Kairos Awards for Graduate Students and Adjuncts

Criteria || Submission Guidelines

Kairos, A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is pleased to announce the Kairos Awards for Graduate Students and Adjuncts, sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin's Press. (These awards were formerly titled the Kairos/Lore Awards for TAs and Adjuncts.)

Three $500 awards will be given to graduate students and/or adjuncts in the field of computers and writing. These awards are based upon the three areas that guide our professional lives: Service, Scholarship, and Teaching.

We chose these areas because graduate students and adjuncts are in fact professionals who do work in these areas, but who face institutional constraints that often undervalue—or flat out don't recognize in some cases—the work they do. For many graduate students and adjuncts, their service, scholarship, and teaching often do not translate into simple acknowledgment, let alone higher pay, more travel funds, and better working conditions.

We are especially looking for individuals who show great promise -- people who are already making great contributions but also people from whom we may expect great contributions in the future.

Graduate students and adjuncts working in fields relating to the mission of Kairos (computers and writing, rhetoric-and-technology, etc.) are eligible to apply for an award. One nomination per year per person, please. The deadline for nominations for these awards is March 1, 2008.

Criteria

Service/Promising Service Award

The Service Award is given to an individual whose work includes activities that promote excellent computers and writing pedagogy, theory, and community building.

Examples of service include, but are not limited to,

• creating and artfully managing e-mail listservs, MOO spaces, webboard discussions, blogs, wikis, or CMS community sites serving on local campus, regional, or national committees related to our field;
• leading outreach, training, and workshops locally and/or at conferences;
• serving on C&W-oriented journal staff or editorial boards;
• volunteering time and expertise about how to use computers effectively.

In your nomination, please provide us with:

• Evidence of service. Please provide URLs for blogs, CMS, and/or workshop pages; archives of discussions; documents from committee work; examples of editorial/journal work, and so on.
• Reach/Scope of service. Number of people who've attended workshops; diversity of people worked with; whether service takes applicant outside usual academic network to communities beyond the campus or the field.
• Value of service. What does it accomplish/contribute; who does it help; how has it been received?

Scholarship/Promising Researcher Award

The Scholarship Award is given to a person whose research and scholarship is already excellent and/or also shows future promise for having an impact on our field. The committee is not looking for "the webtext or article of the year" (for that type of award, please nominate for the Best Webtext Award), but rather a pattern of excellent scholarship which demonstrates an individual who will make significant contributions to the field.

Examples of scholarship include:

• articles, webtexts, reviews, or interviews,
• conference presentations,
• textbooks and instructors’ guides,
• coursework papers, annotated bibliographies, and (lit) reviews
• multimodal texts, written code, or software.

In your nomination, please provide us with evidence of:

• Currency of scholarship. How do the author’s ideas and insights add to the field?
• Reach/scope. Where did the scholarship appear? To what audience is it addressed?
• Value of scholarship. To what extent does the scholarship situate itself among pedagogies and theory? Is there quantitative or qualitative data that support the scholarship’s value?

Teaching/Promising Instructor Award

The Teaching Award is given to a person who uses computers and writing pedagogies in her or his classroom-based practice to promote student learning.

The following are possible locations/spaces of classroom-based practice:

• computer-networked environments
• hybrid courses (combinations of face-to-face and online teaching)
• online/distance teaching, and
• classrooms in which digital technology is not readily available but in which the nominee uses computers and writing pedagogies to achieve excellent non-technology-rich in-class teaching while also encouraging students to complete technologically involved assignments outside of class.

In your nomination, please provide us with evidence of:

• Pedagogy. Does it focus on computers and writing-related pedagogical values such as, but not limited to student-centered, interactive, and process-based learning?
• Innovation. Do the assignment sequencing and activities take advantage of the pedagogy and technology available? Does the teacher teach writing and/or technologies in new ways, or ways that break from institutional/academic conventions?
• Reflection. What has the teacher learned and what can other teachers learn about the craft of teaching with technology from the practices described?

Nominees for this award should include as part of their letter of nomination:

• a syllabus or link to a course Web site
• a sample assignments or assignment sequence (briefly annotated, to explain rationale behind them)
• a summary of recent course evaluations

Submission Guidelines

Submit digital applications by email to kawards@technorhetoric.net by March 1, 2008.

In your email, please:

• Place the award category (Service, Scholarship, or Teaching) and the full name of the nominee in the subject line.
• Place the full contact information for the nominee—including their full name, affiliation and campus addresses, phone numbers and e-mails—at the top of the message. Include expected degree and date of graduation if the nominee is a graduate student.

Please attach the following items to your nomination email (Rich Text Format is preferred) :

• A letter from the applicant that describes the work done and how it meets the criteria above (include URLs to examples where appropriate).
  
  
• A copy of the applicant's CV 
  
  
• Two (2) letters of support from those in a position to assess the service, teaching, or scholarship
  

  Letters of support can also be e-mailed directly by those who write them to kawards@technorhetoric.net. Please ask recommenders to include the subject lines as indicated below. Subject lines should look like this:

  • Service: Firstname Lastname
  • Teaching: Firstname Lastname
  • Scholarship: Firstname Lastname
    
    
• Supporting evidence, including documents, Web addresses, and/or instructions for how to access materials. If you want the committee members to look into an online classroom, please make sure to provide any necessary passwords and let your students know you'll have guests.

Please do not apply for more than one category.  If you want to see a colleague or friend apply, please pass this information on to him or her so that he or she can help you gather supporting documents and other materials, and also to cut down on accidental dual nominations.

Awards will be presented at the 2008 Computers and Writing Conference at Georgia State University.  If you have questions, e-mail the Kairos Editors at kawards@technorhetoric.net.