, K-12 faculty, TYC faculty, and graduate student participation.
The deadline for proposals is Friday, October 19th.
Submit proposals as a Microsoft Word compatible attachment (.doc or .docx) or PDF to: writingsymposium@ncsu.edu. PLEASE INCLUDE ALL IDENTIFYING INFORMATION—TITLE, NAME(S), AFFILIATION(S), AND EMAIL ADDRESS(ES)—IN THE EMAIL. THE ONLY IDENTIFYING INFORMATION IN THE PROPOSAL DOCUMENT ITSELF SHOULD BE THE TITLE.