Call for Participants

Our SSHRC funded project seeks to make postsecondary writing support more inclusive with your help. Those of us who work with students to support their writing regularly confront and challenge oppressive norms that reproduce ableism, whiteness, Standardized English, and colonization (among other intersectional oppressions). These problematic norms are often silently reproduced via various university structures connected to writing (e.g. admissions requirements, grading standards, teaching materials, placement and exit exams, etc.).

Here’s where you come in: If you teach writing classes, work as a writing centre tutor, make decisions about writing requirements for students at a college or university in Canada, then you are someone with experience in Writing Studies. You have likely produced reports, teaching materials, curriculum plans, and other studies as part of this work. As we all know, there are few venues to share this unpublished (yet vital) knowledge or “grey literature” in Canada.

The work you do is important, and it needs to be shared. We invite you to participate in our efforts to make what’s happening with Writing Studies in Canada more effective and responsive to the needs of our students and institutions by sharing your “grey literature.” The work and insights you share will shed light on what’s happening in our classrooms, programs, and institutions by way of four workshops:

• Postsecondary Writing and Citational Justice
• Postsecondary Writing, Belonging, and Identity
• Postsecondary Writing, Accessibility and Technology
• Postsecondary Writing and Working Conditions

We ask participants to submit at least one piece of “grey literature” (such as a course outline, unpublished research, report – see below for more suggestions) and attend the workshop relevant to your submission. Each workshop will feature a keynote speaker and discussion related to the workshop theme with an eye to both sharing and synthesizing this knowledge. The outputs of these workshops will be in the form of position statements, policy briefings, and relevant open-access resources that practitioners and administrators can adapt to evolve their approaches to writing instruction and support. Let’s create resources that will benefit us all!

Workshops

“Postsecondary Writing and Citational Justice” (tentative dates are Sept 17, 24, 25) invites participants to share how they work to reverse racist and exclusionary research practices through their methods or research and writing as well as how they help students understand and practice inclusive research.

“Postsecondary Writing, Belonging, and Identity” (tentative dates are Sept 17, 24, 25) asks participants to discuss how they use writing instruction to foster belonging in postsecondary classrooms, specific discourse communities, and in a larger community of scholars and writers.

“Postsecondary Writing, Accessibility and Technology” (tentative dates are Oct 15, 22, 23) gathers experts to critically examine the relationship between technology and accessibility, with an eye towards developing insights into opportunities (multimodality, accessibility, digital literacy) and challenges (academic integrity) for writing instruction.

“Postsecondary Writing and Working Conditions” (Oct 15, 16, 22, 23) asks participants to discuss the state of labour, including its precarity, that is foundational to writing instruction and support in postsecondary institutions in Canada.

What Can I Submit?

The following is not an exhaustive list, but here are some suggestions for submission (please note that these submissions are not listed in order of importance):

• Academic Integrity policies
• Accessibility policies and statements
• Anti-racism statements
• Artificial Intelligence tools policies
• Assessment methods
• Assignment instructions/options
• Blog posts
• Conference papers
• Course design materials
• Course outlinesDissertations (or excerpts)
• Funded or unfunded grant proposals
• Info about admissions, placement, tracking data
• Learning outcomes statements
• Mission statements
• Program assessment summaries
• Proposals
• Training materials (for TAs, RAs, multi-section courses)
• Tutoring materials
• Reports
• Unpublished research
• White papers
• And anything you think would be helpful

Submission Information

Deadline: June 10, 2024
Please submit using this form (housed on servers in Canada): Submission Form