Creating the Conditions: Empowering Communities in Writing and General Education
(Panel)Joshua Fausty (Kean University)
How do writing and general education programs create conditions for communities that empower themselves—sustaining, growing, and often exceeding their original design? This panel invites papers that examine collaborative relationships among students, near-peers, tutors, and faculty that form in and around writing instruction and beyond, with particular interest in work that attends to the unexpected: encounters, connections, and forms of growth that arise when pedagogy exceeds the transactional to become genuinely communal.
Papers might address—for example—embedded tutoring or near-peer mentoring in composition; teaching-and-learning communities (communities of practice) among faculty, tutors, and students; writing or Gen Ed programs at HSIs, HBCUs, or open-access institutions; the relationship between first-year instruction and identity transformation; intergenerational writing communities and alumni engagement; or the challenges that AI poses to authentic intellectual and creative development. Empirical, theoretical, and reflective approaches are welcome, as is work that bridges composition pedagogy, approaches to general education, and literary (or other forms of) community-building.
This panel examines how writing and general education programs create conditions for communities that empower themselves, sustaining, growing, and exceeding their original design.