I am pleased to announce that my panel proposal for Northeast MLA 2021 has been accepted. Little did I know when I wrote the proposal how pervasive digital approaches to teaching composition would become now that we find ourselves in the middle (?) of a global pandemic. As I write this, it is not yet certain if we will be able to have this panel in real life or if it will be entirely virtual. In spite of this uncertainty, I welcome your submissions. The questions that I pose are now even more important to our field than when I wrote them. It might be difficult for you right now to even contemplate scholarly work let alone prioritize it, but let these questions, at the very least, inform your thinking about how you will develop your fall classes, how your students will experience learning in new, entirely-digital modes, and how many of the challenges we are just now “realizing” have been there all along. I am enthusiastically waiting to hear your thoughts on this subject. Please feel free to contact me with questions about the panel.

Primary Area / Secondary Area

Rhetoric & Composition / Pedagogy & Professional

Panel Abstract

“Digital Pedagogy in the Composition Classroom”

College composition is still largely taught much as it has been for the last couple decades, emphasizing traditional academic genres and instruction in the “processes” of academic writing with little attention paid to how technology has altered the processes of writing as well as the broader concept of communication. Even recent moves to include alternate research assignments or teach multimodal processes rarely linger over the particular impacts of digital technology. This panel seeks to explore how composition instructors embed digital pedagogies in their composition classrooms. Digital pedagogy is broadly defined as “approaches to teaching the digital” which can include everything from helping students navigate an LMS to teaching students to design an entire video game.

The two most central questions for this panel are: What does digital pedagogy look like in a composition classroom? How does digital inform and/or transform our existing approaches to writing studies? These questions engage with NeMLA’s conference theme of tradition and innovation in order to examine how humanities approaches can change the world.

Some additional questions this panel might explore include: How do composition instructors scaffold digital literacies in their classes? How do composition instructors explore explicitly digital composition processes? How do they teach digital genres, analyze digital content, and facilitate discussions about digital topics? How do their students engage in digital advocacy? How do their students reflect on and critique the digital?

This panel seeks papers that push our understanding of a digital praxis in the composition classroom.

Submit an abstract here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18566