I had the opportunity over the weekend to present on an outstanding panel at the Northeast Modern Language Association's 2018 meeting in Pittsburgh, PA titled Building a Better University: Creating A Culture of Collaboration. My presentation, "Putting it in Writing: Teaching Circles and Institutional Return on Investment," tackles how scheduled, officially-sanctioned meetings between writing program stakeholders … Continue reading NeMLA 2018: “Putting it in Writing”
Students always benefit from more rhetorical analysis. This is a simple statement that our disciplinary identities, the connotations that automatically form in our brains as rhetoricians and writing teachers, perhaps might function to cloud. What I mean to say here is not that (or not only that) students benefit from more rhetorical analysis assignments being … Continue reading Re-Framing RetroActive Composition
“One class down. Two more to go.” I can’t put a number on how many times I’ve whispered sentences like these under my breath over the past two years. Typically, I’ll find myself in a coffeeshop somewhere or perhaps at my living room table, hunched over a stack of papers that I’ve … Continue reading On UnGrading the Composition Classroom
A great deal of research in rhetoric, communication and composition in recent decades has attempted to bridge classrooms in higher education with deeper considerations of civic purpose, social activism and training for capable citizenship. However, these pushes toward community literacy and classroom advocacy have yet to fully consider the impact social web … Continue reading Stand Up!- Theorizing the Activist UnEssay, Pt. I
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
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
This is lifted from a creative piece I wrote a while back. It fits the mood of this Fourth of July well, when my mind drifts into fantasies of deserts, golden hayfields and cacti caked in the red glow of sunset--essentially anything recent political developments haven't infringed as of yet (as hard as Scott Pruitt … Continue reading A Prose Poem for the Fourth of July…
I've been reading a lot recently on literacy narratives, chronicles of time and transformation in which writers reflect on their past experiences reading, writing and communicating in conversation with others. I'm intrigued with what I might find myself writing were I to begin a literacy narrative project, especially considering my literacy, as it stands, is only just … Continue reading A Blast From the Past
Ambedo JD Richter To be successful in Millennial America without sacrificing soul and artistry—that was the goal, the tightrope to be walked in a concrete land of parking garages and traffic lights, where everything is bought and sold, where a person’s selfhood is bartered for attention and defined to the outside world as a collection … Continue reading Ambedo (A Chapter from A Novel Written Long Ago…)
In a few weeks, I'll be presenting at a writing classroom and pedagogy conference called Writing Matters. This year's theme is "The Work Of Writing," and will feature panels and presentations from a variety of K-16 teachers. This semester, I've been teaching my Freshman composition courses at SUNY Cortland through a blog, which we utilize … Continue reading Writing Matters
Jacob Richter 