During the first week of March, CWRU’s Writing Program served as local hosts for the annual NCTE Conference on Communication & Composition in Cleveland, Ohio. This national conference sees thousands of writing instructors, rhetoricians, and program administrators gather together for four days of presentation, workshops, and networking events. Writing Program Director and Oviatt Professor of English, Dr. Kimberly Emmons welcomed conference attendees to the city at the opening ceremony, while Hospitality Chairs, Dr. Erika Olbricht and Dr. Martha Schaffer, provided recommendations for local restaurants and sites to see, and Volunteer Chairs, Dr. Thom Dawkins and Dr. Shayna Sharpe coordinated more than 40 volunteers from across the university and from neighboring institutions to assist with the conference on the ground. Many thanks to:
Denna Iammarino
Kris Kelly
Michelle Lyons-McFarland
Heidi Moawad
Reda Mohammed
Annie Pécastaings
Campbell Pratt
Xixin Qiu
Amy Sattler
Jess Slentz
Pouya Vakili
Marion Wolfe
Xia Wu
In the flurry of pre-conference events and workshops, Peer Writing Fellows (Undergraduate WRC consultants) Justine Allen, Annabel Degenholtz, James Gomez Faulk, Lucian Alexander-Roy, Sarah Secrest, and Pehel Pehel, presented at the International Writing Center Conference on “Community Outreach and Writing Center Programming in an Age of Disconnection,” explaining their projects designed to connect the WRC to students’ lives through activities and events that promote community and human interaction. The Fellows described their PAWS (Peer-Assisted Writing Support) evenings, social events like cookie decorating and zine-making, and a series of classroom introductions and workshops about the WRC. Bookending the conference and this topic, Peer Writing Fellows, Justine Allen and Annabel Degenholtz, facilitated a zine-making table in the conference’s Action Hub.
Several Writing Program faculty presented projects related to their teaching and research. Dr. Cara Byrne, Dr. Michelle Lyons-McFarland, Dr. Denna Iammarino, and Dr. Kris Kelly hosted a well-attended roundtable discussion titled, “Make That Table Round: Multimodal Making and Inclusive Pedagogy in First-Year Writing,” in which they described their applications of critical making theory and making pedagogy in their writing-intensive courses. Using these concepts, they have been able to enhance their students’ writing experiences in skills by emphasizing the iterative process of composing as well as human-oriented and physical manifestations of thought and revision. Merging theory and practice, these instructors shared their class projects: an artist’s book, a zine, remixes for elementary students and their teachers, and a multimodal project designed to promote students’ individual voices.
Writing Resource Center (WRC) Director, Dr. Gabrielle Parkin, and Assistant Director, Dr. Marion Wolfe, also presented to a full room of attendees on “Rethinking Required Writing Center Visits to Build Community Through Collaboration.” They described a project conducted between the WRC and AIQS 110: Foundations of College Writing, in which students were required to attend two WRC sessions with their AIQS papers at different times in the semester. Preliminary data from a survey of students, faculty, and consultants revealed positive results of this emphasis on writing as social activity and the need for human readers and feedback. The WRC will continue to develop and promote this work, which creates a strong partnership between different elements of the WRC and the Writing Program.
–Martha Schaffer