This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by the Language, Literacies and Education Network (LLEN)

Speaker: Bronwyn T. Williams, Professor of English, University of Louisville. United States

The public conversations around education during the pandemic have often focused on concerns about possible gaps in student knowledge and skills. Yet teachers and researchers have also understood that it is important to attend to the affective and emotional experiences students are having during this unsettled time as they have had to shift to learning from home, and back to school, often several times. The identities that students construct, as readers, writers, and learners, are always shaped by the intersections of affect and memory with social and institutional forces.

In this talk I will discuss a research project undertaken during the pandemic in which I have conducted a series of interviews with 40 university students from March 2020 to December 2021 about their efforts to navigate and adapt to their altered writing and learning situations. The students describe complex interactions of, and embodied responses to, the changing roles of technology, place, and social relationships in their experiences of school. From these experiences students are developing emotional dispositions and autobiographical memories that construct narratives about who they are as students as well as about their relationships to literacy practices and education. Regardless of how long the pandemic lasts, it is important to explore the ways in which the practices and perceptions of education developing now may ripple and resonate for years to come.

Bronwyn T. Williams is a professor of English and director of the University Writing Center at the University of Louisville. He writes and teaches on issues of literacy, identity, digital media, sustainability, and community engagement. His most recent book is Literacy Practices and Perceptions of Agency: Composing Identities. Previous books include New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders; Shimmering Literacies: Popular Culture and Reading and Writing Online; and Identity Papers: Literacy and Power in Higher Education.

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