The English Department Hosts Annual Compositionist Conference

The English Department Hosts Annual Compositionist Conference 

This year’s Compositionist Conference, held on August 20, highlighted the incredible work done each day by all the teachers of ENGL 1010, 2010, and 2020 — and how the teaching of writing in these essential courses enhances the educational experiences of students at USU. This was our most successful Compositionist Conference yet, with over 40 teachers and campus partners in attendance, 12 innovative presentations, 18 engaging presenters, and 6 enthusiastic chairs who kept the conference running smoothly. 

Presenters included Associate Professors Beth Buyserie and Genevieve Ford, Assistant Professors Charlie McMartin and Xiao Tan, Principal Lecturer John Engler, Senior Lecturers Dustin Crawford and Ashley Wells, Lecturers Mary Ellen Greenwood, Zack Gregory, Rachel Quistberg, Rosa Thornley, and Kristen Wheaten, Graduate Instructors Sydney Brooks, Cassidy Crosby, Drake Hansen, Melanie Kimball, and Library Instruction Specialists Rachel Lawyer and Lara Petersen. 

This year, we made a special effort to highlight the wide range of work accomplished by all members of the Composition Program. This year’s program featured Graduate Instructors discussing interdisciplinary reading strategies, trauma-informed pedagogy, and how to gamify your teaching. Statewide faculty from Blanding shared our new self-directed placement questionnaire, Indigenous pedagogies that foreground the strengths of our predominantly Native student population at Blanding, and our new ENGL 1050 course, which is designed to provide additional writing support to students either before or after ENGL 1010. We heard from our two new assistant professors in Composition Studies talk about teaching with Generative AI and writing for and with the community. We featured experienced lecturers who shared their expertise on writing for study abroad, on teaching digital literacies for public life, and teaching with USU Voices, our yearly open-access anthology that features writing by USU Composition students. We also learned from lecturers who recently taught or are in the process of developing new courses, including ENGL 3040, a special topics DHA course called Perspectives in Writing and Rhetoric, which this time focused on anti-rape protest rhetorics; ENGL 3060, a new DHA course on The Rhetorics of Health and Healing; and an online version of ENGL 2020, our newest CL2 course on Professional Communication, which will be piloted in Spring 2025 and offered online regularly starting Fall 2025. And we welcomed back librarians, who are essential partners in the teaching of information literacy here at USU. 

Each year, the Compositionist Conference offers us an opportunity to come together, engage in dialogue, and learn more about the teaching of composition from each other. The conference also kickstarts our monthly professional development sessions, which provide us with ongoing opportunities to learn from current research in rhetoric and composition and our own pedagogical expertise. In keeping both with our theme of “Making Public the Work We Do” and with CHaSS’ focus on interdisciplinary work, our Professional Development series for 2024-2025 will focus on “Interdisciplinary Collaborations.” We’ll be inviting guests from a variety of disciplines to dialogue with us, giving us the chance to learn more about the content of and writing in their disciplines, and for them to learn more about the teaching of writing from our USU composition teachers. 

Associate Professor and Director of Composition Beth Buyserie says, “I’m incredibly proud of the work that all teachers in the Composition Program accomplish — both the work featured at this year’s Conference and the everyday work that often goes unsung — and I thank them for dedicating their care and expertise for the benefit of USU students.”