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Previous research has recognized the neoliberal trends that permeate the rhetorics of academic wellness, placing the responsibility for wellbeing on individuals rather than institutions and systems. In this study, the authors implemented a participatory action research (PAR) project to collaborate with different stakeholders in one university writing program and develop programmatic approaches to support the wellbeing one subset of academic faculty: graduate student instructors. Along with an account of how we adapted our PAR methodology to align with the wellness needs of our participants, we also provide a description and analysis of the intervention developed collaboratively in the PAR group. We end with five takeaways that researchers and stakeholders in graduate student education can apply to developing programmatic interventions that better support graduate instructor wellbeing: 1) research methodologies should adapt to foreground wellbeing; 2) productive conversations about wellbeing should start by acknowledging and validating the lived experience of graduate instructors; 3) students want to be involved in programmatic processes and procedures that support their wellbeing; 4) facilitating (but not requiring) non-productive social interaction among grad students can support GI wellbeing; 5) the work of supporting wellbeing is never fully done---we call on administrators, faculty members, and students to continue this work.

Adopting a queer pedagogy in composition classes that include diverse student populations can play an important role in promoting conversations on diversity and equity in the classroom. Under this approach, teachers and students are invited to question the connections between language, the body, power, and ethnicity, thus analysing how our language practices denote unique perceptions of the world. In this article, we intend to connect queer composition theory and pedagogies to a research experience to account for how teachers and students construct embodied and meaningful interactions in the composition class when they explore alternative queer forms of thinking and writing. To accomplish this goal, we foreground the work of queer composition scholars who question how our everyday language and writing practices shape our perception of other individuals and challenge us to consider how we mutually care for and respect each other’s language practices and raced bodies within our pedagogies.

This research assignment asks preservice undergraduate secondary education teachers in an applied grammar class to engage in a two-prong research project: a multimodal, interactive “poster” and a research paper that together explore the pedagogical possibilities for engaging with World Englishes in middle and high school classrooms. The prompt invites students to consider social justice and equity at the level of language. The assignment draws on both antiracist and queer pedagogies and examines the relationships among language, power, and resistance to linguistic oppression in the classroom. As students work through the assignment, they enact real-life stories of historical and contemporary figures from around the world who were forced to speak a colonizer’s language and resisted linguistic oppression. They then read articles focusing on Black Language, Indigenous languages, and World Englishes, which serve as touchstones for their own research. Although designed for a grammar pedagogy class, the assignment can be modified for multiple disciplines; at the end of the article, I provide several examples of how teachers outside English might modify the assignment for their own disciplinary contexts.