2018 Conference on the Teaching of Writing

Keynote Address (captioned)

Dr. Jason Palmeri (Miami University) and Dr. Ben McCorkle (OSU at Marion)

Some fifty years ago, in 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” Forty years later (in 2007), in her Chair’s Address to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Kathleen Blake Yancey observed that new media and composing technologies had led to the invention of new genres as well as to the creation of a new writing public. And in the decade since Yancey’s riveting talk, these new media and composing technologies have become progressively “newer,” allowing, and inviting, us in the college writing course to now also more readily produce rather than just consume new media and new messages.

What does the teaching of writing with new media and new messages mean — and look like — for you? During this conference, we’re asking:

  • How have new media and composing technologies transformed the intellectual work of college writing?
  • How can we address or incorporate some of the genres of new media and new messages that students often use to compose outside of class?
  • How can traditional conceptions of rhetoric inform our engagement with multimodal composition? Conversely, how can digital work reinvigorate traditional conceptions of rhetoric?
  • How can we foster multimodal literacies in those cases when learning environments don’t offer students sufficient access to digital technologies?
  • What particular activities and assignments have we successfully used in composing with new media and/or new messages? How are instructors employing remix or remediation in the teaching of writing?

The 2018 Conference on the Teaching of Writing took place at the University of Connecticut’s Hartford campus on Friday, April 6.