Association of Writers & Writing Programs, 2010 Annual Conference -- Denver

With professional development funds from the Roaring Fork Campus, I was able to attend the 2010 Annual AWP Conference. Thank you! This conference is always packed full with educational and inspiring sessions. Below are just a few of the highlights of my experience:

The Joy of Assessment: Romancing Narratives of Student Success from Outcomes and Rubrics. This session was presented by Kendall Dunkelberg, Anna Leahy, Stephanie Vanderslice, Mary Cantrell, Aileen Murphy, and Judith Baumel. The focus here was on assessment of creative writing programs; however, as a teacher of primarily composition courses, I found most of their comments relevant for any course that involves writing. Key points addressed in the session included: (A) There is value in creating curriculum maps. (B) More faculty need to be present at the HLC Annual Conference to keep our voices part of the mix. (C) "Closing the loop" doesn't often happen (e.g., that assessment data can change programs) because immediate needs usually trump data (e.g., class size). (D) The real purpose of assessment is making ourselves accountable to our stakeholders, and while this may have some faculty frustrated, meeting the demands of accountability will not go away. Faculty need to take a role in assessment processes in order to continue to have a say in what it is that we do. (E) As writers, we know our central task is to create a narrative out of our data, and while we must remain transparent in how we are "doing" assessment, our ability as writers affords us the opportunity to tell the grand tale of what we do. (F) E-portfolios are a great way to track student performance and skill beyond the scope of one's individual classroom. With this type of assessment tool, we can begin to see if students are meeting the general education goals. (G) Assessment isn't a science; it is about paying attention, giving us the power to see what needs to be done. At Virginia Tech, faculty within the discipline choose one outcome to assess each year, and they pay faculty readers to examine outcomes from students' e-portfolios. [Examples of English ePortfolios can be found in their gallery at http://eportfolio.vt.edu/englishgallery.html.] The panelists created a wiki on the "Joy of Assessment" for further discussion post-conference. It is available at http://joyofassessment.wikidot.com/. Other assessment resources highlighted in this session include:

• http://www.aacu.org/
• http://openedpractices.org/
• http://www.teaglefoundation.org/learning/resources.aspx#assessment
• www.msche.org/publications/SLA_Book_0808080728085320.pdf

The Western Landscape in Contemporary American Poetry. This session was presented by Haines Eason, Oliver de la Paz, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, C. Dale Young, and Paisley Rekdal. Poets read from their work and discussed the nature of the western landscape as it relates to their poetry as well as the people of "the west." Other aspects highlighted in the discussion included the military use of the land, geological time, landscape as image, landscape as character, and the disembodied speakers in lyric poetry.

The Contemporary American Indian Prose Poem: When Form Invents Function. This session was presented by Dean Rader, LeAnne Howe, Janet McAdams, Janice Gould, Eric Gansworth, and Allison Hedge Coke. All of these poets were featured in a recent issue of Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, and all read from their work as well as participated in a discussion on the semiotics of prose poetry.