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.
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- 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?
