Overview

Mission and Vision: MnWE’s mission is twofold: to help transform writing and English into teaching and learning experiences using practical methodologies that serve students best, and to do this with equity, increasingly, whenever and wherever possible. Our vision is to bring scholarly ideas, pedagogy, and equity together to help create the future of our disciplines.
           
Who We Are: The MnWE Coordinating Committee facilitates all MnWE activities as unpaid volunteers. The committee is comprised of university and college tenure-line and adjunct faculty, graduate students, administrators, editors, and high school faculty who teach advanced writing and English in the high schools.

What We Do: Minnesota Writing and English–MnWE–offers a two-day academic conference each spring in the metro area of Minnesota or occasionally in Greater Minnesota. Our annual conference is held in person and online simultaneously, which allows us to host speakers from around the world. Our annual gathering has been described at times as being better than some national conventions.

Annual MnWE Conference: The MnWE Conference includes interactive plenaries emphasizing discussion, many daily roundtable breakouts, lunches, free time to talk with colleagues, and entertainment. Our roundtable sessions confound the usual conference style by replacing typical formal presentations with nontraditional, interactive events. Roundtables begin with several presenters speaking for several minutes each. After the short presentations, they and the audience discuss the viewpoints and experiences that have been presented. Most breakouts are comprised of small groups in which we encourage presenters to entertain the new, the untried, and the old-but-revised in order to precipitate friendly, respectful questions and thoughtful answers.

Guidelines of the MnWE Community and Committee:            
  • MnWE is a community of writing, literature, and related faculty, students, and community members who share information through a listserv and attend an annual conference.
  • MnWE is led by a collaborative committee of unpaid volunteers. 
  • MnWE focuses on pedagogy and equity in college-level Composition, Rhetoric, Creative Writing, Literature, Tutoring, and related professional activities. 
  • Our community reaches decisions by open communication and consensus.
  • Volunteers
    • share views and listen carefully to understand each other’s perspectives,
    • conduct helpful exchanges online and in-person (especially when we disagree),
    • appreciate each other’s contributions to the MnWE movement,
    • compliment and reinforce each other,
    • and help participants have positive, motivating experiences.

Publications of MnWE: MnWE sponsors MnWE Journal, a free, yearly, online journal committed to topics about equity; and MnWE News, an online newsletter published six times a year. MnWE News is privately circulated on the MinnState English Discipline Listserv and free to over 2000 English and Writing faculty (see below to subscribe). Both the Journal and the News offer teaching ideas, updates about our academic disciplines, and events, reviews, and resources.

News

MnWE News is a bi-monthly communication that offers three or four very brief features about local, regional, and/or national news relevant to writing and English teachers, links, and reviews of articles and books significant to the practice of teaching writing and English.
Our email listserv for the “News” has 2500 names of faculty in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and parts of Iowa, Illinois, and North and South Dakota. In addition to the bi-monthly newsletter, we send MnWE Conference calls for papers and other information about the conference, occasional notices of other useful regional and national conferences being held in the the Upper Midwest, and other occasional forwards that may be especially helpful or useful. Our listserv email addresses are exclusive–never shared–and directions for leaving the list are always at the bottom of every email. 

Joining is easy and free. Simply email Richard Jewell at r[email protected] and give him the email address at which you’d like to receive MnWE emails. (Adjuncts and graduate students, you may want to provide a private email address so you don’t lose the “Email News” if you move to another school.)

For most people, unsubscribing is easy. Simply follow the directions at the bottom of any email you receive from MnWE. (Please try this method of unsubscribing first, before asking Richard to unsubscribe you.) However, some school servers may not allow you to unsubscribe automatically as above. If this happens to you, please follow these directions to unsubscribe:

  1. Find the unsubscribe directions at the very bottom of one of the MnWE emails sent to you.
  2. Copy your email address exactly as shown in the unsubscribe directions.
  3. Paste the address into the content of a new email, and send it to Richard Jewell, asking to have this email address deleted from the listserv.  (See above for his email address.)
Are you receiving two copies of the listserv emails? If you’d like to receive just one, then go to the bottom of the email sent to you at the email address you’d like to have MnWE delete. Then follow the directions at the bottom of that email.

History

PictureRichard Jewell
MnWE was started officially by Richard Jewell, an Inver Hills College tenured faculty member, who had taught previously at both the University of Minnesota and St. Cloud State University. In January 2007, he asked Donald Ross at the University of Minnesota if the two of them might work to develop a joint conference in their two systems and throughout the state.

When Donald agreed, Richard then went to the annual MnSCU English and writing discipline meeting in Minneapolis in February to ask whether its members would like him to develop an annual state conference that would include all Minnesota colleges and universities.

About eighty faculty from throughout MnSCU were present; they voted by over 80% to support the conference.  A founding committee coordinated by Richard formed immediately to organize the first conference.

The initial committee has grown to include several dozen active members and MnWE representatives at their schools who come from campuses in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. The conference and the newsletter reach out to all states surrounding Minnesota.

Members of the committee represent a wide diversity of college and university professors, instructors, and graduate students from University of Minnesota campuses, Minnesota and Wisconsin state universities and public two-year colleges, and a variety of nonprofit and for-profit private colleges and universities. We also are proud to include students in the conferences and on our committee, and we are glad to see an increasing number of high school faculty attending the conferences, who teach college writing and English in their schools.

The first conference was in spring 2009. Attendance normally varies from 140 to 200 in the Twin Cities metro area. Richard Jewell continues to serve as the General Coordinator. In about 2011, two additional central positions were added: Larry Sklaney as Conference Coordinator, and Danielle Hinrichs as Conference Program Coordinator. Both of them have, since 2015, been General Conference Co-Coordinators.

Minnesota Writing and English Conference

Copyright 2019