Event Date: February 2, 2024

Event Location: Online

Deadline to Submit a Proposal: October 23, 2023

The USC Writing Program’s Upper Division Curriculum Committee welcomes proposals for “Uncharted Territories: Genre, Audience and Innovation in Advanced Writing Contexts.” This one-day online event aims to bring together teachers of advanced and/or upper-division college composition courses to discuss innovative methods and best practices for widening and strengthening student engagement with diverse genres and audiences. Join us to explore emerging developments, as we strive to help our students become more effective communicators, critical thinkers, and rhetorical citizens in today’s rapidly changing world.

Context

Advanced Writing has been persistently and notoriously difficult to define. Indeed, there’s a long history—even among composition scholars—of confusion surrounding what Advanced Writing is. As early as the 1950s, gatherings at the Conference of College Composition and Communication included conversations about how to demarcate this terrain, which ended with no clear answers except that it was certainly time for a drink. 

But does it matter that, after all this time, attempts to formulate a precise definition have failed? The strength of this area of teaching and scholarship may largely reside in this ambiguity, which creates flexibility for experimentation, diverse methodologies, and multi-modal creativity. Perhaps it is time to renew this discourse, not because it is necessary to resolve the question of what advanced writing is but because it is fruitful to ask: What are we doing with our Advanced Writing classrooms in this wide-open space?

This symposium seeks to create a space for Advanced Writing teachers to gather, share materials, and support each other as we teach our students how to write in various public-facing contexts and genres, and how to address a range of audiences. What genres are teachable? How are we innovating as we design assignments and lessons? How are technological changes and new media transforming genres, audiences, and pedagogical practices? To create a space wherein teachers can inspire other teachers, we are especially interested in sessions that emphasize innovative pedagogy and praxis. 

Questions & Issues: We welcome proposals for panels, individual presentations, and workshops related to any of the following topics:  

• Fresh approaches to audience & genre

• Assignment innovation: experiments in assignment design, supporting students in creating products, student autonomy in defining audiences or selecting genres

• Digital literacies; teaching multimedia or multi-modal assignments, podcasts, videos, Medium.com & other online publishing

• Generative AI. Incorporating AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude; harnessing LLMs as tools; ethical considerations; plagiarism

• A fully formed panel (3-4 presenters) organized around an issue of your own design related to audience & genre in upper division writing courses 

We also hope to populate a series of roundtables with both educators and students on the following issues. Participants who wish to invite one of their students to join the conversation too can indicate that in their proposal.

• Alternative Modes of Assessment (collaborative grading; ungrading; unilateral, labor-based, and empathy-based grading contracts; specification grading)

• Assessing Unconventional Assignments (Once students are producing work that befuddles standard rubrics, how should it be evaluated? How can unorthodox projects be introduced into the socialized portfolio grading context? Does group assessment stifle innovation? How can we (should we) look to reshape group assessment to fairly and consistently evaluate works that don't conform to the traditional portfolio model?

• Personal Statements for Graduate School, Fellowships, and Awards

• Generative AI:How are instructors incorporating it into pedagogy? How are students responding?   

• Advanced Writing + the situation of writing/comp programs (staffed mostly by NTT faculty) within the contemporary university

What To Send Us: Proposals of 200-450 words.

• Panel proposals: 3-4 speakers organized around a theme or issue of your choice

• Individual presentation proposals: 1-2 speakers delivering a single talk/paper

• Workshop proposals: Sessions focused on discussion, collaboration, audience participation, and workshop activities

• Roundtable: Join one of our pre-set roundtables by telling us about your relationship to and expertise in the topic and what you would contribute to the conversation

Proposal Submission Deadline: Friday, October 23, 2023

Please submit Proposals via this GOOGLE FORM.

For any questions about developing your proposal, contact Tamara Black at tamarabl@usc.edu or Elizabeth Durst at edurst@usc.edu with the subject line “Advanced Writing Symposium.”