“‘You Have to Act…’: An Intersection of Teaching, Mothering, and Activism.” Conference on College Composition and Communication, Pittsburgh, PA, March 2019. (Accepted Proposal)

“‘You Have to Act…’: An Intersection of Teaching, Mothering, and Activism.” Conference on College Composition and Communication, Pittsburgh, PA, March 2019. (Accepted Proposal)

Grant:
Lecturers' Professional Development Fund (LPDF)
Academic Year:
2018 - 2019 (June 1, 2018 through May 31, 2019)
Funding Requested:
$1,306.00
Project Dates:
-
Applicant(s):
arconway
Overview of the Project:
I have been accepted to present at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the flagship conference for rhetoric and writing. The theme of the conference is “Performance-Composition, Performance-Rhetoric” and is chaired by Vershawn Ashanti Young. In my teaching, I enact a labor contract as a form of anti-racist writing assessment. My labor contract is influenced by Young and other writing scholars. At CCCC, I will learn more about overlapping topics of interest (code-meshing, intercultural communication, and representations of race) from the framework Young has established for the 2019 conference. Thus, by attending CCCC I seek to bolster my research-based teaching by learning more about evolving theories of how performance shapes embodied understandings of language and literacy.

My CCCC presentation, “‘You Have to Act’: An Intersection of Teaching, Mothering, and Activism,” investigates how academic mothers balance numerous labor commitments, including activism, by incorporating community-based learning into their teaching. My participation with this panel continues a research project on motherhood and activism that I began last year. Presenting on the panel also offers an opportunity to develop future collaborations with fellow panelists and attendees who teach community-based learning courses and who want to advocate for more supportive working environments for mothers.

By attending CCCC, not only will I share my own knowledge production, but I will also learn from the numerous panels and special-interest groups in area clusters related to my research and teaching interests: First-year and Advanced Composition; Language; Community, Civic & Public; and Writing Pedagogies and Processes.

Final Report Fields
Project Objectives:

1.The primary objective of this project was to conduct research and to share initial findings with disciplinary colleagues. 2.By attending the conference where I presented, I was also able to learn from colleagues via workshops and panel presentations for the benefit of my research and teaching

Project Achievements:

After presenting at the conference, one audience member asked to cite my presentation paper in a book she has under contract about mothers in higher education. The keynote address at the conference engendered much positive and negative response, including racist backlash (an Inside Higher Ed article briefly covered the controversy). In one first-year writing course where students are writing essays about discourse communities and where we have studied white racial habitus of language, I informed my students about this aforementioned controversy in my own discourse community. I will be able to implement accessibility and grant writing practices I learned from a “Cripping the Classroom” workshop and a “Grant Writing Pedagogy” workshop, respectively. After my social media work at the conference, I have moved into a formal service position in my field: Social Media Content Creator, Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. I used my research project as a model for teaching how to prepare an elevator speech in my Professional Writing course.

Continuation:
I will continue to collect and analyze survey results. I will reach out to interview participants over the summer. My goal is to write an article based on this research; the target journal is Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition.

Dissemination:
the department has various newsletters that cover faculty achievements. I will include mention of my eventual article in one of these e-newsletters.
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