Inkshed
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Inkshed (later CASLL, the Canadian Association for the Study of Language and Learning]) was a Canadian organization of teachers and scholars of writing and reading, predominantly in postsecondary institutions. It effectively began in 1982 with the publication of a newsletter, which continued in various forms until 2015.[1] The first national "Inkshed Working Conference" was held in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in August 1984, and annual conferences were held in various Canadian cities until 2015.[2]
The organization's aims, as codified when it was incorporated, in 1994, were "to provide a forum and common context for discussion, collaboration, and reflective inquiry in discourse and pedagogy in the areas of writing, reading (including the reading of literature), rhetoric, and language."[3]
The name "Inkshed" was proposed by co-founder James A. Reither, who found it in the Oxford English Dictionary as a "humorous" word, meaning "the shedding or spilling of ink; consumption or waste of ink in writing."[4] He and Russell A. Hunt, the other co-founder, explained that it was their intention to make "freewriting," a strategy popularized by composition theorist Peter Elbow, into "something dialogically transactional"[5] by embedding the writing into situations, usually in classrooms, where the freewritten texts were immediately read by others, in search of ideas or insights that impromptu writing might generate. The Inkshed conferences used this strategy in various ways over the years, the common thread being that written texts were created and read immediately, and stood in for—and underlay and promoted—some part of the oral discussion that usually characterizes academic gatherings.[6]
Inkshed's origin has been characterized as in part a reaction among Canadian teachers of English to the widespread advent of the (often required) introductory composition course in US universities,[7] and the concomitant growth there of the "comp industry." As more courses were offered, more faculty was hired, more pressure exerted on young faculty to publish, more conferences in which to collaborate and present, more organizations to sponsor such conferences and more journals in which to publish. In Canada such an institution never did develop.[8] At the time of Inkshed's founding, the vast majority of first-year English courses in Canadian universities were identified as introductions to literature, and while it was often tacitly assumed that learning to write was something that such courses would afford, little attention was paid to issues at the forefront of theory and scholarship such as the cognitive processes of composition, and introductory composition courses were rare.[9] Thus, for Inkshed, in contrast to the situation in the U.S., there was no pre-existing constituency of composition teachers and thus no supporting infrastructure.[10] Canadian teachers and scholars who, for whatever reasons, were concerned with the teaching and learning of writing, typically found colleagues and collaborators by attending American conferences and reading American journals.