Christy I. Wenger, Department of English and Modern Languages
Wednesday, September 30, 2015 at 2:00 pm
Byrd Center for Legislative Studies Auditorium
Christy I. Wenger will present research from her recently-published book, Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies: Contemplative Writing Pedagogy, which argues for the inclusion of Eastern-influenced contemplative education within writing studies. Wenger observes that, although we have “embodied” writing education in general by discussing the rhetorics of racialized, gendered, and disabled bodies, we have done substantially less to address the particular bodies that occupy our classrooms. She proposes that we turn to contemplative education practices that engage student bodies through fusing a traditional curriculum with contemplative practices including yoga and meditation. Wenger draws on case studies of first-year college writers to present contemplative pedagogy as a means of teaching students mindfulness of their writing and learning in ways that promote the academic, rhetorical work accomplished in first-year composition classes while at the same time remaining committed to a larger scope of a writer’s physical and emotional well-being.
Christy I. Wenger is Assistant Professor and Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Shepherd. I serve as Board Member and Blog Editor for NCTE’s Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning. In addition to publishing in JAEPL and WPA, I am the author of Yoga Minds, Writing Bodies: Contemplative Writing Pedagogy. When I’m not teaching and/ or researching my own classrooms, I am working on projects that investigate how contemplative practices can inform writing program administration as well as those that investigate the connections between mindfulness and multimodality.