Kairos Awards for Graduate Students and Adjuncts

Award Definitions || Submitting Applications || PDF Version

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.

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 applications is April 1, 2007.

Awards Definitions and Criteria

Service includes work and 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; and
• volunteering time and expertise about how to use computers effectively.

The committee will assess:

• 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 includes work that moves more toward analysis and reflection than how-to's and classroom practices.

Scholarship can mean:

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

The committee will assess:

• 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 includes classroom-based practice in which the nominee uses computers and writing pedagogies 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.

The committee will assess:

• 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

Submitting Applications

Please include the following items with your nomination:

• 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 
• 2 letters of support from those in a position to assess the service, teaching, or scholarship

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.

Submit digital applications to kairosed@technorhetoric.net by April 1, 2007, by placing the award category and full name of the nominee in the subject line of your e-mail.

Letters of support can be e-mailed directly by those who write them to kairosed@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

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 e-mail message. Include expected degree and date of graduation if the nominee is a graduate student.

Attached to the e-mail, include the application letter and any supporting documentation. If possible, attach files in Rich Text Format. 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.

Any snail mail materials necessary to support a nomination may be sent to the following address and must be postmarked by April 1, 2007.

Cheryl E. Ball
3200 Old Main Hill
Department of English
Utah State University
Logan, UT 84322-3200

Awards will be presented at the 2007 Computers and Writing Conference at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.  If you have questions, e-mail the Kairos Editors at kairosed@technorhetoric.net.