Chris Belcher
University of Southern California & Oberlin
Chris Belcher will discuss strategies for engaging students in the craft of personal narrative, knowing that their collective experiences in one (degraded) form of the genre is the college admissions essay, a genre that conditions marginalized students to “pimp out [their] trauma for a shot at a future [they] want but can’t fully imagine” (Anthony Abraham Jack).
Sam Cohen
Oberlin
Sam Cohen will share her visions for “de-carceralizing the classroom,” which “relies primarily on fostering process-based writing in which students trust their own thinking rather than looking to external authority for evaluation, and modeling critical thinking from a place of not-knowing.”
Raechel Anne Jolie
Independent Public Intellectual
Grappling with the adage that we ought to “write from the scar, not the wound,” Raechel Anne Jolie will speak about “how [that adage] often exists in tension with what [they] ask of [their] students.” They will consider how, “After a decade of teaching and writing, [they] have reflected on what feels acceptable to bring to the classroom versus the page, and how [their] usual approach (of revealing less in the classroom and more on the page) supports or hinders facilitation of student transformation.”
