Dear UConn Community,
On behalf of the Conference Planning Committee, we are pleased to announce the University of Connecticut First-Year Writing Program’s Twentieth Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing. The conference will be held in Storrs on Thursday, April 24th, and Friday, April 25th, 2025.
This year’s conference theme is “Joy to You and Me: Making Space for Joy in the Writing Classroom.” We understand joy as a powerful resource, a mode of resistance, and a pedagogical framework. As writing instructors, challenges to ourselves and our students are innumerable. Finding joy amongst dread, upheaval, and catastrophe can be a practice of resilience, a refusal to accept a status quo that hurts us. We also understand joy in the classroom as an act of care, both for instructors and students. Opportunities for laughter, compassion, and play can both be a needed distraction, but can also act as revelatory gestures of expression that help us frame our experiences in new ways. Joy invites others into our space and fosters community in our classrooms and on our campuses. How do we frame the work we do not merely as keeping up but about flourishing? How might we even understand failure as a kind of flourishing?
We are thrilled to be hosting Stephanie West-Puckett as this year’s keynote speaker. Dr. West-Puckett’s research centers the use of queer interventions for writing studies and assessment. Her current project bridges these pedagogical methods with practices of joy in the writing classroom.
While attending sessions from research panel presentations, to teaching workshops, to research slams, attendees will consider the following questions throughout the conference:
- How do practices of joy emerge in the writing classroom?
- How can joy be incorporated into assignments and class activities?
- How does joy shape our experiences as teachers? How might it shape our students’ experiences?
- How can joy influence writing assessment? How might we think about joy and failure as key components to assessment?
- How can we think about joy in connection to Writing Program Administration? What’s at stake and what opportunities are there?
- How is joy constructed in particular ways according to race, gender, and sexuality?
- How can writing practices make room for or create possibilities for joy? How might we situate multimodal writing as specific kinds of joy?
- How can resistance and revolt be constituted as joy? How do we explore this in our classrooms or on our campuses?
- How can we understand joy as a community endeavor? What opportunities can joy create in our classroom, department, or campus communities?
- How can joy be a part of conversations about dual enrollment programs in our learning communities, such as Early College programs that bring first-year writing classes to high school students?
Registration is now available via our conference website, which we will continue to update over the coming weeks. Registration is $20 for UConn affiliates, $30 for non-full time non-UConn affiliates, and $50 for full-time non-UConn affiliates.
If you have any questions, feel free to email us at FYWConference@uconn.edu.
We hope you will join us to celebrate joy in the teaching of writing!
Sincerely,
2025 UConn Conference Planning Committee
For more information, contact: UConn Conference Planning Committee at FYWConference@UConn.edu.