We’re gearing up for our virtual spring conference, and we’re excited to announce that we’ll be joined by Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, an associate professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania. You can read more about Dr. Thomas’s research in literacy and teacher education in our “Crossing the Divide” section below. Drawing on Dr. Thomas’s work, the theme of this spring’s conference is “Reading, Writing, Restorying,” and our program will focus on reenvisioning how we define reading and writing in the first year writing course.    

Crossing the Divide: Post-Secondary Scholarship

Ebony Thomas’s work centers on representations of diversity in children’s and YA literature. Her 2019 book, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, explores the ways characters of color are marginalized in speculative fiction for children and young adults. A self-professed fan-fiction enthusiast, Thomas is interested in how readers re-make, “bend,” and “restory” texts. Her work examines how students’ creative and multimodal responses to texts constitute methods of critical inquiry, identity exploration, and political action. You can read more about Ebony Thomas’s work on her website and access many of her articles through the UConn library website. 

Teacher Feature

Kim Shaker began her teaching career in 2001 and has taught English at East Hartford High School for 19 years. An ECE instructor since 2008, Kim has been an active part of the ECE community. She has served on the ECE English advisory board and presented frequently at ECE conferences on topics such as merging AP with ECE, facilitating Socratic dialogue, and thinking critically about cultural perceptions of truth. Her 1011 course, which is aligned with AP Literature, examines canonical literary works through the lens of topics such as tragedy, existentialism, and postmodernism. Over the last decade, Kim has seen her course change “towards not only incorporating, but highlighting multimodality.” Asked what her favorite aspect of teaching ECE is, Kim says, “My favorite thing about teaching ECE is everything about teaching ECE!”

Cool Resources

• Learning for Justice Formerly known as Teaching Tolerance, Learning for Justice is an educational initiative that was begun by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1991 to combat racism. The program provides a wealth of free resources for teachers, including curricular tools, professional development, and a monthly magazine. Featured in the spring issue: an interview with Lorena Germán, director of pedagogy at EduColor and co-founder of the grassroots initiative #DisruptTexts.
• Politics of Language Google Doc Assembled by Missy Watson, Assistant Professor of English at the City College of New York, this list features a comprehensive selection of readings, videos, and resources on language difference that are suitable for use with students. Sample writers include Audre Lorde, Geneva Smitherman, Charles Foran, and Min-Zhan Lu.
• CCCC Teaching Resources for Writing Instructors The Conference on College Composition and Communication’s teaching resources page includes a number of links to useful materials for writing instruction. Listed resources include collections of syllabi, model writing and research assignments, guidance for course planning and management, and open source publications. 

What’s Coming Up

• ECE English Spring Conference This spring’s ECE English conference, entitled Reading, Writing, Restorying, is scheduled for Thursday, April 8th. Visit this link for details or to register.

• Upcoming Poetry Readings Former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith will be featured as part of Trinity College’s A.K. Smith Reading Series on Tuesday, March 16 at 7 p.m. Also on March 16th, UConn’s Aetna Visiting Writer-in-Residence Ilya Kaminski will present a virtual reading of his work from 6-8 p.m. Click here for details and registration.
• Festival of Irish Women’s Writing The UConn Irish Literature Department is hosting a series of talks on Irish women writers. Seven events will be offered from March 4th to April 20th. Contact series host Prof. Mary Burke at mary.burke@uconn.edu for details.
• Teacher Writer Workshop CWP-Storrs will hold a teacher-writer workshop on Saturday, March 20th from 9:45 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Attendance will be virtual. Contact dpieratti@swindsor.k12.ct.us to RSVP and for a meeting link.

With semester one coming to an end for many of us, and the deadlines it entails, we hope you’re still benefiting from the recent break and the advent of the new year, one that promises to bring some welcome changes for all of us. When the school year began in September, we couldn’t know whether four months later we’d be back to normal or entirely remote. For most of us, the reality is still somewhere in the middle, and the routine of hybrid teaching has become somewhat familiar. That said, it still has its challenges, and they’re not without their rewards. What have you learned about creating community, reaching reluctant learners, or administering a college-level course online that will stay with you into next year?

Teacher Feature

Lee Ann Murphy, who has taught at Fairchild Wheeler Magnet School in Bridgeport since 2014, is about to teach her first ECE English 1010 course this spring. Lee Ann is a second-career teacher who worked in magazine publishing for ten years before entering the profession, and feels excited to draw on her multi-genre and multimodal writing skills to develop authentic writing activities for her students. Asked what most excites her about teaching an ECE course for the first time, Lee Ann welcomes the chance to see her students develop and take more intellectual risks: “I feel lucky that I taught all the students in this class when they were freshmen, so I already know many of their strengths and weaknesses. But now that they are 11th graders, we can embrace more sophisticated challenges and really work to take their writing to the next level.” 

Crossing the Divide: Post-Secondary Scholarship

Kairos, a Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, is an online, open-access journal that publishes biannually. Its articles are wide-ranging and accessible, and often take advantage of the journal’s online format in their use of multimedia and digital components. An article from their spring 2021 issue, entitled “What do first-year students find reliable in online sources?” (Silva, Green, & Mendoza, 2021) details the findings of a survey-based study on students’ information literacy. Other current topics include student-teacher zoom conferencing, participatory composition, and writing center blogs.

Cool Resources

• NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge Held every spring, NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge is a great incentive for students to experiment with writing and producing podcasts. The contest, which runs from January 1 through March 15, requires students to create an original podcast of 3-8 minutes. The site offers tips, techniques, and samples for both teachers and students, as well as ideas for generating topics.
• News Literacy Project According to their mission statement, the News Literacy Project is “a nonpartisan national education nonprofit [that] provides programs and resources for educators and the public to teach, learn and share the abilities needed to be smart, active consumers of news and information and equal and engaged participants in a democracy.” Their educator network, NewslitNation, provides resources for engaging with other educators as well as teaching tools through Checkology, their news literacy curriculum.  
• Canva If you’re still relying on Google Slides for your presentations, you may want to check out alternative presentation platforms, such as Canva, which offers a variety of fresh templates for presentations, worksheets, infographics, and posters. In addition, students with Google accounts can easily log in to create a wide variety of multimodal projects.  

What’s Coming Up

• Racism in the Margins This anti-racist pedagogy initiative of UConn’s Writing Center will host two days of virtual talks on Friday, Feb. 19 & Friday, Feb. 26, from 3:00-5:00 p.m. Haivan Hoang, Mya Poe, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Asao Inoue will be featured speakers. Registration required.
• Connecticut Poetry Circuit Thursday, Feb. 11, 6:00-8:00 p.m. The Connecticut Poetry Circuit is a group of Connecticut undergraduate poets nominated by five area colleges to offer a series of poetry readings throughout the state. Learn more from UConn’s creative writing program, and consider suggesting it to your students!
• Hartford Library Book Clubs The Hartford Public Library offers a number of book clubs that meet virtually throughout the year. Selected texts for January and February include How We Became Human, by Joy Harjo, Hood Feminism, by Mikki Kendall, and The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin.  Visit the attached link and scroll down for details on their current offerings. 
• Teacher-Writer Workshop CWP-Storrs will hold a teacher-writer workshop on Saturday, February 20th from 9:45 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Attendance will be virtual. Contact dpieratti@swindsor.k12.ct.us to RSVP and for a meeting link.

At our fall conference this November, we had a chance to hear from many of you on your goals and strategies for creating equitable, accessible, and anti-racist classrooms, and were inspired by your energy and commitment to continue some of the day’s conversations (more on this below!). Perhaps it was that sense of enthusiasm, or the recent start to the holiday season, or the hope for a Covid vaccine, or the expectation of other changes on the horizon, but it feels like 2020 might just end on an upswing. At the very least, most of us are feeling ready for a new year and a new beginning. Since this will be our last newsletter of the year, we’d like to wish you a restorative break and a strong start to 2021. 

Fall Conference and Anti-Racist Pedagogy Reading

This fall’s conference on anti-racist writing assessment was our first experiment with hosting a virtual program, and we’d like to thank all who participated, including and especially our presenters, Arri Weeks, Lalitha Kas, Lizz Maurer, Jason Scavotto, Mary Rose Meade, and Ann Trapasso. During the conference, we collected valuable resources and artifacts from participants on your readings, practices, and reflections on anti-racist pedagogy. One of our main goals for the spring is to find a suitable platform to share this wealth of material, but in the meantime, we’d like to begin by pointing you to a new resource on our homepage: a reading list of scholarship on anti-racist pedagogy that’s relevant to ECE writing instructors and easily accessible through UConn’s library. At your request we’ve also included access to the video presentations our teachers contributed to the conference, as well as Scott’s opening remarks.     

Teacher Feature

Lalitha Kasturirangan, who presented at our fall conference, teaches ECE English at Eli Whitney Technical High School in Hamden. Her presentation, which shared strategies for encouraging multiple Englishes in the classroom, began with her recollection of attending a missionary school in India, where she wrote stories about picnicking in the English countryside:  “I was raised with this implicit bias that in order to seem intelligent, I needed to be somebody else.” In addition to her most recent conference work, Lalitha presented with Scott Campbell and other ECE English teachers at NCTE in Baltimore last year, and has taught in India, the UK, and the Philippines. Asked how she felt about her most recent presentation she said, “I felt that I was speaking through the voice of my students, showcasing the issues they face in their strive for success and achievement of their dreams. It felt good to be able to do so!”    

Crossing the Divide: Post-Secondary Scholarship

Edited by scholars Cheryl E. Ball & Drew M. Loewe, Bad Ideas About Writing, which you can access in its entirety through Open Access Textbooks, is an extensive collection of short essays by more than sixty composition scholars (including UConn’s own Ellen Carillo). The compilation is divided into easy to navigate sections, and each chapter title critiques a particular misconception—the notion, for example, that “You Can Learn to Write in General,” or that “Only Geniuses Can Be Writers.” Despite their headings’ playful candor, chapters are sharp, substantive, and at times refreshingly opposed, as in the case of Crystal Sands’ and Anne Leahy’s articles for and against rubrics.

Cool Resources

• Asao Inoue’s Google Folder on Grading Contracts Scholar and former CCCC Chair Asao Inoue, who has written extensively on his use of composition grading contracts, provides access to resources and teaching materials through this Google folder. (See, too, his pieces on our Anti-Racist Pedagogy Reading List.)  
• WAC Clearinghouse Books The Writing Across the Curriculum Clearinghouse, whose resources we’ve shared in the past, is a publisher of journals, books, and online content, much of which is available for free. They provide access to dozens of books on writing instruction, all available digitally through their website.
• Insert Learning and Peardeck are two more Google offerings that interface with Google Apps. Insert Learning is a simple Google Chrome add-on that allows you to insert instructional material such as short-answer questions or discussions onto an existing webpage and assign directly to Google Classroom. Peardeck is a feature for Google Slides that allows instructors to enhance slideshows by controlling navigation, adding visuals, and inserting interactive activities.  

What’s Coming Up

• 2021 MLA Convention If you’ve always wanted to attend an MLA conference but never could justify the travel, 2021 is your year. This winter’s convention will take place from January 7th to the 10th and will be entirely virtual. Registration for the conference ends December 28th, but late registrations will be accepted until early January. 
• Teacher-Writer Workshop CWP-Storrs will hold a teacher-writer workshop on Saturday, December 12th from 9:45 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Any teachers hoping to hone their writing skills in a casual and supportive environment are welcome. Attendance will be virtual. Contact dpieratti@swindsor.k12.ct.us to RSVP and for a meeting link.
• Student Writing Contests Letters About Literature, Scholastic Writing Awards, and Connecticut Student Writers are all accepting submissions of student writing up to their respective January deadlines. Visit their websites for details. 

As most of us near the end of our first quarter, the daily schedules of teachers across the state remain just as varied and variable as where they started; while some of us may find our in-class populations diminishing, others may have returned to full in-person learning. In my own district, though our administration makes a bold effort at transparency, teachers are nonetheless stressed by the pace at which district quarantine policies, national guidelines, and weekly schedules are subject to change, leaving us struggling to keep up. Add to this instability an upcoming election and the uncertainty intensifies. In short, it’s tough out there; we hope that all of you are benefitting from some self-care and communal support right now. We’re here for you if you need us!

Crossing the Divide: Post-Secondary Scholarship

Earlier this fall, Scott shared an article by Vershawn Ashanti Young—current Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)—highlighting the CCCC’s demand for black linguistic justice. Though Young’s tenure as chair began only last year, one of his seminal works remains his 2010 article “Should Writers Use They Own English,” in which he responded to the 2009 New York Times column series, “What Should Colleges Teach?”, by famously outspoken critic Stanley Fish. Taken along with the CCCC’s position statement on students’ right to their own language, which came out in 1974, these texts present a dynamic narrative around writing and notions of correctness, one that contextualizes the field’s stance today as well as the work we hope to do at our upcoming November conference. If you don’t intend to attend the conference, consider sampling these articles. To what extent does correctness continue to govern our work as writing teachers as we navigate the divide between high school and college classrooms? 

Cool Resources

• Planboard Planboard by Chalk is a free, virtual lesson planner that interfaces with Google Apps. With Planboard, you can view your calendar by the day, week, month, or unit, create pdfs of your plans, and (with an upgrade) export materials to Google Classroom. 
• CompPile CompPile is a comprehensive database of scholarship on rhetoric and composition managed by WAC Clearinghouse. Although many articles require library access, it’s a great place to engage your curiosity about writing pedagogies and review existing titles in the field.
• Jamboard Jamboard is a virtual whiteboard similar to Padlet, but integrated into Google Apps. It is not entirely anonymous, though it only allows you to track student responses as they post. In addition, it functions a bit more intuitively than Padlet—sticky notes are easily moved, resized, and grouped, and users can add new pages to manage different aspects of discussion. 
• Datayze Writing Assistance Apps Datayze’s writing assistance tools allow students to input passages from their own writing to analyze stylistic features such as use of passive voice, readability, repeated words, and others. In the wrong hands, textual analysis tools connote rigid, outdated notions of “correctness.” But students can learn a great deal about their own and others’ writing by considering sentence-level features. And the “by zombies” test makes learning about passive voice fun.

Teacher Feature

Kim Kraner has taught ECE English 1011 at Avon High School since 2015. Asked what has been most surprising about teaching ECE this fall, Kim remarked on her seniors’ fresh attitudes; “I think last spring’s hiatus left students intellectually curious. They came back to school this fall really ready to take on the challenges of learning.” Kim’s current course focuses on war literature, and she notes that student engagement in the texts is high, “It’s so wonderful to have kids who want to read the books you’ve chosen for your course… Leaving more of the ownership of the learning to the students has been great.” One multimodal assignment she has planned for this year? A mini research project in which students create a digital text—a podcast, video, or website, for example—introducing the rest of the class to a key theoretical framework they will later apply to their reading.

What’s Coming Up

• Fall ECE English Conference This fall’s ECE English conference, entitled Thinking Beyond Curriculum: Anti-Racist Writing Assessment, is scheduled for Monday, November 16th. The virtual conference will include short panel presentations, examinations of key literature, and collaborative inquiry. Visit the link for details.
• Letters About Literature Letters About Literature is a contest held nation-wide annually for students in grades 4-12. UConn’s Neag School of Education will host this year’s Connecticut contest, with help from the Connecticut Writing Project and the Department of English. Submissions open November 2nd. 
• Trinity College AK Smith Reading Series Trinity College’s A.K. Smith Reading Series is being offered virtually this fall, and has already featured poets Amy Pickworth and Jericho Brown. Upcoming readers include novelist Justin Torres (Nov. 9th) and short story writer Julia Armfield (Nov. 11th)