IRC Pre-conference Workshop

For a second time on the European scene, we will host a workshop in Europe.  We will host a pre-conference half-day afternoon workshop on July 1. The workshop aims to discuss 19 proposals focused on research about writing in higher education in Europe. By research, we mean a project with a focused research question, an identified methodology (qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic, historical, discourse analysis, corpus, etc), and the collection of data in some form. The research activities are at different stages and frequently far from final.

We know that researchers around the world are interested in finding sites for serious cross-national, extended conversation that includes multiple research traditions. This workshop is therefore designed to make space available for extended time to read, process, think through, and discuss in detail each other’s work. We hope it also prepares participants for the international conversation during the conference.

We have learned, through ten previous workshops at the College Conference on Composition and Communication, and most recently at the first European Literacy Network Summit in Porto in 2018, that we all need this kind of extended dialogue about our research in addition to the networking we do at conferences. Given that we inhabit many roles of differing discursive power across complex, multiple linguistic, institutional, political, geographic, theoretical and pedagogical spaces, it is our experience that the dialogue informed by reading our projects irrespective of what stage they are at permits us to get rich feedback on our own projects-in-process, as well as work to understand each other’s work through its unique institutional, cultural, and political contexts. The workshop also provides a chance to perform as a community, encouraging collective reflection on the nature and status of higher education writing research more broadly, and sponsoring collaboration as a network of writing scholars across these contexts.

We want to engage researcher-participants from many countries and research traditions in an equal exchange dialogue, learning from each other: the primary focus is on the writing research itself. The research can be focused on teaching or studying writing in any language. The projects in the workshop are “international” in the sense that they offer sufficient contextualisation for participants to relate to them in view of the fact we all work in very different higher education systems.

We are convinced that we can learn a lot from each other and that the respective international scenes mutually enhance writing research. We therefore encourage participants in the workshop to also consider how they can collaborate on projects or contribute to each others’ projects by combining methodologies and methods across borders and approaches after the workshop. We also know how critical it is for all scholars to be directly engaged with projects and research models from multiple research traditions.

Thank you! Please write with any questions at all or to any of the International Researchers Consortium steering committee:

Magnus Gustafsson magusta@chalmers.se

Ann-Marie Eriksson ann-marie.eriksson@gu.se

Christiane Donahue Christiane.K.Donahue@dartmouth.edu

Violeta Molina vmolina@javerianacali.edu.co

Steffen Guenzel steffen.guenzel@ucf.edu

Raymond Oenbring raymond.oenbring@ub.edu.bs

Amy Zenger az07@aub.edu.lb