I had the pleasure of presenting alongside a number of talented writers and writing educators at this past weekend's SUNY Council on Writing conference. My presentation on creative thinking's role in first-year composition classrooms was one of many that attempted to voice the inner intricacies and challenges facing our discipline as teachers of literacy and … Continue reading SUNY Council on Writing
Here's the body of what I'll present at the 2017 SUNY Council on Writing conference in Syracuse, NY. My talk is just that-- a talk-- so these notes are really only serving as memory aids. I won't be reading word-by-word directly from a conference paper, but rather will be verbally outlining a thesis on the … Continue reading Cognitive Seeds: The Role of Creative Thinking in First-Year Composition
Should first-year writing students choose their own essay topics? I’d like to take some time this morning to venture an interesting take on this question that has been turning around in my head for a few months now. Long a topic of boisterous debate within composition and rhetoric, the role of student … Continue reading Should Students Choose Their Own Writing Topics?: A Mindful Approach
I'd like to begin this post by posing a question to my readers, especially those involved in the ever-complicated undertaking that is the teaching of the craft of writing: how can we press our writing communities, whether they be inside of the college classroom or outside of it, to travel intellectually beyond current thinking into … Continue reading The Faces of Janus: Rothenberg, Divergent Thinking and the Productivity of Gray Areas
In a few weeks I'll be presenting at the 2017 SUNY Council on Writing conference to be held at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, NY. Here's the abstract of the presentation I'll deliver, which delves into creativity, cognition and the college writing classroom in the age of distraction. Cognitive Seeds: The Role of Creative Thinking … Continue reading Cognitive Seeds: 2017 SUNY Council on Writing Presentation
A recent report coming out of the Pew Research Center on U.S. politics and policy issues lays bare a startling dataset which paints a challenging-- and incredibly polarizing-- picture of how Americans view the landscape of higher education in 2017. The Pew report surveyed Americans registered to the two major political party affiliations on their … Continue reading Republicans and Higher Education
Composition and education have long questioned a central premise of the academy and university life in higher education: What is a classroom? Recent research published in Psychological Science steers us toward a premise that is of paramount interest to our discipline. What would it mean for the natural world to serve the acting, thinking brains of our … Continue reading Can We Hold Class Outside, Professor? Nature, Cognition and Composition
Blame it on Oprah. Blame it on One City One Book. Blame it on the declining reading habits of ordinary Americans (as recent popular wisdom would have you believe). Just about every highschool, community center and early-college common curriculum in the past decade or so has tried out some version of a community-read initiative. SUNY Cortland, … Continue reading On the Value of “Soft Reading”
In her article published just a few weeks ago in Enculturation, Bonnie Tucker lays out a theory of what she refers to as technocapitalist disability rhetoric. Technocapitalist disability rhetoric (what I'll call TCDR), in Tucker's conception, is a familiar representation trope in which technology and engineering corporations utilize depictions of disability in an attempt to associate their … Continue reading Wired Utopia: Expanding Technocapitalist Disability Rhetorics
Compositionists have in recent years begun, in a mode similar to the ethical, social and Sophistic turns of recent decades, the collective project of mobilizing the discipline to hold in greater esteem the cataclysmic situations of public concern unfolding in front of our eyes. We need only examine the evening news … Continue reading When Worlds Speak: Apocalypse, Composition, Critique
Jacob Richter 