Event Details

Seminar hosted by Professor Bronwyn Williams, University of Louisville, USA

Bronwyn Williams is Professor of English and Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville, USA.

Abstract:

We live in a world of disruptions large and small, from climate breakdown, the pandemic, economic precarity, political extremism, and more. The impact of these disruptions for students, however, is in more than just perceived learning loss. Instead, such experiences often disrupt normalized practices of learning and writing and highlight for students changes in how they perceive evolving relationships to place, technology, school, and their embodied needs. In this talk I focus on students’ experiences during the pandemic to explore how the disruptions of where and how they learned revealed, and often challenged, their long-standing conventions and assumptions about their identities as students and writers. This research involved a series of interviews with more than 30 US university students, across a range of grades and disciplines, between April 2020 and March 2022 about the effects of the pandemic on their literacy and learning practices. Yet, as students remade places, worked through digital media, or rethought interactions with instructors, more than their practices changed. The students articulated the ways in which their perceptions and feelings about place, technology, and school were evolving. In framing these as evolving relationships, I connect sociomaterial theories with theories of affect, social interactions, and rhetoric in exploring how the effects of ongoing disruptions on such relationships offers insights into the ways that students construct their identities as writers and learners in uncertain times.

This event is jointly hosted by Morecambe Bay Curriculum and Centre for Higher Education Research and Evaluation.