What a wonderful year it has been for the RISD Writing Center. We’ve taken on new ventures and participated in engaging events, from public speaking workshops and Grad Thesis Writing Retreats to a full day of exploring ekphrasis and our series of Readings in the Writing Center. It’s been a pleasure to collaborate with faculty, staff, students, and guests, and we want to thank everyone who could be part of it.
Now that it’s summer, we’re looking ahead to 2014-15, and we’ve got plenty in store: we’ll be continuing our support for the RISD writing community and continuing to build on some of this year’s new endeavors, but we’re also expanding in exciting new ways. Here’s a sneak peek at what we’re planning and what we’re reading.
This summer, we’ll be considering new perspectives for tutors, especially in terms of collaborative learning and social justice. These readings will help us train tutors as leaders and as allies, both in the work they already do and in new approaches:
— Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors
— bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress
— Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
— Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change
This coming year, the RISD Writing Center will expand its tutoring to include writing, public speaking, and visual rhetoric for all RISD composers. In preparation for this big step toward multimodal composition, we’re looking at the following books:
— Sohui Lee and Russell Carpenter’s Routledge Reader on Writing Centers & New Media
— N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis
— David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel’s The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric
— Le Odell and Susan M. Katz’s Writing in a Visual Age
— Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground
— Mathieu Borysevicz’s The Book About Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground
As always, we’re keeping in touch with critical conversations around writing, art, and design. These texts are our latest finds on the topic:
— Noel Carroll’s On Criticism
— Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum’s On Not Knowing: How Artists Think
— Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing
We wish you good summer reading, too, and look forward to seeing you all in the Fall.