Heidelberg is a Detroit-based, outdoor art installation that for 30 years has both delighted and angered residents is used as a backdrop for exploring spaces of collaborative engagement. This panel examines the multivalent meanings of Heidelberg and how it, and similar spaces, can be used rhetorically in the Composition classroom.

Our goal in this collaborative presentation is to examine how the GameSpace Learning Lab might create future opportunities for furthering research, developing hands-on teaching practices, making WAC and WID connections with other departments, creating new or augmented course designs/offerings, and eventually influence the gaming industry as a whole.

After a short presentation based on my research into best practices and my experience as a student, I will facilitate an open discussion on designing and implementing group projects to foster collaboration, creativity, and personal responsibility.

This presentation considers the effects of monolingualism on international publishing rates from 1996-2015 in the natural and social sciences. Evidence is presented that indexed journals are becoming more nationally diverse, but that this diversity has entailed costs for individual scientists, journals, and particular academic disciplines outside of Anglophone communities.

The goal of Common Core is to prepare students for “college, career, and life” by establishing rigorous, comprehensive standards that all students are expected to meet. With emphasis placed on literacy and math, Common Core stipulates all teachers are teachers of reading and writing. While admirable in nature, in practice, Common Core seems designed with standardized testing which is used to keep tabs on teacher effectiveness rather than gauging student readiness or ability. A possible consequence of this focus is apathetic writers only concerned with passing the test. The goal of writing is shifted from a personal communication of ideas or values to meeting arbitrary requirements.

This presentation suggests that embodied acts of student protest can influence how humanities scholars collaborate across disciplines. As a method of collaboration, I consider Achille Mbmebe’s, “horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions.” For Mbembe, a horizontal strategy of openness requires a new arrangement of epistemological traditions while troubling current epistemic hierarchies, ascribing Western Eurocentric knowledge systems over others.