2021-2022 Webinar Series

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Listings of Past Webinar Series

The listings below document the efforts of past webinar leaders, as well as the evolving interests of online literacy educators.

Members may watch recorded webinars by clicking on the image accompanying each listing.

Webinar Descriptions

Strategies for Antiracist & Decolonial Language Pedagogy in the Online Writing Classroom

Webinar Leaders: Rachael Shapiro, Missy Watson, & Jude Miller

Date of Webinar: September 27, 2021

Overview

Writing teachers are becoming increasingly attentive to the fact that we may perpetuate, enable, or sustain systemic racism by teaching and assessing through the lens of White language supremacy (Inoue). Yet, it can be difficult to know how to get started in working for linguistic justice in practical ways in our day-to-day teaching. In this webinar, we draw from our combined experience in antiracist linguistic justice work and online pedagogy to offer concrete strategies for online writing teachers. We will briefly explore the theoretical concepts of monolingualism and translingual praxis before inviting participants to consider strategies for three specific sites for linguistic justice: critical learning outcomes, critical inquiry, and feedback and assessment.

Participants will:

Learn about translingual praxis, an antimonolingualist, antiracist, and decolonial approach to teaching writing
Be presented with a range of translingual approaches that participants could immediately put into practice in their own online and face-to-face classes
Practice taking a translingual approach to provide sentence-level feedback on student writing

Webinar Leader Bios

Dr. Rachael Shapiro is Associate Professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University, where she is currently serving as the Provost’s Fellow for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. She has taught developmental, freshman, critical research, professional, and digital writing classes both online and face-to-face, in addition to years of writing center work. Dr. Shapiro has focused her research, teaching, and service on social justice, linguistic diversity, and antiracist and decolonial pedagogy for fifteen years in areas like digital literacies, language politics, feminism, and globalization. Her work has appeared in journals like College English, Composition Forum, and Literacy in Composition Studies.

Dr. Missy Watson is Associate Professor at City College of New York, CUNY. She serves as the Director of First-Year Writing and the Writing Across the Curriculum Programs, and she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in composition, pedagogy, language, and literacy. Her research lies at the intersection of composition, translingualism, and second language writing and revolves around seeking social and racial justice. Her recent publications can be found in the Journal of Basic Writing, Basic Writing e-Journal, Composition Forum, Composition Studies, the Journal of Second Language Writing, and Pedagogy.

Dr. Jude Miller is a Lecturer in Rowan University’s Writing Arts department, where he is the Assistant Coordinator of the First-Year Writing Program. He primarily teaches courses in the First-Year Writing sequence, as well as technical and professional writing courses. He currently serves as the At-Large member of the CCCC OWI Standing Group, and he has been an active member of GSOLE since 2019.

Accessible Affordance of Asynchronicity: Cripping Online Instruction

Webinar Leaders: Leslie Anglesey & Molly Ubbesen

Date of Webinar: November 19, 2021

Overview

Teaching and learning in the same space at the same time is typically the unquestioned norm for education. However, in times when we are not able to come together, it becomes clearer that this synchronicity is a privilege, one that not everyone had from the start. In our webinar, we will discuss the accessible and equitable affordances we find in asynchronous teaching. Drawing on disability studies scholarship, we explore crip time as “a flexible approach to normative time frames” (Price 62). When we consider normative notions of time, we can recognize many layers of inaccessibility in many traditional writing classrooms. Online writing classrooms, however, have the opportunity to create uniquely accessible spaces because they do not solely operate upon normative notions of time. We will share our experiences teaching asynchronously and invite participants to share their own experiences, concerns, questions, and plans for the future.

We will support online teacher-scholars by:

Conceptualizing the relationships between asynchronicity, accessibility, and crip time
Contextualizing access as an approach to inclusive learning for all students
Promoting asynchronicity as an accessible teaching modality for instructors
Providing strategies for asynchronous instruction informed by student feedback
Considering how we might apply the affordances from asynchronous teaching across teaching modalities
Sparking ideas with participants for pedagogical planning

Webinar Leader Bios

Lesley R. Anglesey (she/her) is assistant professor of rhetoric and composition in the department of English at Sam Houston State University. Her research interests focus on issues of access/ibility in writing pedagogies and in health communication. She is a co-editor of Standing at the Threshold: Liminality and the Rhetoric and Composition TAship. Her work appears in Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments, The Peer Review, and Works and Days, and has also appeared in the edited collection Interrogating Gendered Pathologies.

Molly E. Ubbesen (she/her) is assistant professor and director of writing at University of Minnesota Rochester, an interdisciplinary health sciences school, where she teaches scientific writing and disability studies. She is on the editorial team for the second edition of the collection Disability and the Teaching of Writing. Her work appears in Writing Program Administration, Composition Forum, and Disability Studies Quarterly, and she is currently conducting a research project on accessible assessment.

Somos Tango: Social Political Activism in Contemporary Tango Lyrics

Webinar Leaders: Mary Lourdes Silva & Juan José Ortega

Date of Webinar: February 18, 2022

Overview

Since 2000, the global renaissance of Argentine tango has coincided with the development of several social justice movements throughout Latin America (e.g., #Ni Una Menos). In contemporary tango lyrics, we find both male and female composers using tango to project their political message about political corruption and gender violence. As an instrument of protest, creativity, connection, and cultural identity, tango parallels the history and evolution of Hip-Hop music in New York City during the late 70s and 80s, where Black and Latino youth, marginalized by race and class, used Hip-Hop to express their anger and affirm their identity and role in society. Although Hip-Hop and Argentine tango share a history of sexism, hypermasculinity, and chauvinism, Hip-Hop as critical discourse has been successfully integrated into first-year writing instruction to educate students about race, class, linguistic diversity, gender norms, and culture. In our webinar, we introduce American audiences to tango as critical discourse, as a multimodal embodied art form that links multiple modes of expression to global social movements and political histories pertinent to Latin America and the rest of the world. We briefly explore theoretical concepts of translingualism and introduce pedagogical strategies to diversify the curriculum and normalize translinguistic communication.

Webinar Leader Bios

Mary Lourdes Silve is an associate professor of writing at Ithaca College. She received a PhD in Language, Literacy, and Composition Studies from UC, Santa Barbara, as well as her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Fresno State. Her past and current research examines the citation practices of first-year college writing students; pedagogical use of multimodal and multimedia technologies and practices; implementation of institutional ePortfolio assessment; gender/race bias in education; and movement-touch literacy as a modality to teach reflective thinking in first-year writing. She also studies and teaches the culture, literature, and dance of Argentine tango in upstate New York.

Juan José Ortega is an Environmental Engineer, Spanish Teacher, and tango analyst from Argentina. His interest in the music, lyrics, dance, and history of tango started at an early age. He moved to Buenos Aires for his academic studies and lived there for 11 years, where he continued to develop his passion for tango and the local folklore. He currently lives in Italy where he recently taught an online course at the Philadelphia School of Tango about the history of political unrest in tango lyrics.

Toward Linguistic Inclusivity: Evaluating Approaches to Instructional Materials and Technology

Webinar Leaders: Marcela Hebbard, Janine Morris, & Catrina Mitchum

Date of Webinar: April 29, 2022

Overview

This webinar will focus on the importance of linguistic accessibility in our online courses by briefly sharing selected study data that suggests that we need to be cognizant of the impact that our instructions on technology use in the classroom have on student success for our linguistically diverse students in our online classrooms. While we teach writing first, we can’t teach writing online without technology. Inaccessible interfaces and instructional materials can impede any of our students’ success, but can have the largest unintended impact on our students who speak non-standard varieties of English (Sayer & Braun, 2020). We draw from the framework of humanizing online teaching (Pacansky-Brock & Vincent-Layton, 2020) to provide methods for making online literacy courses linguistically accessible through our technology instructions.

Participants will:

Work on increasing accessibility in technology instructions by reflecting on the impact of their own linguistic practices on their teaching of online literacy.
Workshop materials from online courses that incorporate hands-on practice in small groups.
Enhance their understanding of how their own linguistic practices play a role in their teaching.

Webinar Leader Bios

Marcela Hebbard, DMin and PhD Candidate, is a Lecturer III at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley where she teaches composition, linguistic and teacher preparedness courses. Her research interests include online writing pedagogy, language and identity, first-year writing, translingual and transnational writing, and teacher preparedness. She has published articles in several academic journals and edited collections.

Janine Morris, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts at Nova Southeastern University. She is also a Faculty Coordinator in the NSU Writing and Communication Center. Her research focuses on emotions and affect in writing centers, online writing instruction, and graduate student writers.

Catrina Mitchum, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer and Interim Director of Online Writing Instruction at the University of Arizona. She has been teaching online since 2009. Her research interests are in retention and online course design and delivery of online writing classes.

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