Beyond Grading “Participation”: An Assignment to Promote Engagement and Metacognition in First-Year Writing Classes

Many teachers include “participation” among the graded requirements in FYW, but too often their methods of assessing it are inconsistent, unclear, and poorly theorized. Furthermore, when we assess “participation,” we are essentially grading students’ soft skills (attendance, homework, hiding phones, etc.) rather than actual writing. The presenter will share a method of assessing “participation” both coherent and consistent with the goal of improving student writing through assessing student engagement, responsibility, and metacognition

Houses of Hospitality: The Material Rhetoric of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker

This dissertation presents an analysis of the material practice of hospitality in the Catholic Worker movement during the 1930s. Dorothy Day (1897-1980), a radical Catholic social activist, co-founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1932, and one of the movement’s goals was to provide hospitality to poor and unemployed people. Day’s understanding of hospitality, and consequently the practice of hospitality at Catholic Worker houses, was shaped by Day’s experiences as a radical during the 1910s and 1920s, her conversion to Roman Catholicism, and her notions of gender; each of these factors led Day to understand hospitality as consisting primarily in materially grounded practices that lead to the mutual identification of host and guest. Of particular importance to Catholic Worker hospitality were the materials of space and food, which, in addition to promoting the mutual identification of individual hosts and guests, also shaped the identity of the movement itself, the content of the Catholic Worker newspaper, and Day’s and her followers’ critique of bureaucratic, state-sponsored responses to social injustices. Furthermore, the practice of hospitality also provided members of the movement with an epistemological grounding for their critiques of social injustices by allowing them to encounter real presences—subjective, transcendent realities that members of the movement understood in theological language as encounters with Christ. As Day and her followers practiced hospitality, they had to contend with a number of forces of institutionalization that would place conditions on their hospitality and limit its transformative potential. Finally, this analysis contributes to ongoing discussions about the place of hospitality in the teaching of composition by noting that the teaching of writing is subject to similar forces of institutionalization; the ways that Day and her followers responded to such forces—especially through an emphasis on domesticity and religious faith—are important to consider because they suggest that writing teachers need to consider the spiritual roots of transformative hospitality

Promoting Generosity in Whole-Class Writing Workshops

This presentation considers how whole-class writing workshops (in which an entire class responds to one student’s work) can benefit students. To achieve this benefit, however, teachers need to place more attention on helping students practice generosity in responding to their peers’ writing. The presentation will explain how to conduct such workshops successfully and offer ideas for how teachers can promote generosity in their classes

Writing is Like What: An Analogy Assignment to Examine Assumptions about Writing

This presentation explores how asking FYW students to compose an analogy essay about writing has helped them uncover and examine problematic assumptions about writing

It\u27s Not an Error, It\u27s a Tool: Comma Splices in First-Year College Writing

Writing teachers are conficted about comma splices: they and other academic readers routinely categorize a splice as a serious error, yet we also recognize that “real” writing frequently includes this “error” in otherwise unobjectionable prose. In fact, FYW students typically produce comma splices not randomly but with specifc rhetorical intentions. This session will examine the rhetoric of comma splices—how we talk about them and how students actually use them—and suggests ways we can help students master this rhetorically charged comma use