Winter 2024 issue of Literacy in Composition Studies

Literacy in Composition Studies, a journal co-founded and co-edited by Tara Lockhart, published issue 11.1 this winter, including a book review by our own Gin Schwarz! Check out the current issue at www.licsjournal.org. 

Writing Program Website (CMS)

Our CMS webpage has now been updated to include course descriptions in Spanish and Mandarin! This is a major step towards improving accessibility for students whose first language isn’t English. A special thank you to WP leadership Robert Kohls and Esther Chang, and to Dr. Miguel Martínez Jiménez and MA TESOL alum Hui Yu (Hana) Wu Arnold for their work on translating the course descriptions.

Bridget Gelms Publication, Summer 2024

"A special of issue of Technical Communication Quarterly that I guest-edited with Dr. Cynthia Johnson will be published in July (vol. 33 issue 3). The theme is '(Re)defining "Professional" in Technical & Professional Communication,' and the issue as a whole works to reimagine what professionalism means in our classrooms, workplaces, and communities by critiquing the professional practices that uphold oppressive and exploitative structures."

Bridget Gelms, Publication in Collection, May 6 2024

Bridget published a chapter in the edited collection Learning from the Mess: Method/ological Praxis in Rhetoric and Writing Studies. Her chapter draws from personal research experiences to argue that researcher well-being should be a larger part of our methodological frameworks as researchers.

Meg Schoerke’s Review Essay in the Hudson Review

Meg Schoerke's review-essay "'To be alive, is power': Emily Dickinson's Letters," appears in the Spring 2024 issue of the Hudson Review and is featured on the magazine's website.

Jenny Lederer’s Upcoming Publication: “Texts, Tweets, Twitch, TikTok: Computer-Mediated Communication as an Inclusive Gateway to Linguistics”

“In February, Jenny Lederer's article "Texts, Tweets, Twitch, TikTok: Computer-Mediated Communication as an Inclusive Gateway to Linguistics" will be published in the edited volume, Inclusion in Linguistics, which is one of a two-book series dedicated to decolonizing linguistics, in part, by recruiting underrepresented student groups into the field. Lederer argues that one way to make the discipline more inclusive is to introduce students to language anaysis through the study of screen-to-screen communication, techinically refered to as computer-mediated communication. She argues that a focus on student-generated data allows the student to be both data source and data analyst, increasing comfort and familiarity in the language studies classroom.”

Heather Sawyer's Articles in Scale: The Graduate Journal of Design

Staff member Heather Sawyer, also a student in the MA Design program, designed the cover and wrote two articles for the 7th edition of the SFSU Graduate Journal of Design. Her articles include an overview of protest posters in the 1968 student strike, "Defiant Design: Protest Imagery in the San Francisco State Third World Strike" and a short book review, "Rediscovering San Francisco Through Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City." 

Jenny Lederer's Talk: “Texts, Tweets, Twitch, TikTok: Computer-Mediated Communication as an Inclusive Gateway to Linguistics”

 On March 1st, Jenny Lederer gave the talk “Texts, Tweets, Twitch, TikTok: Computer-Mediated Communication as an Inclusive Gateway to Linguistics” as a part of the 22nd Annual CSU Symposium on Teaching at CSU San Bernadino.

Writing Program Website Edits: The Largest Archive of Student Writing on our Campus

“...an approach to assessment that is asset-based and improvement-oriented.”

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The Writing Program launched a new webpage detailing our innovative, decolonial assessment project and research. Featuring assessment efforts over the last 5 years, the webpage summarizes our framework and method and points readers to additional published research by SF State Faculty - take a look! And many thanks to Chris Conroy for tech support.

Kat DeGuzman, “Re-distortion as Archipelagic Aesthetic”, April 5 2024

Kat DeGuzman delivered a presentation titled "Re-distortion as Archipelagic Aesthetic" at the University of Arizona. Kat was invited as the Spring 2024 McLaughlin-Weber speaker. The McLaughlin-Weber Speaker Series brings scholars of non-American literature to Tucson to share their research with the University of Arizona's Department of English and the interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory.

Jennifer Trainor, John Holland, Tara Lockhart, and Robert Kohls' Publication: June 2024

Jennifer Trainor, John Holland, Tara Lockhart, and Robert Kohls are excited to have their publication, Decolonizing Assessment to Reveal Abundance: Crafting Threshold Concepts and Mapping Learning Journeys, appearing this summer in the companion publication to our flagship conference: CCCC. In this paper, we describe our attempt to decolonize program assessment, bringing it into alignment with progressive, antiracist goals. We replaced learning outcomes with threshold concepts in order to better capture teachers’ learning goals in our classes and we created a learning map that took an asset-based approach to student writing. Following principles of antiracist assessment, we eliminated language that echoed white supremacist literacy practices (e.g. “mastery”), included a consideration of the affective economies that circulate around literacy education, took care to locate students’ struggles in their material/institutional conditions, and drew on teacher expertise.

UCSF-SFSU Team Launches the Communicative Justice Initiative

Maricel Santos and Maria Jose Bastias (MA TESOL alum and SFSU EdD candidate) have collaborated with UCSF colleagues and U.S. adult educators to launch the Communicative Justice Initiative (CJI). CJI seeks to change the way we see health data by changing the way we engage adult learners from linguistically diverse communities. Read more about CJI in this blog post  "Data Literacy & Communicative Justice: Spring 2024 Update" hosted by EdTech Center at World Education. 

Students’ Perception on Research and Career-Readiness Competencies –

June 20-21

Anastasia Smirnova will present a project on "Students’ perception on research and career-readiness competencies" at the ConnectUR conference in June 2024. This project is conducted in collaboration with Whitney Taylor (SFSU, Political Science).  

Message from Staff

Thank you to everyone who shared content for the Spring newsletter, your contributions help keep us all connected! As we wrap up another semester, it's great to be able to reflect on the many events, achievements, and celebrations that kept the English department busy.

Wishing everyone a restful summer, see you in the fall!