Given the increased quantity of, and emphasis on, essays in the college application process, we set out to incorporate best practices and personal experiences to create a program to support our students, who are primarily first-generation college applicants. In this session, we share activities, strategies, and relationship-building techniques, each designed with the needs of first-generation students in mind, to provide you with tools to help your students overcome barriers and pursue their post-secondary dreams.
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Website:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FpubSbSsO80QbvmAAwQXzCVTTCoNbQONLWKD2xp14DY/edit?usp=sharing
Argument-centered instruction (ACI) has been receiving heightened attention from education leaders in recent years, as the Brookings Institution study Resolved and the 2024 PBS documentary Beyond Debate indicate. Traditional classrooms are becoming communities of genuine intellectual inquiry, as students engage with challenging texts and content within a framework formed by salient, exigent, rich, and open questions. ACI has been refreshing and in some places redeeming the study of long-form fiction – i.e., the novel. This workshop will use these four great novels to show participants exactly how to argumentalize the teaching of the novels in their curricula: Caramelo, The Great Gatsby, Maus I & II, and Things Fall Apart. This session requires participants to bring a device to the session.
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In this session, I will share a little about my revised composition course. For the first time, I tried cookbooks as the “text” in second-semester composition. This session will explain my process and some early impressions of this change since this semester (Spring 2025) is the first run of the concept. The rationale came from a desperate need to help students engage with writing on their own terms rather than a reliance on ChatGPT.
I am a scholar of popular culture and usually use those types of text in second-semester composition, but that approach was failing me–and my students—with the rise of LLM tools. The idea came to me when I noticed an episode of Kitchen Nightmares on TV. I wondered if that could be the center of the class. I did some research and found that some libraries, including Michigan State University, had a significant historical cookbook collection. I then remembered a fellow scholar at one of the Popular Culture Association Summer Research Institutes I attended who was studying the marginalia in the Bowling Green State University’s library collection of cookbooks. I put the ideas together, and with the help of a $1 per book used bookstore in my community and some donations from fellow faculty, Composition II: Food Writing, rolled out in January. The class process will be discussed in the session. A preview: Each student receives a randomly selected cookbook on the first day of class. That book will be described as “individualized cookbook” in the presentation. The individualized cookbook becomes the text for the class. By that I mean, each individualized cookbook will be the artifact students will use to craft their assignments. COM 102 requires (from the transfer-level codes) a text from which students create arguments and the formal research assignment. Each individualized cookbook is different; thus, students will learn to engage with audience, purpose, context, and the ethos of authorship in a variety of ways.
Learn how to empower students to take ownership of their learning by implementing practical strategies to foster resilience and collaboration. Gather practical, structured feedback techniques to use in your next class activity, and watch your students set and reach their goals, build relationships, and take pride in their academic journey.
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