Book a Workshop or Lecture for Your Organization
CALL staff have given dozens, perhaps hundreds of well-received lectures and led as many or more highly productive workshops for organizations across the United States and Canada on a wide range of topics. After leading nationally-renown literacy organizations for more than a decade, they are now available to speak to or lead a workshop for you and your organization.
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Workshops will include some speaking from your facilitator, but the majority of the time will be on active learning processes such as writing and/or designing, small group problem solving, and more. Your audience will leave a workshop with a tangible product of some as a physical or digital monument to their learning.
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Lectures tend to be a more "traditional" type of speaking engagement where the audience is generally more passive. The speaker delivers a presentation on the chosen topic with your audience in mind, and they will leave with materials such as handouts, helpful links, and any notes they take during the lecture.
Below, find a list of commonly requested lectures and workshops CALL staff have facilitated many times in the past. Or, if you don't see exactly what you need, select "Custom" to work with us to design a lecture or workshop to fit your and your audience's needs.
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We look forward to working with you!
Book a Collaborative Workshop
Literacy of the Body: Movement as a Tool of Reflection
"Don't judge, just notice." It's a mantra from popular online yoga instructor Adirenne Mischler as she guides her fellow humans to pause for a moment in their bodies. In our fast-paced world, we don't have a lot of time for pausing and noticing. In this workshop you will learn and practice some foundational yogic techniques and pair them with short, reflective writing exercises to cultivate a habit of self-reflection, which can be beneficial to boosting writing confidence, creativity and reducing writer's block.
Personal Statements
Trying to get into college or medical school? Writing a cover letter for a job application? Personal statements and cover letters feel stilted and awkward to many of us. There is a good reason for it, too. When else would we go on about how great we are for 250 words, being sure to include elements of story, links to our resume, focusing on the other person's values, etc? I hope never, because you'd be a horrible conversationalist. But these are just a few of the tips that CALL instructors can share with you to take your personal statement skills to the next level and land that scholarship, job, or more!
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Fact or Fiction: Critically Evaluating Sources of Info
For centuries, the division between "literate" and "illiterate" was between those who could and could not read text on the page. Today, the US lags behind the world's average literacy rate of 86% with just 79% of US adults considered literate. But even as we fight to raise text literacy, a new form of literacy has taken on massive social importance: Information Literacy. How do you source, locate, vet, and apply information? What impact does your success (or not) have on your and others' lives? There are some quick and helpful tricks to it, and CALL is here to share them!
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Book a CALL Speaker for a Literacy-Related Lecture
Linguistic Justice: The Selves We Speak
When we talk about speaking, writing, grammar, word choice etc. there are a number of descriptive words that often get thrown around. "Standard," "Professional," "Right," "Correct," "Academic" etc. etc. But when people across the English-speaking world learn and speak in a variety of ways, who gets to choose what is "professional" or "correct," and why do they get to choose and not someone else? Why does the "standard" more closely align to the ways certain groups of people speak and differ more from others? The answers that scholars universally agree on may surprise you, and the impacts of this knowledge could have a massive impact on the ways you view language, its power over our society and who gets to succeed or is pushed toward failure in our world.
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College Writing: How is it Different than High School?
Writing is often defined as black-on-white, text-on-page. But that is only one singular type of writing that scholars call "orthography." Writing can include many other types of composition such as pictures, charts and graphs, page organization, and even audio and video. Movies and podcasts, after all, have to have scripts! But all of these aspects of writing don't exist just to turn in essays or send emails. Writing is a manner of action directed toward and audience with a specific purpose. How can you use writing to accomplish your goals, no matter how complex or simple, focused or diverse they are? How can you move from seeing writing some tedium to accomplish to a powerful way of accomplishing? Learn from CALL speakers some tips and tricks to make your writing matter!
Working with Multilingual Writers
Multilingual writers are as varied as the individuals themselves. Groupings such as L1, L2 and L1.5 can be helpful, but don't necessarily capture the complexity of the individual experiences with language. Even the "home" language of a writer can impact the ways they interact with writing and speaking in English in unique ways. As an educator, manager, editor or friend, responding to the writing and language use of multilingual writers in ways that are helpful can be challenging. Luckily, CALL lecturers have decades of experience in working with multilingual writers and training others to do so. Learn some of the evidence-based do's and don'ts of working with multilingual writers from a wide range of contexts, and how you can make your environment a place where all writers can thrive.
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