Meeting Diverse Needs through Professional Connections
June 13-15, 2019
George Mason University, Arlington Campus
Arlington, Virginia, USA
Call for Participation
With 3 million students enrolled in post baccalaureate education in the U.S. alone, faculty members and administrators whose daily work involves understanding and advocating for the complex needs of graduate students know the critical importance of successfully connecting and collaborating with a wide range of partners in impactful ways. National trends in graduate and postgraduate education highlight just a few factors that contribute to shaping complex needs: 59% of graduate students identify as female, 1.4 million identify as non-white, 1.3 million are part time, and more than 1.1 million of these students participate in distance education (Institute of Education Sciences, 2018). In addition, international students comprise approximately 20% of graduate enrollments in the U.S. (Hawes, 2018). Similar patterns of growth and diversification in the graduate population have been seen in other countries.
Following three successful summer institutes (Yale, Monterey, and Michigan), the 2019 CGC Summer Institute seeks to highlight the many ways that graduate communication professionals build, grow, and sustain successful collaborations and the way they build alliances and partnerships to help support graduate student success.
Advocating for a diverse body of graduate students and post-docs often requires graduate communication professionals to connect and collaborate with a wide range of professional partners. We can, for example, draw on multiple disciplinary frameworks for theorizing our work. We can consult the scholarship on graduate communication coming out of a variety of fields. In addition, we can work with other graduate communication specialists from many different institutions and institutional locations, such as graduate schools, intensive English institutes, English departments, and writing centers. Another way of drawing on this expertise is through collaborating more directly with a wide variety of professionals at our own institutions and in the larger community. For example, graduate communication professionals may:
- Work directly with disciplinary faculty to not only gain insights into the milestones that graduate students in a given department must meet, but also share strategies to support these students in the disciplinary classroom and beyond
- Communicate with administrators to advocate for graduate communication support services
- Co-teach graduate-level courses with faculty or staff from different departments on campus
- Develop workshop series on topics related to graduate-student concerns in collaboration with professionals from the student health center, the career center, the office on academic integrity, etc.
- Invite guest speakers from industry to talk to graduate students about the specific communication needs for success outside of academia
- Conduct needs analyses and other research into graduate students’ communication needs during and beyond their degrees
Some questions related to these collaborations include (but are not limited to):
- What disciplines offer theoretical resources for understanding and propelling our work with graduate students?
- What research and scholarship about graduate communication have emerged from the disciplines?
- Where are graduate communication professionals located in the university, and how are graduate communication professionals in different locations collaborating with one another?
- With whom do graduate communication professionals collaborate? Why? How?
- In what ways do graduate students benefit from such collaborations?
- In what ways do these collaborations benefit an increasingly diverse graduate student body (linguistically and culturally) and an increasingly diverse array of graduate programs (e.g., professional master’s programs, online programs, etc.)
- How do graduate communication professionals—and their collaborators—benefit from working together?
- How do we advocate for services for graduate students to university administration?
- What are the impediments to collaborating for graduate communication professionals? How can such impediments be overcome?
- What are the components of successful collaborations?
To explore these questions or other issues pertaining to your graduate communication context, the Institute will feature works-in-progress sessions, workshops, roundtable sessions, and keynotes. Participants are welcome to submit proposals for works-in-progress sessions, roundtables, and/ or workshops, or attend the Institute to “listen and learn.”
Proposals
All proposal deadlines have passed. Register here to attend the conference to listen and learn!
Workshops
Proposals due Friday, February 8, 2019 by 11:59 PM, EST
Roundtables
Proposals due Monday, April 8, 2019 by 11:59 PM EST
Works-in-Progress or Listen and Learn
Attendees who haven’t submitted a proposal for a workshop or roundtable will be asked to either submit a “works-in-progress” proposal or to choose the “listen and learn” option when registering for the Institute.
Works in Progress Presentations: present a 10-minute synopsis of your work in graduate communication program administration, course design, pedagogy, tutoring, materials development, or research, and end with a problem or question for discussion. Presenters will be grouped in strands according to areas of interest in order to listen to each other’s presentations and engage in substantive discussion (approximately 20 minutes). Enter a short abstract (limit: 250 words) of your presentation on the registration form and a short, descriptive title. You will also be prompted to choose the category that best fits your proposal:
- Research—share work-in-progress reporting scholarly and/or institutional research
- Pedagogy—share course designs, writing assignment designs, and pedagogical approaches,
- Theory—what does theory look like in our context?
- Tutoring Approaches/Communication support outside the classroom
- Negotiating Campus Politics—working conditions, finding campus allies, arguing for budgets
- Materials Development—textbooks, professional development materials, materials for courses and tutoring programs
- Co-curricular support
- X Strand—none of the above but important to the work of graduate communication support
Participants are encouraged to share their work regardless of the maturity of their projects. All Works-in-Progress proposals will be accepted.
Proposals due by the close of registration on Monday, April 15, 2019 by 11:59 PM EST.
Listen and Learn (Registration Only)
Attend the institute, listen to the speakers, participate in workshops, attend works-in-progress strands, participate in the discussions, and take home ideas for your classes, programs, and research. All listen-and-learn participants will be listed on the program.
Submitting Multiple Proposals
Participants are welcome to submit multiple proposals, but our plan is to accept only one proposal from each speaker in order to make sure that everyone who wants to present at the Institute has the chance to do so. If you submit multiple proposals, please make a note of this at the end each proposal and indicate which proposal you would like us to prioritize for selection. (For example, if you submit a roundtable proposal and a works-in-progress proposal but would prefer to lead the roundtable discussion, indicate in both proposals that you want the roundtable to take first priority.) If you submit a roundtable or workshop proposal only and that proposal is not accepted, you will be invited to submit a works-in-progress proposal.
You can learn more about the CGC and register for the Institute through our website: www.gradconsortium.org.
Recent Comments