The 48th Annual Spring Conference on the Teaching of Writing

Slow Reading in a Fast World: 
Writing and Reading as Critical and Rhetorical Engagement

Dates TBA | Old Dominion University, Norfolk Campus & Online

Proposals are submitted here via Google Forms. The standard proposals deadline is TBA but will likely be in late January. Acceptances will be sent via email approximately 30 days before the conference. However, if you submit a conference proposal by November 2, we will send you an early decision by December 18.

Teachers of writing, language arts, literature, and linguistics have long understood that reading and writing are not separate skills but deeply interwoven cognitive and rhetorical acts. As Kathleen Blake Yancy, Liane Robertson and Kara Taczak’s work on transfer and reflective practice reminds us: students who learn to read rhetorically become writers capable of understanding and contributing meaningfully to conversations. But that capacity is under real pressure. 

We’re teaching writing in an era when information saturation, generative AI, algorithmic feeds, and assessment culture have trained students– and the broader public– to extract conclusions from texts rather than trace how those conclusions were built: skimming for takeaways, treating summaries as equivalent to the source, accepting AI-generated text as neutral rather than authored. Teaching slow, analytical reading that interrogates sources, recognizes rhetorical moves, evaluates evidence, and situates claims in context has never felt radical and necessary, and writing courses and writing-intensive courses are among the most powerful sites on our campuses for cultivating exactly these literacy capacities. But how do we teach slow, analytical reading, and how do we help students see and value the relationship between reading and writing in a moment like this? 

The 48th Annual Spring Conference on the Teaching of Writing invites teachers, scholars, and graduate students of writing and writing programs to explore how our classrooms, curricula, and pedagogies support writing and reading as acts of rhetorical and critical engagement. We invite all educators who care about the teaching of writing– at any level, in any context to take up questions such as:

  • What annotation practices, activities, and assignments have you found best support the reading-writing connection? How do threshold concepts in writing studies, including those centered around writing as inquiry, genre awareness, or rhetorical situation, illuminate the role of reading in writing development and vice versa? What annotation practices, activities, and assignments have you found best support the reading-writing connection?
  • How do we push back against the acceleration pressures of contemporary academic life and cultivate counter-cultural practices of slowness–slow reading, slow writing, slow thinking? What does this look like and what happens for our students and in our classrooms when we’re able to do it?  
  • How do writing, literature, English, and language arts courses teach students to read sources critically and recognize rhetorical strategies? How does this work support students’ thriving as writers, citizens, and professionals?
  • What does it mean to read and write responsibly in an age of AI-generated text, deepfakes, and contested information landscapes, and how do we prepare students to engage with texts and the world critically, ethically, and responsibly?
  • What adjustments to teaching research and teaching students to read and engage with scholarly texts have you made to your assignments in the Age of AI?
  • How do multimodal, digital, and visual texts expand or complicate what we mean by “close reading” in writing courses, and how do we help students engage in close reading of these texts?
  • How do universal design for learning principles and accessibility pedagogies challenge us to reimagine what “reading” and “writing” look like in our classrooms? How do we design reading and writing experiences that honor the full range of ways students make meaning, process texts, and compose, and what do we gain when we do?
  • How do culturally sustaining, and anti-racist pedagogies shape the ways we ask students to engage critically with texts?
  • How do our writing and literature courses function as gateways– into academic discourse, into confidence, into students’ own intellectual and creative lives? How do social-emotional learning principles and trauma-informed pedagogies help us design classrooms where students feel safe enough to take the rhetorical and intellectual risks that close, critical reading and effective writing require?
  • How does inhabiting our own identities as readers and writers shape the way we teach? Do you engage in reading-specific personal practices or rituals, such as participating in a book club, consuming reading-focused digital newsletters or channels, etc. that might inform your teaching? What and how are you reading, writing, or making right now– and what might happen if we brought those selves more fully into our classrooms and our conference conversations?
  • How do we sustain ourselves as educators– and model sustainability for our students– when the work is demanding, the pace is relentless, and the emotional labor is real? What practices of renewal, play, creativity, and rest keep you in the work and bring you back to yourself? 

Submitting a Proposal

How to Submit a Proposal

Proposals are submitted here via Google Forms. The standard proposals deadline is TBA but will likely be in late January. Acceptances will be sent via email approximately 30 days before the conference.

If you submit a conference proposal by November 2, we will send you an early decision by December 18. 

What to Include

All proposals ask for the same basic information:

  • Presenter name(s), institutional affiliation(s), and contact information
  • Session format (see options below)
  • Session title
  • Abstract of no more than 300 words describing your topic or focus, your approach, and how your session connects to the conference theme.
    • Please note, however, that if you are proposing a Presentation Panel, your abstract may be up to 200 words per presenter. You are also welcome (but not required) to include a brief précis of up to 150 words that brings all the presentations together and describes the thread connecting them.

Session Formats

We welcome proposals for the following session formats:

Individual Presentations (15–20 min per presenter + Q&A; 50–75 min total): Focused presentations of research, pedagogy, or theory related to the conference theme. Individual presenters will be combined into panels by conference organizers. If you are looking to do a traditional conference-style presentation, this is your session.

Presentation Panels (15–20 min per presenter + Q&A; 50 min for 2 presenters, 75 min for 3): Coordinated presentations on a shared topic, pedagogy, or research thread, proposed and submitted together. If you and your co-presenter(s) are looking to do traditional conference-style presentations together, this is your session.

Roundtable Discussions (50 min; at least half dedicated to discussion): A brief framing of a practice, issue, or central question followed by facilitated discussion. Roundtables may be proposed individually or as a small group. Your abstract should identify the issue or question at the center of the session and describe how you plan to invite attendees into the dialogue. If you are more interested in talking with and learning alongside attendees than in presenting, this is your session.

Workshops (75 min.): Hands-on, participatory sessions in which attendees engage directly with pedagogical strategies, materials, or approaches. Your abstract should describe what attendees will do and what they will take away. If you have a classroom practice or approach you want fellow educators to experience firsthand, this is your session.

Teaching Demonstrations (50 min): Participatory sessions in which the presenter(s) lead attendees through one activity, assignment, or lesson. Your abstract should identify the activity or lesson and describe how attendees will engage with it. If you have an innovative way of teaching a specific skill, text, or concept that you want to share with fellow educators, this is your session.

Self-Care & Sustaining Practice Sessions (50 min): Teaching is demanding, joyful, exhausting, and meaningful– often all at once. These sessions carve out space for the renewal and play that educators need as much as their students do, engaging attendees in something artistic, meditative, creative, or healing: a guided journaling exercise, a collaborative art-making activity, a mindfulness or movement practice or anything else that restores and replenishes. Your abstract should describe the practice and what you hope attendees will experience or take away. If you have a practice that sustains you and that you want to share with fellow educators, this is your session. If you expect 75 minutes would be better for your session, don’t hesitate to let us know. 

Teachers as Readers & Writers Sessions (50 min): Writing teachers are often readers and writers themselves, and this session type makes space to honor those identities. These sessions engage attendees directly in the acts of reading, writing, or both: a generative writing workshop, a close reading of a shared text, a craft conversation, or a book club-style discussion. Want to lead a group through a poem? Facilitate a conversation about a book that’s shaped how you teach? Invite attendees to write alongside you? This is the place. Your abstract should identify the text, prompt, or practice at the center of the session and describe how attendees will be actively engaged as readers and/or writers. If you want to invite your colleagues to show up as readers and writers, this is your session.

Works Cited

Taczak, Kara and Liane Robertson. “Reiterative Reflection in the Twenty-First-Century Writing Classroom An Integrated Approach to Teaching for Transfer.” A Rhetoric of Reflection. Ed. Kathleen Blake Yancy. USUP. 2016. 

Yancey, Kathleen, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak.Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. USUP. 2014. 

Sponsored by The Thistle Foundation Fund of the Hampton Roads Community Foundation and The ODU Department of English