Mission: The goals of this workshop series are to support instructors at the University of Washington in developing their own antiracist pedagogical interventions in several categories, including: ethical approaches to teaching canonical literature; personal writing; antiracist assessment; autoethnography; and multimodal composition.
Participants: Sarah Ghasedi, Dana Woodcock, Olivia Hernández, Jacki Fiscus, and Emily George
• Olivia Hernández will lead a workshop that focuses on strategies for implementing personal writing in the classroom. Hernández will outline relevant scholarship on scholarly personal narrative writing and discuss how she has developed personal writing prompts in composition and literature courses that frame autobiographical content as a translingual rhetorical strategy. Hernández will then prompt workshop participants to share their own ideas about utilizing personal writing, asking: How should these assignments be framed? What approaches can be brought to assessing assignments that utilize personal narrative as a rhetorical choice?
• Jacki Fiscus will lead a workshop that will explore ethical and inclusive approaches to assessment practices and feedback strategies. She will overview relevant scholarship and provide an insight into the experiences of instructors who have implemented these grading contracts in their own classrooms. Fiscus will provide examples of grading contracts and discuss concrete strategies for tracking student labor in the classroom and accounting for their rhetorical awareness in the writing they produce for the course. Attendees will brainstorm and share ideas for how to include these practices in the participant's’ own course design.
• Emily George will lead a workshop on implementing antiracist pedagogies while teaching courses steeped in the historic English literary canon. This discussion will center on two questions: Which challenges and opportunities apply to all classes that aim to be ethical and inclusive, and which are specific to classes where the material is historically white, male, and exclusive? And, in addition to more widely applicable best practices for creating an antiracist classroom, what are the best approaches for framing readings, facilitating class discussions, and creating assignments that engage with the English canon in productive and ethical ways?
• Sarah Ghasedi will lead a workshop on strategies for incorporating autoethnographic research/writing into composition courses. We’ll begin by asking: What is autoethnography? What value can it bring to the composition classroom? Why do advocates of this method claim that it helps promote a deeper understanding of one’s
positionality within a given community or culture, and a better understanding of the positioning of others? Ghasedi will share assignment models and specific examples of autoethnographic projects, and participants will be invited to discuss and brainstorm ideas for their own classes.
• Dana Woodcock’s workshop will focus on multimodal composition and its capacity to enable inclusion. More specifically, we will explore case studies that demonstrate how a conceptual reconfiguring of modalities within texts can create opportunities for groups traditionally marginalized from participation--for example, those with hearing or speaking disabilities within musical theater productions. This reverse engineering will then pave the way for rethinking our assignment sequences, specifically the moments in which we can ask students to consider the potential space the modalities of their projects can create, and the possible boundaries they can cross.