A Humanistic Enterprise: Connection in the Classroom in an Age of Automation
Saturday, June 13, 2026
8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History
Saturday, June 13
Conference Schedule
8:00-8:25 a.m. Registration and Breakfast
8:25 a.m. Welcome by the YRC Executive Board
8:30-9:30 a.m. Panel 1: Fostering Connection Through Play-Based Learning
“Leveling Up Learning: Integration of Communal Gamified Pedagogy within First- Year Composition” — Ismael A. Benjelloun, University of Central Florida
In an era where digital mediation and post-pandemic learning environments have weakened classroom connections, composition instructors face renewed challenges in fostering meaningful in-person engagement. While many educators have experimented with gamified instruction through platforms such as Kahoot and Quizlet, these approaches often remain limited to short-term motivation and isolated participation. This presentation explores the implementation of a community-centered gamified pedagogy within the freshman composition classroom, emphasizing collaboration, rhetorical agency, and sustained student engagement.
“Seeing the Filter: Defamiliarization and Human Presence in the AI-Mediated Classroom” — Andrew Testa, UC Davis
As automated tools tempt students to outsource their thinking, this session addresses the conference theme by re-centering the writing classroom as a space for in-person connection and agency. Moving beyond punitive “detection” models that create adversarial relationships, this pedagogical intervention uses defamiliarization to make algorithmic mediation perceptible and strange. The approach presented values humor as an act of intellectual resistance and human presence. By modeling rhetorical risk in real-time, the instructor guides students to view professionalism as relational credibility rather than depersonalized polish. Attendees will gain concrete “look-fors” and reflective activities that foster student self-awareness and agency. Ultimately, the session provides a roadmap for helping students “carry the sunglasses” into other disciplines, ensuring they maintain their humanistic impulse in an AI-saturated world.
“Dare to Give a F***, Together: Collective Writing Processes and Micro-
Projects” — Dina El Dessouky, UC Santa Cruz
This presentation focuses on turning to in-class collective writing processes and micro-projects as strategies for countering trends in apathy among college students, while increasing connection between participants through mutual practice. The exercises aim to reconnect participants to our holistic needs—through embodiment and grounding—while in a community setting. We’ll also discuss important considerations for timing, lead-up, and debriefing within an academic term. Since most college courses are outcomes-driven and do not view social-emotional learning as an important disciplinary outcome, students might be left to fend for themselves in their often very limited time outside of coursework when it comes to even simply acknowledging social-emotional needs, let alone meeting them. But writing as a discipline is well-suited to social-emotional learning, and collective writing processes and micro-projects (projects that can be completed during a single class or part of one) can offer students a fruitful and much needed “break” from higher-stakes “outcomes.” Thus, it is an investment in collective well-being for college writing instructors to allocate and prioritize a portion—however small—of in-person class time to ultra-low stakes writing practices wherein the class can together name current feelings and fears, and visions for the future.
9:30-9:45 a.m. Break
9:45-10:45 a.m. Workshop 1: “Using Embodied Writing Experiences to Foster Connections with Place, Nature, and Species” — Kara Mae Brown, UC Santa Barbara; Tuesday Mahdavi, UC Santa Barbara; Vela Reynolds, UC Santa Barbara
We see our work as both resisting AI and working with digital technology as a way to foster connections. The outdoor, place-based writing activities and experiences that we describe are ultimately embodied and collaborative, and therefore representative of the kinds of humanistic, person-to-person connections that the conference seeks to explore. However, we are also interested in how the use of digital technologies, some that use AI components, within that humanistic practice might indeed provide a conduit to non-human connections, by allowing users to create deeper relationships with place, nature, and species. As a group of faculty and undergraduate students, scientists and writers, we also understand our work as a part of the broader movement of eco-pedagogy, which seeks to use an interdisciplinary approach to education to create a more integrated understanding of nature and better understand environmental injustices.
10:45-11 a.m. Break
11-12pm Rhetorician of the Year: Adam Banks, Stanford University
12-12:45 p.m. Lunch break
12:45-1:45 p.m. Panel 2: Restoring Humanistic Values in the Writing Classroom
“Centering Trust in the Writing Classroom” — Katherine Ross, UC Santa Cruz
As we grapple with how to approach AI in our classrooms, whether by championing resistance, designing careful integration, or something in between, we face the challenge of determining whether our students are using AI in unscrupulous ways and how to respond. Or do we? This presentation seeks to consider the potential consequences of trusting our students not to use AI in ways that violate academic integrity, and explore ways to foster trust in our classrooms.
“Cultivating Agency by Cultivating Trust: Arguing for Good” — Eva Braunstein,
UC Santa Barbara
Classrooms are places where friendships are formed. We train our students in more than the production of the written word; we can, if things go well, train them in neighborliness, too. This enriches the life of each individual student, and it also has the potential to enrich the lives of the people our students go on to work with in professional, civic, and academic contexts. In this talk, I will unpack two in-class writing activities that I ask students to do in my upper-division Rhetoric and Writing course. Both activities build trust between students as they engage with topics that may lead to disagreement, allow playfulness in a context circumscribed by clear criteria, and invite students to exercise their own judgments, and thus their own intellectual agency.
“Creating Belonging in the College Writing Classroom” — Lindsay Knisely, UC Santa Cruz
This presentation will offer instructors methods for designing belonging into the writing classroom. The presentation will describe elements of belonging and emphasize the importance of creating a sense of belonging in college courses. What interventions can writing instructors use to create a sense of belonging in our classrooms? Attendees will be encouraged to consider how they may already be helping their students feel a sense of belonging and how to amplify this element of our teaching. For example, instructors can address common student concerns through writing-based belonging interventions, which will be described in the presentation.
1:45 – 2:00 p.m. Break
2:00-2:30 p.m. Workshop 2: “The Dialogic Classroom: Ethical Engagement through Reading, Writing, and Listening” — Rachel Ketai, UC Los Angeles; Maja Manojlović, UCLA; Patrick Bonczyk, UC Irvine
This workshop explores how rhetoricians can sustain human connection and ethical engagement across differences through a dialogic, listen-first approach to reading and writing instruction in an era marked by toxic polarization and technological disruption. Participants will engage with concrete classroom practices that use ethical frameworks to cultivate virtues like curiosity, intellectual humility, accountability, and respect through reading and writing.
2:30 – 2:45 p.m. Break
2:45-3:45 p.m. Panel 3: (Self-)Reflection and Process in Teaching Writing and Rhetoric
“Embracing a ‘Process Ecology’ to Rehumanize Our Writing Classes” — Dan Curtis-Cummins, Pikes Peak State College
“Process pedagogy” is foundational to Composition pedagogy, since Elbow and others pioneered the discipline and scholarship in the 1980s. Since then, and especially post-pandemic, there has been a push for active learning with “Dynamic Activities” (Rezniki & Coad 2023), equity-based contract grading (Inoue, Carillo, and others), and inclusion of anti-racist approaches to Students’ Right to their Own Language (1974 NCTE Resolution; Young; Smitherman). These trends in Composition Studies and higher education in general call for renewed classroom experimentation, and documentation of results. In a suburban Colorado community college, I outline my “classroom ecology” (Inoue 2015) that has evolved over 10 years of teaching First year Composition, combining the aforementioned theories with a deeply reflective approach to process-pedagogy. This workshop will include participants in revealing and exploring the ways they can enhance the focus on metacognition and students’ awareness of their own individualized learning, and reading processes in their classroom ecologies, as recursive with and integral to teaching them “the writing process.”
“Deconstructing the ‘A’ in College Composition Classrooms and Rubric Design Under Digital Pressures” — Arabella Edler, California Polytechnic State University
Since the introduction of writing and composition courses at American institutions, ideology has shaped writing instruction in ways that are structured in classroom assignments and grading policies. With the rapidly evolving technological pressures of GenAI, rubrics which emphasize the “final product” are often praised by faculty and receive high grades despite the minimal critical analysis executed. This poses a fundamental question: How should instructors evaluate “good writing” if “good” is almost always inherently ideological in an age of modernized digital literacy? This presentation considers practical approaches to rethinking post-secondary composition rubric design. As such, it examines how composition instruction is affected by ideology and GenAI, particularly in the context of grading rubrics. I argue that the composition classroom must take a reversal perspective grounded in student-centered approaches and consider how instructors can implement tailored teaching practices to work with student writers.
“Forgotten Logic: Summary, Synthesis, and the Argument You Didn’t Know You Had” — Andrew Wankier, UC Los Angeles
In an age of AI-generated text, composition instructors have focused heavily on questions of academic integrity and the future of the essay itself. Yet the more urgent crisis may be quieter and older: students have forgotten how—and why—to engage with existing scholarly conversation. Long assumed rather than explicitly taught, the foundational practices of academic writing, including accurate summary, paraphrase, and synthesis, have atrophied across generations of instruction. The result is not simply weak prose but a deeper inability to represent another person’s argument faithfully before responding to it. This paper argues that the deliberate teaching of summary and synthesis is not remedial instruction but a humanistic intervention. Drawing on classroom practice in college composition courses, it examines how foregrounding these fundamentals reorients students toward discernment—the ability to slow down, accurately represent another mind’s point of view, and situate themselves responsibly within a larger conversation.
3:45-4:00 p.m. Closing/Wrap-Up
5:00-9:00 p.m. Beach Bonfire and Storytelling
We invite you to our bonfire at Seabright beach, beginning at 5:00pm. We will have a variety of foodstuffs to roast on sticks and prime viewing for the sunset!
Thank you for joining us!