Course info

Despite the challenges and limitations we face as non-mental health professionals, faculty working with undergraduate students on their writing often bear witness to troublesome mental or behavioral health issues. Developing research-based, trauma-informed pedagogies, curriculum, and program design can help us reject tropes that cast our support as a “touchy-feely” approach to the writing classroom.

This workshop will introduce attendees to the emerging concept of trauma-informed writing pedagogies. Workshop participants will gain a general understanding of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) science and research in order to help counter tendencies in the academy to willfully ignore, deny, or minimize the impact of ACEs and trauma on our students, our institutions, and on ourselves.

The workshop will focus on how individual instructors can draw on research and an emerging set of guidelines to develop their own institution- and classroom-specific models for implementing trauma-informed writing pedagogies.

Jan Rieman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She teaches courses in first-year writing, advanced writing, the rhetoric of place, and composition pedagogy. Her research interests include trauma-informed writing pedagogy, antiracist writing assessment, and composition theory. She is a founding member of the Trauma, Adversity & Resilience in Writing Studies group and co-editor of Next Steps for/in Writing about Writing (2019).

This event will take place in Zoom. Join the workshop here: https://appstate.zoom.us/j/605594301?pwd=RmwvTitGRUZHdTlrREM5OUY3V3UwQT09