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Workshops

Thursday

W1 — Heal (Help Encourage Affirm Listen): A Workshop on Community-Based Writing Instruction

Rhea Estelle Lathan, Florida State University
Micaela Cuellar, Florida State University
Sam Kronforst, Florida State University

This workshop consists of two 30-minute interactive sessions followed by discussion focuses aims to demonstrate how to facilitate participant engagement with community partners through the following contexts:

  • Writing Centers: In Sam’s research, he establishes a proof of concept of a community-based writing center grounded in African rhetorical principles that centers empathy, invitation, and healing despite continually conflicting with a history of broken partnerships between a large public university and a community-based public library. In response to justifiable concerns by many community members of color, Sam continually reworks language in and delicately navigates conversations with them.Thus, his workshop invites participants to adopt the roles of consultant/consultee in mock one-on-one consultations, grounded in an Afrocentric rhetorical framework in order to experience navigating through difficult conversations underneath threatening political pressures emblematic of current community and higher-education writing environments.
  • Writing Workshops: Micaela’s session will connect scholarship about community-based literacy practices with writing workshops that are pedagogically informed by practices of healing and the arts, engaging attendees by prompting collective storytelling, as rooted in Writing and Healing pedagogy and Black feminist methods of survival. Micaela will share some preliminary data collected and analyzed from previously hosted community-based writing workshops and will incorporate in a small group discussion, guided free-writing, and the opportunity to explore our own social and emotional literacies. 

Through both sessions and the subsequent discussion, workshop participants will leave with materials (via QR Code) for practical application along with on peer feedback to aid in the implementation of community-based writing instruction in their own communities.

W2 — Designing Just Futures via Food Justice in Classroom, Community, and Research Projects

Food justice is a design principle for research, teaching, and community writing projects. Participants will work with facilitators to design projects that support food justice in their own communities.

Micro-presentations:

Designing Food justice-oriented courses, including:  

  • An analysis of ways a food theme in First-Year Composition (FYC) enhances or distracts students from achieving the Council of Writing Program Administration’s (CWPA) learning outcomes and programmatic cultural competencies. Brienna Duloz (Eastern Oregon University & Ohio University)
  • An overview of a course on food literacies that unpacks the U.S. food system with an eye toward food justice. Eileen Schell (Syracuse University)
  • A reflection on college writing classes that employ permaculture and anti-racist writing pedagogies to design food justice and community writing projects in school and community gardens. Stephanie Wade (Stony Brook University)
  • A description of travel-based Alternative Spring Break courses focused on issues of land, language, and power in the rural West. Cori Brewster (Eastern Oregon University)
  • An overview and reflection of how specific critical food literacies (CFLs) appear in a co-taught Food Science senior project course. Dianna Winslow (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo)

Designing food justice activist research and advocacy:

  • An appeal to audiences to notice how agribusinesses use rhetorical affect to recenter white masculinity, secure a future based on trust of industrial-scale farming, and prop up the hydrocarbon economy. Abby Dubisar (Iowa State University)
  • An analysis of findings from interview-based research and volunteer experience on agriculture in the Catholic Worker movement. Shaya Kraut (Iowa State University)
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W3 — The East Colfax StoryWalk: Celebrating Authentic Voice and Story through Neighborhood Art and Poetry

Courtney E. Morgan, Sidewalk Poets
Abby Templeton Greene, Sidewalk Poets

Come and learn about The East Colfax Story Walk: a two-part project comprising storytelling workshops (held in various languages) and public art. Locals from Denver’s East Colfax neighborhood including long-term residents, members of the large neighborhood refugee and immigrant populations, as well as youth and adults, participated in storytelling workshops. Their writings were then turned into public art, displayed in various ways throughout the neighborhood. Join us as we celebrate and honor this creative collaboration through visual photographs, maps, anecdotes, and documentation of this community walk as we take part in witnessing one of Denver’s often forgotten and most ‘unseen’ neighborhoods. This 90 minute workshop will also include writing prompts and exercises. 

W4 — Everything Changes and Nothing Stands Still: Deepening Place-Based Connections through Archival Research and Partnered Exploration

Ruth Boeder, Wayne State University

Living in a built environment, such as a city, town, or even village, necessarily means we are walking among the remainders of our collective history. What might the buildings, streets, and overall design of our shared spaces tell us? We will explore the concept of “archives” as a tool for exploring and forming collective memory within the designed, built environment that surrounds us, in three parts: 

  1. I’ll share a story of my own learning from ancestors, caused by a pressing need to learn about the buildings they had created. I explain the power of this learning moment by using material rhetorics to frame my experience.
  2. Next, participants will explore current archival resources, both digital and physical, available in and for their communities. 
  3. We will examine the genre of finding aids, or rather a twist on the genre that I call an “exploration guide”. After hearing how this tool has helped me make organizational and neighborhood history come alive for my contemporary audiences, participants will start drafting a guide that presents their new archival-based insights to their own contexts and audiences. 

Participants will leave the workshop ready to conduct similar sessions in the future. In preparing for and facilitating such moments, participant-leaders can create connections with material rhetorics on a visceral level, for themselves and for their audiences. This work becomes all the more urgent within broader social dynamics that call into question whose memories will be honored, how public spaces can be utilized, and what history can be recorded. 

W5 — Designing Community Writing Circles for Justice

Tru Leverette Hall, University of North Florida
Jennifer Wolfe, Women Writing for a Change Jacksonville

Community writing is essential, therapeutic, action-oriented, and coalition-building, and contextual—existing at the nexus of a particular time and place and with a particular group of people. How do we design community writing opportunities to best foster these qualities? What are the best ways to engage with the space, place, time, and people involved, and what outcomes are desired? This interactive workshop helps participants answer these questions by engaging the writing and community-building protocols of Women Writing for (a) Change (WWfaC). We intend for this workshop to enact the design protocols and practices of WWfaC and, through the container of the circle, to help participants engage with questions centering space, place, and time:

  •     How do we harness the gifts of a particular space, place, time, and group of people to further justice work? 
  •     How do we use writing in community to question and challenge injustices and design a more just future? 
  •     What are the practices and protocols that best create space for collaboration and connection? 
  •     What are the benefits of contemplative writing, often seen as solitary, when it is practiced in community? 
  •     How might land-based community connections (such as writing in community gardens or other public spaces) help further justice work within and beyond those communities? 
  •     How does writing within these particular land-based spaces make our justice work more fruitful? 

In asking participants to work through these questions, we hope to model ways of answering them, helping participants consider how they might utilize community writing as they design their own justice work beyond the circle. 

W6 — Poetry Between the Coordinates: Experiences of PWI in Cultural History Context

Heather Cleary, University of Toledo
DaMarco Hill
Duvonna Goins
Recorded (Mary MacDonald, Daija Banks, Mitchell Pei)

 Graduate students in medicine and social work came together to write raw poetry using co-created writing prompts to elicit narratives of childhood memories of neighborhood segregation and experiences of a predominantly white university. This project was inspired by participatory action research (PAR) initial analysis of published work by high school and university students involved in a community writing project called Fearless Writers that focuses on youth-led research on social justice topics. In this case of this presentation, social separation and implicit bias caused by the U. S. history of discriminatory housing and banking practices (redlining) were the community writing project focus. The raw writing by graduate students was then woven with cultural history investigation of student childhood neighborhood coordinates. These poems and cultural histories of neighborhoods will be shared with the audience. This is a unique approach to collaborative autoethnography. Cultural history method is used to put lived experience and personal, lyrical writing into cultural context and serves as a model of ways educators can listen more closely to student experience and consider the social determinants of high education experiences. Participants will have an opportunity to write using the Amherst Writers and Artist writing group method and have an opportunity to explore the social determinant factors of where they grew up and what discriminatory policy histories remain hidden to most of us. Participants will have an opportunity to reflect on how this collaborative autoethnographic exploration using poetry and cultural history is helpful to intergenerational and interracial knowledge creation.

W7 — Playing Games with the Future: A Try-It-Yourself Template for Community-Led Design

Kate Schapira, Brown University
Adriana Buller, Warren resident and environmental educator
Rafael Ash, Brown University

This workshop invites you to learn about, and try with others, an imaginative and collaborative community planning process through creative visioning and storytelling. Designed with and for Warren residents, whose town is strained by housing injustice and menaced by sea level rise, these games are adaptable to your city or town’s people and circumstances. Let’s play together! Here’s what we’ll do:

 1) “Cognitive mapping” of participants’ homes: In this warm-up, everyone draws a quick sketch of where they live now, including things you like and don’t like about it, and what you consider looming threats or changes. 

2) Collective design of an ‘ideal’ neighborhood within your community, working with the constraints or threats that participants have defined. On big paper on the wall, participants arrange paper cutouts of different elements of a neighborhood–houses and apartment buildings, businesses, water, trees and grass, roads and paths. Together, you’ll create a neighborhood that you’d like to live in.

3) A game to test three different proposals for addressing the agreed-upon community constraints or threats (with one option being “do nothing).  In small teams, taking notes, participants answer some big questions about their scenario, and consider what life there might be like for people in different positions if this plan took place. You’ll then read each others’ notes and mark the most important ones with stickers. Finally, you’ll come up with 2-3 questions to ask neighbors, and one to ask city officials, to invite them into the planning process. 

W8 — Human Faces, Human Stories: Saginaw

Phil Eich, Storyville

For many, the story of Saginaw is simple: an industrial boom town goes bust, creating poverty, blight, and a reputation as “one of the most dangerous cities in America”. 

But five years ago, Saginaw decided to start telling its own story. In 2019, Saginaw created a platform for the people of Saginaw to tell their own stories in their own words and then publish them on social media, and every week for the last five years, those stories have empowered citizens while reshaping how the world sees Saginaw and how Saginaw sees itself: not as a community defined by hardship, but by resilience, pride, and love.

In this workshop, we’ll explore the community storytelling model used by Saginaw, then break it down into a simple, three-step process that anyone—regardless of writing ability— can use to amplify the voices in any community.

No matter how you define the community you serve, this workshop will equip you with ideas and tools that create real change while making people feel seen, heard, and understood.

This interactive workshop will be presented in the form of a series of instructional modules followed by hands-on practice: 

  • The Story of Saginaw Storytelling
  • The App that Makes it Work
  • Storytelling isn’t a fad, it’s fundamental
    • Storytelling exercise
  • Great writing begins with great questions 
    • Interview exercise 
  • Storyteller vs. Story advocate 
    • Editing exercise 
  • Storytelling Applications 
     
    • Application Group Exercise

W9 — Co-Designing (Ex)Change Across the Fence

Paul Feigenbaum, University at Buffalo
Tania Lopez, Florida International University
Kathie Klarreich, Exchange for Change
Leeann Parker, L.E.A.P.
Annabella Baboun, Florida International University

From its inception in 2014, the South Florida based nonprofit Exchange for Change (E4C) has featured the voices and experiences of inside authors. Through various courses and practices, inside authors tell their own stories and raise awareness about the conditions incarcerated people face. These programs include: 

  1. The Luis Angel Hernandez Poet Laureateship, an honorary two-year position that highlights the talents of E4C’s most accomplished writers.  
  2. Twice annual End-of-Semester Showcase Graduation ceremonies.
  3. The Student Leadership Council (SLC), an organization created by the student body at large in each institution.

Crucially, all these programs are shaped actively by inside E4C students, who assert their humanity, claim their voice and identity, and assume leadership roles amid spaces that routinely deny them agency and autonomy and that seek to define them exclusively by their incarcerated status. In doing so, inside students actively co-design the nonprofit’s mission of (ex)change across the fence.

We will begin by providing brief context for Exchange for Change’s mission and the practices listed above (featuring work by the 2025-2026 Poet Laureates). The workshop’s primary focus will be for workshop attendees to work with materials related to E4C classes and graduations.

After completing these exercises, we will debrief as a full group. 

By observing (and participating in) how E4C co-designs (ex)change, attendees will learn practices that might guide their own designs for (ex)change, whether in connection to prison literacy or other community literacy projects.

W10 — Layered Voices: Graffiti as Community Building

Megan Simmermeyer, University of Pittsburgh
Gissell Del Castillo, University of Pittsburgh

Viewing graffiti through a lens of space and rhetorical tactic, we seek to lead participants in an interactive workshop to consider the role of layering in the artform. What does it mean to layer graffiti over a particular surface or space? How, too, does one artist layering their work over another’s contribute toward collaboration, or possibly, erasure? Which, in turn, can bring up questions of both individual and collective voice. As a public facing form of artwork, graffiti affords artists the opportunity of being heard and circulated widely. 

Our workshop grounds itself in an initial presentation of theoretical background before moving into a discussion of community context and practical tasks. We seek to engage with this practicality by involving workshop participants in a collaborative style of graffiti. Provided with various surfaces, such as small drywall panels or plywood, workshop participants will engage with design concepts of layering and the materiality of the surfaces on which graffiti manifests. Participants will use different mediums such as artists’ markers and stencils to overlap drawings on various surfaces and watch in real time the different tiers of art be created. 

After, we will engage in a discussion that centers questions of how such an act (layering) constitutes rhetorical moves, or uses of rhetorical tactics to imbue the art with meaning. By the end of the session, we will return to questions of practicality in terms of pedagogy and ask how workshop participants might bring these methods back to their own institutions, classrooms, and communities.

W11 — Our Tangled Roots and Textured Stories: A Workshop on Abolitionist World-Building, Radical Kinship, and Critical Cartography for Collective Liberation

Teigha Mae VanHester, Butler University

Weaving, braiding, and knitting are universal literacies, ever present in global Indigenous cultures and communities. The work of cultural rhetoric scholars like Carmen Kynard, Angela Haas, and Malia Powell ask scholar-activists to reorient our understanding of texts in ways that allow us to see these various forms of cultural literacy as key epistemological forms of resistance and meaning making. Through working with natural fibers – flora and fauna – indigenous communities have been crafting tapestries of justice, resilience, and kinship for millenia. This workshop seeks to channel this intellectual ancestry to consider how these communicative forms are sites where critical cartography, radical kinship, and abolitionist world-building take place.

The aim of this collective work is to equip participants with pedagogical insight to begin to consider the following questions:  

  • How do we make meaning with the maps we have been given?
  • How have lines erased our inherent need for communal solidarity and radical kinship? How can we reclaim it?
  • In what ways can we weave, braid, and knit critical cartography and facilitate radical reimagination and revolutionary thinking?
  • How do we weave committed to world-building for abolitionist futures? 

These practices cultivate a way for community-based scholar-activists to begin radically reimagining the ways we story ourselves into the revolution (past, present, and future). Through discussion, craftivism, and community; participants will build with the textured and nuanced agency as a collective. This workshop provides the opportunity to celebrate contradictions and complexities, learning from and through ‘our tangled roots’.

W12 — Write-In to Coda: (Re)Designing Creative Genres

Gabrielle Kelenyi, Lafayette College
Chad Seader, Northern Michigan University
Alison Turner, University of South Dakota, Vermillion
Stephanie Wade, Stony Brook University

The editors of Coda, a section of The Community Literacy Journal devoted to community writing and creative work, will host a write-in that aims to help writers develop material and help editors support writers. We will write in community with each other and engage in discussion about the genres that ensue from community engagement and activism. We will grapple with questions about delineating between the creative and the critical, connections and disparities between activism and community writing, and how experimental genres and subjects can deepen our understanding of community engagement through informal writing and discussion. First, attendees will be invited to write; facilitators will provide prompts, but attendees can also continue working on their own projects during this time. Then, facilitators and attendees will move into breakout groups to discuss their writing. This will serve as an opportunity for writers interested in publishing their work with Coda to get initial feedback from Coda editors, think about the role of the accompanying reflection, and potentially share the writing they just produced. We will conclude by reflecting in the large group about the challenges and affordances of designing creative genres in community writing contexts.  This workshop is for those who are thinking about how creative writing could help them understand their work; interested in writing about their community work; designing community writing projects and looking for publishing opportunities for themselves and participants in their projects; refining, responding to, and redesigning ongoing creative work ensuing from activism and/or community; and more!

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