SUNY Council on Writing

 

CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Teaching Writing for Social Justice
SUNY Council on Writing, Annual Conference
State University of New York at Plattsburgh March 26-27, 2010

 

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Nancy Welch, University of Vermont

Nancy Welch is Professor of English at the University of Vermont where she teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and women’s studies and is also active in the faculty union, currently working with a coalition of campus labor and student groups on the Don’t Downsize Education at UVM campaign. She is the author of three books: Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction and Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, both from Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, and The Road from Prosperity, a short-story collection published by Southern Methodist University Press. Most recently her scholarship has focused on reclaiming the rhetorical strategies and tactics of U.S. social justice and labor movements for tackling the challenges to public writing and voice today.

Conference Theme: Teaching Writing for Social Justice

At a far remove from New York’s metropolis, bejeweled with Adirondack lakes and streams, New York’s North Country seems to peacefully stretch along the US-Canada border. However, as the acclaimed 2008 film Frozen River shows, Plattsburgh’s region is also a site of global human trafficking. Indeed, the North Country is a place—like many others across the state, the country, and the globe—where the politics of language can affect people’s life chances in extreme ways. To consider the roles writing and writing instruction can, yet often fail, to play in making the larger political and economic contexts we inhabit more equitable, we convene the conference, “Teaching Writing for Social Justice.”  Central to our discussion will be this question: how do we define the work of teaching writing for social justice?

• Is it an institutional practice where a civically-minded citizenry can be trained to study and address social wrongs? 
• Is it an ecological practice where students can be taught to live well in a place so that issues of human justice and environmental stewardship are seen as one and the same thing? 
• Is it a sociocultural practice where the production and sharing of texts is a dialogic, revision-rich act promoting the growth of all writers, valuing students' right to their own language(s) and dialect(s), and broadening the field of acceptable genres for university writing?

Particular consideration will be given to proposals that explore how we define social justice through the teaching of writing.

“Teaching Writing for Social Justice” also encourages you to explore the juxtapositions and intersections particular to writing and social justice in these and other areas:

• First Year Writing
  • What does a democratic writing pedagogy look like?
  • How do teachers deliver instruction that improves at-risk students' performance?
  • How do teachers provide assessment that encourages substantive revision?
  • How do writers and teachers (re)construct identities that reflect and challenge their own and others’ experiences of social injustice?
  • How do program and student outcomes interact to limit and/or promote individual and social progress?
  • What do FYW teachers’ students and colleagues think of writing instruction framed as a means of creating equitable conditions on and off campus?
    
    
• Writing Program Administration
  • What constitutes (in)equitable placement?
  • How do WPAs, departments, and FYW programs support professional development for PT faculty that increases security, improves working conditions, and more?
  • What service learning opportunities do FYW programs offer their students and faculty? What are their problems and possibilities?
    
    
• Writing
  • How do certain home and school literacy practices index and/or disturb social divisions of race, class, gender, ableness, and so on? How do these practices affect peoples’ social futures as students, as workers, as citizens?
  • When and where are composition and rhetorical theory being applied for critical purposes? Are there contexts where such applications should be avoided?
  • Can writing teach its practitioners to productively challenge yet wisely respect certain individual, social and ecological limits?
  • How can the practices of writing, reading and critical thinking combine to promote social justice?
  • How is writing an inherently revolutionary act?
    
    
• Writing Centers
  • What institutional locations enable writing centers to do the most good on campus in supporting all writers’ growth?
  • What must tutor training involve if consultants are to see their work as forwarding social justice issues?
  • How can centers acknowledge yet reduce problems associated with the digital divide? What role does online consulting play in this work?
  • How can writing center administrators and tutors support social justice issues on campus?
    
    
• Secondary Writing Instruction
  • How are teachers and administrators working to support students’ learning in schooling conditions shaped by high-stakes assessment?
  • How are teachers and schools working with at-risk students in innovative ways?
  • How do official and unofficial (or tacit) censorship efforts and impulses affect writing curricula and their enactment?

Proposal Guidelines

We welcome paper or panel abstracts of no more than 400 words, including a brief description of individual presentations. We welcome papers and panels by higher and secondary educators, including graduate students and peer tutors; first-time presenters are encouraged to submit. All papers and panels should seek to foster dialogue among these constituents. In your abstract, include all contact information, the title of your paper or panel, and a description of your technology needs.  Sessions will run 90 minutes, and panels may comprise 2-4 people.  To present, registration is required upon acceptance.

Proposal Submission

Please send inquiries and proposals by January 15, 2010 to Nichole Bennett-Bealer at nbenn001@plattsburgh.edu or Tom Friedrich at tfrie001@plattsburgh.edu.