by Jenn Fishman and Darci Thoune This is the fifth post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  Professional meetings are a mixed bag, whatever we call them: conferences, conventions, institutes, seminars, or workshops. On one hand, they give us chances to share work, learn from each other, and network beyond our home programs, departments, and campuses. On the other hand, conference-going can seem obligatory (i.e., just another CV line); attending can present real hardships, financial and otherwise; and too often professional meetings reinforce institutional biases. So, how do we make choices about what to participate in, how, when, and why?  Some of us involved in the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) recently asked ourselves these questions thinking about our own, much beloved annual event. The WIS just turned 5, and 29 of us celebrated with an article that appears in Community Literacy Journal (17.2). Our conversations were free-ranging reflections on our upstart event, a local meeting with national reach that usually registers about 100 onsite and online participants, all writers and writing educators. Talking with each other confirmed our sense that the WIS is a “happening,” which Geoff Sirc defines as “a space no one wants to leave.” That feeling was shared by one-time attendees and regular participants. It even inspired some colleagues, including Jessie Wirkus Haynes at Bellin College and Barb Clauer and Melissa Kaplan at Lansing Community College, to plan WIS satellite events that will take place on their campuses later this year.    Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin hosts the annual Writing Innovation Symposium     But what happens at the WIS or any other professional meeting to make it a “happening”: to make participants feel drawn to stay or, in our case, to return from year to year and even to extend their experience in some way?  While we don’t have a single answer or recipe to share, we have some ideas. We notice, for example, that the WIS centers us as writers as well as writing educators, and the event itself centers on interactivity that is rooted in relations. For example, in 2023 when our theme was “Writing As_____,” plenary presenter Melissa Tayles did more than talk to us about trauma-informed writing pedagogy. She got us writing and helped us develop what she described as “sustainable plans for instructor well-being and regulation in the writing process.” The next day at the plenary workshop, Barb and Melissa invited us to write collaboratively, and we spent 2 hours immersed in the collective creativity of their Community-Generated Poetry Project. Before and after these sessions, we talked to each other. We talked about the plenaries and the courses we were teaching. We talked about our students, our writing research, and our families. We swapped references and recipes. We connected as writers and writing educators—and as people. At the closing session, when a student group called The Comet Project performed some of our poems (from the plenary workshop), we were rapt. Together, we laughed at the humor they found in our words, and we were moved by the depth and emotion they discovered in our drafts. When they finished, as we applauded and applauded, it sure seemed like no one wanted to leave.  We draw from this set of observations a sense of how important it is for conferences and symposia to welcome us as we are and wish to be, both professionally and more broadly, more personally. We see how glad WIS participants are, including ourselves, to reciprocate: to offer things we know about writing and to glean new knowledge—and not just by listening. WIS taps into a shared desire for something that might be comparable to the hands-on learning that many of us like to incorporate into our classes. WIS also cultivates a robust “underlife” by giving participants so many opportunities for the exchanges they wish to have over and above–as well as before, during, and after—formal programming.  As we and our WIS colleague Jennifer Kontny embark on more formal inquiry into what makes a professional meeting a happening, we wonder how you would describe the conventions, seminars, workshops, &c. that have meant the most to you.   If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here. ... View more

by Holly Burgess, Ph.D candidate, Marquette University This is the third post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  On January 7, 2023,  Tyre Nichols was murdered by officers of the Memphis Police Department. Tyre Nichols was a father, son, photographer, friend, skateboarder, and so much more. His life mattered. Twenty-one days later, the police footage of Nichols’s death was streamed via the media. On January 28, 2023, unable to sleep, I debated whether to write to my students about Tyre Nichols. I began to draw comparisons between Tyre and myself; we are both twenty-nine years old, Black, and enjoy Memphis. As an avid Elvis fan, I’ve visited Memphis, TN, three times in my life; Graceland became a sacred place to visit and spend time. I remember the first time my mother brought me to Memphis for my fifteenth birthday; I was excited to be in a predominantly Black city. Residing in Wisconsin, I was raised in a predominately white suburb, my heart yearning to be amongst Black people and culture. When we left the gates of Graceland, I cried. Looking back, I realize why Memphis is so special to me—Memphians treat you like family and welcome you in with their southern hospitality. I knew Tyre Nichols’s death would leave Memphis in civil unrest, hurting and longing for change. I knew that my students would also be hurting. I emailed my two English classes my thoughts about Nichols. I told my students that I would open space for them to discuss their feelings and grief regarding Nichols. I drafted a call-to-action to the English Department, demanding they release a statement about Tyre Nichols’s death. My call-to-action resulted in other Black students and faculty members expressing their demands to the department, which led to the formation of a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) steering committee that aims to: promote Black faculty/students' work, creating more Black-oriented events like celebrating Black History Month, hiring and retaining Black faculty and students, creating more curriculum based upon African American literature, culture, and rhetoric. While these initiatives are a great first start for confronting the anti-Blackness that lies in society and academia, one thing I learned is that even in times of trauma and hurt, white colleagues assume that Black faculty and graduate students have all the answers, that we have ready-made lesson plans about how to teach police brutality, institutional racism, and violence in our classrooms. The fact is that we’re people first, and we are hurting. We’re not immediately ready to develop and steer curricula based on our identities and emotions. We need time to process the grief as a community before we are tasked with guiding white academics who wish to do better. In February, I attended the 2023 Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS) at Marquette University. This year’s theme of the WIS is Writing as ____, wherein the presenters were tasked with filling in the blank. I chose to fill my blank with “Writing as a Black Scholar.” At the WIS, I presented a poster titled “The People Are Rising”: Revolution and Violence in African American Social Movements and Literature.” My poster was an overview of my forthcoming dissertation; I have created a literary genealogy of four generations of Black social movements. I trace how each generation reacts and responds to police brutality and violence. During my poster presentation, a few audience members were interested in my dissertation and academic work; however, most wanted to make a spectacle about my statement on Tyre Nichols and my accidental activism within the English Department. My name was now attached to Tyre Nichols and the departmental change that it sparked rather than my dissertation or scholarly work. I’m a Black Ph.D. candidate and know the cost of activism. Accidental activism results in white colleagues looking to you for readings, guidance, lesson plans, and workshops; it places a heavier burden on you to steer a department into anti-racist pedagogy and social progress. I have been dubbed the “girl in the Tyre Nichols email” rather than an emerging Black scholar. I recognize why more experienced BIPOC faculty members feel jaded about the prospect of change within English departments. It requires extra work from them, a minority tax. Social progress relies on BIPOC faculty rather than white colleagues self-educating. I’m unsure what can be done to change the English literature canon or anti-racism, but I can suggest incorporating more Black authors and texts into your classes—reaching beyond the standard of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Incorporate Black musicians, poets, and rappers, and your students will thank you.   If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here. ... View more

by Darci Thoune and Jenn Fishman This is the second post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  As Jenn and I explored in our last blog post on the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), putting our finger on how this modest symposium makes so much magic is challenging. But with some reflection it’s easier and easier to see that part of what makes the WIS special is collaboration—and we mean collaboration on every level. Yes, there are the regulars who serve on the Steering Committee and those who faithfully travel to Milwaukee when she is at her least hospitable, but there are others as well. We’re thinking about the graduate students and early career folks who join us as active participants in a symposium that works with and against the expectations of a traditional conference. As we entered our 3rd year of the WIS we wondered how we could manifest more of this—more support for a wider range of participants and more opportunities for them to be meaningfully involved in the WIS magic making. As writing administrators, we’re accustomed to being scrappy and opportunistic when it comes to funding. Knowing that we wanted to find more ways to support (in travel funding, in mentoring, in networking opportunities) WIS participants from a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds, we approached the amazing Laura Davidson at Bedford/St. Martin’s with a wild request--namely, would they support the travel expenses of two to three WIS Bedford/St. Martin’s (WIS B/SM) Fellows? Our hope was that a WIS B/SM Fellow’s Program would especially prioritize participation by first-gen, BIPOC, and multiply marginalized undergraduates, graduate students, contingent faculty, and early career scholars. We were delighted that Laura (and the rest of the B/SM team) enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity to work with all of us involved in the WIS. This program has become a source of reliable funding and support for--at this point--five WIS B/SM Fellows. Over the first 2 years, the Fellows have been an illustrious bunch. In 2022, the inaugural fellows were Amy Patterson and Ulisa Blakely, who both joined us remotely. Amy Zoomed in from Boston where she was a postdoctoral associate at Northeastern University, teaching multilingual writing and advanced writing in the disciplines. Ulisa, at the time, was a graduate student at Northeastern Illinois University, studying multimodality, technology, and literacy. The following year, we welcomed three fellows, although only two were able to attend. The 2023 cohort included Holly Burgess and Shiva Mainaly, who were able to attend in person, and Abigayle Farrier, whose attendance onsite and online was foiled by the winter storms that turned much of Texas into a no-fly zone just as the WIS was getting underway.  In addition to supporting our WIS B/SM Fellows with travel funding, Laura’s team also offered an opportunity for the WIS B/SM Fellows to contribute to the Bedford Bits blog. Our first two incredible blogposts are forthcoming from Holly and Abigayle. In Holly’s upcoming post, “Writing as a Black Scholar: Teaching Black Activism, Hip-Hop, and The Cost of Activism,” we learn about the many ways one Black teacher does activist work in and out of the classroom at a primarily white institution. In Abigayle’s post, “Today Is Kindergarten Day!” we are encouraged to remember that writing is a hands-on activity and that we sometimes need to create spaces in our classes for students to play. In both posts, we’re inspired to reflect on our identities and our relationships in our programs and in our classrooms. With the continued support of the superheroes at Macmillan, we look forward to the submissions from this year’s WIS B/SM Fellows. Interested in becoming a WIS B/SM Fellow? Follow this link for the WIS 2024 CFP! We also invite you to learn more about the WIS via the latest issue of Community Literacy Journal, which includes look back at the symposium’s first five years, coauthored by 29 WISters including Holly and Abigayle. If you’re interested in learning more about the WIS consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our CFP here.   ... View more

In 1996, Lisa Ede and Cheryl Glenn began imagining a conference that would bring together rhetorical and feminist scholars, groups that heretofore had not had much to do with one another. There were feminists aplenty among rhetoricians, but feminists across other disciplines seemed reluctant to cross the border into rhetoric. Lisa and Cheryl aimed to begin some cross-disciplinary conversations, and so they invited two keynote speakers: Jackie Royster from rhetoric and writing studies and feminist philosopher Nancy Tuana. We all gathered in Corvallis in late August 1997, excited and expectant. The conference more than lived up to expectations, and by the time the first day of the meeting concluded, people were asking Lisa and Cheryl when the next conference would be. Since they had only planned a one-time conference, they had no answers to this question—but conference goers soon took matters into their own hands, and Lillian Bridwell Bowles and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota volunteered to hold the next “fem/rhets” conference, as it came to be called, two years from then, in 1999. The conference was soon “adopted” by the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, a fairly new organization at the time (founded in 1989)—and it has been held every other year since 1997 (in 2013 my colleagues at Stanford and I had the great pleasure of hosting the conference). I’ve attended most of the fourteen conferences, and I was determined to make this year’s, especially because it was being held at Spelman. And indeed, I made it there for the second and third days of the conference, and I came away impressed and inspired by the scholarly projects I heard described. In fact, I wished that every teacher of writing and rhetoric I know could have been there with me!   Spelman College hosted 2023's FemRhets Conference   One panel, "Counter Storytelling: A Feminist Antiracist Approach to Dismantle Colonial Archival Logics," interrogated the archival logic at work in how and what we (are allowed to) remember, reminding us that archives are constructs, constructs that have great power and arguing that we and our students need to examine archives with this fact of life in mind, and to “re-story” archival records when necessary. Another panel on Rhetorical Consent and the Foregrounding of Intimacy in Qualitative Research asked us to reconsider the relationship between researcher and “subjects,” and to work toward a more capacious theory that would acknowledge and honor the “intimacy” that characterizes some of the best qualitative research studies. Yet another took a new look at the rhetorical canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery: Efe Plange demonstrated the ways in which a group of Ghanian feminists used invention in satirical and humorous ways to flip the script on all-male panels devoted to women’s issues; Sarah Flores looked at arrangement through the lens of the Mexican Cookbook for the American Home; Jordynn Jack reimagined style as she argued that weaving and not embroidery is the key textile. In embroidery, the stitches are added on to a fabric, but in weaving the pattern is woven in from the beginning to the end; it is evident from planning through completion and thus captures the rhetorical nature of “style” much better than embroidery ever could. Jessica Enoch examined feminist approaches to public memory studies and called for “commemorative accountability”; and Britt Starr explored the ways in which social media platforms both liberate and constrain young feminist activists’ access to systems of delivery (especially TikTok) today. Finally, a roundtable discussion on community-led digital archives featured descriptions of the Digital Transgender Archive (K.J. Rawson) as well as reports on Black ooral history projects (Rachel l McIntosh) and the Digital Archive of Indigenous Languages (Ellen Cushman), all of them tremendously important—and exciting. I came away from this conference thinking about how these and other sessions offered so many ideas for rethinking how we teach research and just what a “research” project can be. What a joy it is to introduce students to such a more broad and inclusive vision of research—and to show them how such research can and should be connected to who they are and where they come from. Bravo Spelman and the Coalition of Feminist Scholars for supporting and showcasing this wide range of groundbreaking studies. ... View more

by Jenn Fishman and Darci Thoune This is the first post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a 2-day annual event hosted online and in Milwaukee, WI, by a group that includes Darci and Jenn. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “symposium.”  Five years is and isn’t a long time, especially in higher education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 60% of college students finish their undergrad degrees in 5 years, while the Survey of Earned Doctorates reports the median time to PhD isn't much longer: just 5.8 years. For all of us involved in the annual Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), 5 years turned out to be just enough time for us to realize that we were really on to something—and to start putting it into words.  Since its founding in 2018, the WIS has been a regional event with national reach. Annually, in the dead of winter, the WIS lures writers and writing educators from all over North America to Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, for two days of writing activity. As co-founder and Chief Capacitator, Jenn leads the cross-institutional steering committee that brings each symposium to life. In 2022-2023, that group was helmed by Darci, Jennifer Kontny, and Patrick Thomas; it also included Grant Gosizk, Jackielee Derks, Jenna Green, Kayla Urban Fettig, Kelsey Otero, Lilly Campbell, Maxwell Gray, Sara Heaser, Shevaun Watson, and Tara Baillargeon.    Marquette University hosts the Writing Innovation Symposium   When we look back and try to put a finger on what, exactly, makes the WIS the WIS, a few concrete details come immediately to mind, starting with our modest size. Usually, the WIS registers about 100. Participants come mainly from across academic ranks, roles, and disciplines, though non-ac colleagues tell us they feel right at home. The weather is also a contributing factor. Together, we have braved both ice and snowstorms as well as a polar vortex, which dropped the temperature to -23! Yet, it’s always warm and cozy in the University Libraries, where on-site we hunker down, while off-site attendees click in and out of Zoom sessions and Slack channels to join us. In so many ways, the WIS is Brigadoon, and for the 48 hours we gather each year, we form something that feels like community. In many ways, COVID-19 amplified this sense. The 2020 WIS was the last professional event many of us attended before the global pandemic was declared. Likewise, the 2022 WIS was the first in-person conference for a lot of us—and not just because it fit our budgets and schedules. Just as magnetic objects create force fields that attract particular elements (i.e., iron, nickel), the WIS draws writers and writing educators in a powerful way. By inviting everyone to base their contributions on work they have done—writing, writing pedagogy, research, writing administration—the WIS affirms the expertise that each participant brings with them. The WIS also primes attendees to learn from one another, and in doing so it affirms that everyone, from plenary presenters to the newest graduate teachers, has something to learn.  Symposium themes help focus our collective energy. We have worked to “Connect!” (2019), and we’ve explored some of the many connotations of “Just Writing” (2020). We’ve also come together to “Write It Out” (2022) and to fill in the blank: “Writing as _____” (2023). However, we direct our word play along with our most serious efforts, our plenaries are interactive, and our programs always include workshops as well as a session that features posters and creative, digital and analogue displays. Last year, we introduced flash talks into the mix, inviting presenters to distill their WISdom into five-minute presentations accompanied by a single artifact (e.g., handout, bookmark, cookie). Inaugural examples prompted rich exchanges about everything from “Writing in Times of Hopelessness” and “Writing as Empathic Design” to “Composing in the Pool,” “Reinventing the Writer’s Workshop,” “Writing as Resistance,” and “Writing as Power,” and “Writing as Weapon/Antidote.”  The story of WIS continues to be written. Recently, twenty-nine of us talked about an article that appears in Community Literacy Journal 17.2, and we’re glad to be contributing to Bedford Bits. Macmillan has been a vital supporter of the WIS, hosting meals and sponsoring opportunities like the workshop on Tiny Teaching Stories that Chris Anson led one year. In 2022, working in collaboration with Laura Davidson, we launched the Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows Program. It provides WIS registration, travel monies, and mentorship opportunities to early career colleagues. To date, B/SM WIS Fellows include:  Abigayle Farrier (2023) Amy Patterson (2022) Holly Burgess (2023) Shiva Mainaly (2023) Ulisa Blakely (2022) Look for more from us as well as them in weeks to come—and consider joining us in Milwaukee at WIS 2024! Read our Call for Papers here.    Image via Wikimedia Commons ... View more

Dr. Lockett is an Assistant Professor of English at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She deeply enjoys serving the oldest historically Black college for women, and is committed to teaching and learning about the relationship between composition, new media, sustainability, and collective intelligence. At Spelman, Dr. Lockett actively contributes to the English Department’s writing minor in the areas of professional and multimedia composition. She also provides leadership to the Comprehensive Writing Program in major curricular initiatives like First-Year Composition and Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines (WAC/WID). In 2015, she was awarded a $10,500 grant from the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) Grant to organize and lead a faculty development symposium on Integrating Wikipedia into Writing-Intensive Courses at ACS Colleges. She continued her work with Wikipedia in 2017, organizing Spelman’s first-ever Art+Feminism–Black Women’s Herstory Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Currently, Dr. Lockett is the proud recipient of the UNCF/Mellon Faculty Residence Fellowship (2017-2018) where she is a fellow at Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference. While in residence, she is working on her book project Overflow: Rhetorical Perspectives on Leaks.    Diversity and inclusion.  Equality.  Social justice.    These terms and concepts comfortably blanket educators asserting their desired vision of the world in a distant, cold, and bitter wasteland. Part of the mystery of such words lies in the major assumption that historically white institutions (HWCUs) need to be more integrated, or at least appear mildly interested in some kind of commitment to this effort. However, what exactly do these words mean to faculty and administrators at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and single-sex colleges?     In my own personal experience teaching writing and unofficially administering the Writing Intensive initiative at Spelman College—a historically black college for women in Atlanta, Georgia—I feel alienated from the framing of diversity discourses. Before I discuss certain aspects of my experience, I want to clarify those conversations may be very applicable to predominantly white contexts that are more or less typical for the majority of instructors and researchers participating in our discipline. However, black women faculty face major challenges in work environments where they are a highly represented demographic. Arguably, this educational space comes with significant risks that are sometimes muted by the nature of the college.    I didn’t start to notice the systemic silence surrounding faculty and student demographics at Spelman until I started developing and leading faculty development workshops about the teaching of writing at the college across and within disciplines. Faculty often did not explicitly discuss what it meant to teach black women, or what it was like for black women of various ranks to exchange teaching and learning. There was a kind of assumption that since we were mostly black women gathered in a space, we would know what to do.    And I thought I would know.   The allure of being part of the demographic majority when you are used to being represented as a minority is intoxicating. After living in some of the whitest towns in America from 2001-2013—Kirksville, Missouri; Norman, Oklahoma; and State College, Pennsylvania—the first week of working at Spelman felt unreal. Black women of every size, shape, color, hair type, hair style, and age moved through the space with smiling faces that lent sparkle to the sun and shine on skin that blinded me with the power. We saw each other, feeling that shared electricity of novelty and glimpsing hope. Potential filled me up like fresh fruit. Alive. Fleshy. Ripe. I moved more slowly than at Penn State where I needed to be small, dart fast, and move out the way. And those other places where I regretted being seen or taking up space, where I communed with the trees during breaks to avoid the concrete jungle of young white bodies shuffling about swiftly and completely enough to swallow me whole. In that small private college in Atlanta, I felt an indignant right to be there. Not to color the place, and not to sit on a margin, but to be at the center of its life.    But we weren’t *all* black women faculty, and the black women faculty there most likely had been teaching in predominantly white American college classroom spaces before coming to Spelman. Did we understand that we needed to talk about the meaning of teaching black woman somewhere? To talk about what it means to work with other black women? That we needed to know more about our assumptions about the meaning of our bodies to the students in those classrooms? In faculty meetings? How were students receiving our instruction and what did they expect?   After participating in first-year writing portfolio assessment with an interdisciplinary jury for the past few years, as well as several writing-intensive faculty development workshops on topics like “Integrating Wikipedia into Writing-Intensive Courses” and “Teaching Black Women Writers,” I strongly believe that we need to do even more research on several major issues facing HBCU faculty—including but not limited to:   Their attitudes and expectations towards their training and work environments. Their deliberate or unconscious reproduction of the field’s dominant discourses in writing instruction at HBCUs Their students' responses to an instructor’s demographic embodiment and social relationship to (and within) the black community Their scholarly knowledge of and/or production of research projects centered on Rhetoric and Writing programs at HBCUs—historically or present Their sociopolitical relationship to the HBCU and how it influences access of and distributions of resources both within and outside the college   Next week, March 28-31, I am thrilled to attend my first-ever HBCU Symposium at Howard University, sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin’s and the Howard University Writing Program. This event will be the second time that I have been to a professional development opportunity that organizes HBCU writing faculty representing various institutions in a single space. Two years ago, July 25-28, 2016, I attended a UNCF/Mellon Teaching and Learning Institute on Critical Hip-Hop Rhetoric and Composition led by Shawanda Stewart and Brian Stone at Huston-Tillotson University. This event enabled me to network with a number of passionate writing teachers operating under financial and pedagogical constraints. Although much of the institute’s focus was on teaching students, especially those in first-year composition courses, this event brought up some glaring issues about how the field does diversity in terms of faculty development. For example, Asao Inoue—2018 Program Chair of the CCCC and one of our featured speakers—offered a dynamic, memorable workshop on assessment. Inoue’s discussion about how we may be unknowingly institutionalizing whiteness through our grading practices at the expense of marginalized students resonated with many of us. The fact that HBCUs could be subject to white supremacy by its own instructors was hardly surprising, given some of our colonial histories. Moreover, some of the institute’s attendees were white, and seeking to leverage the most value from diversity and inclusion strategies.   But when we started talking about our institutional context, as scene and agency, the conversation uncomfortably shifted to unknown terrain. To prepare for Inoue’s visit, we were required to read his book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Feeling as if Inoue was not writing to underrepresented instructors, I asked him to explain how his theory of antiracist assessment applied to HBCUs after we were well over halfway through his planned workshop. Other instructors also wanted to discuss this problem. Moreover, I wanted him to help me understand how to get linguistically conservative instructors to manage “gradeless” classrooms. I recognized quickly that if we were going to have that conversation, it would deviate too sharply from the workshop he planned. I stopped pushing it, and Inoue gracefully and thoughtfully acknowledged the validity of my concerns. Nevertheless, the disconnect between Inoue’s antiracist aims and their relevance to HBCUs seemed jarring, given that he knew he was communicating with an audience of HBCU writing instructors.   Even at a workshop at an HBCU with HBCU faculty, I was compelled to engage “diversity” pedagogical hypotheticals about represented students we don’t teach and instructors whose bodies are not black like me. (For more info about this audience issue, see the endnote.)   At the upcoming HBCU symposium, I am looking forward to discussing some of the unique challenges of teaching writing in the HBCU space. Engagement with contemporary sociopolitical issues may be encouraged even as student deficiency is focused on more than the task at hand. The teaching of grammar is often believed to be the primary and exclusive duty of English departments and Writing Centers, which positions us as easy targets to blame for student failure during faculty meetings. We often lack examples of how to structure and administer our programs because our history and traditions have yet to be fully incorporated in our field’s dominant disciplinary historiographies, our most widely circulated First-Year Composition readers and Rhetoric textbooks, or our conference panel offerings at NCTE, CCCC, ATTW, RSA, NCA, Computers and Writing, etc. Certainly this was illustrated by the teaching and learning institute at Huston-Tillotson.   Moreover, I look forward to using the space of the HBCU symposium to collaboratively develop more resources that racially diverse HBCU faculty need to effectively serve our unique demographic. In this historical moment, I’d love to see conversations about the role of HBCUs in contemporary society take the lead on cultivating an empowered faculty. Without a culture of empathic and collaborative collegiality, black and brown women teachers are just as alienated as they are at PWI/HWCUs. How can we be expected to uplift our beautifully diverse students when it seems so socially unacceptable to mention, let alone critique, the environments we labor in?   Endnote   This audience issue is discussed at length in Sarah Banschbach Valles, Rebecca Day Babcock, and Karen Keaton Jackson, who argue that diversity scholarship about Writing Centers tends to assume that directors are “middle-aged White female(s) and the student, or in some cases the tutor, is the Other” (Writing Center Administrators and Diversity: A Survey, 2017). As their article demonstrates, scholarship about the field’s administrative leadership such as Writing Center Directors and WPAs is scarce, raising questions about the racial landscape of the field’s entirety of practitioners and those they serve. While Jill Gladstein’s National Census of Writing Project offers some sense of institutional writing program representation, it does not collect data about the bodies occupying them. One recent exception is "Race, Silence, and Writing Program Administration: A Qualitative Study of US College Writing Programs,” published by Genevieve Garda de Mueller and Iris Ruiz last year (2017).    References   de Mueller, Genevieve Garda, and Iris Ruiz. "Race, Silence, and Writing Program Administration: A Qualitative Study of US College Writing Programs." WPA: Writing Program Administration 40.2 (2017).   Fulford, Collie. "Hit the Ground Listening: An Ethnographic Approach to New WPA Learning." WPA: Writing Program Administration 35.1 (2011): 159-62.   Green Jr., David Frank. "Notes of a Native Son: Considerations when Discussing Race and Privilege in the Teacher's Lounge." The Journal for Understanding and Dismantling Privilege 4.2 (2014): 261-75.   Hocks, M. "Using multimedia to teach communication across the curriculum." WPA: Writing Program Administration 25.1-2 (2001): 25-43.   Howson, Emily, Chris Massenburg, and Cecilia Shelton. "Reflections on Building a Popular Writing Course." Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy 3.1 (2016).   Rose, Shirley K., Lisa S. Mastrangelo, and Barbara L'Eplattenier. "Directing first-year writing: The new limits of authority." College Composition and Communication (2013): 43-66.     Taylor, Hill. "Black spaces: Examining the writing major at an urban HBCU." Composition Studies 35.1 (2007): 99-112.   Valles, Sarah Banschbach, Rebecca Day Babcock, and Karen Keaton Jackson. "Writing Center Administrators and Diversity: A Survey."   ... View more