Building Better Collaborations: Julia Voss Visits Stanford

Friday, January 28th, Julia Voss, Assistant Professor of English at Santa Clara University (SCU), visited PWR. Invited by the Teaching and Tutoring Practices (TTP) Committee, Voss attended our meeting and later led two separate workshops for PWR instructors at our program-wide meeting.

The first workshop Voss ran was on democratizing collaboration. Voss emphasized several possible strategies for improving group work outcomes in the classroom amongst a diverse student body. While relatively homogenous groups perform better in the short term, Voss explained, diverse groups will outperform homogenous groups over time.  

The second workshop was on information literacy scaffolding, and drew upon Voss’s current research project on the correlation between awareness of one’s identity position and the ability to recognize information bias. Voss’s handout identified many different activities and approaches to take into the classroom when planning lessons on recognizing bias during the research process. 

“I really appreciated that [Voss] gave us a chance to workshop. There’s such a temptation to use the time when you’re up front to talk. But she really wanted us to get what we needed out of it,” Meg Formato said at the conclusion of the afternoon. Lisa Swan added, “She gave us several different ideas for activities we could implement right away on information literacy.” Sangeeta Mediratta agreed: “I loved Julia Voss’ discussion of cultural capital and the participation gap in student group work and her use of highly structured interventions and assigned roles to mitigate some of these challenges.  I would love to see how we in PWR would like to experiment with her methods in our own students’ group work such as during group discussion and peer review. Role play in class seems like a fun, playful, and yet effective way to get at more even participation and enhanced student community.”

During both workshops, Voss used Poll Everywhere to elicit feedback from instructors on their practices. After a tense moment when we appeared to lose our internet signal, comments started to appear on screen. Seeing our responses to Voss’s questions constituted an exciting moment for us at TTP, one -- a long time in the making. 

The idea to bring Voss to campus can be traced to two different moments. The first occurred on the plane ride home from Pittsburgh after the Conference on College Composition and Communication Conference (CCCC) in March 2019. Some PWR attendees met several faculty members from SCU who happened to be on the same flight. Thus began a conversation about our shared interests in cultural rhetorics and communication in digital spaces as well as our proximity to one another in the South Bay area. A few of us discussed the possibility of future collaboration. 

Then, when the 2019 September Sessions coordinators selected Voss’s Composition Studies article, “Who Learns from Collaborative Digital Projects? Cultivating Critical Consciousness and Metacognition to Democratize Digital Literacy Learning” as a reading for the Pedagogies and Platforms Reading Group, a light bulb went off. As co-chairs of TTP, Tesla and I - who also happened to be in the Pedagogies and Platforms September Sessions group  - discussed the possibility of bringing Voss to campus and put together a proposal for Adam Banks and Marvin Diogenes. 

Given that Adam introduced the theme of “Writing Futures” for the 2019-2020 September Sessions, Voss seemed like a perfect candidate because of her research interests in both digital literacies and cultural rhetorics. In our pitch to Adam and Marvin, Tesla and I saw Voss’s work as one step toward bridging our program’s multi-year focus on cultural rhetorics into this new, emerging focus.

Given that the study which inspired our invitation concerned a semester-long collaborative digital project, we knew we’d have to think about how to make it more immediately useful to PWR. Thus began over two months of discussion amongst TTP members as well as between TTP leadership and Voss. To make sure we had a grasp of the ways PWR instructors use collaboration in class and teach research, we built a survey that gave us better data. Voss used this information to put together the two workshops, and we also got the chance to follow up on some longer-term discussion questions with her during a pedagogy round-table at the TTP meeting that day. 

In one conversation, Voss - who has run many faculty development workshops at SCU - stated, “In my experience, teachers want information that they can apply now, today.” Her workshop provided that information to us and offered more ways to think about how we teach information literacy to our students.