Welcome to the 2014 Transitioning to College Writing Symposium
Since 2011, I’ve been privileged to work with, meet, and learn from dedicated and forward-thinking writing teachers from throughout Mississippi. Regardless of their particular designation or teaching location, they want to engage their students in learning how to become better writers and effective communicators. They are excited by opportunities to expand their awareness of how they can best support students who will transition from writing in one setting to another, usually unfamiliar, setting, knowing that many of their students will experience such transitions several times as they progress in their academic and/or professional work. Such teachers respond to the challenge of educating students to be able competitors in today’s global marketplace, and they enrich the sessions, workshops, and roundtables offered each year at our annual Transitioning to College Writing symposia. Thus, our theme for this year’s symposium is an apt one: “Global Connections, Local Partnerships: Writing across Borders in a Digital Age.” The theme speaks to global connections we enjoy as well as local partnerships that have enriched our teaching across public and private secondary and post-secondary settings, and it responds to our long-standing interest in how writing and composing work in digital environments around the world.
This year, our symposium responds to suggestions from past attendees and our current planning committee. We continue with our tradition of bringing visiting scholars to the symposium, and we have expanded our inclusion of Mississippi-based scholars who speak to our particular locales of writing instruction. Join us on Friday, October 10 and Saturday, October 11, as we learn from and respond to Mr. Vinnie Segalini, Director of English Language Arts with the Mississippi Department of Education, Dr. Lawrence T. Potter, Professor of English at Jackson State University, and Dr. Frances di Lauro of the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. Topics range from supporting secondary-school teachers as they implement the Common Core State Standards, to understanding how writing becomes an effective tool for student transitions by means of reflective practice; to integrate writing into other content areas by means of writing across the curriculum strategies; to using digital writing tools and helping students become more literate digital citizens.
We continue to focus on the value of integrating writing centers in secondary and post-secondary Mississippi schools. In 2011, when the first Transitioning to College Writing planning committee convened, we wanted to include someone who could represent a high school writing center. We did not find any, but we had (fortuitously) tapped into a deep interest in incorporating writing centers in secondary school settings. That first year, then, we brought Amber Jensen, a high school English teacher from Edison High School in Virginia, to share with us her experiences in setting up a writing center at her high school, especially since she’d done that with very limited resources. 2011 attendees also heard from Anna Britt Begnaud, who was (and still is) the writing center director at Itawamba Community College here in Mississippi. Both Amber and Anna are returning as visiting speakers at this year’s symposium, and as I write this post, I’m thrilled to know that there are now several secondary writing centers here in Mississippi that, guided by tested scholarship on writing center studies, are supporting student writers in various ways. Students who have access to such writing centers are experiencing – before they enter college or begin their careers – the value of talking about their writing projects with others, of understanding the role of authentic audiences as they write, and they are aided to write with purpose and careful attention to supporting their writing with evidence-based claims and persuasion.
Over the next three weeks, visit this Blog page often to read posts from our program planners. We’ll also continue to post about specific workshops and events that will take place during the symposium. Learn more about our visiting speakers and the topics they will be speaking on by selecting the Speakers tab on this website. Many secondary and post-secondary teachers will be leading workshops, guiding roundtable conversations, and sharing resources that we can use when we return back to our local writing landscapes. Review the program schedule, register for the Symposium, and we hope to see you here in Oxford soon!
– Alice Johnston Myatt, Department of Writing and Rhetoric, University of Mississippi