I Have A Draft

The title of this blog was the refrain of the second half of my summer of 2015. Far from bragging, though, this summer has been a true testament of how important community and support are in getting meaningful work done and feeling productive.

The first part of my summer was spent teaching for the Institute of Reading Development, a company based out of Novato, CA that employs teachers to teach reading classes to four year olds through adults all over the country. I completed a three week online training course to be prepared to teach each of the eight reading classes at the variety of levels. I taught six of the eight classes during the first five week summer session. I taught four year olds to adults, and it was quite a different experience than teaching college students! I was really excited by the books I got to teach, which included Cat in the Hat, Banner in the Sky, and one of my favorite novels ever- The Fellowship of the Ring. I read a lot of fun books and I did learn a lot about learning milestones, reading expectations in schools, and the variance between reading levels at different ages. I learned, too, that I am in the exact right career path. As much as I enjoyed my reading students, I missed working with college students. Their level of knowledge, confidence, and expectations are exactly where I enjoy teaching most and feel most useful.

I spent the second half of the summer working on three writing and research projects- two essays that I plan to use for the portfolio requirement for my Ph.D. program and an article manuscript that my ISU colleague, Laurenn York, and I have been working on for a couple years. I worked with a writing group, Casie, Jess, and Abby mainly (pictured on the left), for about four weeks before the start of the new school year, and though we were all working on different projects, the accountability, support, and resourcefulness of this group was such a help to me. The most marked difference between the first half of my summer and the second was that in the first half the work was quite markedly isolated (although, I much appreciated the support of my IRD supervisor and fellow teachers) and the second half of my summer was significantly aided by the writing group. Due to this concentrated work, I actually submitted three manuscripts to the publishers and/or to the editors to whom the work was due.

This summer was trying, tiring, inspiring, and edifying. I loved having some time off to spend with my dogs, cruise with my Dad's family in Caribbean, attend my cousin's baby shower in Albuquerque, NM, spend the 4th of July with friends in Durango, CO, and (though it coincided with the semester) attend another cousin's wedding in Italy. I'm ready, now, to jump back into the semester full force. I am teaching two classes that I have never taught before, and another class in a brand new setting; I am also taking a feminism & composition course (yay!), a teaching practicum, and completing an internship. Here we go!

Cheers to Year One!

One year of my Ph.D. is now under my belt! I'm glad to see it gone, but I had a lot of really great opportunities and milestones in the year for which I am so thankful. Here is a look back over the past semester and a glance at what is to come this summer and next school year.

Spring

My teaching was a big focus of my school year. In my everyday plans I have found that I spend about two weeks focusing hard core on teaching- lesson planning, research, grading, etc. while keeping up with my course work. Then, I have to switch and spend the next two weeks or so with intense focus on my course work- reading, researching, writing, etc. while keeping up with my teaching responsibilities.

If you ever wanted to see more of my work inside of the classroom, then the VITA videos that I have mentioned in the last two blogs are a great way to do so! I will post the links to all three videos here, as well as a final project that served as the culmination for a lot of the work I discussed in the second video.

VITA Video One
VITA Video Two
VITA Video Three

Multimodal Assessment Culmination Report 

This pedagogical work paired well with my own scholarly research as I looked at course design through the lenses of composition theory and professional and technical writing theory in two of my classes. In my third course, I wrote a seminar paper focused on social justice issues in my hometown of Madison, WI and constructed an argument for the power of memoir writing by black women to help combat some of the racist and sexist ideologies that are present in the city. I am excited to see the future of this work because I believe it could have a positive impact in a place that I hold very dear.

My second semester started with conference activity at SWPACA and SWES (as discussed in my last post) and ended with a trip to Menomonie, WI for the annual Computers & Writing Conference. This was my first time attending C&W and I found it to be an extremely friendly, helpful, and informative conference. It was an exciting opportunity to gather with these scholars who are passionate about the future of technology in the field of rhetoric and composition.

I presented on an ongoing project at the Graduate Research Network (my abstract found on page 5). The feedback and suggestions were so helpful, as was the afternoon session of the network focused on job preparation, interviewing, and negotiation. The conversations in both parts of the network were so informative and will have an impact on my future decisions. This conference in (chilly) Wisconsin was a great way to wrap up my first year and second semester.

Summer

This summer I will be teaching for the Institute of Reading Development. I will teach two five week sessions with ten reading classes in each session. I will teach ages four through adults in these classes. I am really looking forward to engaging with some of the middle school through adult students specifically as we will be reading some really fascinating literature and nonfiction (my speciality). If you want to know more about the institute or the specific programs I will teaching, check out my CV for the full list, or the site for more information.

This summer I will also, of course, be working on my own projects for submission to journals, edited collections, and as the portfolio paper component of my degree requirements. I hope to have completed these papers by the time the new semester starts... if I don't melt in the desert heat first. If only someone would have told me that it is hot here before I moved ;)

Fall

I think that one of the highlights of the fall 2015 semester will be attending and presenting at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference held at ASU! The preliminary schedule is stacked full of amazing speakers in the field talking about really important issues. Just based on what I have read and heard so far, I think this conference may be my favorite conference of the year.

I am also very excited about the teaching opportunities that I have in the fall. I am scheduled to teach ENG 217: Writing Reflective Essays and ENG 301: Writing for the Professions, as well as the possibility of some community college work. I am looking forward to every teaching class but specifically to ENG 217, as I hope to base dissertation work on the texts and activities that my students produce and participate in in the class. The flyers for these two classes are linked here:

ENG 217
ENG 301

Looking forward even further to spring 2016, my co-chair, Abigail Oakley, and I are already planning and brainstorming and cementing details for SWES 2016. Excited to have scholars converge in Tempe for Fem/Rhet and SWES next year!

Here's to what the summer and year two of my Ph.D. will bring!

The second semester is heating up

... quite literally! January in the desert is probably the most beautiful weather that anyone could ever ask for. Warm and sunny during the day, cool and dry at night. That weather made the transition to a new semester a bit easier. Now mid-February is starting to bring some mid-70s to 80s days!

Visiting the Sedona Desert

This semester I am taking three classes, plus a one credit practicum, and teaching two ENG 102 classes. I am pretty busy, but I am enjoying the work I am doing. Here are a few highlights:

Last semester I interviewed Dr. Jacqueline Wernimont, who is a new faculty member at ASU. I enjoyed sitting down and talking with her, and then the interview was published in Accents on English fall 2014/winter 2015 department newsletter. Read the interview to see what we talked about!

As I talked about before, I was featured in a series of video vignettes for Visualizing Teaching in Action. Steven Hopkins completed the second video vignette earlier this semester. I am especially excited about the subject matter of this video because assessing multimodal work is something that is difficult but very important. I am excited to see where this work will go.

I attended two conferences this semester: I served as a volunteer and panel chair at the Southwest English Symposium (SWES) hosted here at ASU, and I just returned from presenting at the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

SWES was a busy weekend, but I really enjoyed working the registration desk, hearing Dr. James Gee talk about the future of the university (although it wasn't a bright picture!), participating in the attendee banquet, and chairing a popular culture pedagogy panel. I am also very much looking forward to next year's SWES conference. The call for papers is asking presenters to think about objects and commodities. Please check out our website to find more/ updated information for SWES 2016!

The entryway to SWES 2015

SWPACA was a fun, busy weekend in Albuquerque. I heard there were about 800 people in attendance, and there were lots of great panels to choose from to attend. One of my favorite panels that I attended was focused on teaching with a food theme in composition classrooms. The presenters gave a lot of great ideas, and then the conversation after the presentations was enlightening and inspiring.

I presented on a panel called "Food and Culture: From Fried Dough to Chili Queens" and I gave a presentation entitled "Identity, Culture, and Border Crossing: The Language of Baklava & Popular Literacy." Check out the presentation abstract or feel free to ask if you would like more information about this presentation! I was awarded the 2015 Heldrich-Dvorak Travel Fellowship based on this abstract, which was very appreciated and exciting. It was a great weekend in Albuquerque, and I'm ready to jump back into teaching and attending my own classes.

The Heldrich-Dvork Travel Fellowship Award

Semester One: DONE.

I have successfully completed my first semester as a Ph.D. student at ASU! I definitely faced a few hurdles, as should be expected when beginning a new program and encountering new expectations and challenges, but I did achieve a 4.0 and I am proud of the work I did!

I really enjoyed teaching my ENG 101 course. It was a challenge to try to fit my own personal ideals and pedagogical values into a somewhat prescriptive course plan, but I think I was able to find a good balance and that my students left the classroom as better readers and writers and maybe even slightly better people (one can hope, eh?). I had a really phenomenal class, and from the beginning they were very willing to engage with the material, me, and each other. I assigned final course reflection memos for the first time this semester, and I really enjoyed reading the comments from the students. They weren't just telling me that they liked me and the course (which most students feel the obligation to do at the end of a course), but they actually told me about various elements of learning that they felt they had grasped this semester and how those understandings might be helpful to them in the future. That is always very rewarding.

One of my favorite assignments that I ask students to complete every semester is a Writers Identity Activity (adapted from my ISU colleague Evan Nave), where I ask my students to find a picture and write a short description of something that makes them feel awesome and alive and how that applies to their writing. The students then go around and comment on each other's photos and posts, which helps them to get to know each other, but also helps them to see how differently each person is inspired to write. In the final reflection memo this semester one student commented on this activity saying:

"The one day where we did that activity in which we took a picture of something that we love and incorporated it into our writing styles was very insightful. What I took away from that activity was a sense of self-awareness. Everybody has a different writing style and various thinking processes. It was interesting to see what everybody put as their picture and how they related it to their own personal writing. I think that definitely assured me what type of writing/study habits and styles of thinking I have. Now I can use this self-awareness to my advantage on future assignments."

Assertions and awareness like that is why I truly love teaching writing. 

As I mentioned in my previous blog posting, I was featured in the ASU Writing Programs Visualizing Teaching In Action video vignettes looking at specific practices in the classroom. Thanks to my ASU colleague Steven Hopkins, the first video vignette is finished! I am happy to have contributed to this work at ASU.

I was also pleased with my final products for my own classes this semester. Coming into the program, and in almost every discussion I had with professors and other graduate students, I received two pieces of advice:

1) Make EVERY project that you complete work towards a larger research/ teaching goal.
2) Make your projects work together.

With that advice, and after receiving literally identical final assignments for two of my classes, I tried to come up with projects that worked toward a larger research goal (like a portfolio paper, or even my dissertation). I came up with two research proposals that focused a Lebanese food memoir: The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber. I look forward to actually working on and towards this research work in the future.

For my teaching practicum course I developed materials that could be utilized in the Spring 2015 semester to help students navigate the sometimes "muddy water" of completing and submitting multimodal projects for credit. The materials are linked below. Check them out if you are interested in this kind of work (also linked under "Projects"):

Teacher's Guide

Student's Guide

Finally, I will finish this blog entry the same way I finished my first semester: inspired by the work of literacy ethnographer Deborah Brandt. I loved her work in Literacy in American Lives not only because she observed and interviewed participants in my home state of Wisconsin but because of the way that she asked questions and the goals that she was trying to achieve in her study. She writes:

"It is the persistent interest of this study to characterize literacy not a it registers on various scales but as it has been lived" (11). 

That is exactly how I want to approach every research study and classroom interaction and conference presentation in my career. Not as it registers on decontextualized scales but as it is lived.

What is life, if not for the living?

*Eleven Weeks In*

Here I am, 11 weeks into my first semester as a PhD student, and I am surviving!

Due to some proposed programatic restructuring, I am most likely beginning my degree under the title of PhD in English: Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacies (old title listed with my ASU biography). Because I am just starting this program the proposed name change and subsequent requirement changes really only affect me in a positive way. Under this new structure I will not have to take linguistic classes, but I am required to take a literacy course. Entering the program, I was wary of the linguistics requirement because linguistics is a very difficult subject area for me. I am enrolled in a literacy course this semester, though, and have found it to be enlightening and beneficial to my overarching scholarly work.

Here are some highlights from the semester thus far:

* I joined the Graduate Scholars of English Association (GSEA) at the beginning of the year and this has proved to be valuable and a lot of fun! I was paired with a third year student who serves as my "mentor," answering questions, getting coffee, offering advice, and I have enjoyed meeting with her. I have also attended a panel on alternative career choices following graduation, attended socials, and written a short bio piece for a new faculty member through this organization.

* I was accepted to present at the Southwest Popular and American Culture Association Conference (SWPACA) in Albuquerque in the middle of February, 2015. I am looking forward to presenting at this conference and getting to hear ideas and meet fellow scholars interested in the same kind of work that I am doing.

* I was randomly selected to be featured in an interview and video recording of my ENG 101 class for a Writing Programs project entitled Visualizing Teaching In Action (VITA). This was challenging in that I had to reflect on and discuss my own pedagogical practices and beliefs, but I think it has been productive for both me and my students to have done this work.

I still have the last third of the semester to finish out, and I am hoping it will be as rewarding and productive as it has been thus far. I will post more about the points posted above as they come to fruition.

Summer Tutoring

As a full time student nine months out of the year, the summer months always provide a bit of a quandary as far as how to best spend my time and how to make some money. I've done nannying in the past and this summer I got to spend two mornings a week with a friend's one year old son, which I really enjoyed. I wanted to branch out this summer, though, and perhaps begin to grow a private tutoring business. Craigslist came in handy and I was able to secure three students to do private tutoring sessions with. One man I met with only one time as he was wanting some specific guidance on workplace tone and diction, but the other two students I met with weekly from one to four hours.

This experience was unique for me because unlike a composition classroom in which you spend maybe one hour meeting individually with a student over a fifteen week period, I was able to sit down with these students every single week and speak to them directly about their growth in English and composition, as well as quickly and specifically identify areas where they needed further instruction and practice. The ages, backgrounds, and needs of the two students were very different, but I felt confident that by my final sessions with them they had both grown and achieved higher levels of success in their reading, writing, and comprehension of English.

What struck me most through all of the sessions I conducted this summer was the way that genre studies is so applicable in almost any writing or reading scenario. Genre studies and activity theory are the basic pedagogical ideas that the Illinois State Writing Program is based on. When I first started at ISU I was so confused by the idea of genre studies, and a colleague and I sat down with our WPA to simply say, what is this theory and how do we teach it? Although I was totally unaware of this type of pedagogy, or that ISU taught it, when I enrolled, I am forever grateful that I not only grasped the ideas, but have learned how to effectively teach them. Joyce Walker is the WPA at ISU and her article "Just CHATing" briefly explains genre studies and CHAT. This article is a great gateway to understanding, and helping students understand, the complexity of writing situations both within and outside of the classroom.

Although I didn't get as far on some publication work as I would have liked, I still feel that this summer was well spent. I was able to make some money, begin to work with students in private tutoring, and see the foundation of my learning and understanding grow deeper. The two students that I worked with consistently this summer had this to say about their growth in the sessions:

"Learning about and practicing grammar and writing responses has aided me the most."

"Learning about audience was most helpful to me because each genre of writing can use many audiences, depending on the topic and format."

Assessment Institute Success!

The assessment institute went well today! We started out the day with sessions on statistics and rhetorically based writing assessment from Diane Kelly-Riley and Bob Broad, then moved into our breakout sessions. I ran my first two sessions on race, culture, and identity in writing assessment, and we had really good discussions. The first session group emphasized the importance of recognizing language variation in the classroom, and we discussed the ways that we could help students recognize the value in that difference as well. In the second group we discussed more specific assessment strategies for looking at race and culture in writing assessment.

Laurenn and I ran the third breakout session on our Initial Genre Assessment. I really enjoyed this discussion. Many of the participants had really good questions about student reactions as well as how we implemented the assessment in our course. They also offered some really great suggestions for us to consider for the future of our assessment and publications.

The afternoon session was spent in smaller work groups. There were some really great some discussions in these sessions as well as the participants shared their various assessment and program needs and views. The following list encapsulates some of the discussion items and questions raised in this session:

* Learning objectives versus rubrics
* What do we want our writers to be able to do?
* The program profile must ask: what do we value?
* In workshops we must demonstrate how assignments meet outcomes
* What's best to assess?
* Assessment needs to be part of the curriculum

I enjoyed the opportunity to be an associate institute leader at the CWPA. It challenged my thinking and perceptions on many assessment issues.