*A note from the conference committee: This panel is slightly different than the other ones. Instead of three, separate papers, presenters Tina Iemma, Cheyenne Ross, and Sarah Glessner will be presenting in a round-table fashion on the same paper topic.*
Reflections on Social and Institutional Change within Writing Across Communities
Michelle Hall Kells defines Writing Across Communities as “programs (curricular, administrative, cross-institutional, and extra-institutional) that seek to extend writing support for ethnolinguistically diverse populations vertically and horizontally, throughout the entire process of literacy education in and beyond the curriculum.” This panel seeks to examine the philosophical and theoretical considerations behind the implementation of the Writing Across Communities initiative at St. John’s University. WACommunities, a purposeful reworking of a more common Writing Across Curriculum programmatic framework, seeks to subvert the hegemonic structures at play with regard to student writing and student-faculty relationships in higher education spaces. In addition to working from a Writing Across Communities approach imagined by Kells, WACommunities at St. John’s uses a “students-as-partners” (Cook-Sather, Bovill and Felten) model, whereby students working as Undergraduate Writing Coordinators are at the center of programmatic collaborations with faculty and administrators. By foregrounding collective efforts, these three graduate student panelists will discuss WACommunities’s attempts to enact social change upon the ways writing is invited, implemented, examined, and assessed within and beyond the academic space. Highlighting the communicative literacies (academic, cultural, civic, professional) of both students and faculty, we emphasize how acknowledgment of their labor, passions and lived-experiences may develop more equitable student/faculty relationships within higher education.
This panel of three graduate students–one advanced doctoral student and WACommunities Assistant Director, one second-semester doctoral student and WACommunities fellow, and one BA/MA student in her third year of coursework–will discuss pedagogical implications of WACommunities programming, consider the ethical considerations behind the development of such an initiative, and invite discussion into what the continued development of this new program may look like for the St. John’s University community.
Tina Iemma is a PhD Candidate at St. John’s University.
Sarah Glessner is a PhD Candidate at St. John’s University.
Cheyenne Ross is a BA/MA Candidate at St. John’s University.
Forms of Justice 