For a summary of the recent relaunch event for the Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie at SFU in downtown Vancouver, see the Storify made by Dr. Katja Thieme, Arts Studies in Research and Writing, Department of English, UBC:
Many thanks to Katja for capturing an event that so many of us were sorry to miss!
Planning for the 2017 CASDW Annual Conference is under way.
Dates: May 27-29, 2017
Location: Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario
The call for proposals will be coming soon, but in the meantime mark your calendars. The deadline for proposals will be mid-January.
The Canadian Writing Centre Association is very pleased to announce that the Call for Proposals for our 2017 conference in Toronto, Ontario is now open.
Where: OCAD University, Toronto, Ontario
When: May 25-26, 2017
Keynote: Dr. Frankie Condon, University of Waterloo
In her IWCA award-winning book, Rhetoric of Respect (2016), Tiffany Rousculp makes a call for developing a “rhetoric of respect” within writing centres that “entails recognition of multiple views, approaches, abilities, and . . . limitations” (25). In a community address in 2014, Frankie Condon similarly argues that “we will need to understand and act on the understanding that our most important stakeholders are the students we serve and the communities from which they come. . . We will need to work with our students and their home communities to learn their needs (instead of assuming we know them already or are better qualified to determine what those needs are or should be).” Both writers make the call for writing centres and institutions to have respect for “the individual’s position and experience” (Rousculp 28) in a way that does not assume that the writing centre “knows better” than the writers who enter our doors.
As we look to the future of writing centres in Canada, we must consider how we make space for the multiple stories that writers have to tell—not with the goal of helping them erase differences or assimilate, but with the goal of respecting and valuing the multiple cultures, languages, writing practices, lived experiences, and educational histories that they carry with them.
The Canadian Writing Centres Association invites writing centre practitioners—from far and wide—to consider how we respect individual differences amid pressures to serve ever greater numbers of students on limited budgets and in sometimes challenging administrative contexts. How do we continue to diversify our programs, our tutor training, and our research? And how do we extend our rhetorics of respect outside of our centres, across our institutions, and into our larger communities?
The full call for proposals is available on the CWCA website.
Proposals must be submitted through our online submission form. Email submissions will not be accepted this year.
Any individual presenter may be included on up to two (2) proposals, but at least one of the proposals must be for a group presentation (3-5 presenters).
Questions about conference proposals can be directed to CWCA Vice-Chair, Nancy Johnson Squair: squairn@douglascollege.ca
Presenters will be notified by email concerning the status of their proposal(s) by February 10, 2017.
Proposals are due by April 2017
The road to adult competence in writing is long, beginning before the earliest childhood scribbles and passing through many locations in and out of school and beyond. As well, writing competence enlists multiple dimensions of changing lives—experience of the world, development and repurposing of psychological resources, social interactions and organized activities that writing participates in, knowledge of cultural resources, emotional orientations, physical manipulation of technologies, social roles and status, and even economic power. Consequently, each person’s experienced path into writing is individual and leads to a different kind of writing competence. Yet our studies of writing and writing instruction tend to focus on a limited period in the life of a writer or a single level of education, and often view the competence as a single general thing. Even then, we have only a limited number of longitudinal studies that track change within the four or six years of a single educational institution.
To foster more studies that look at writing development across the lifespan and writing policies and programs that extend across life periods, a special issue of Writing and Pedagogy is to appear in Summer 2018 (19:2). This issue invites submissions that have a longitudinal orientation or otherwise look at writing development, writing instruction, other interventions, curricula, or educational policies that stretch across age epochs or several years. Possible topics include:
• Comparison of texts from different periods in students’ lives.
• Writers’ retrospective views of their writing development over time.
• Longitudinal case studies of writers’ development over life periods
• Stratified samples of student writing at different ages
• Curricula and other writing interventions that extend over several years of student’s lives
• Writers’ transitions from one level of schooling or from one workplace experience to the next
• Application of developmental research and theory from other disciplinary domains that bear on writing development
• Studies of the influence of available social experiences and changes in those experiences on the changes in writing
• Comparisons of writing development under different cultural, social, or economic conditions
• Studies of writing development in moments of encounter with new writing opportunities
• Studies of differences of curricula, standards, and assessments offered for students of different ages
• Studies of the impact of different expectations and opportunities on writing development at different levels of schooling
Contributors may also address an issue or topic that is not listed above but which illuminates some aspect of writing development from a lifespan perspective.
We seek articles in all categories, as follows:
Featured Essay: A full-length article (7500-9500 words) offering a fresh perspective, grounded in theory and empirical results and potentially controversial, on a major issue or issues related to Lifespan Development of writing or instruction or policy relevant to a Lifespan perspective.
Research Matters: A full-length article which provides empirical research (e.g. quasi- experimental study, action research, and case study) on writing development that stretches across several ages or transitions across life epochs.
Reflections on Practice: A mid-length article (3500-6500 words) which presents theoretically grounded, empirically warranted, and referenced discussions of practices involving the teaching and learning of writing.
From the e-Sphere: A short article (1000-2000 words) or mid-length article (3500-6500 words) describing educational interventions that are attentive to writing development that extends beyond the length of a single course.
New Books: A short review or full-length, multi-book review article on books published or to be published in 2016, 2017, or 2018 that address issues related to Lifespan development of writing.
For articles in all categories other than book reviews, interested potential authors should send their email and postal addresses along with a provisional title and draft article or detailed abstract, summary, or outline of contents by email or hard copy by post to the guest editor. For best consideration, submit this by 30 April 2017. Also send a 75-100 word biographical statement that includes highest degree and where from, current institutional affiliation and job title, and major achievements. For book reviews, please notify the guest editor of relevant books to appear in 2016, 2017 or 2018 and whether you would like to be considered as a possible reviewer of a specific book or books, for which the reviewer will receive a free copy. If you wish to be considered as a reviewer, also send email and postal address along with a 75-100 word biographical statement that includes highest degree and where from, current institutional affiliation and job title, and major achievements. Full submissions are to be submitted on the journal website by 1 September 2017.
Guest editor contact information:
Charles Bazerman
bazerman@education.ucsb.edu
Gevirtz Graduate School of Education
University of California Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA
A new full-time Program Coordinator position is being created in the Office for Diversity in Graduate Education at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. It is an exciting blend of writing program administration, writing consultancy, research on graduate education, and administrative work that is especially related to community engagement.
The “Writing Initiative” part of the work (at 50% of the appointment) particularly serves an established retention program for graduate (mostly doctoral) students of colour. In addition to a demonstrated commitment to working with historically underrepresented communities in higher ed, the person in this position needs to have deep experience in the individual writing consultation as a site of teaching and learning. Thus, while the position is not housed in a writing centre, the consultancy practice is based in WC pedagogies. The full posting can be found here.
Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing/Association Canadienne de Rédactologie 