Conference Sessions

Session I

From Johnny Mnemonic to Classroom Bots: How We Might Save Our Classrooms from GAI Slop

Monica Hogan, JCCC

Learn how I use generative AI through Playlab to create bots that help students understand assignments, prompt critical thinking, and link esoteric ideas to their lives and job plans. For generative AI to be useful in education, instructors must take responsibility for prompting, interactions, and output.

Turning the Algorithm into the Text: AI, Authority, and the Pedagogical Plot Twist

William Sewell, Dakota State University

In this presentation, we share an assignment that asks students to use ChatGPT not to produce analysis, but to critique it. By treating the algorithm as the text, students question its authority, uncover its assumptions, and engage generative AI as a subject of literary analysis rather than a shortcut around it.

You Thought This Was About Something Else: Teaching Through Narrative Misdirection & Unnoticed Foreshadowing

CJ Holthaus, Northwest Missouri State University
Dr. Wayne Chandler, Northwest Missouri State University
Dr. Joseph Haughey

You thought this was about something else—and that’s the point. This interactive session uses a short exemplar text to model how narrative misdirection can make learning stick. Participants experience the twist, unpack why it works, and leave with adaptable texts and teaching materials.

The Good, the Bad, and the Proficient: Practical Tips for Competency-Based Learning

Nichole Schroeder, Lee's Summit West High School

Increasingly, schools are transitioning to competency-based learning (CBL). In this demonstration, we will explore three strategies for incorporating CBL into the classroom. We will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each practice, surprising outcomes for student and teacher work, spaces for further exploration, and practical ways teachers can adopt CBL methods.

“Do It for the Plot:” A (Damaged) Creative Writer Unteaches Plot Twists in Narrative Essays

Rachele Salvini, Ottawa University

This presentation explores how teachers can use popular storytelling devices, such as plot twists, to help college-level students understand the mechanics of narrative structure and character development, with a focus on writing as a practice that fosters personal growth and adaptation.

Choose Your Own Adventure: Creating Plot Twists Through Literary Theory

Lara Schulenberg-Day, Lee's Summit West High School and University of Missouri-Kansas City

This session reframes literary theory as a pedagogical plot twist that disrupts predictable literary analysis and shifts interpretive power to students. Participants experience theory-driven close reading strategies that subvert expectations, deepen critical thinking, and reveal how narrative turns expose questions of authority, voice, and meaning in texts and classrooms.

Modern Day Whodunnits - Mystery Short Story Writing in the ELA Classroom

Jess Duff, Bishop Ward High School

In this session, educators will learn the process of Mystery Short Story creation to guide students in the creative writing process. We can’t change the world our students live in, but we can give them the confidence to write their own stories and reverse the traditional read-then-respond structure of the ELA classroom.

Back to the Future with Progymnasmata Rhetorical Exercises

Nathan Jones, JCCC

How can college writing students be encouraged to draft original, creative, personal essays in the age of artificial intelligence? This presentation explores the application of ancient Progymnasmata rhetorical exercises for teaching modern college-level writing skills.

Historicism as Plot Twist in Literary Instruction

Ashlea Ernszt, Metropolitan Community College–Maple Woods

Students often read texts through a contemporary lens, obscuring meaning. When students ignore the social and cultural conditions in which a work was produced, the text risks becoming flattened or misunderstood. This session argues that instructors can use historicism to create pedagogical plot twists experienced as revelatory by modern students. Using several well-known short stories, this presentation will show how historical context disrupts assumptions and reshapes modern readers’ interpretation of plot structure.

Session II

Twisting Terminology: What African-American Authors Can Teach Us about Redefining and Rejecting Literary Labels

Allie Conde, JCCC
Lee Merrill, JCCC
Gabrielle Smith, JCCC

How powerful are literary terms? Hear three undergraduate students unpack well-known and lesser-known terms associated with canonical African-American literature, such as intersectionality, “Black writer,” determinism, and free will. This multi-genre discussion features the works of essayist Frances M. Beal, poet Robert Hayden, prose writer Richard Wright, and playwright/poet Amiri Baraka.

Back to the Garden, Back to the Playground: Grounding FYC in Peace, Play, and the Personal

Jennifer Jackson, University of Central Missouri
Chelsea Everly-Orman, University of Central Missouri
Lori Burns, University of Central Missouri

These presenters will share how they made significant shifts in their FYC themes, originally in response to increasing AI proliferation and its upending of our profession and pedagogy. As they reinvented their courses, they turned away from the abstract and technological and towards the material, concrete, and natural.

The Art of the Heist: Bizarre Burglaries in a First-Year Composition Class

Joanne Janssen, Baker University

In movies, heists are predictable: stock characters execute perfect crimes. Actual heists are much more bizarre—and those surprises make “the art of the heist” a rich theme for a college composition classroom. By exploring the unique motivations and the unusual objects stolen, students explore provocative questions about societal values.

Who Killed Ruby Ackroyd? A Murder Mystery Approach to Critical Thinking

Mark Browning, JCCC

Dean Ruby Ackroyd is dead, apparently murdered. In this session, participants attempt to interpret clues to form a theory of who among a trio of suspects committed this terrible crime. The session will include a shortened version of the activity as well as explanation of its value.

Strategic Disruption—Harnessing Surprise to Transform Student Engagement

Barbara Brown, Kansas Wesleyan University

This interactive session examines how strategically designed "surprise moments" can disrupt student disengagement and activate deeper learning. Participants will experience and analyze surprise-based pedagogical techniques, including textual ambushes, perspective inversions, and temporal disruptions, then workshop adaptable strategies for their own courses. Grounded in cognitive science, this approach transforms predictability into curiosity-driven engagement.

All Hands-on Deck with a Plot Twist, Teaching Research through Auction Lots, Estate Sale Finds, and Archival Material

Sally Bennett, JCCC

How can writing instructors ignite a love of research in a social media-driven age where letter-writing and diary-keeping is a thing of the past? Through presenting physical evidence from the lives of two KC area women and a western Illinois farmer, we discover their plot twists and suggestions for writing assignments.

Hope in Death: The Energy of Obituary Writing

Abigail Lambke, Avila University

This presentation focuses on a writing assignment in a FYC course where students write an inspirational future obituary for themselves. Instead of a depressing task, it was a hopeful assignment where students stretched their creative muscles and dreamed about their future.

Genre Plot Twist: From Imitation to Transformation

Justin Eells, Missouri Western State University

Composition courses often frame genres as static containers waiting to be filled with content. Genre-bending assignments such as the Hermit Crab Essay and the Remix Project subvert student expectations and encourage them to twist those containers and understand genre as a dynamic category to be adapted according to rhetorical needs.

Session III

Out with the Old: Re-Seeing Peer Review and Revision Assignments

Louise Krug, Washburn University
Jennifer Pacioianu, Washburn University
Dennis Etzel Jr., Washburn University

Panelists will provide tested tactics to give your peer review and revision methods a glow up! You’ll get a surprising mantra to save you from frustrating peer reviews, and a revision assignment that students will actually enjoy! Panelists will hold mini-workshops for both areas in this high-energy, fast-paced panel.

Going Analog: Teaching Writing in the Age of AI Using Letters, Blue Books, and Embedded Teachers with Paper and a Pencil

Lindsey Bartlett, Emporia State University
Kevin Rabas, Emporia State University
Curtis Becker, Washburn University

Three English faculty, two from Emporia State University and one from Washburn University, discuss how they have returned to more analog methods of teaching in response to the rise of AI in their writing-intensive classes.

I Love Mess: How the Lyric Essay Is Transforming My College Composition Classes

Bob Sykora, JCCC

The “lyric essay” is generally not the kind of writing students do in academic settings. But what can these obsessive, messy, emotional, evasive essays teach college composition students? This presentation will consider how lyric essays can serve as models for the habits and skills called for in academic research papers.

Song Lyrics and Singer Personas in Composition Courses: A Plot Twist in the Traditional Rhetorical Analysis

Ildi Olasz, Northwest Missouri State University

I challenge students’ understanding of song lyrics and pique their interest in the singers’ rhetorical strategies as a way to enhance class discussions and improve writing processes. We discuss paradoxes, counterarguments, etc. and references to history, politics, literature, and music in The Beatles, Don McLean, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, etc.

Decentering Shakespeare: Literary and Pedagogical Plot Twists in Early English Drama

Kara Northway, Kansas State University
Mia McCormick, Kansas State University
Montana White, Kansas State University
Allison Arnold, Kansas State University
Allison Meerian, Kansas State University
Avery Hansford, Kansas State University
Rachel Koontz, Kansas State University and U.S. Military Academy West Point

Students often equate Renaissance literature with Shakespeare, but his popular contemporaries’ plays offer surprisingly radical plot twists. Panelists will present a lively new examination of these other plays, asking, if early theaters were seen by contemporaries as “schools,” what can they teach us about scripting lesson plans and pedagogical performance?

Keynote

Any Hope in Art and Life: Adjusting to New Realities

Laura Moriarty

“People wish to be settled,” Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, slyly, for he continued: “only so far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” Emerson’s opinion is widely held in fiction writing, where threat and discomfort don’t just drive tension; they’re agents of change, pushing a protagonist to see themselves, someone else, or the entire world in a different light. But in our lives off the page, there are of course all kinds of “growth opportunities” we’d rather not encounter. In this keynote address, novelist and writing teacher Laura Moriarty will consider how unwelcome plot twists might affect, sometimes in surprising ways, individuals and entire professions.