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In this interactive session, the speaker reports on recent advocacy efforts and initiatives for multilingual students at Santa Rosa Junior College. Initiatives include the development of transfer-level writing courses for multilingual students, removing financial barriers by expanding noncredit writing course offerings at higher academic levels, eliminating deficit-based labels, and expanding student services for linguistically marginalized students. Participants will be invited to share their own advocacy efforts at their institutions and in the broader language education field. This session contributes to the ongoing conversation about language equity in academia, with a particular focus on multilingual students attending community colleges.
Presenter: Bita Bookman
This interactive workshop invites participants to explore the opportunities and challenges surrounding generative AI and writing instruction. Together, we will ponder how generative AI might be leveraged to help democratize the writing process while also considering how we might help students gain confidence in developing and expressing their own authentic voices.
Presenter: Ann Shadden
This panel will examine our fledgling ESL Noncredit/Multilingual Program whose mission is “to support multilingual literacies and promote language diversity by honoring the voices and rich cultural heritages of the multilingual students on our campus and surrounding communities through scholarly research, student-centered engagement, and community outreach.” We will begin by providing an overview of the program, including its exigence, purpose, and set-up. We will then describe what we hoped to have happen vs. what really happened, noting material, professional, and institutional challenges we continue to wrestle with. Lastly, instead of using our experiences as a blueprint for best practices, we will instead invite discussion from colleagues to help share their own experiences in building, sustaining, and championing similar programs. Our hope is, that by sharing our collective experiences, we can all come away with something useful as we engage in similar work. Moreover, we also hope to build a community of support across the California Community College System and beyond.
Presenters: Chloe de los Reyes and Herberth “Alex” Jaco
Join us as we share how to start the semester off in your English composition course to set the tone for a linguistically just community. We’ll share our linguistic justice unit of readings, activities and assignments as well as discuss grading and using students’ own writing goals in assessment.
Presenters: Rachel Spangler and Alex White
View examples, then draft your own (or revise one you brought) writing assignment and assessment that encourages linguistic and rhetorical choices and play as the mode of learning, and teaches the course learning outcomes. This method is based on the antiracist concepts of contract grading and labor-based grading, and comes out of antiracist writing assessment grant work in Washington State led by Asao Inoue. Leave with links to videos on how to make ungrading work well with Canvas.
Presenter: Lisa Bernhagen
This session will focus on a soon-to-be-published scholarly chapter in Reconceptualizing Feedback published by Utah State University Press. In it I’ll share what I’ve learned from students about how to give better feedback, to stop focusing on error, giving prescriptive feedback, and harming students with the unnecessary assimilationist pedagogies. In it I’ll share the guiding questions I created for linguistic justice-focused assessment and a sample rubric, the LSR, or Less Shitty Rubric.
Presenter: Michelle Gonzales
This workshop tackles the challenge of fostering equitable learning spaces for multilingual students through Question-Based Pedagogy (QBP). The presenter advocates for an empowering shift, encouraging students to actively seek feedback. The session includes activities like traditional feedback sessions, literature reviews, and QBP presentations. Participants engage in hands-on experiences learning how the presenter revised her in-class activities, making them question based. The workshop's aim is to build a writing community that respects cultural identity, historical context, and critical cultural needs. Attendees leave equipped to implement QBP in their classrooms. The outcome includes revised syllabi and involvement in six QBP-related activities, promoting inclusive learning environments and student empowerment.
Presenter: Lauren Mecucci Springer
This workshop provides an opportunity to learn about, and engage with, a version of contract grading that has been adopted by the entire first-year writing program at Arcadia University as part of the program’s larger commitment to language equity. The presenters will share program-wide data about student reactions to the language equity aspects of alternative grading practices, with an emphasis on issues like decentering “standard” grammar and encouraging students’ own styles and varieties of English. We’ll end with a discussion of how instructors in our FYW program are revising class practices and materials in response to this student data. Participants will have opportunities to share their own experiences, ask questions throughout the session, and receive materials they can use with their own classes.
Presenters: Willow DiPasquale and Rachel Collins
One day, I asked myself: Would I read any of the essays my students wrote if I wasn't their teacher? My answer was an emphatic "Oh, hell nah." This simple test became my guiding principle: teach students how to write so that someone in the real world would read it.
This required a shift. The most fundamental was audience, the starting point for any writer.
In this workshop, I’ll share my first two formal writing assignments: a letter to your younger self and a love letter. Through reimagining audience, students could now access the full range of their linguistic repertoire.
Presenter: Dickson Lam
This interactive workshop will discuss cooperative learning and valuing the classroom as the center of societal change. Personal practices will be shared on using equity-based groups to increase tolerance and encouraging translanguaging to promote language equity. Simultaneously, participants will be invited to collaborate on what is considered ”proper, standard" English in the ESL classroom.
Presenter: Camillia Trombino
Decolonizing the language of photography involves examining and challenging the colonial legacy embedded in the terminology associated with photography. By doing this, one is able to reclaim narratives, diversify perspectives, question power dynamics, acknowledge histories, and promote ethical practices. Using presentation and discussion methods, this session will briefly look at the history of the lexicon of photography before delving into the ways that simple changes in vocabulary can help to create a more inclusive and equitable space within the world of photography.
Presenter: Jeremiah Gilbert