Dear colleagues,
Our fall online series continues with workshops on Autoethnography, 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, October 20, 3-4:30pm (Eastern)
Black Woman of the Yam: Being Black While in the Academy
Led by RAsheda Young
RAsheda’s talk is influenced, in part, by bell hooks’s game-changing book Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, a text that centers blackness and black women within the context of familial, cultural and societal interactions. Through an autoethnographic approach, RAsheda shares her experience as a Black woman, Black mother and Black professor within academia and the world more broadly during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Covid-19 and phenomenal betrayal.
Friday, November 3, 3-4:30pm (Eastern)
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.
Friday, December 1, 3-4:30pm (Eastern)
Writing for Dramatic Performance in Community and the Classroom
Led by Sarah Moon
In this workshop, we’ll discuss teaching community writing for performance. This talk will describe the food-centered community writing and performance workshop, Write Your Roots (click here for more information). Sarah will discuss the meaningful opportunities that rehearsal and performance afford the writing process, as well as the community discourse spurred by live performance. In addition, Sarah will discuss the ways this project has been adapted for the first-year writing classroom to help establish mutual identification at the beginning of the semester, serving the ideal of creating a true classroom community.
Presenter biographies:
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.
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.
Sarah Moon is an assistant professor of humanities at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, a community writing facilitator and award-winning playwright. Her Write Your Roots projects have taken place in Willimantic, CT and Providence, RI and her plays have been produced in Washington D.C., Boston and New York City. Her newest play Apostates, PA will receive a public reading at Eastern CT Center for History, Art and Performance, where she is the 2023 Artist-in-Residence, this fall. Her scholarly work is published in Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and is forthcoming in Pedagogy. She lives in rural Eastern CT with her husband and three children.
Please join us!
With gratitude and encouragement,
AEPL’s Executive Committee
Click here to learn more about the Assembly’s work!
Eric Leake, Ph.D.
MARC Director, Associate Professor
Department of English
Texas State University