Global Society of Online Literacy Educators Professional and Affiliate News

!NEW! Jobs in the Community!

Justin Cary — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 13:13:05 GMT

GSOLE has partnered with various organizations and institutions to help promote job postings and career opportunities throughout the community. Please check this page often for new postings and feel to share these postings among your own networks.

_______________________________________________________________________________

The English Department at Old Dominion University is seeking applications for three Lecturer positions in General Education Literature and Composition. These are 10-month renewable non-tenure track appointments, starting on July 25, 2024, offering opportunities for summer teaching and administrative work.

We invite applications from candidates with a diverse range of rhetoric/composition and/or literary expertise. Applicants specializing in LGBTQIA+, LatinX, African American, Indigenous, and/or Asian American studies; narratology, graphic/visual novels; game theory/studies, gamified pedagogies, and/or LitRPGs; directed-self placement, co-requisite and/or ALP models of composition; UDL, accessibility, and/or disability studies; multiliteracies, AI and/or social-emotional learning; and/or WAC/WID are also encouraged to apply. The ideal candidate will demonstrate a commitment to inclusive teaching practices, contributing to course design, reading selections, assignments, and classroom management.

Lecturers will primarily teach courses fulfilling the university’s general education composition and literature requirement, such as English Composition and Introduction to Literature. However, there may be opportunities to teach courses within their area of expertise based on programmatic needs. These positions entail a 4/4 teaching load and service on two departmental committees. Additionally, successful candidates will collaborate with the Directors of General Education English in curriculum development, outcome review, and professional development initiatives.

Applicants are encouraged to apply for the positions that align best with their expertise and interests within the broader scope of General Education Literature and Composition at Old Dominion University.

Details on these respective positions are available below.

Lecturer of General Education Composition (Non-Tenure Track):

https://jobs.odu.edu/postings/19791

Lecturer of General Education Literature (Non-Tenure Track):

https://jobs.odu.edu/postings/19789

Lecturer of General Education Literature & Composition (Non-Tenure Track):

https://jobs.odu.edu/postings/19790

Online Writing Centers Association Seeks Executive Board Members

Meghan Velez — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 13:46:44 GMT

The Online Writing Centers Association, a GSOLE Affiliate, has extended the deadline for Executive Board nominations to Monday, November 8 at midnight Eastern.

To submit your application, visit the OWCA website. For this extended deadline, we are encouraging applications for the following positions:

Diversity & Social Justice Co-Chair
Accessibility Co-Chair
Student Representative
Grants Coordinator

If you have questions about OWCA, the Executive Board positions, or the election process, please reach out to OWCA President, Jenelle Dembsey, jmdembsey@gmail.com, or OWCA Secretary, Beth Nastachowski, beth.nastachowski@mail.waldenu.edu.

Upcoming AWAC Workshop on Antiracist Assessment

Meghan Velez — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 19:08:56 GMT

The Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (AWAC), a GSOLE affiliate, is offering its second virtual workshop on WAC pedagogy, “Toward an Asset-based Antiracist Approach to Writing Assessment” on Wednesday, November 17, from 2:00pm - 3:30pm EST, which is also 1:00 – 2:30 CST, 12:00 – 1:30 MST, and 11:00 – 12:30 PST.

If you are an AWAC member, register for the event by visiting the Upcoming Events page on the AWAC website.

Interested in joining? Visit AWAC's membership page. Registration will close Monday, November 15th at 5:00pm EST (Zoom link will be sent to participants before the event).

The speakers are Shawanda J. Stewart and Stephanie M. Frausto from Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. In “How to Stop Harming Students: An Ecological Guide to Antiracist Writing Assessment,” Inoue and Poe identify seven interconnected, holistic components of a writing assessment ecology and encourage people to consider the histories and the ideologies that inform their writing assessment values. During this interactive workshop, they will work through determining these values. Please bring with you about 10 side/end comments made to student writing.

Speaker information:

Shawanda Stewart is an Associate Professor of English at Huston-Tillotson University. Her primary research interests include African American rhetoric, language ideology and culture, and first-year composition pedagogy.
Stephanie M. Frausto is an English Adjunct Professor at Huston-Tillotson University. Her current research topics include antiracist assessment and student learning outcomes and objectives.

Questions? Please contact AWAC Mentoring Committee Co-Chairs Lindsay Clark (lclark@shsu.edu) and Amy Cicchino (atc0057@auburn.edu).

CCCC OWI Standing Group Research Survey

Cat Mahaffey — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 10:52:56 GMT

Hi Friends,

The Online Writing Instruction (OWI) Standing Group, which is part of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), is conducting a survey of anyone who teaches writing in an online environment, full or part-time. The purpose of this study is to replicate a 2011 survey and report on The State-of-the-Art of OWI. Our goal is to create a 10-year picture of the developments of online writing instruction, including taking into account the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to emergency remote teaching.

The survey does not require that you share any identifying information, but it does give you the option to link to a separate survey where you can provide contact information if you are willing to participate in an interview or focus group which will be scheduled at a later date. These two surveys are separate, so your contact information will not make your first survey responses identifiable. This survey should take you about 15 minutes to complete.

Please feel free to share this survey with applicable colleagues, listservs, and social media groups.

If you are interested in taking the survey, follow this link: State of the Art of OWI 2021

Principal Investigators:

Jessie Borgman, CCCC OWI Standing Group Chair

Cat Mahaffey, CCCC OWI Standing Group Associate Chair

Research Team:CCCC OWI SG Working Group

Northeast CCCC Summer Conference Call for Proposals

Amy Cicchino — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 19:41:34 GMT

The Northeast CCCC Summer Conference originally scheduled to take place at Boston University during the summer of 2020 has been moved online and will be held virtually over Zoom from July 6-7, 2021. The conference theme-- Critical Literacies in the 21st Century Classroom—remains the same.

The conference organizers are re-opening the call for proposals specifically to invite “P.S. (Postscript) Proposals” that reflect the changes we have experienced as a country and community of educators since the initial call for proposals went out. They invite proposals that address issues such as teaching reading and writing during the COVID-19 pandemic; developing and delivering online, hybrid, and distance learning writing courses; and keeping students engaged and motivated to read and write during these difficult times. P.S. Proposals might also address how the increased attention to race in our country, as well as how the political divisiveness and violence we have seen, has affected the teaching of critical literacies. P.S. Proposals should be in one of the three presentation formats sponsored by the conference (see the website) and are due April 15.

Anne Ruggles Gere will be presenting the conference keynote.

For more information and to submit a proposal please see the conference website: https://necccc.org/

We hope you will join us in July! Conference registration opens April 1.

GSOLE Joins TYCA for a Webinar Series in OLI

Amy Cicchino — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 20:27:21 GMT

This October, GSOLE collaborated with one of its affiliate organizations, the Two-Year College Association, to co-host a webinar series in online literacy instruction (OLI). Each of the three, 30-minute presentations addressed a topic that GSOLE and TYCA members identified as areas of interest in a Needs Assessment Survey the organizations distributed in early October. All three webinars had participation ranging from 32 to 40 individuals. Presenter information, brief summaries, and links to resources and recordings for each event are below.

Wednesday, October 21^st “Managing Emotional Labor and Intellectual Workload”

Presenters for this event were…

Joanne Baird Giordano, from Salt Lake Community College, has worked in open-access OWI programs for over a decade, including teaching, designing courses, coordinating faculty development activities, and mentoring instructors. Her research and writing focuses on strategies for supporting two-year college students’ transitions to college reading and writing.
Holly Hassel, Professor of English, North Dakota State University, has been professor of English at NDSU since 2018. Before that she was a faculty member for 16 years at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County in Wausau, WI, an open-admissions two-year college. She has taught online courses since 2004, including first-year writing, literature, and women's and gender studies courses.

Giordano and Hassel opened by explaining why global events have increased teachers’ emotional labor and mental load. They defined emotional labor as “the degree to which our jobs entail recognizing, understanding, and managing the emotions of students, colleagues, and ourselves” and mental load as “invisible project management” associated with “anticipating and meeting the current and future needs of others.”

The presenters then shared the results of a 2019 TYCA Workload Task Force Survey that sought to identify how instructors coped with workload challenges, identifying the following strategies:

Front-load course development work
Keep notes and do course revisions after a class ends
Work on revising only one class at a time and let the others go
Stick with the same readings or assignments for multiple semesters
Use the same course materials for multiple modalities
Reduce number of assignments/activities
Reduce graded assignments
Limit graded revisions
Strategically schedule due dates
Reduce professional activities
Select responsibilities with released time or compensation

Giordano and Hassel then gave a framework (see presentation slide 14) to help teachers decide which tasks needed immediate attention because they were important and which could be done later or not done at all. Giordano and Hassel ended the webinar by asking participants to identify tasks that could fall into each of the four matrix categories. In all, this presentation provided individuals with strategies to moderate increased labor and workload while normalizing the challenges and feelings many instructors are experiencing during the pandemic.

Webinar resources are available here.

Thursday, October 22^nd “A Palette for Peer Review”

Presenters for this event were…

Christie Bogle has taught at Salt Lake Community College since 2003 with special attention to ELL students. She has taught online for many of those years. As the lead member of an online composition team, she also supports faculty teaching online and using inclusive strategies like UDL.
Stephanie Maenhardt has taught at Salt Lake Community College since 1999. She spent nearly 7 years as a fully online instructor, teaching courses in composition, literature, and diverse cultures. She has served as the Chair of TYCA-West, the TYCA-West National Rep, and the TYCA Archivist. She is currently the Program Chair for TYCA 2021.

Bogle and Maenhardt opened by explaining the benefits of peer review: it engages students in critical thinking, helps them evaluate their own learning and progress, and contributes to a classroom community. They then explained that peer review should meet the design of one’s particular course. For instance, teachers leading developmental courses might situate peer review around understanding the role feedback has in revision and reflecting on writing process while a first-year composition course’s peer review could divide the revision process into higher- and lower-order concerns accompanied by peer review protocols that reinforce assignment’s evaluation criteria. As well, delivery and modality need to be considered when designing the peer review process. Asynchronous peer review, for example, allows more freedom for timing, which can prompt a deeper engagement with a peers’ work, but is limiting because students cannot seek clarification in live-time.

Peer review can be made more approachable and manageable for students by creating flexibility and cognitively manageable processes. To do this, isolate the parts of the peer review process into different types of learning tasks. For instance, synchronous online peer review asks that students navigation technology (how to sign up for peer review and post drafts, how to meet with their partner), interpreting language (directions for peer review instruction and communicating with peers and instructor), task management (achieving the assigned tasks in the time allotted), and context (when should they use speech vs. chat, what should that peer-to-peer interaction look like). Once instructors have identified the separate tasks, they can design peer review materials to explicitly support students in each type of learning task.

The participants then broke up into two groups discussing the logistics of synchronous and asynchronous peer review at introductory and advanced levels. Slides for these conversations are available in the event resources folder.

Webinar resources are available here.

Friday October 23^rd “Presence(s): Why and How”

Presenters for this event were…

Jason Snart is Professor English and Chair of Literature, Creative Writing, and Film at the College of DuPage, a large suburban community college in Glen Ellyn, IL, just outside of Chicago. His books include Hybrid Learning (Praeger, 2010) and Making Hybrids Work (NCTE, 2016). He is also the editor of the Online Literacies Open Resource, published by GSOLE.
Bernie Hoes is an Instructor in the English Department at Madison College. Bernie has been teaching composition for 20+ years. He is the recipient of numerous teaching awards and was recipient of Madison College’s 2013 Teacher of the Year award. Bernie describes himself as the quintessential face-to-face classroom teacher.

Snart and Hoes formatted their webinar on social, cognitive, and teaching presences to mimic a dialogue between two instructors: one posing problems related to online teaching with the other responding to these problems with suggested strategies.

They began with social presence, or the ability for students to feel like part of a cohesive class and experience the interpersonal connection needed to more deeply engage with learning. Online instructors often express frustration at the lack of classroom community in some online courses. To increase social presence, instructors can prompt students to participate in introductory activities with one another, meet their instructor through pre-recorded videos and conferences, and learn in discourse community groups with their peers.

Cognitive presence, defined as opportunities for students to engage with course material and peers as they construct knowledge, can be encouraged by virtual collaboration platforms, like Padlet or Google Slides. When selecting these technologies, Snart and Hoes recommend favoring technologies that work across devices and allow students to participate in activities without creating an account.

Finally, the presenters defined teaching presence as both the personality of the online teacher as well as students understanding the role they can play in teaching and learning from peers. Snart creates teaching presence by asking students to learn from each other through group projects where they assess peer learning and reflect on how they communicate knowledge to one another. Instructor teaching presence can be created easily through messaging systems like Remind, which helps teachers communicate to students by scheduling reminders and encouraging notes.

Webinar resources are available here.

GSOLE and IRW Come Together to Support Online Rhetoric Instruction

Amy Cicchino — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 20:38:09 GMT

On Thursday, August 20th, GSOLE co-hosted “Delivering Rhetoric Online: A Roundtable Discussion” with the International Rhetoric Workshop, an affiliate organization. This event featured four instructors who had diverse experiences teaching rhetoric and teaching online in domestic and international contexts:

Foteini Egglezou, founding President of the Hellenic Institute of Rhetorical and Communication Studies and Professor of Critical Pedagogy at the Hellenic Open University in Greece, teaches in the distance Master's program. Dr. Egglezou's research interests are focused on the implementation of Rhetoric and Argumentation to all educational stages, the educational use of debate, the relation of Rhetoric to Critical Pedagogy, Critical and Active Citizenry, and the uses of argument in political speech. She discussed her moving "Odyssey," a debate program for high school students around Greece, online in response to COVID.

Erin Wais-Hennen, adjunct professor at Grand Canyon University, teaches Technical Writing and Rhetorical Theory for graduate students. She was Assistant Professor of English at Lindsey Wilson College where she taught Modern Rhetoric, Writing & Culture, among other courses. Dr. Wais-Hennen came to online instruction after a neurological disability caused her to lose her ability to speak. She offered rhetoric instructors alternatives for online instruction outside of speaking or being on camera and shared her social cognitive approach to online instruction.

Rich Rice, Professor of English in the Technical Communication and Rhetoric program at Texas Tech University, teaches composition, rhetoric, and technical communication courses online, including courses on topics like the history of rhetoric, grant writing, online writing instruction, intercultural communication, contemporary composition and rhetoric, and new media. Dr. Rice discussed how a modified rhetorical triangle can help students account for rhetorical choices in location and modality.

Brendan Hawkins, a PhD Candidate in rhetoric and composition at Florida State University, teaches History of Rhetoric, Rhetorical Theory and Practice, and Research, Genre, and Context in addition to supporting GTAs as the Online Writing Coordinator for the College Composition Program. Hawkins shared his key terms approach to rhetorical online instruction, which allows students to grapple with broader questions about rhetoric while encouraging them to read across texts and time periods.

In addition to sharing the strategies they enact in their local contexts, the presenters answered questions related to delivering rhetorical content online and designing engaging online learning. Hawkins noted the value of asking students to produce rhetorical summaries, informal writing assignments that help them work through dense theories before they begin discussing with their peers and instructor. Dr. Egglezou encouraged us to remember rhetoric is an embodied act and explained how she uses video examples and analysis activities to discuss how rhetoric is presented through movement as well as words. Dr. Rice explained that while the discussion board is a very adaptable space for learning, rhetoric instructors can use virtual collaborative platforms (like Google Docs or Wikispaces) as well as multimodal forms of responses to engage students with rhetorical theory. Both Rice and Dr. Wais-Hennen drew strong connections between rhetorical theories and professional practices. Wais-Hennen asks students to apply their rhetorical knowledge to professional documents by creating analysis reports or redesigning the documents to better enact rhetorical principles they study. Rice explained that he allows students to achieve the learning outcomes by examining and composing documents that are taken up by their professional communities. Finally, in an open discussion, presenters and speakers discussed how to communicate expectations for civil engagement in the online classroom. Miranda Eggers, an attendee, suggested having students collaboratively define civil discussion and work as a community to create guidelines. Hawkins noted the importance of transparency in communicating expectations to students early and often.

We had a well-attended and lively group. Below are additional resources related to the event:

A recording of the event can be accessed here and here is a link to the PowerPoint slides.
During the roundtable, several resources were provided, either in the chat or as part of presentations. Those resources have been provided below for your convenience.
- Wais-Hennen’s video responses:
- This “Special issue free access: A Response to Emergency Transitions to Remote Online Education” from Information and Learning Sciences
- Egglezou mentioned the Hellenic Institute of Rhetorical and Communication Studies (HIRCS), which can be accessed via email (irese.rhetoric@gmail.com) or online at https://odyssey.igf.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/%CE%9F4-IN-ENGLISH.pdf
- You can learn more about the Odyssey project at their website, https://odyssey.igf.edu.pl/, which is also available in English at https://odyssey.igf.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/O3_ENGLISH_25.03.2020-1.pdf
- Hawkins mentioned an online scheduling platform, https://calendly.com/
- Rice shared the AAC&U’s VALUE Rubrics: https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics
- The Global Society of Online Literacy Educators’ webinar series on social justice in the online classroom: https://gsole.org/webinars/participation
- International Rhetoric Workshop’s 2021 event information: http://www.internationalrhetoric.com/
Several of our speakers would be happy to follow-up with you to discuss teaching rhetoric online in further detail: Foteini Egglezou, fegglezou@yahoo.gr & Erin Wais-Hennen drewaishennen@gmail.com

Global Society of Online Literacy Educators Professional and Affiliate News

!NEW! Jobs in the Community!

Online Writing Centers Association Seeks Executive Board Members

Upcoming AWAC Workshop on Antiracist Assessment

CCCC OWI Standing Group Research Survey

Northeast CCCC Summer Conference Call for Proposals

GSOLE Joins TYCA for a Webinar Series in OLI

Wednesday, October 21st “Managing Emotional Labor and Intellectual Workload”

Thursday, October 22nd “A Palette for Peer Review”

Friday October 23rd “Presence(s): Why and How”

GSOLE and IRW Come Together to Support Online Rhetoric Instruction

Wednesday, October 21^st “Managing Emotional Labor and Intellectual Workload”

Thursday, October 22^nd “A Palette for Peer Review”

Friday October 23^rd “Presence(s): Why and How”