About MnWE
Mission and Vision: MnWE’s mission is to help transform writing and English into teaching and learning experiences using practical methodologies that serve students best. Our vision is to bring scholarly ideas and practical pedagogy together to help create the future of our disciplines.
Who We Are: The MnWE Coordinating Committee facilitates all MnWE activities as unpaid volunteers. The committee is comprised of university and college tenure-line and adjunct faculty, graduate students, administrators, editors, and high school faculty who teach advanced writing and English in the high schools.
What We Do: Minnesota Writing and English–MnWE–offers a two-day academic conference each spring in the metro area of Minnesota or occasionally in Greater Minnesota. Our annual conference is held in person and online simultaneously, which allows us to host speakers from around the world. Our annual gathering has been described at times as being better than some national conventions.
Annual MnWE Conference: The MnWE Conference includes interactive plenaries during lunch, free time to talk with colleagues, entertainment, and many daily roundtable breakouts. Our roundtable sessions confound the usual conference style by replacing typical formal presentations with nontraditional, interactive events. Roundtables begin with several presenters talking for several minutes each. After the short presentations, they and the audience discuss the viewpoints and experiences that have been offered. Most breakouts offer small groups where we encourage presenters to offer the new, the untried, and the old-but-revised in order to precipitate friendly, respectful questions and thoughtful answers.
MnWE also sponsors an online MnWE Journal, issued free online yearly; an online newsletter, issued six-times-per-year; and the MnWE News, which is privately circulated and free to over 2500 English and Writing faculty (see below to subscribe). Both the Journal and the News offer teaching ideas, updates about our academic disciplines and events, reviews, and resources.
Subscribing to the MnWE News: If you are not on the listserv and would like to join it, simply send your request and email address to richard at jewell dot net. We always enjoy signing up new list members.
History of MnWE: MnWE was started officially by Richard Jewell, an Inver Hills College tenured faculty member, who had taught previously at both the University of Minnesota and St. Cloud State University. In January 2007, he asked Donald Ross at the University of Minnesota if the two of them might work to develop a joint conference in their two systems and throughout the state.
When Donald agreed, Richard then went to the annual MnSCU English and writing discipline meeting in Minneapolis in February to ask whether its members would like him to develop an annual state conference that would include all Minnesota colleges and universities.
About eighty faculty from throughout MnSCU were present; they voted by over 80% to support the conference. A founding committee coordinated by Richard formed immediately to organize the first conference.
The initial committee has grown to include several dozen active members and MnWE representatives at their schools who come from campuses in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. The conference and the newsletter reach out to all states surrounding Minnesota.
Members of the committee represent a wide diversity of college and university professors, instructors, and graduate students from University of Minnesota campuses, Minnesota and Wisconsin state universities and public two-year colleges, and a variety of nonprofit and for-profit private colleges and universities. We also are proud to include graduate students in the conferences and on our committee, and we are glad to see an increasing number of high school faculty attending the conferences, who teach college writing and English in their schools.
The first conference was in fall 2009. Attendance normally varies from 150 to 200. Richard Jewell continues to serve as the General Coordinator. In about 2011, two additional central positions were added: Larry Sklaney as Conference Coordinator, and Danielle Hinrichs as Conference Program Coordinator. Both of them have, since 2015, been Conference Co-Coordinators.