During the 2025-26 school year, Emory Writing Program faculty shared pedagogical “micropractice” presentations during our monthly meetings. Faculty member Daniel Bosch first introduced the term, and shares a bit about its background here:
The term “micropractices” comes to us via my best friend Donald Moore, cultural anthropologist and emeritus professor at UC Berkeley. He is careful to say that the prefix “micro” here is not scalar, does not denote local, nor is it opposed to “macro”, but is “about detail, specificity, and the situatedness of practices within relations.” Don cites Foucault’s “microphysics of power,” de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life, and threads of Bourdieu for his use of the term. He wants to use with these thinkers and others to put forward a “take on power relations that gets away from and explicitly critiques power as if it were a possession, commodity, or thing that one either has or does not have.” Micropractices tend not to be the focus, says Don, of “faculty meeting discussions or some departmental pronouncements about pedagogy…”; he means by the term “the actually existing conduct of faculty in pedagogical (and other) situations, relationally with students and with other-than-students.” Of course the term is not limited to uses with regard to faculty….
Inspired by Daniel and Donald, we decided to carve out five minutes at the beginning of each meeting for “micropractice” presentations, with ten minutes for Q&A. Here are this year’s presentations, with resources provided by the presenters:
- Daniel Bosch: “Teaching the Pause.” Daniel shared techniques for teaching students how to pause while reading out loud, and situated the pause as a form of embodied knowledge and audience awareness.
- Christian Gallichio: “Reverse Outline & Rewrite Proposal.” Christian shared a mini-assignment that asks students to reflect on the structure of an essay they’ve already submitted, propose revisions, and practice revising a single paragraph.
- Suchismita Dutta: “Flash Writing Thursdays.” Suchismita shared a weekly 20-minute writing activity that asks students to practice rhetorical analysis.
- Melissa Yang: “Collective Mentorship.” Melissa shared several collaborative annotation, writing, and note-taking activities.
- Dan Abitz: “100 Soundscapes of Emory.” Dan described a freewriting/brainstorming session focused on meaningful sounds on the Emory campus.
We enjoyed celebrating the everyday techniques used to engage students in writing and communication education!