The 6th Annual GesaE. Kirsch

CWS Graduate Student Symposium

Friday, April 24, 2015

GSLIS Building, room 126

8:30 am-9:00am: Breakfast Welcome by GesaE. Kirsch, Bentley University

9:00 am-10:15am: Risk, Reward, and (Re)Mediation in the Writing Classroom

Katrina Kennett: Digital Platforms and Literacy Practices in 8th Grade ELA

Evin Groundwater: The Egalitarian Rhetoric of the Massive Open Online Course

Melissa Larabee: Putting Words in Their Mouths: Incarcerated Students, Their Literacy Sponsors, and the Trouble with Providing a Voice

10:30am-11:30am: Regulated, Redacted, and Recovered Writing

Katherine Flowers: Theorizing Language Policy and Translingual Practice

Paul McKean: Open Secrets: Secrecy, Redaction, and Governmentality in the Guantanamo Diary

Anita Mixon:“Come All Ye, Nonbelievers:” A Dialogic Critique of Reverend Woodbey’sDistribution of Wealth

11:30 am-1:00 pm: Box Lunches

1:00pm-2:00pm: Keynote by Amy Wan, Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

Who is the Public at the Public University? The Legacy of Higher Education for American Democracy

In “Who is the Public at the Public University?” Amy J. Wan examines how missions that encourage institutions to serve the public can both invigorate and challenge the literacy and citizenship training that occurs at universities and colleges. This presentation analyzes the 1947 publication of Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education, the first significant national document to posit citizenship as a desired result of higher education. The public policy supported by the report marked a shift in thinking about the new role of higher education as part of the social engine and encouraged schools to develop pathways for access. Wan connects this previous shift to more recent trends in writing studies and in higher education, such as the elimination of remediation and the increase in multilingual and transnational students. In this talk, she suggests that heeding an institution’s public mission yields ethical imperatives in teaching literacy to a diverse public.

2:15pm-3:30 pm: Negotiating Institutional and Everyday Rhetorics

Allison Kranek: In a Writing Habit of Mind: College Mission Statements and the WPA Framework for Success

Maria Carvajal: Spanglish in the Composition Classroom: Leveraging Students’ Rhetorical Code-Switching Practices for Academic Writing

Dominique Clayton: “They Gon Think What They Gon Think, but We Still Try:” The Negotiation of Language in College Settings

3:30pm-4:30pm: Reflections by Jon Stone, Alexandra Cavallaro, and Eileen Lagman

4:30pm: Happy Hour at Murphy’s Pub – All Welcome!

A very special thanks to:

Amy Rumsey

The Kirsch Foundation