Month: October 2021

Notes from the Director: 25 Oct 2021

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Checking-in, with warm invitation

As we wind down the first half of the quarter there’s been a bit of looking around in shock–really? We’re already almost halfway through?–and it seems a good time to take stock of where we find ourselves right now. We want to invite you to check in with yourself–and with us–around how the return to in-person instruction is shifting your experience of teaching or is presenting new rewards as well as challenges. 

You can check in with us in any way you like–and this Director’s Note, co-written by Missy González-Garduño and Stephanie Kerschbaum, takes up the theme of check-in to describe some of the ways that you can connect with us and with a supportive network in our program. 

This google form is a check-in of the sort that you might use with your own students, and it offers a brief set of questions that can communicate to us as EWP administrators what we need to have on our radar as well as what we should ensure we continue or maintain. This is new terrain for us as it is for you, and we don’t want to just guess at what may be at the forefront of your minds or experiences as we prepare resources, supports, and next-steps. So if you’re willing, please consider taking 5-6 minutes to jot down quick responses. We will share in a future Director’s Note what we learn from this mid-quarter check-in and how we are moving in response.

In addition to the above Google Form, we are also doing other kinds of proactive outreach. One of these efforts has focused particularly on instructors who are teaching in-person for the first time in our program. One of us, Missy, has been organizing small-group conversations among 2nd year instructors during collective office hours. EWP ADs have been giving short tours of the A-11 suite and chatting with instructors about their course plans, in-person experiences, and COVID concerns. We have particularly enjoyed showing folks around the suite for the first time: showing off our new communal table, the printing room, and the different AD offices as folks popped their heads out for quick hellos. Feel free to stop by and get some tea if you are cold and curious about the space.

These small-group conversations have been open and collaborative spaces where ADs and instructors alike have helped each other troubleshoot different issues such as time management, new lesson plans, and challenges around fluctuating attendance patterns as students negotiate cold/flu/possible COVID symptoms. These challenges include trying not to teach two classes at the same time (one remote, one in person) or doing extra work to support absent students–and we’re glad to talk more about these kinds of challenges with any others who might want to consult or check in with us. We’ve enjoyed hearing folks talk through the transition to new courses and in-person teaching; for those of us on duty, it has been so great to live vicariously through the awesome teachers who have been so generous as to share their experiences with us.

And as a reminder, Stephanie is in the office Monday-Friday and has open office hours where she is available both in her personal zoom room or in person in A-011 from 3-4 p.m. on Wednesdays and 2-3 p.m. on Thursdays. If those times don’t work for you, just email kersch@uw.edu to schedule a time to come by. We’re currently working on trying to get a chalkboard to make it easier to signal when Stephanie is in the office & available for you to stop in and ring her doorbell.

Finally, another way to connect and check-in would be to attend our first Fall quarter Teacher Talk. This event, hosted by Francesca Colonnese, begins with the recognition that many of you may be experiencing complex emotions–including anxiety and uncertainty–as you continue to hear about positive COVID cases and close contacts and navigate teaching in this time. If this resonates with you, please consider joining our virtual event this coming Wednesday, 27 October at 2:30 on Zoom (RSVP link here). Francesca is explicitly designing this as a space to process and share what it has been like to teach under these difficult conditions.

–Missy González-Garduño and Stephanie Kerschbaum

Welcome to Compendium!

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Welcome to Compendium, a blog looking to connect instructors across the University of Washington’s Expository Writing Program to ongoing resources, teaching materials, events, and more!

Compendium was originally piloted in 2018 (under the working title “The EWP blog”) as a space for our staff and instructors to share news, materials, and program updates. Over the past few years, the blog has been reimagined to better respond to the needs of our instructors, has been placed on hold during a global pandemic when everything became an online space, and has finally launched today. We’re excited to see where these community conversations take us this year! 

From its origins as “the EWP blog,” this site eventually settled on (with some debate and much punnery) the name Compendium. Programmatically, the compendium is a familiar framework for EWP instructors: each quarter we ask students to build a compendium to highlight their work across the course. 

Etymologically, “compendium” is derived from the Latin “compendĕre,” meaning that which is weighed together, from com (together) and pendĕre (to weigh). Definitions of “compendium” are numerous, but this online community resonates especially with the definition provided by Oxford Languages: “a collection of concise but detailed information about a particular subject, especially in a book or other publication.”

In framing this online space as a compendium, we hope to evoke the shared teaching context that connects our community and to create a collection of the work happening in our classrooms and our research, all centered around our commitment to critical, equitable, and antiracist writing praxis. It’s very easy—especially in the quarter system—to get buried in one’s own work, whether administrative or teaching, whether on-campus or off. We hope that this blog will provide an easily accessible platform for everyone to see the fantastic work our instructors have done across this program, to provide access to ready-to-use classroom resources like template lesson plans and activities, and, most importantly, to collaborate. 

Thank you for reading, and again, welcome to Compendium!

–Alycia Gilbert, CIC AD 2021

Interested in contributing to Compendium or participating in other EWP events? Check out our Resources menu to Get Involved!

Instructor Spotlight: Anselma Prihandita

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Photo of Anselma Prihandita

Quick Facts

Name: Anselma Widha Prihandita
Courses Taught: ENGL 131, ENGL 109/110
Pedagogical Touchstones: Critical Pedagogy ; Encouraging sensitivity and critical attitude to power relations, especially so that marginalized students can explain their discomforts in ways other than “it’s my fault,” as they’ve often been trained to do ; bell hooks’ “education as the practice of freedom”
Favorite Course Themes: Autoethnography, in which students did an autoethnographic research project on their own educational experiences in order to make sense of how colonial, Eurocentric, capitalist, white supremacist, etc. the university is.

Q: How have your studies influenced your teaching and/ or how has your teaching influenced your studies?

My experience as a student does influence my teaching. Being a first generation graduate student, a person of color, and an international student, I feel some affinity with students from similar backgrounds. I’m aware of how for people like me, the lessons we get in classrooms here are not always most culturally relevant or sustaining. Therefore, I try to craft curriculums with better diversity and representation—for example by grounding my syllabi on works by scholars of color, or by simply encouraging students to embark on projects that may not immediately be in the interest of the dominant public (or scholarly communities), but are nonetheless closer to their hearts and homes. I would say that my teaching is greatly inspired by decolonial theories, which broadly work toward a delinking from white Western knowledge. This influence also goes both ways: my studies now focus on decolonial pedagogies.

Q: Could you describe a particularly crucial, defining teaching moment you’ve had throughout your career? 

One memorable teaching experience that I had was my first time teaching ENGL 109 (a class reserved for students affiliated with the various student support programs under the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity). When I read my students’ preliminary essays, I noticed that almost all of them wrote about how they didn’t feel confident in their writing skills. Many spoke of how they were often told that their writing was not up to standard, even though it was perfectly fine. Seeing the emotional challenges that these students faced, since then I tried my best to support students not only by teaching them writing skills, but also by fostering the habits of mind, resilience, and self-assurance necessary to move within and through this higher education institution—an experience that can be hurtful to some people.

Q: After completing your degree, what are your plans professionally? Have these evolved since entering your program? How has your teaching evolved? 

Regarding my plans for after completing my degree, I honestly don’t know. I think a big part of that would be trying to decide whether I want to start a career here in the US or come back home to Indonesia. I left my home country thinking that I would definitely be coming back, but after 2 years here, sometimes I feel like I’m losing touch with that homeland. A lot of the things I’ve learned and practiced here are grounded on American contexts, which might not be easily translatable to how things are back home. I think that as you learn and teach, it’s very important to keep in perspective the context and geopolitics of the knowledge you’re gaining and practicing, and remember that nothing—not even pedagogies and theories—can be a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.

Collaboration Grant Project (2018): Materializing Translingualism in the Writing Classroom

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Purpose of the Project:

 The goal of this project is to make translingual pedagogies accessible to UW instructors across disciplines by providing tangible pedagogical materials on enacting translingual pedagogy. Translingual theory is intimidating because most of the literature that explains it is filled with composition jargon. Such texts render translingualism inaccessible to our colleagues in fields beyond composition. We have tried to make it more concrete and accessible from a theoretical orientation to a pedagogy that can be adapted for any writing-based course that engages with the issue of language difference(s). The intended audience of our project is any writing teachers interested in the aforementioned issues. We are thankful to have received the EWP’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Collaboration Grant which is made possible by a seed grant from the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity.

The website currently includes teaching materials that can be practiced as a translingual orientation: syllabi, course readings, assignment prompts, assessment philosophies and practices, and lesson plans/class activities that are contributed by our colleagues from composition, TESOL, English literature, and education.

Homepage Ι Definitions Ι Syllabi Ι Readings Ι Prompts Ι Assessment Ι Lesson Plans Ι Additional Resources

Facilitators:

Zhenzhen He-Weatherford:

A Ph.D. candidate and writing instructor at the UW English Department, Zhenzhen is professionally invested in pedagogies that foster an inclusive learning environment that honors the diverse linguistic, cultural, experiential, and technological knowledge of students, making it an asset to their educational accessibility and success in college and beyond. Her scholarly interests include critical multiculturalism and pedagogies, multimodal composition, and translingualism. She is currently teaching at the Interdisciplinary Writing Program and also a Mellon Fellow for Reaching New Publics in the Humanities.

Sara Lovett:

Sara is a second-year Ph.D. student studying the teaching of college writing in the UW English department. She currently teaches English 109/110, a sequence of writing courses for first-generation college students. Her teaching and research interests include two-year colleges, basic and developmental writing courses, anti-racist pedagogy, game studies, and public writing. She is on the the Anti-Racist Task Force of the Writing Program Administration Graduation Organization and is the incoming Graduate Representative for the Council for Play and Game Studies.

Sumyat Thu:

Sumyat is a Ph.D. student and writing instructor at the UW English department. She also works as an assistant director of the UW Expository Writing Program/Computer-Integrated Classrooms. As for research interests, she studies the relationships among language, literacy, identity, and language and race (raciolinguistics). She is also pursuing a Public Scholarship certificate program at the Simpson Center for the Humanities and interested to do community engaged research that builds campus–community equitable relationships.

Acknowledgement:

We thank the following writing teachers and colleagues who contributed their teaching materials that are in line with or make a critical conversation with the translingual framework.

List of contributors:

Ahmad Alharthi, Avram Blum, Jacki Fiscus, Sunao Fukunaga, Emily George, Zhenzhen He-Weatherford, Ainsley Kelly, Dino Kladouris, Sara Lovett, Carrie Matthews, Holly Shelton, Alex Smith, Sumyat Thu, TJ Walker