Conference Theme

2025 Allerton English Articulation Conference Theme

Moving from the Margins to the Moment: Resistance, Resilience, and Renewal

This year's conference theme, Moving from the Margins to the Moment: Resistance, Resilience, and Renewal, invites us to share ideas and perspectives on the following issues:

Moving from the Margins to the Moment

Roughly sixty years ago, college and university English faculty recognized an acute problem: professors and lecturers were expected to teach based on their scholarship and wits alone; no formal training in teaching was expected or required, resulting in a hit-or-miss experience for students. Concerned educators came together to address this problem at the first Allerton conference, The Allerton Park Conference on Research in the Teaching of English, sponsored by the U.S. Office of Education in cooperation with the University of Illinois. What had once been denigrated and denied—research and training in the teaching of English—moved from the margins to the moment, evolving into the Allerton English Articulation Conference that still lives today.

Resistance, Resilience, and Renewal

Now, in a darkly politicized age of anti-intellectualism and mistrust of education that threatens to gut or eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, we have a new moment, a new exigency, a new urgency to again move from the margins and assert the values and practices that we know to be effective. Not only with our intellects, but with our hearts and souls, we must resist the forces that would undo decades of progress in higher education by taking action in our home schools, our communities, and in the legislative bodies of our state and nation. We must show our resilience in supporting each other and defending our best practices for the sake of our students. And in spring, which is always already a riot of renewal, we must renew our commitment to each other and our field by sharing and examining our pedagogy and practices.