9:30-10:00

Registration and check-in

10:00-10:15

Welcome (Beth Carroll, Director of WAC and UWC) 

Remarks (Shernita Lee, Associate Vice Provost for Student Success)

10:15-10:30

App State Transfer Admissions and Engagement (Kim Morton)

10:30-10:45

Break

10:45 - 12:00

Dr. Amanda Berardi Tennant

Dr. Tennant's morning talk will focus on her research regarding how people from the Appalachian region negotiate cultural identity in different rhetorical situations and how they respond to stereotypes. Appalachian college students can bring rich forms of cultural knowledge to the writing classroom. For example, students who have attended Appalachian high schools may have knowledge of the affordances and drawbacks of public education in rural regions. Students who hunt or fish can bring firsthand experience with the outdoors that motivate their commitments to environmental conservation. However, students can hesitate to share their experiences or write about topics relevant to their backgrounds because they do not wish to evoke stereotypes of Appalachians as impoverished, uncultured, and even illiterate. In this talk, Dr. Amanda Tennant reports on her research with high-achieving Appalachian students to describe how these students use key moves, which she calls “moves of rhetorical (in)visibiliy,” to strategically draw on Appalachian cultural knowledge across different writing genres (Tennant, “Rhetorical (In)visibility,” College Composition and Communication). 

12:00-1:00

Lunch

1:00-2:30

Dr. Amanda Berardi Tennant

In her afternoon workshop, Dr. Tennant will describe how writing teachers can support students’ agency to practice these moves, which include self-identifying aspects of Appalachian identity that translate into forms of experiential knowledge and negotiating the risks of deploying identity markers in relation to their audience and potential stereotypes. Specifically, Dr. Tennant will describe a three-part sequence of assignments she has used to support Appalachian students in first-year writing where students compose narratives about a place that is meaningful to them, identify research questions related to their narratives that they explore through research arguments, and adapt their research into a public writing genre. Attendees will discuss how they can adapt these assignments to serve Appalachian, rural, and working-class students at their institutions.

2:30-2:45

Break

2:45-4:00

Information Literacy in the Time of AI [collaborative panel of faculty and librarians]