Dear colleagues,
Our fall online series continues with workshops on Autoethnography, Poetry, and Spiritual Writing. All events are offered free of charge and will take place on Zoom. Click here to register to attend one or more of the events (or paste this link in your browser: https://forms.gle/GmMJ6xPQjek69FzX9)! Registered participants will receive a Zoom link 1-2 days before each event. **Presenter biographies follow below.**
Friday, September 15, 3-4:30pm
Autoethnography as Resistance in the Academy: A Conversation Circle
Led by Liz DeBetta and RAsheda Young
Join AEPL board members Liz DeBetta, Ph.D. and RAsheda Young, Ph.D Candidate, for a conversation about Liz’s new book Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness and how autoethnography can be used to disrupt the canon and provide opportunities for critical writing that is humanizing, reflective, and grounded in theory. The conversation will be followed by time for Q & A with attendees.
The purpose of Conversation Circle is to give all members the chance to share their publications or works in progress with their colleagues. Let us know if you’d like to be next!
Friday, September 22, 3-4:30pm
Exploring International Poetics via Autoethnography
Led by Saurabh Anand
Join new AEPL member Saurabh Anand to explore how he used poetic autoethnography to study his experiences as a TESOL and international student-teacher. During the session, Saurabh will read some of the chapters’ poems and discuss the importance of International Poetics as a theme.
Friday, November 3, 3-4:30pm
The Genres of Spiritual Writing: Writing and Reading the Self and the Divine
Led by Joonna Trapp
Join long-time AEPL member Joonna Trapp as she shares her experiences teaching several iterations of an upper division, genre-based class, “Spiritual Writing.” She will discuss the perks and pitfalls of having students read spiritually inclined texts from vastly different forms and faith/secular contexts and why it is important to their development as persons, thinkers, and writers. The texts become models for student explorations of spiritual genres, such as the parable, the spiritual poem, meditations on place, pilgrimage narratives, letters of complaint, interviews, mission statements, and spiritual autobiographies. Students learn “knowing-the-self” spiritually and communally while learning to appreciate the multi-vocal range of spiritual rhetoric which has always been an avenue for change, resilience, and hope in the world. Participants in the workshop will have access to assignments, text lists, syllabi, and other documents to do their own adapting for their own teaching experiences.
Presenter biographies:
Dr. Liz DeBetta is an independent scholar-artist-activist committed to changing systems and helping people navigate trauma through creative processes. She believes that stories are powerful change agents and when we write them and share them we connect and heal. She has presented nationally and internationally on topics ranging from adoption and reproductive justice, using writing to heal trauma, gender-based violence, and resisting colonial paradigms in higher-ed. She has published articles on adoptee narratives and has an award winning one woman show called Un-M-Othered. Her book Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness is available from Brill Publishers. Find her on the web at www.LizDeBetta.com.
RAsheda Young, Assistant Teaching Professor at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, was one of thirteen faculty members from the School of Arts and Sciences awarded the Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education award in October 2022. One year prior, she was inducted into Asbury Park High School’s Distinguished Hall of Fame for exemplary teaching, dedicated community service and on-going activism within the Black Lives Matters movement. RAsheda has presented her research at numerous conferences that focus on integrating critical play, radical love, autoethnography and contemplative writing pedagogy as instructional strategies to humanize learning experiences for all learners. She has held national leadership positions within the Conference on College Composition and Communication, The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning and is currently serving as an Executive Board Member for the National Council of Basic Writing. She is a graduate of the Language and Literacy, MA at The City College of New York, a published writer and a PhD candidate at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Saurabh Anand is a Rhetoric and Composition student pursuing his Ph.D. in Writing Center Studies at the University of Georgia where he is also an assistant writing center director. His creative works have appeared in the English Journal, The Autoethnographer, the Journal of International Students, the Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, and the South Florida Poetry Journal.
Joonna Smitherman Trapp retires from Emory University in December of 2023. She has served as the Director of the Writing Program and the WAC program there. She was department chair at two other universities as well before moving to Emory. She and Brad Peters co-edited the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (JAEPL) for seven years. As a rhetorician, she has long been working on an archival project attempting to recover the antebellum lyceum movement in the Old South. In addition to vampires, Flannery O’Connor, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, pedagogy is her passion, and she loves to talk to other teachers about their teaching.
Please join us!
With gratitude and encouragement,
AEPL’s Executive Committee
Click here to learn more about the Assembly’s work!