Professional Presentations
Cheryl Caesar wrote an activity titled "Encounters with Racism" that appears on pages 54-57 of the Dynamic Activities for First Year Composition. This book is a collection of classroom activities that have been developed by writing instructors all over the country.
Abby Sobutka participated in the 2023 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) at Michigan State University. She worked on website development and management to display Dr. Acevedo’s research, TTTRWE, in an accessible way. Abby utilized a video presentation for UURAF to exhibit her work with Dr. Acevedo’s website and the assistance and design she had contributed.
Dr. Acevedo and other higher education faculty were selected as Documentarians for the 2020 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), but the event was cancelled due to COVID. The purpose of the Documentarians was to record in multi-modal ways participants' reflections of the Conference and their experiences.
The Documentarian Tales collected here express various themes, from work-life balance, to labor conditions and professional lives, to social and racial justice. In aggregate, we hear them to tell the sorts of stories you might expect from reflections during a time of pandemic lockdown. Each of these Tales, in some way, touches upon themes of Health and Wellness: Mental Health, Anxiety, and Trauma, Connection and Isolation, Grief and Loss, and Health and Illness.
CCCC is a professional organization that is committed to supporting the agency, power, and potential of diverse communicators inside and outside of higher education classrooms. CCCC advocates for broad and evolving definitions of literacy, communication, rhetoric, and writing (including multimodal discourse, digital communication, and diverse language practices) that emphasize the value of these activities to empower individuals and communities. CCCC promotes intellectual and pedagogical freedom and ethical scholarship and communication.
Workbook for First-Year Writing Teachers
With a team of two graduate students, Cheryl Caesar and Joyce A. Meier, Ph.D. have been collaborating on a workbook for first-year writing teachers seeking to incorporate anti-racist work into their classes. They have both been accepted as Inclusive Pedagogy Fellows at MSU for the coming year, which will give them an opportunity to develop the project further with collegial allies.
Cheryl Caesar has also written a chapter on anti-racist activities for the first year writing classroom; the book, Dynamic Activities for First-Year Composition, is expected to debut at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in February 2023.
Cheryl Caesar, with TTT alumna Joyce Meier, is co-mentoring a team of multilingual undergraduate students who are creating animated videos to help faculty make their classes more inclusive and welcoming for international students. Over the past two years, the team has presented thier work at MSU's Social Justice Art Festival, the Learning Abroad Conference, THAT Camp, the Diversity Research Showcase and UURAF. At the last two events, they won prizes. They've gone beyond MSU to present virtually at the Minnesota conference, "Practicing Digital Activisms". The team has had a scholarly article on their research accepted by the journal Young Scholars in Writing.
With a panel of three librarians, Cheryl Caesar spoke to the European Council on Information Literacy (ECIL) in the summer of 2021 on the affordance of university learning community partnerships in breaking down disciplinary silos and promoting information literacy. Subsequently, the team wrote a book chapter, "Learning Community Partnerships: Building and Strengthening Collaborations on Campus and Beyond," for a forthcoming anthology from publisher IGI Global.
Writing is a tool that has many purposes and can be used as a stepping stool to achieve a variety of desired goals. This particular project was designed to help faculty participants identify and bond with their authentic personal and professional selves through collaboration, reflection, and writing. The project intends to: first, share this artifact of resiliency with colleagues internal and external to the humanities so they, too, can use their written narratives to straighten their instruction and commitment to students and colleagues; second, to offer new and current writing teachers a framework for a faculty professional development experience that encourages collaboration, reflection, and writing to ensure ongoing personal and professional change and growth. My goal for this project; was to make my mentor's vision a reality. To give this project life, in a visual aspect. To do this, I created a project website and a variety of other social media accounts to facilitate the dissemination of their research on a broader scale. Being part of this research team taught me many valuable lessons. That has helped me grow both personally and professionally.
Ashley Siwek (2021)