The call for proposals is now up for the Tenth Biennial UNH Composition Studies Conference. The deadline is May 14, 2004, and the conference will take place from October 15-16, 2004. The theme is "Composing Cultures: Diversity and the Teaching of Writing":

We have used the terms “diversity” and “culture” in our title, realizing that they raise many questions, such as: what understanding of diversity and culture do we bring to our classrooms, and how does it affect our teaching? What understanding of these terms do our students bring to our classrooms, and how do we account for these perspectives?

At the conference we hope to explore questions like the following: In what ways are the "rhetorics" students bring into class at odds with academic “rhetorics”? How can we mediate that difference? How does this kind of "contact zone" contribute to changes in academic discourse? How do students’ allegiances to popular culture and visual media affect our approaches to teaching writing? How can an educational institution deal sensitively and effectively with students whose first language is not English but who may reject the identity of an "ESL student"? How can we raise issues of race in classes that are almost entirely white?



This conference will not simply deal with these issues in the abstract; it will look at ways in which differences play out in our teaching. It will promote interdisciplinary discussions that involve: composition studies, rhetoric (and contrastive rhetoric), ESL, women's studies, race studies—all integrally tied to pedagogy.

Link via vitia.