This year, we had six graduate fellows that worked on various projects on digital rhetoric. Below are some of their reflections on the year, including some information on the projects that they’ve been working on. You can find their projects across various places on the website, including Hack and Yack, the Blog Carnival 21, and the DRC Talk Series, among others. The DRC Fellows also worked on a panel for Computers and Writing 2023 titled: “Connecting Places: The Hybrid Practices of Graduate Students”.
We’ve been honored to have these emerging scholars join us this year and look forward to seeing where their projects will go in the future!
Jiaxin:
The past year with the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC) has been an amazing experience! It has enriched my understanding of digital rhetoric and collaborative learning through projects. My journey with the Sweetland DRC began when I first heard about it from my advisor, who was a DRC alumnus. Later, I had the pleasure of connecting with Jianfen Chen, and she introduced me to her collaborative project, the DRC Syllabus Repository, which was very helpful and meaningful for all the instructors to have this collective space. When I received the acceptance email a year ago, I was excited to contribute and work on the projects at DRC.
In the past year, I have engaged in two individual projects and one collaborative conference presentation that have broadened my horizons. The first project is a tool review blog under the Hack & Tack series. I explored Scrivener as a tool for managing and organizing writing projects. Writers can use Scrivener to create an integrated framework for their early-stage writing, break down the content into manageable units, and set up project targets to stay on track during the writing process. Each writer has their own unique needs and preferences. I hope this tool review could help writers get a quick review of this app. The second project is an interview under the DRC Talk Series. Dr. Jason Tham, a past fellow, provides insights of design thinking and its intersection with digital rhetoric in the interview. I hope this interview could offer valuable insights for those seeking to understand and engage design thinking in research and teaching in the field of digital humanities.
One of the highlights of this year was the collaboration I experienced while preparing for the Computers & Writing (C&W) conference presentation, titled “Connecting Places: The Hybrid Practices of Graduate Students”. We shared ideas, created drafts, and prepared slides in the meetings. Collaborating with my DRC fellows was inspiring! By including in-person, synchronous, and asynchronous presenters, we captured the essence of hybridity and shared insights from varied perspectives.
Reflecting on the past year, I feel so grateful for meeting with this wonderful group of people and the opportunities that DRC has provided me! Thanks to the directors Alyse, Naomi, Anne, Simone, and my cohort for making this year unforgettable! I look forward to seeing the amazing things from the fellows in my cohort and will definitely follow the incoming works from DRC fellows!
Chris:
My time in the Sweetland DRC was really profitable. I was able to work with a wide array of interesting people within the fellowship. Equally, it provided me with the opportunity to network outside of the fellowship. The fellowship provided me with a space to grow and refine my research. I encourage others to apply to be a fellow, it’s fun and you’ll meet neat people!
Nitya:
It was a pleasure working as a DRC fellow this year. It was my first time and the experience had been quite rewarding. I was selected as a fellow in the final year of my doctoral program, and it was a bit chaotic due to my job search and dissertation defense. However, I felt strongly supported as I worked on my Computers and Writing presentation and paired up with Laura to complete the project on blog carnivals.
I would like to start with my Computers and Writing presentation in which I participated asynchronously online. My presentation coincided with the theme of the conference this year, hybridity, and I discussed how hybridity was practiced in one of my undergraduate composition classrooms via a project. The project prompted the students to think about their situatedness at the crossroads of the real/physical and the virtual/digital realms and contemplate it through the critical lens of social movements that have overlapping beginnings, developments, and consequences in multiple spheres. The students were then required to articulate their thoughts and analysis via multiple modes.
Similarly, for the blog carnival, Laura and I worked on collecting the blog carnival entries on discussing “the roles of digital rhetoricians in the design, development, and deployment of various methods in determining accuracy and authenticity in the face of vast amounts of misinformation and the advancements in AI for various contexts, including professional, educational, social, and political settings.” We were able to read through the proposals and get the blog entries published in the website which are now visible for everybody to access.
Overall, this has been a great experience. I got to meet some wonderful people who were warm and supportive the whole time that I was a fellow. I plan to stay updated about the new and exciting developments in DRC through the website in the future as well. I will also encourage more people to apply for the fellowship since this has been such a positive learning experience for me.
Laura:
This was my second year as a fellow, and I was so happy for the opportunity again! I loved putting together the Blog Carnival. It was a great experience in writing a Call for Proposals, reading through and accepting proposals, and working with the contributors to ensure everyone got their pieces posted to the website. I am so grateful for my two years with the DRC! I have worked with and among amazing people! It was a wonderful experience that I will carry with me through my future endeavors!
Alexandra:
As a multilingual woman graduate scholar in Composition and Applied Linguistics, I find Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC) Fellowship an outstanding opportunity to grow as both an academic and a person.
During my 2021-2022 fellowship, I accomplished a digital storytelling project that
Although I designed my project individually, the feedback and support I received from other fellows and mentors throughout my journey made an important impact on the project’s outcomes. My project Transformative Pedagogy and Decolonial Approach Through Digital Storytelling enabled me to encourage multilingual students to draw upon their full linguistic repertoires while creating their digital stories. It raised awareness about multilingual writing practices in digital space which promotes digital diversity as well as multilingual classrooms, which still rely on English as a dominant (Daniel & Zybina, 2019) and colonial (Alim & Paris, 2017) force. My project offers a transformative pedagogy and decolonial approach across contexts in language classrooms that promote the use of all students’ repertoires beyond monolingual prescriptive using digital storytelling as a pedagogical tool.
In terms of collaboration, DRC fellows presented at the Computers and Writing Conference 2023 in Davis, CA. This collaborative project enabled interconnection and a true partnership with peer review, encouragement, and meeting deadlines. In addition, we presented in a hybrid format, which made our collaboration more engaging and globally connected.
I truly believe that DRC Fellowship is beneficial for graduate students to develop their creativity, work on desired projects, and meet amazing people. I feel rewarded spending a year collaborating with intelligent and caring people as well as accomplishing my project: which I hope would make a difference in language classrooms.
