Workshop F: Literacy Across Disciplines In and Out of the Academy: Engaging and Empowering Student Writers – RM 120

Suellyn Winkle, Sante Fe Community College
Anne Kress, Sante Fe Community College

The majority of community college and university freshman have the same goal: to complete a bachelor’s degree and enter the working world. While it is true that not all students have excelled academically prior to their college enrollment, all bring significant and meaningful life and work experience that can be leveraged to create an engaging academic classroom environment. The press to develop writing and thinking acumen in students across all disciplines and at all levels is especially strong in an age of new media and technology-enabled discourse, which promotes greater access to the tools of 21st Century literacy while at the same moment it limits access to the traditional filters for bias and quality. This session will demonstrate—with large doses of humor and reality—how to empower student writers within the academy to set a pattern for engagement along the lifelong writing spectrum: first, as composition students; second, as upper division majors; and third, as literate citizens in the larger world outside the walls of academe. The presenters will share examples of podcasts, blogs, wikis, and hyperlinked texts as objects of class analysis and products of class assignments.