WAC Writer's Series
The WAC Program regularly invites scholars to campus for conversations with Composition and WID faculty for its Speakers' Series. Since its founding in 2008, WAC has sponsored workshops by Chris Anson, Nancy Sommers, Nick Carbone, John Zubizarreta, Eileen Schell, Kathleen Yancey, Lisa Ede, Nedra Reynolds, Frank Farmer, Dee James, Joe Harris, Elizabeth Wardle, Kim Gunter, Beth Carroll, Mary Anne Maier, and Patrick Bahls. We are particularly grateful to Bedford/St. Martin's and Appalachian's Office of Extension and Distance Education in helping us bring the best scholarship of the field to Appalachian faculty.
Eileen Schell
Engaging Food Politics in the Writing Classroom with Dr. Eileen Schell
Through her scholarship and teaching, Dr. Schell has developed a set of assignments and strategies for helping students research, write, and develop a critical literacy about carried aspects of agriculture and the food system. In this workshop, Dr. Schell will ask participants to consider their own questions about food and farming and then move outward to discussing potential approaches toward developing a course, set of writing assignments, or even just a daily classroom activity that takes up some aspect of food and farming. Dr. Schell will also share materials and readings she has developed and student projects that have resulted from these writing courses.
Materials:
Schell, Eileen E. "Think Global, Eat Local: Teaching Alternative Agrarian Literacy in a Globalized Age. Teaching Writing in Globalization: Remapping Disciplinary Work. Ed. Daphne Desser and Dain Payne. Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. (Original Manuscript)
Guthman, Julie."If They Only Knew: Colorblindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions." The Professional Geographer 60.3 (2008): 387-97.
Annas, Pamela, Sarah Chinn, and Susan O'Mailey. "Radical Teaching and the Food Justice Movement." Radical Teacher 98 (Winter 2014): 1-3.
Frank Farmer Workshop
Is There An App for That? or Installing the New Updates for Rhetoric 2.0
Dr. Frank Farmer
Associate Professor of English, Univerisity of Kansas
Monday, April 11, 2011-Price Lake Room, 4-6 p.m.
Description:
Rhetoric is sometimes the forgotten term in our everyday use of visual rhetoric. This is because we are, to some degree, still susceptible to the "gee whiz" factor in how we respond to new technologies, most of which lend themselves far more to the visual than the rhetorical. It is likewise the case that visual rhetoric has probably received much more theoretical consideration than pedagogical attention, often leaving teachers with not many new ideas and resources for addressing rhetoric in ways that are genuinely appropriate for our times.
This workshop will be aimed at putting the rhetoric back in visual rhetoric, at developing pedagogical strategies for teaching visual rhetoric in an environment of new technologies. We will revisit some of the traditional concerns of rhetoric—audience, delivery, ethos, figures of speech, and rhetorical purpose—in order to see how these venerable concepts are altered, in interesting and creative ways, when inflected through visual media.
Materials:
Unit I: The Photographic Narrative
Unit III: The Public Service Announcement and Reflection Essay
Nedra Reynolds Workshop
On August 22, 2010, Nedra Reynolds, chair of Writing and Rhetoric at University of Rhode Island and author of Portfolio Teaching and Portfolio Keeping, conducted a workshop on portfolio teaching for faculty from Composition and Geography and Planning. The workshop focused on creating challenging reflective writing activities and offering students choice and scope in portfolio keeping.
While at the workshop, participants came up with a list of best practices of portfolio keeping. The following list, compiled by workshop participants, entails what should go into a portfolio and the opportunities that portfolios provide:
Best Practices of Portfolio Keeping:
Learn expectations and clarity
Lots of response from faculty and peers
Lots of choice (topics to write on and what to put into final portfolio)
Self Reflection
Opportunity for Revision
Error is last
Don't Grade Everything
Process writing
Reflection/Metacognition
Research based writing
Argumentative writing
Rhetorical strategies
Collaboration
Peer workshops/response
Information Literacy
Voice
Audience
Purpose
Community awareness