The Department of English and the Writing Program will host the Edward S. and Melinda Sadar Lecture in Writing in the Disciplines Monday, Dec. 9, from 3:15 to 4:30 p.m. in the Tinkham Veale University Center Senior Classroom.
Cassandra Phillips, professor of English for the College of General Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will present “Literacy and Materiality: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching to Reach All Learners.”
This lecture and discussion will focus on the ways that literacy learning and instruction can—and should be—grounded in the material realities of higher education. After analyzing the areas that make up the field of writing studies:
- Material conditions (the job market, employment prospects and labor);
- Scholarship (the research published in several major writing studies journals over a nearly 20-year period); and
- Teaching (drawing from a multi-year study of students in a series of developmental and first-year reading and writing courses in campuses across the state).
Recommendations will be made to bring those often disparate areas into alignment for the benefit of students, teachers, programs, and professional associations.
Phillips’s research focuses on literacy studies, reading and writing pedagogy, assessment, writing program administration and development, curricular design, online pedagogy, and developmental education. She is the coauthor of Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor, Teaching, and Scholarship (2022), which won the Council of Writing Program Administrators Best Book Award in 2024, and Reaching All Writers: A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving Writing Classrooms (2024). Her work also appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Writing Program Administration, Pedagogy, Peitho and edited collections.