"Literacy and Materiality: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching To Reach All Learners," the Sadar Lecture by Cassandra Phillips

This lecture and discussion will focus on the ways that literacy learning and instruction can—and should be—grounded in the material realities of higher education. After analyzing the areas that make up the field of writing studies: material conditions (the job market, employment prospects, and labor); scholarship (the research published in several major writing studies journals over a nearly 20-year period); and teaching (drawing from a multi-year study of students in a series of developmental and first-year reading and writing courses in campuses across the state), recommendations will be made to bring those often disparate areas into alignment for the benefit of students, teachers, programs, and professional associations.

Cassandra Phillips is a Professor of English for the College of General Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she also serves as the Writing Program and Developmental English Coordinator. Her research focuses on literacy studies, reading & writing pedagogy, assessment, writing program administration & development, curricular design, online pedagogy, and developmental education. She is the coauthor of Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor, Teaching, and Scholarship (2022), which won the Council of Writing Program Administrators Best Book Award in 2024, and Reaching All Writers: A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving Writing Classrooms (2024). Her work has also appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Writing Program Administration, Pedagogy, Peitho, and edited collections.

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