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”
I spent Saturday writing and working with the Seven Valleys Writing Project and its members at Writing Matters V. This year's theme, Creating a Culture of Writers, was particularly attractive to me as I continue to pursue a career working within English and Writing departments within academia, and obviously as I prepare and construct pedagogies … Continue reading Writing Matters V (2018)- “Writing With Mirrors”
*** The following is an abstract submitted to the 2017 NeMLA convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania*** For the Fall 2017 semester, the SUNY Cortland composition program implemented “teaching circles” as a required, yet loosely-defined, obligation for all instructors teaching FYW in the program. Hoping to spur dialogue, conversation and communication among program stakeholders, the WPAs … Continue reading Putting it in Writing: Teaching Circles and Institutional Return on Investment
The scene is a familiar one. A student knocks reluctantly on my office door, enters the musty room with uncertainty and then proceeds to speak some deeply heartfelt words in a trembling, quivering voice. Something along the lines of “I do not feel comfortable with other people viewing the writing I produce for this class.” … Continue reading Discourse in Democracy: Composition, Digital Citizenship and the Crafting of Authentic Rhetorical Situations
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
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
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 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 