Greater Kansas City Writing Centers’ Project
2019 Conference and Workshops
August 24, 2019
Johnson County Community College
Regnier Center
12345 College Blvd
Overland Park, KS 66210
Keynote Speaker: 
Dr. Annika Konrad is a Senior Lecturer at Dartmouth College, where she teaches and researches writing at the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Her passion for teaching writing began as an undergraduate Writing Fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Later, as a doctoral student at UW-Madison, she served as Director of the Writing Center for one summer and Assistant Director of the Writing Fellows Program for three years. Her research focuses on disability and accessibility, and she has given numerous workshops on accessibility for peer tutors and writing instructors. She has published works on related topics in Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, Composition Forum, and WPA: Writing Program Administration Journal. Her article in Reflections was selected to be reprinted in Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition, 2015-2016. Recently, she co-edited a special issue of Composition Forum on “Doing Composition in the Presence of Disability.” She is currently working on a book project entitled Arguing for Access: The Rhetorical Work of Disability in Everyday Life. While in Madison, she founded of The Outlook From Here, a community writing project in partnership with Wisconsin Council of the Blind and Visually Impaired, for which she received recognition from Community Shares of Wisconsin.
Keynote Talk:
Access as a Lens for Peer Tutoring: Flexibility, Multimodality, and Universal Design
While disability is often considered a deficit, this talk focuses on how disability and accessibility offer opportunities to develop more inclusive writing center practices. Dr. Konrad will introduce key concepts like accessibility and universal design for learning (UDL), which we will use to examine a variety of writing center “access scenarios” derived from Dr. Konrad’s research and teaching. Together, we will work to identify commonplace writing center practices that need to become more flexible to foster accessibility across areas of writing center life. Ultimately, this talk will offer an opportunity to think more deeply about your own tutoring practices and give you a foundation for building a culture of access in your own writing centers.
Greater Kansas City Writing Centers' Project 