April 23, 2026
Teaching Writing in a Time of Chaos — April 23, 2026 9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. MST | Online via Microsoft Teams
9:30 Opening Speaker: Dr. Tony Scott
10:00 (MDT) Session 1 | Play as Pedagogy
Andrew Ridgeway — “Eat the Rich: Role-playing Class Inequality”
“Eat the Rich” is a semester-long role-playing game designed for college students to explore class inequality, civic power, and community decision-making through immersive simulation. Set in the fictional town of Prosperity, NC, students inhabit characters across three economic factions (Wealthy, Middle Class, and Working Class) as the town faces a water contamination crisis and a contentious vote on a chemical plant expansion. In my presentation, I’ll talk about how I developed the game, how I’ve started bringing students into the development process, and why I think RPGs and game design are an increasingly valuable approach to teaching.
Emily Riley — “Monster Comp: Teaching Writing in a Monstrous World”
Teaching composition courses with a monster theme provides a unique opportunity to break down fascist rhetoric in an accessible way. Fascism relies on demonizing others and creating fear. Studying monsters in the composition classroom can help students recognize the tactics of demonization and give them practice engaging with their fear and discomfort. How have movies, books, and newspapers framed monsters in the past? How do we frame them now? In class, we analyze differing portrayals of Frankenstein, the “murderous” circus elephant named Topsy, and other media monsters. Comparing the rhetorical situations, devices, audiences, and values of our sources can help explain the different accounts we find. Students practice identifying bias, spotting what has been left out, and (in the case of real life monsters like Topsy) discerning the truth from conflicting sources.
Sherri Craig — “Put Down the Screens and Pick Up Some Zines”
This presentation draws from interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching experiences to argue that zines represent a unique form of writing that works to buck the status quo. Zines differ from formal genres such as reports and brochures whose production writing studies scholars often connect to “real world writing”. Zines are often wilder and more immediate: they can be more polyvocal or more personal, they are less focused on things like replicability or answering to anonymous peer reviewers, and they circulate rhizomatically: from person-to-person rather than from academic presses to other academics in a linear and cold fashion. Insert glitter and Crayons and suddenly the phones and laptops disappear and conversation changes. Imagine people talking to each other and laughing over the stress of where to place a disembodied magazine clipping. The presenter also provides insight on how to create zine assignments for various courses, from first-year classes to graduate seminars.
11:00 (MDT) Session 2 | Classroom Practice & Care
Finn Anderson — “Three Anonymous Words”
Drawn from the past four years of turmoil at Columbia University, this ten-minute talk shares one sure-fire activity to ensure democratic resilience during difficult times: an exercise called “Three Anonymous Words.” As a result of this short writing collaboration, students are able to temper their outrage, develop more generous, democratic discourse, and practice Negative Capability — one’s willingness to linger in uncertainty.
Karla Murphy and Chelsie Schlesinger — “The Kids are All Right: Reflection Maps as Joyful Writing Practice in a Time of Chaos”
In this 10-minute talk, we share one small, collaborative practice that creates a safe and joyful space for students to open up about their learning in a time of public crisis. We co-teach a large first-year writing course at a public university, working with hundreds of students each year who are juggling work schedules, mental health struggles, family responsibilities, and now the pressures and temptations of generative AI. Like many instructors, we are well aware of these tensions, as we are also mindful of how these overlapping pressures impact our most vulnerable students.
Our modest intervention occurs after each major project. For every assignment, students create a reflective “journey map” tracing how their work came together and what they were feeling, doing, saying, and writing along the way.
Laura Vernon — “Taking a Stand Against Traditional Grading”
This presentation will focus on my taking a stand against traditional grading and the potential political and cultural challenges of doing so. I will explain how we can overcome these challenges and will encourage participants to embark on their own alternative grading journey. We are teaching writing in a time of grading chaos, and I believe a change is needed to bring order and stability to a broken system. Our writing students deserve better from their writing instructors, and we deserve better as we cope with grading burnout. Specifications grading has given me hope that there is a better way to teach and to learn.
12:00 (MDT) Session 3 | Labor, Power, and Resistance
Leah Heilig & Josh Chase — “Ghost Work & Dead Labor: Rethinking How We Teach Self-Advocacy in the Digital Gig Economy”
Our proposed talk explores how the technical and professional communication (TPC) classroom can be a site to develop tactics to empower workers against the challenges of this emerging labor landscape. TPC scholars are uniquely positioned to identify and promote such tactics, not only because of their knowledge of how symbolic-analytic work mediates technical systems and professional organizations, but also because of their contact with (and their role in training) future workers. Ghost work itself is also entrenched in TPC and communication design, as ghost workers use content strategy and content management skills to arrange metadata and curate digital information, edit and refine content, and use interface savviness to navigate online labor platforms (OLPs), the primary workplace in this digital economy system, which manage work assignments, task workflow, and payment.
Renee Ann Drouin — “‘Gamers Deserve the Guillotine’: Teaching Students to Care about Working Conditions of the Game Industry”
My presentation discusses the successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) ways my students have learned to be loud with empathy and critique abusive practices.Yet my hope comes in how students respond and develop over the course through class discussion and writing. Besides most of them now believing the game industry should unionize (and writing papers on how to), they critique writings on the basis of bias (anti-female), recognize how race isn’t represented fairly (‘One said he didn’t realize how often the villains in first person shooters are Middle Eastern’) and come up with tips on how to protect children from predators in games.
Stephen Shambach — “Archival Recovery as Resistance Pedagogy: Mentoring Undergraduates in the Recovery of Black Women’s Civil Rights Voices”
This presentation examines how archival recovery of marginalized voices can function as resistance pedagogy within writing classrooms and undergraduate mentorship. Drawing on Jacqueline Jones Royster’s concept of “traces” and Carmen Kynard’s “vernacular insurrections,” I argue that training undergraduate researchers to excavate silenced histories from institutional archives constitutes a powerful pedagogical intervention against authoritarian attempts to control public memory. Through Florida State University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, students and I will engage with primary materials from six regional repositories—including FAMU’s Meek-Eaton Black Archives and the Riley Museum—learning to challenge what counts as legitimate historical knowledge while developing critical research and writing literacies that resist sanitized institutional narratives. This approach transforms archival research from extractive academic practice into scholarship that is accountable to the communities whose histories it recovers. By centering the voices of Jakes, Patterson, and other Black women activists excluded from dominant narratives, undergraduate mentorship becomes a site where students learn not merely research methods but the practice of freedom—reclaiming histories that Florida’s current political apparatus wants to erase.
1:00 (MDT) Session 4 | Meaning-Making in an Algorithmic Age
Ben Averia & Sharece Boghozian — “The ‘Postplagiarism’ Era is Here and it’s Honestly a Vibe: Alternative Assessments After Generative AI”
Our presentation is concerned with the ways that Generative AI (GAI) is altering our understanding of Academic Integrity and how we respond to Academic Integrity Violations (AIV) in the age of GAI. Several studies indicate that AIVs are not consistently reported within Higher Education Institutions (Aronson, 2024; Bretag, 2020; Lohman, 2025); therefore, data on the amount of AIVs there are among college students is unreliable. Adding to the already haphazard practices of AIV reporting, the prevalence of GAI abuse among students is exacerbating the problem of AIV, and lack of clear solutions for instructors and institutions is hindering the development of AIV prevention. This presentation evaluates several stopgap solutions we’ve encountered in our discipline that are hindered by considerable drawbacks in both equity and efficacy and concludes with a robust alternative to take-home essays, which are vulnerable to GAI, that attempts to address as many of these faults as possible.
Shiva Mainaly — “Teaching the Seams: AI Abuse as an Invitation to Critical Making”
When students deploy AI to circumvent learning, they inadvertently reveal something more valuable than any essay they might have written: the precise contours of their alienation from academic labor. Rather than policing these boundaries with detection software—itself a form of surveillance pedagogy—what if we taught students to deliberately expose AI’s seams? This presentation proposes critical making as a response to AI abuse, drawing from Ratto’s (2011) concept of “thinking through making” to reframe writing instruction. Students are invited to intentionally use AI poorly, documenting where it fails, where it produces bland universality, where it cannot access embodied knowledge. They then create “seam maps”—annotations revealing the fractures between human complexity and algorithmic approximation. For example, asking AI to write about grief, migration, or workplace injustice produces tellingly generic prose. Students learn to identify these failures not as “catching AI” but as understanding what Birhane (2021) calls algorithmic colonialism—the flattening of situated knowledge into training data.
Liz Blomstedt — “Narrative as a Practice of Hope in Sustainability Writing”
This presentation explores how narrative writing can function as a practice of hope, specifically in a writing class themed on sustainability. In my classes this year, I invited students to draft, revise, and refine personal and community-based stories, culminating in submission to Rooted, a public-facing project sharing student sustainability narratives. To frame this work, students engaged with scholarship in climate change communication, including the UN’s adoption of the Talanoa Dialogue, which emphasizes storytelling as a means of fostering collective understanding and action, and Linda Brodkey’s work on critical ethnographic narrative. I will share student writing and reflective analyses that reveal how narrative fosters agency, relationality, and meaning-making. In a moment shaped by generative AI and disengagement, these assignments offer a compelling model for restoring humanity, voice, and possibility to the writing classroom.
2:00 Brief Concluding Remarks
