WRAB Conference

Hi, everybody!

Keeping on with my last newsletter, I enjoyed going to Graceland very much. If you are an Elvis fan you will love to visit his house and share the spaces where the King lived. Below is a photo of his living room.

Last week was a very busy one. On Monday I took a flight to Washington D. C. where I stayed a couple of days. The city, with all its magnificent buildings and high-quality museums, is wonderful! On Wednesday I went to the George Mason University for the Writing Research Across Borders Conference. You can check the conference website in here. The WRAB conference is a very big conference focused on writing. I have the opportunity to meet several writing researchers and attend very interesting conferences and talks. Denise Schmandt-Besserat and Steve Graham presented two remarkable conferences. Schmandt-Besserat talked about the origins of writing and how literacy is preceded by numeracy; and Graham synthesized what cognitively-oriented research has told us about struggling and developing writers. There was also a very emotional ceremony honoring four leading writing researchers, namely, Charles Bazerman (from the University of California, Santa Barbara, U.S.), Pietro Boscolo (from the University of Padova, Italy), Michel Fayol (from the Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France), and John Hayes (from the Carnegie Mellon University, U.S.). Another big moment of the conference was a 3 hours session titled “Cognition and context: Are there grounds for reconciliation?”. Following eight reflections on the cognition-culture schism in Writing Studies, there was an exciting debate about the potential for common ground and the possibility of an “integrated theoretical vision”.

Now, I am already in Nashville and tomorrow morning I will visit the IRIS Center. This is a very important center aimed at providing research-validated information about working with students with disabilities in inclusive settings.