46 Celebration of Student Writing

Celebrations of Student Writing, though not entirely ubiquitous across writing programs, have been a hallmark of writing research courses for years. Linda Adler-Kassner and Heidi Estrem (2003) first wrote about Eastern Michigan University’s embrace of the CSW as the writing program’s capstone experience in 2003. For them, the CSW was “intended to assert a more public presence for college writing” and “address the struggles some writing instructors describe in their discussions of research writing.” Further, in redesigning their curriculum they were eager to find a balance between instructor autonomy and program coherence; in short, they “wanted everyone to be in the same ballpark, even one as big as Yankee Stadium” (Adler-Kassner & Estrem, 2003). The CSW allowed this program coherence to develop organically, to orient questions about curriculum design in terms of a clear, tangible context, “a rhetorically situated audience” (Carter & Gallegos, 2017, p. 79). One of my colleagues, Chelsea Lonsdale, describes the CSW as a sort of “science fair for writing,” an apt description, though in some ways a CSW is the anti-science fair, a demonstration that humanities research need not be defined in terms of the scientific method.

Instituted in 2016, our university CSW is, in many ways, still in its fledgling phase. Although many CSWs are particularly dedicated to displaying the fruits of research writing developed in the second semester composition class, at our university all English classes are invited to participate. First-year students through graduate students are represented in our event, as well as students taking composition, literature, and creative writing courses, and we offer simultaneously the fair-style art installations and poster presentations in one room during the CSW, and creative readings and plays in an adjacent space. In this way our CSW has a departmental mission of uniting English sub-disciplines that is perhaps a higher priority for us than demonstrating the products of research writing to the wider university audience.

Figure 1. The Map for the Middle Tennessee State University 2019 Celebration of Student Writing

Figure 2. The Collaboratively Constructed Diorama at the Middle Tennessee State University 2019 Celebration of Student Writing

Figure 3. Photographs from MTSU Celebrations of Student Writing