Stephanie Kerschbaum Guest Lecture

Stephanie Kerschbaum

Helen C. White Hall 7191
@ 3:30 pm CDT - 4:30 pm CDT

The CTRW is hosting a guest lecture from Stephanie Kerschbaum titled “Learning from Student Writing to Address Educational Injustice and Access.” Kerschbaum offered the following description of her talk:

“Contemporary conversations in writing studies are being shaped by continued demographic change in U.S. higher education alongside social, political, and cultural upheaval in the United States. Against this backdrop, there remains urgency for composition teachers and scholars to address persistent inequities in higher education writing instruction. In the first part of this talk, I offer a brief trajectory of U.S. based composition instruction in relation to educational injustice and exclusion and a sketch of how contemporary writing pedagogies seek to recognize the full range of students’ multilinguistic and semiotic repertoires as well as the power dynamics that shape language use. In the second part, I’ll engage this current map of post-secondary writing instruction and research by asking what we can learn from turning to student writing, building on emerging insights and questions grounded in a large-scale program assessment project in the University of Washington’s first-year writing program.”

Stephanie L. Kerschbaum is Professor of English at the University of Washington, where she also directs the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and serves as core faculty in the Disability Studies Program. She is editor of the Studies in Writing and Rhetoric book series and author of Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference (NCTE, 2014), which won the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Advancement of Knowledge Award, and Signs of Disability (NYU, 2022), which is available in print and open-access. Since moving to Washington in 2021 she has discovered a love of hiking in the Cascade mountains and gazing upon large bodies of water.