From undergraduate to emeritus, the Moravian College English Department was well represented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication—the world’s largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition—in Pittsburgh, March 13 to 16, 2019.
Gabrielle Stanley ‘21, participated in the CCCC undergraduate poster session with her study “Understanding the Learned Conceptions of Writing that First-Year Students Bring to College.” As a continuation of research she did last summer for her SOAR project, Gabby analyzed more than 220 first-year student responses to the question “what is good writing.”
Writing at Moravian Director Crystal Fodrey and Master of Arts in Teaching Fellow Chris Hassay ’17, ’19, co-presented on their work with the Writing-Enriched Curriculum (WEC) in a presentation called “‘Define Writing in Your Discipline’: Qualitative Research Practices as Epistemological Acts within a Writing-Enriched Curriculum.” They highlighted interviews as spaces of simultaneous performance where both interviewers and interviewees connect, communicate, and perform for each other highlighting interview data as valuable on two fronts: 1.) to show faculty the ways writing pedagogy features in their context, and 2.) as data points supporting the iterative improvement of WAC programming
In a different session, “Writing Fellows as Agents of Transfer: Training in Threshold Concepts To Support Campus-Wide Sites of Writing,” Meg Mikovits ’03, writing center and writing fellows program coordinator, presented with colleagues from UC Davis and Occidental College. The presentation focused on how recent writing studies research lends itself to professional and pedagogical development opportunities for undergraduate writing fellows, including those at Moravian who support student writers in all first-year writing courses and some upper-level writing-intensive and writing enriched classes.
Emeritus Professor of English Joel Wingard presented on “Performing as an Emeritus Professor while Adjuncting,” a gender- and age-theorized account of his post-retirement experience in the writing program at Penn State, Abington. Joel also chaired the meeting of the Special Interest Group (SIG) for Senior, Late-Career, and Retired Professionals in Rhetoric & Composition/Writing Studies. As a related rhetorical project, Joel and fellow Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, native Russel Durst of the University of Cincinnati, set up, maintained, and broke down a memorial installation for the Tree of Life synagogue shooting victims. The installation was the work of Design professors at Carnegie Mellon University as part of CMU’s public response to the murders. Conference attendees were invited to write brief reflections on American violence and tie them to the fencing.