CCW Academic Job Market Workshop

CCW members can access webinars and past webinars for free, using the discount code found in the Members Dashboard. If you are not a CCW member, you can learn more about membership here.

Part of the Coalition for Community Writing’s Vision Statement states, “We envision a transformation of higher education to encourage impactful curricula and research as essential outputs of institutions that serve as a vital part of their communities.”  As part of CCW’s mission to achieve this transformative vision, we support graduate students who work in community writing, community literacy, service-learning, and other high impact praxes to get a job after they leave graduate school.  We cannot have the transformation of higher education that we seek if graduate students and junior faculty are told not to do this kind of work until after they’ve gotten a job or after they’ve earned tenure.  Our communities won’t wait.

CCW’s Engaged Graduate Student Initiative presents the first workshop in our job market series — to support people on the academic job market to best showcase their work. We will offer alt-ac workshops this year, as well.

The Workshop

This online workshop, sponsored by the Coalition for Community Writing, will offer mentorship and advice to participants going on the academic job market this fall or in the future. It will be led by eight teacher-scholars in rhetoric and composition, a group of faculty who have either served on multiple academic search committees or who have recently successfully navigated the academic job market in tenure track, non-tenure track, and staff positions.  Our facilitators, who have deep experience with community writing and literacy projects, can offer advice related to how to search for jobs and how to frame community-engaged work in job market materials so that it is understandable and impressive to search committee members, especially those who may not be familiar with the value of this work.

We invite participants who are planning to go on the job market either this year or in the future, at any level of experience with community-engaged writing.

Facilitators will give a brief account of their experiences with successful academic job searches, as search committee members, as graduate student mentors, and other areas in which they can offer guidance. We will move in and out of breakout rooms in smaller groups, with a facilitator in each room to guide conversation and answer participant questions. While the facilitators will offer suggestions and guidance, others in the workshop may function as both mentor and mentee, based on experience. Participants will have the opportunity to switch breakout rooms several times, providing multiple chances to ask questions of some of the leaders in the field of community writing.