All posts by Derek Mueller

Yergeau to Lead 2018 FYWP Winter Colloquium

EMU’s First-year Writing Program invites you to join us in Ypsilanti on Friday, March 23, for the 2018 Winter Colloquium. Dr. Melanie Yergeau  will present  at 10:30 a.m., “Black Mirror Meets the Classroom: Neurodiversity and Social Robots.” After lunch, at 1 p.m., she will lead a writing pedagogy workshop, “Disability, Access, and Multimodal Pedagogies.” For more information, contact Derek Mueller, Dir. of the First-year Writing Program,  at dmuelle4@emich.edu, or Rachel Gramer, Associate Dir. of the First-year Writing Program, at rgramer@emich.edu.

Promotional flier for Dr. Melanie Yergeau's presentation and workshop at EMU on March 23, 2018.
Promotional flier for Dr. Melanie Yergeau’s presentation and workshop at Eastern Michigan University’s Pray-Harrold Hall, Room 219, on Friday, March 23, 2018. Free and open to the public. The presentation, titled “Black Mirror Meets the Classroom” is at 10:30 a.m.; the teaching workshop, titled “Disability, Access, and Multimodal Pedagogies,” is set for 1 p.m.

Accessible Academic Presentations

Are you preparing a presentation for an academic conference? Or are you  working with students on in-class presentations, preparations for the Celebration of Student Writing on April 12,  or the Undergraduate Research Fair? Check out the Composing  Access resources, developed by   Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition and the Computers and Composition Digital Press.

TRIO Newsletter Features 33rd Celebration of Student Writing

The December 2017 TRIO Newsletter included an item on that program’s participants in the 33rd semiannual Celebration of Student Writing at Eastern Michigan University, which was held Thursday, November 30, in the Student Center Ballroom. Learn more about EMU’s TRIO program at http://www.emich.edu/triosss/. Additional information about the program’s purposes is available on the U.S. Department of Education website.

Eastern Michigan University TRIO newsletter, December 2017.
Eastern Michigan University TRIO newsletter, December 2017, highlighting student presentations at the 33rd semiannual Celebration of Student Writing.

Teacher to Teacher at CCCC 2018

A new-emerging embedded presentation venue is  being launched this year at the 2018 CCCC in Kansas City, March 14-17. Christine Cucciarre, Director of Composition at U Delaware, has started a program called Teacher to Teacher, which is designed to be a teaching-focused alternative to the well-established Research Network Forum (RNF) that usually runs on the first day of the convention. Teacher to Teacher seeks to sponsor and generate pedagogical cross-talk on the Saturday of the convention (3/17). The deadline for proposals is December 15, 2017. It promises to be a terrific venue for in-progress teacher-research and for the good work you are doing with FYW classes at EMU.

To learn more about this new program and to see the CFP, visit https://sites.google.com/udel.edu/teacher2teacher.

Library Additions – Summer 2017

The EMU First-Year Writing Program has delivered the  following titles to Halle Library as part of its  resources initiative. Titles will be available for check-out later this summer.

  • Race and Writing Assessment (Studies in Composition and Rhetoric) , edited by  Mya Poe  and Asao B. Inoue
  • Transnational Writing Program Administration by David Martins
  • Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics, edited by  Rose Gubele and Lisa King
  • On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies (CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric) by Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes
  • From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957-1974 by David Fleming
  • A New Writing Classroom by Patrick Sullivan
  • The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing: Scholarship and Applications, edited by Nicholas N. Behm, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen
  • Labored: The State(ment) and Future of Work in Composition, edited by Randall McClure, Dayna V. Goldstein, and Michael A. Pemberton
  • A Critical Look at Institutional Mission: A Guide for Writing Program Administrators, edited by Joseph Janangelo

To make additional requests, please  complete the Book/Material Purchase Request Form.

Class Discussion Strategies

From the Cult of Pedagogy blog, “The Big List of  Class Discussion Strategies” circulated  widely last fall, but it has resurfaced in recent days because it presents as a strong collection of ideas for framing class discussions. Note that it  includes Think-Pair-Share as a strategy, which in the context of EMU’s First-year Writing Program is  introduced as Write-Pair-Share. The list of discussion would also do well to include Crumple Toss, the practice of brief fast-writes which are then balled up and tossed into the center of the room. Next students retrieve one and share from it, which each item shared serving as genesis for addressing questions, deepening  observations or responses, reinforcing concepts pertinent to a particular lesson or project  setup.

Glossary of Multimodal Terms

Looking for a broader and deeper vocabulary to associate with multimodality? Check out the Glossary of Multimodal Terms.

Why this glossary
Multimodality studies how and to what social and cultural effects people use and transform resources for communication including speech, image, gesture, gaze, and others. In the last decade or so multimodal studies have introduced many new terms (such as ‘mode’); and they have begun to redefine many ‘old’ones (such a ‘genre’). The aim of this glossary is to provide inroads into this cross-discliplinary enterprise.