Carrie James, a CWS PhD Candidate in Curriculum & Instruction, and Ryan Ware, a CWS PhD Candidate in English will be presenting their Graduate Research Forum (GRF) talks on Friday, May 6th from 11:00am - 12:30pm. Both presenters will deliver individual 30-35-minute talks, followed by 20 minutes of Q&A. See below for talk abstracts and speaker bios.
CWS GRF talks are prepared and delivered by advanced CWS graduate students. These talks are based upon graduate students' dissertation research. GRF talks are also necessary prerequisites for those graduate students earning writing studies concentrations with their degrees.
If you are interested in attending, please contact CWS Assistant Directors Megan Mericle (mericle2@illinois.edu) or Finola McMahon (finolam2@illinois.edu) for the Zoom information.
---
Carrie James
"A Journey of Becoming: Examining the Impact Human-Centered Design Has on Pre-Service High School English Teachers' Instructional Practice"
Abstract: While our country has become increasingly diverse, our teacher population has continued to remain predominantly white, middle-class, and female. How do we prepare future English teachers to be responsive to their students’ lived experiences when their own positionality in the world is often quite different? I argue that the answer partially lies in how we prepare pre-service teachers in their teacher preparation program. To explore this, I adopted a design-based research approach, designing and implementing an instructional intervention in an introductory English education methods course that guides PSTs in the processes of human-centered design. The intervention aimed to foster empathetic instructional practices that are designed to embrace and sustain students’ out-of-school literate practices, funds of knowledge, and cultural heritages. Based on an analysis of interviews, observations, and artifacts, the PSTs in this study have demonstrated broader definitions of the discipline of English, more complex explanations of what it means to teach and teach English, and attempts to design instruction that incorporates both multiple literacies and culturally responsive learning experiences. With further iterations in process, this work suggests that incorporating human-centered design, and more importantly an emphasis on teaching with empathy, could help PSTs to better enact culturally sustaining teaching practices and center students in their instructional designs.
Bio: Carrie L. James (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Curriculum & Instruction with a concentration in Writing Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a former English teacher, she sees research as an opportunity to collaborate with pre-service and in-service teachers to (re)imagine what it means to teach English in secondary school settings, including supporting teachers as they develop instructional practices that guide and support diverse student populations to develop and maintain diverse literate practices. She has presented at several conferences including at the Literacy Research Association, the American Education Research Association, and International Society of the Learning Sciences annual conferences. She also co-wrote a chapter on writing instruction best practices with Dr. Sarah McCarthey for the second edition of Best Practices of Literacy Leaders.
Ryan Ware
"Dialogic Tracing of Trajectories of Semiotic (Un)Becoming"
Abstract: Scholarship on trajectories of semiotic becoming (Prior, 2018) with literate activities is of growing interest in Writing Studies, particularly in accounts of writing grounded in cultural-historical and dialogic approaches, and in lifespan accounts of writing. I describe a research project that contributes to those conversations by following members of The Clergy Project, a nonprofit organization for priests, pastors, ministers, nuns, imams, rabbis, etc., who have lost faith and are secretly harboring nonbelief in clergy roles, or who have or are transitioning from clergy roles to secular lives after losing faith. The project’s key questions are framed around the roles literate activity played in individuals’ loss of faith, and traces trajectories of (un)becoming that are dynamically nonlinear, necessarily messy, and predicated on exceptionally complex streams of times, places, life experiences, artifacts, and literate activities. However, this talk focuses a fair amount on dialogic methods for tracing becoming with literate activities, and looks closely at two data exemplars from the wider project. I argue that Writing Studies needs flexible, theoretically-grounded methods to trace becoming across lifespan trajectories, methods that support dialogic openings, and deepening and enrichment of individuals’ storied experiences with lifespan writing.
Bio: Ryan Ware (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in Writing Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His work has appeared in Written Communication and the proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education. His research focuses on cultural-historical approaches to situated semiosis that foreground literate activity.
