ECE English Conference

ECE English Conference Fall 2021

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Friday, October 22, 2021

10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Conference Program.pdf

CLICK HERE FOR CONFERENCE MATERIAL ARCHIVE

(You must be logged into your UConn email to access)

 

Please check out the following blog posts:

Choosing Readings, Part I

Choosing Readings, Part II

As well as Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction for White Students by Carlin Borsheim-Black and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides and The Antiracist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez.

 

Teaching for Joy and Justice

The past eighteen months have brought substantial challenges to our profession. As teachers, we are just beginning to emerge from the heavy cloud of the pandemic to embrace the new normal. Concerns about access to technological tools for distance learning have given way to concerns about navigating a safe, socially-distanced classroom. In this new world, it’s easy to be overcome with frustration from the need to constantly pivot in our teaching while simultaneously implementing an antiracist pedagogy. Additionally, ECE instructors are keenly aware of the pressure to meet the criteria of the new English 1007 course next year.

Our fall conference seeks to recapture the joy of teaching, to reinvigorate our pedagogy and embrace the beginning of a new era. We will celebrate what we’ve learned from the pandemic and our antiracist work and ask how we can continue to grow as instructors.

In this conference we’ll explore the possibilities which the changeover to the ENGL1007 curriculum affords us by sharing exciting new multimodal assignments; learning how studio pedagogy can foster problem solving through composition; and finding inspiration in fresh takes on the readings we assign in first-year writing. We invite you to lean into the new curriculum with us to discover how it can promote student exploration and reinvigorate our teaching.

ECE English Conference Spring 2021

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CLICK HERE FOR CONFERENCE MATERIALS ARCHIVE

(Please access using your UConn account)

Reading, Writing, Restorying

Research in the teaching of composition has a long history of reinforcing a binary between writing and reading, reflecting tensions around the professionalization of rhetoric and composition as a discipline, and prompting important questions about what actually distinguishes a writing course from a literature course.

As high school teachers, most of us are less acquainted with the post-secondary reading/writing dynamic, largely because, while k-12 literacy study has long prioritized reading, the integration of reading with writing is still treated as organic and largely second nature in most high school classrooms. 

This integration places those of us teaching in concurrent enrollment settings in a unique position. On the one hand, it can complicate our efforts to shift the balance away from literary analysis towards more general education approaches to writing. On the other, it creates an environment for authentic connections between course inquiry, composition studies, and student writing. 

In this conference, we’ll consider how we define reading and writing in the first-year writing course, examining the relationship between assigned texts, writing instruction, and course inquiry. 

    • How can we use course inquiry to move away from traditional rhetorical and literary analyses?
    • What is the role of course readings, and how can we diversify our text selections to reflect broader compositional goals? 
    • How might exploratory composing, including multimodal “restorying,” constitute anti-racist practice?  
    • How do we teach writing using a studio approach? 
    • How are we incorporating course moves in ways that engage students both in and outside of the classroom? 
    • And how might we “restory” our existing curricula to foster more relevant, student-centered, equitable classrooms?

ECE English Conference Fall 2020

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Thinking Beyond Curriculum: Anti-Racist Writing Assessment


In recent years, many of us have sought to actively address the whiteness of traditional English curricula, we’ve introduced more writers of color, considered the racism of canonical works, and discussed the traumas of racial inequity with our students. Yet the ongoing and vital public outcry for racial justice underscores the urgent need to do more to take on our nation’s systemic racial conflicts, and composition scholars have answered this call with a robust body of work addressing the role literacy education might play not just in confronting racism, but in perpetuating it. Many have implicated the supremacy of “White English” in the failure of educational institutions and writing programs to establish greater equity.

Our fall conference will consider these arguments in the context of our work as ECE/FYW instructors, reflecting on what we’re currently doing to address racism in our classrooms, and examining scholarship that proposes next steps. What does it mean for students to have a right to their own language? How do we theorize “Englishes” in an environment traditionally devoted to standards? How can we alter our thinking about assessment to more fully embrace students’ diverse linguistic strengths? And moving forward, how might COVID-era experimentation and the upcoming transition to the new ENGL 1007 course help us more rapidly develop a more equitable and inclusive program? 

Fall poster text