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.
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.
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.
High school teachers that work with students who lack the skills and confidence to be college ready know how difficult it is to capture their attention in the last quarter of the senior year. In this breakout session, I will walk you through a unit designed to engage students in a real-world debate by centering the discussion on controversial monuments in a way that not only captures their interest and reinforces their researching skills, but also offers shared historical context to one of America’s most troubling political choices without alienating students from any particular partisan stance. This session requires participants to bring a device to the session.
Revisions can be a useful tool for students to demonstrate understanding; however, time is the great barrier. How much time do the students need? When will I grade these? In this session, we will work to provide a narrower focus for students to revise small portions of their writing using specific wording from our rubric to practice the skills we want and to demonstrate their ability to meet expectations.
Session Materials
Even with a lot of support, teachers often believe that they have tried everything and become discouraged. Expand your “everything.” Bring energy, passion, and a positive attitude back to students who are struggling while developing their literacy skills. Become more aware of over 120 practices that will ignite improved student achievement and bring struggling learners the joy of success in school. Learn how to use powerful scaffolds to build the confidence and skillfulness of struggling and disinterested learners. See how you can add to your strategies that motivate students to become engaged, empowered, and ready to achieve without watering down content material and lowering standards. Participants will be involved in fast-paced reflection activities to more closely examine issues and options related to low student literacy performance.
In this energetic session, panelists with over 80 years of collective experience share how they design innovations to successfully tackle the puzzle of meeting the needs of a wide range of learners within a single classroom setting. Attendees will participate in interactive scenarios; learn to contribute to effective change; and receive procedures for developing discussion-centric, inquiry units to ignite student curiosity and honor their humanity.
This breakout session will use The Great Gatsby as a mentor text in guiding participants through the critical lenses of Marxist, Feminist, and Racial perspectives. By engaging with the text through these frameworks, participants will develop a deep understanding of how literature reflects and critiques social structures. This presentation will not only enhance participants’ literary analysis skills but also empower them to view their world with a critical and socially aware perspective. By bridging classic literature (or any text) with contemporary social issues, participants will gain a deeper appreciation of literature as a tool for understanding and change. Participants will walk away with hands on ideas on how to facilitate this lesson in their own classrooms. This session requires participants to bring a device to the session.
