Making Room for Us (CCW 2025) [video]

In this panel, presenters will discuss assignment- and course design interventions to orient undergraduate writing students towards expansive and culturally affirming notions of community in academia. Undergraduate and first-year writing courses are commonly justified on the grounds that they develop foundational writing, critical thinking, and analytical skills that prepare students for academic and professional life. This discourse of “preparedness” oftentimes carries with it exclusionary ideas about what constitutes legitimate language-, writing- and knowledge making practices. Over the last 50 years, critical scholars in the field of writing studies have done important work to push back against this deficit paradigm of difference. Notably, efforts from cultural rhetorics (Hsu & Nish; Maraj; Royster) and critical literacies (Kynard; Horner & Lu; Leonard) have been fundamental in legitimizing the ways of knowing and doing that minoritized students bring with them from non-academic communities. The presenters join these efforts as they engage with what it means to “prepare” students for their academic journeys: What practices help us reconfigure community in writing classrooms? How can those configurations encourage recognition and engagement with other ways of knowing? How do we encourage students to listen, to build reciprocal relationships across differences, and to work towards collaborative meaning making (Riley-Mukavetz; Jackson and Whitehorse DeLaune)? How does the emergence of a renewed or affirmed sense of community inform students’ (and our own) understanding of what university writing is and is for?

Bios: Nelesi Rodrigues is an Assistant Professor, cross-appointed in Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy (ISUP) and the Adult Education and Community Development program (AECD) at OISE, University of Toronto. Her scholarship brings mobility justice and embodied feminist perspectives to questions about writing and learning in community contexts, university settings, and the spaces where both meet. She is also interested in arts-informed research methods and pedagogies, and on the role that writing instruction can play in equity and access initiatives in higher education.

Lydia Toorenburgh (they/them) is a tastawiyiniw (Two-Spirit), Bungi Métis and mixed-settler person living as a visitor on lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ lands in Victoria, BC. They hold an MA and an Honours in Anthropology and are now a PhD student in Anthropology and Indigenous Nationhood at the University of Victoria. Their training is in audio-visual, creative, participatory, and community-engaged research.

Jessica Batychenko is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Georgetown University where she teaches in the Writing Program. Her research focuses on dialog-driven, community-engaged teaching. She is invested in pedagogies that highlight the transformative potential of storytelling and dialogue in education, with the goal of equipping students with the tools to think ethically, communicate across difference, and participate meaningfully in public life.

Loren Gaudet is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Academic and Technical Writing Program at the University of Victoria. She is committed to pedagogies of care, and researches how to support first-year students find a sense of belonging in a university context.