Wayne State University’s Rhetoric & Writing Program and Wayne’s Rhetoric Society of America (WRSA) chapter present:

Teaching of Writing Conference: Rhetoric outside the lines

Despite the Conference of College Composition and Communication’s adoption of a statement affirming students' right to “their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style” in 1974, and the reaffirming since, teaching writing has remained within the lines of white language supremacy.Scholars in recent years have advocated rethinking rhetoric and the teaching of writing outside the lines. For instance, the founding of the Institute of Race, Rhetoric, and Literacy in 2021 crafted a new vision for explicitly anti-racist first-year writing commitment. In response to the BLM movement and contemporary racial injustices, many universities, and specifically many English departments have created their own statements to support diversity, equity, and inclusion. These efforts have included but are not limited to new commitments to linguistic justice, efforts to support hiring and retaining BIPOC faculty members, and emphasizing minoritized rhetorics in undergraduate and graduate curricula. This conference aims to continue these efforts and support a community of scholars to further these conversations.

We recognize that “rhetoric outside the lines” can mean many things. For the 2023 Teaching of Writing Conference, we invite you to join us in conversation about how to expand and extend these recent efforts by engaging rhetoric outside of its traditional boundaries as teachers of writing in, across, and beyond our institutions, whether in geographic, political, social, or professional communities, or classrooms.

●     How does incorporating non-western rhetoric, such as a focus on the community rather than individual, revise the relationship between speaker and audience in the writing classroom?

●     How do decolonial and cultural rhetorics impact our students’ identities and contributions in the writing classroom?

●     How have common language practices and their perpetuation in university spaces contributed to white supremacist behaviors in the writing classroom, and how might we further interrogate this complicity?

●     How have feminist rhetorical and pedagogical practices challenged traditional rhetoric inside the classroom?

●     How do queer rhetorics contribute to rethinking rhetoric in the teaching of writing?

●     What assignments or projects encourage “rhetoric outside the lines” to our first-year writing programs and students?

●     What communicative practices outside of traditional rhetoric might offer new insight into our and our students’ ways of being in the writing classroom?

Proposals for the 2023 Teaching of Writing Conference are due by January 31, 2023. The conference will take place at Wayne State University on Friday, March 24, 2023.

Click here to submit an individual proposal.

Click here to submit a panel proposal.

We proactively seek authors whose work reflects BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ scholarship. To help you with this, we encourage you to refer to these sources: Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq's MMU Scholar Bibliography, Andrew Hollinger's Alternative Texts and Critical Citations for Anti-Racist Pedagogies, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Chris Lindgren, and Sweta Baniya's bibliography features works by BIPOC scholars in technical communication, and Cruz Medina's NCTE CCCC Latinx Caucus Bibliography. We welcome proposals for either individual or panel presentations. Sessions will be 60-minutes long and should be planned to allow at least 20 minutes of Q&A and conversation. Proposals should include a title, a session description of 200 words or fewer, and identification of any technology or accessibility needs. If you have any questions about the proposal process or the conference itself, please contact the Assistant Director of Composition, Colleen Hart, at colleenhart(at)wayne.edu or the President of WRSA, Mariel Krupansky, at mariel.krupansky(at)wayne.edu.