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Upcoming Events
The Giving and the Receiving: Spiritual Traditions and Teaching
AEPL Summer Conference
- June 12–15, 2025
- YMCA of the Rockies, Estes Park, CO
- Conference Registration Form: https://forms.gle/mJSQtojYdeEV5VP7A
The Giving and the Receiving: Spiritual Traditions and Teaching is our first in-person gathering since the pandemic. We will continue to explore this path of spirituality in English education, research, and writing while being embraced by the beautifully sublime setting of the Colorado Mountains.
In the high comfort of the YMCA of the Rockies facilities just outside Estes Park, Colorado, scholars, teachers, and writers will share their research, approaches, and creative work, demonstrating new and innovative ways to link our professional lives to the abiding traditions of human spirituality from around the globe.
Literary studies, creative writing, English education, communication studies, theory, archival research, technical writing, multimedia learning, foreign language, and all other aspects of the fields of language, reading, and writing will be part of this ongoing conversation.
Conference Registration
Register for the conference before December 15 for $150. After that date, the price will increase by $50. Students, part-time teachers, and retirees have a reduced membership rate of 50 percent off the usual registration rate. Please note that if the conference fee prohibits your participation, let us know. We may be able to supply a partial scholarship for presenters to whom the registration fee is a barrier to involvement. Note that the registration form has those reduced rates for those needing them. Here is the conference registration form.
Lodging
The reunion lodge room package includes accommodations plus all meals, beginning with the evening meal on arrival June 12 and ending with the breakfast on departure June 15. On-site complimentary recreation includes miniature golf, basketball, volleyball, tennis, indoor swimming, hiking trails, playgrounds, library, and many family programs. Archery, horseback riding, and craft projects are available on-site for a fee.
To make and confirm an accommodation reservation for your group’s event:
- Click on the booking link below.
- Select the group arrival and departure date (June 12–15, 2025).
- Enter the group code (listed below).
- Enter the number of ADULTS (age 13 and over considered an adult for meal pricing).
For any children aged 6–12 years staying in the room with a parent, include in the Comment section the names of the children and their ages. If applicable, meal prices for children will be added to your reservation prior to arrival.
Estes Park Center Booking Link
Group code: Y001AHQ844 (Group code is case sensitive)
Please note that a 35 percent deposit payable to the YMCA is due when making a reservation. Upon receipt of the 35 percent deposit by the YMCA, a lodging confirmation and reservation number will be emailed to you.
Conference Expenses*
Given the nature and location of this in-person conference, we want to be as clear as possible how you might estimate your expenses, including fees, transportation, lodging, and meals related to this event.
AEPL Annual Membership Fee
- $45
Conference Registration Fee by December 15, 2024 ($200 thereafter)
- $150
Double Queen Lodging in Longs Peak Lodge
(shared room $110 - not an option on the YMCA booking site; if you would like to share a room, please select the roomshare option on the conference registration form)
- $219/night
Meal plan at YMCA (Thursday supper through Sunday breakfast)
- $172
The annual membership and conference fee will be paid to AEPL, and the lodging and meal plan will be reserved through the YMCA Group Reservations at the Central Reservation office by calling 888-613-9622.
While there is no requirement that conference participants lodge or eat at the YMCA facility, we do encourage staying on-site. Certainly, the YMCA has other accommodations available, such as yurts, camping areas, and cabins. However, we have reserved a block of rooms for attendees near the meeting rooms and the dining hall for your convenience. These modern hotel-style rooms include two queen beds and a full bath, accommodating up to four persons. We would be happy to help you if you need assistance in finding a roommate—just indicate so on the registration form.
Getting to the Conference
Review the YMCA website for information on how to access their facilities here.
Additionally, the airport shuttle from Denver International Airport can be reserved in advance for $75 one way and $135 for a round trip.
Make a Vacation of It!
For those wishing to come early or stay later, the YMCA has many activities for the family. You can also go to the delightful town of Estes Park (use the town shuttle!) or go into the national park, take a jeep tour, or hire a guide for fishing or exploring.
Please Contact Us for More Information
We would be happy to discuss with you ideas for a presentation, panel, or workshop, or any other questions related to the conference, lodging, transportation, and meals. Just send your questions or concerns to Joonna and Laurence at aeplconf2025@gmail.com.
Conference Organizers
Laurence Musgrove and Joonna Trapp are the primary organizers and hosts of this conference, though we will also be putting out a call for an organizing committee to help review proposals, establish the program, assist in chairing panels, and identify other speakers. If you are interested in assisting in these ways, please contact us by September 15 at aeplconf2025@gmail.com.
Laurence and Joonna
- Laurence Musgrove is a professor of English at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing from a Buddhist perspective. He has presented frequently at AEPL conferences, published articles, cartoons, and poems in JAEPL, and served as AEPL executive committee chair from 2009 to 2012. His latest book is A Stranger’s Heart, a poetry collection.
- Joonna Smitherman Trapp worked for 15 years at small Christian colleges before serving at Emory University as the director of the writing program and the WAC program. Recently retired, she is still teaching in the summers for Emory and engaged in her own writing. She was co-editor of JAEPL for eight years with Brad Peters.
Who We Are
The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, an official assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English, as well as an officially recognized standing group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is open to all those interested in exploring the boundaries of teaching and learning beyond traditional disciplines and methodologies.
Areas of interest include but are not limited to aesthetic, emotional, and moral intelligence; archetypes; body wisdom; care in education; creativity; felt sense theory; healing; holistic learning; humanistic and transpersonal psychology; imaging; intuition; kinesthetic knowledge; meditation; narration as knowledge; reflective teaching; silence; spirituality; and visualization.
Our History
In the twentieth anniversary issue of JAEPL (Journal for the Assembly of Expanded Perspectives on Learning), Susan Schiller recounts some of the early days of AEPL and its deep connections to spiritual ideas and education.
Many of our founders, such as Alice Brand, James Moffett, Dick Graves, and Charles Suhor, according to Susan, were interested in “[t]he language of a spirit-based pedagogy,” which to her “felt risky and without any camouflage.”
In addition, the very first AEPL conference was titled “Feeding the Mind, Nurturing the Spirit” (29). From this beginning, books, scholarly articles, and presentations flowed generously, including Susan’s own edited collection with Regina Foehr, The Spiritual Side of Writing: Releasing the Learner’s Whole Potential (1997).
Further evidence of this journey is contained in our assembly’s journal, JAEPL, including:
- Papoulis, “Spirituality and Composition: One Teacher’s Thought” (1996)
- McCurrie, “Spiritual Identities, and the Teaching of Writing” (2003)
- Duffy, “Community, Spirituality, and the Writing Classroom” (2003)
- Wagar, “Composition as a Spiritual Discipline” (2016)
- Briggs, Schunter, Melvin, “In the Name of the Spirit” (2013)
- DePalma, “Fostering Ethical Engagement Across Religious Difference in the Context of Rhetorical Education” (2021)
More Recently
This journey continued this last year with the winter 2024 workshop “Buddhist Philosophy and Practice in Pedagogy,” led by longtime AEPL member Laurence Musgrove, and the summer symposium “Enacting Empathy in the Classroom and Beyond,” keynoted by Lisa Blankenship and Eric Leake, authors of Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy and Difficult Empathy and Rhetorical Encounters.
Continuing the Journey
We look forward to meeting you in person and learning how you approach spiritual traditions and teaching, both the giving and the receiving.
Fall 2024 Online Series
Our fall 2024 online series includes sessions on writing for healing, a new memoir of Buddhism and teaching, and spontaneous writing and generative AI. All events are offered free of charge and will take place on Zoom. Register for one or more of the events (or paste this link into your browser:
https://forms.gle/mcBpe8mLQz33ct3m8).
Registered participants will receive a Zoom link one to two days before each event. Presenter biographies follow below.
Friday, October 25, 3:00–4:30 p.m. (Eastern)
Playing With Words and Migrating Toward Wholeness: Embodied Writing for Healing and Connection
Led by Liz DeBetta
Spoken word poetry and public performance are powerful ways to explore issues of identity and belonging and establish empathy and connection to self and others. In this interactive workshop, you will learn how emotional content coupled with the energy of performance can empower us to move, speak, and think differently about ourselves and our stories. Utilizing performance tools combined with the Migrating Toward Wholeness© method, we will play with words and co-create a piece of spoken word performance that is both healing and cathartic. “Playing with Words” will guide attendees through a process of using breath and body to connect to emotions with an emphasis on exploring “what is” to generate words and movement. Attendees will discover the therapeutic benefits of using writing and performance to unlock creative expression to migrate and heal embodied trauma.
Friday, November 15, 3:00–4:30 p.m. (Eastern)
Reading and Discussion: Bensonhurst Sutra: Tales of an Italian American Buddhist
Led by Geri DeLuca
Bensonhurst Sutra is a collection of semi-autobiographical essays about an Italian-American woman growing up in the ’60s, on the cusp of the women’s movement, looking for a spiritual tradition that she could latch onto. She became an English teacher at Brooklyn College, a writer, a yogi, and finally, a visual artist—all within the context of being told early and often that girls/women should not call attention to themselves. “No-self” in her culture meant “If you open your mouth, people will know how ignorant you are.”
The antidote was finding herself among her students, many of whom were suffering from similar biases against women and people of color. When she discovered Buddhism, she brought contemplative practices into her classroom. And she wrote about everything that happened along the way.
Friday, December 13, 3:00–4:30 p.m. (Eastern)
When Generative Writing Meets Generative AI: Fresh Insights to Support Authentic Student Writing
Led by Dan Weinstein
Timed spontaneous writing has long been thought to promote self-awareness and emotional growth. This workshop explores several spontaneous writing practices—from the mainstream to the arcane—that have been known to confer such benefits.
Think you’ve heard this already? Well, here’s a twist: recent advances in natural language processing offer new possibilities for analyzing spontaneous texts. AI-powered tools can examine writing for indicators of writers’ emotional state, cognitive processes, and social connectedness, as well as underlying beliefs and motivations.
By blending these techniques and technologies, teachers can help students become more self-aware writers, authentically connecting their language use and their own self-development through spontaneous writing coupled with feedback based on quantitative and qualitative textual analytics.
Presenter Biographies
Liz DeBetta, creator of Migrating Toward Wholeness©, is an adoptee and independent scholar-artist-activist committed to changing systems and helping people navigate trauma through creative processes. She believes that stories are powerful change agents, and when we write them and share them, we connect and heal. Liz is a proud member of Actor’s Equity, SAG-AFTRA, an affiliate faculty member at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and part of the Diversity Scholars Network at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. She has published articles on autoethnography and adoptee narratives, has an award-winning one-woman show called Un-M-Othered, and facilitates trauma-informed healing workshops for adoptees and women. Her book Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness is available from Brill Publishers.
Geri DeLuca is the outgoing chair of the AEPL executive committee and a retired professor of English at Brooklyn College. She now lives in Philadelphia and, thanks to Zoom, maintains her long-time connection to the Insight Meditation Society in Lebanon, NH. She is also an ongoing student at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, which, for the last seven years, has nurtured and deepened her art and meditation practice.
Dan Weinstein, a wordsmith with a penchant for digital innovation, navigates the crossroads of creativity and technology in his role as associate professor of English and director of the Kathleen Jones White Writing Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His journey reflects a deep-seated passion for nurturing student growth through cutting-edge educational tools. Perpetually fascinated by the psychology of creativity, Dan loves to explore how technology can foster learning and self-expression. Dan serves as an appointed member of the AEPL Executive Committee.
Please join us!
Recent Past Events
AEPL 2024 Summer Symposium:
Enacting Empathy in the Classroom and Beyond
Thurs, June 13–Fri, June 14
10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Eastern, on Zoom
The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning invites teachers of writing and literature at the secondary and college levels to come together on Zoom this summer for a two-day symposium dedicated to the practice of empathy in the classroom and beyond.
The symposium will be keynoted by Lisa Blankenship and Eric Leake, authors of Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy and Difficult Empathy and Rhetorical Encounters, respectively. Lisa and Eric are also editing two collections in progress on empathy, difference, and the teaching of writing.
There will be a wonderful range of panels, 30-minute workshops, and hour-long plenary sessions on both days. Attendees must be current members of AEPL to register. Tiered memberships are available for full-time faculty, part-time faculty, faculty emerita, and students. AEPL provides full-scholarship/no-cost memberships to anyone for whom the fees present a barrier to participation. We value your ideas and are committed to providing access to our programs to everyone interested in exploring expanded perspectives on learning.
All registrants will receive Zoom details in the days before the symposium. Please share this announcement and registration link with your colleagues. Non-presenting attendees are very welcome!
The full schedule is linked here and will be updated with biographies of our presenters.
Winter Workshop: Buddhist Philosophy and Practice in Pedagogy
We are thrilled to invite you to start the new year—2024!—by joining a two-part online workshop on Buddhist Philosophy and Practice in Pedagogy. Led by longtime AEPL contributor and former chair Laurence Musgrove, the workshop will review six Buddhist concepts on the nature of universal reality and human behavior and consider how they might serve as heuristics or modes of analysis to benefit our understanding of the teaching of college English and the language arts. The workshop is offered free of charge and will take place on Zoom.
Registered participants will receive a Zoom link one to two days before each event. Further details, including a short biography of the workshop facilitator, follow below.
Buddhist Philosophy and Practice in English Pedagogy—Expanding the Scholarship
Part 1: Introduction to Six Key Concepts
Friday, January 19, 2024, 3:00–5:00 p.m. Eastern
The purpose of this workshop is to introduce six core concepts in the Buddhist wisdom tradition as they describe the scientific reality of the universe or the way of all things (causality, impermanence, and interbeing) and the psychological reality of human behavior and relationships (suffering, equanimity, and freedom). Participants will share previous experiences with and knowledge about Buddhist principles and practices, reflect in writing on how they might apply these concepts heuristically to a range of issues in their teaching, and share their ideas in small groups.
Part 2: Application of Buddhist Perspective to Teaching and Learning in College English
Friday, January 26, 2024, 3:00–5:00 p.m. Eastern
The purpose of this second workshop is to review the six core concepts, learn how participants have begun to test these concepts against their teaching, expand the vocabulary of Buddhist concepts into a shared glossary of subject terms, and form research teams to investigate relevant scholarship in the field, as well as areas of new research.
Laurence Musgrove is a professor of English at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, where he teaches creative writing, composition, and literature from a Buddhist perspective. His articles, poems, and cartoons have appeared in JAEPL, he served as chair of the AEPL Executive Committee 2009–12, and he organized the 2012 Estes Park AEPL Summer Conference on Visual Thinking. In a recent article, “A Buddhist Educator’s Perspective on Well-Being Across the Curriculum,” Laurence outlines his past scholarly work on mental attitude and attention, his emerging interests in Buddhism, six foundational Buddhist core concepts and three trainings of the mind, a definition of a Buddhist educational theory and method, how three of his English courses have been shaped by these influences, and some implications for other disciplines across the curriculum. Laurence also has three verse collections from Lamar University Literary Press: Local Bird, The Bluebonnet Sutras, and A Stranger’s Heart.
Fall 2023 Online Series
We are excited to announce the first three events of our fall 2023 online series. All events are offered free of charge, are open to all, and will take place on Zoom. Registered participants will receive a Zoom link one to two days before each event.
Black Woman of the Yam: Being Black While in the Academy
Friday, October 20, 3:00–4:30 p.m. (Eastern)
Led by RAsheda Young
RAsheda’s talk is influenced, in part, by bell hooks’s game-changing book Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, a text that centers blackness and black women within the context of familial, cultural, and societal interactions. Through an autoethnographic approach, RAsheda shares her experience as a Black woman, Black mother, and Black professor within academia and the world more broadly during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, COVID-19, and phenomenal betrayal.
The Genres of Spiritual Writing: Writing and Reading the Self and the Divine
Friday, November 3, 3:00–4:30 p.m. (Eastern)
Led by Joonna Trapp
Join long-time AEPL member Joonna Trapp as she shares her experiences teaching several iterations of an upper division, genre-based class, “Spiritual Writing.” She will discuss the perks and pitfalls of having students read spiritually inclined texts from vastly different forms and faith/secular contexts and why it is important to their development as persons, thinkers, and writers. The texts become models for student explorations of spiritual genres, such as the parable, the spiritual poem, meditations on place, pilgrimage narratives, letters of complaint, interviews, mission statements, and spiritual autobiographies. Students learn “knowing-the-self” spiritually and communally while learning to appreciate the multi-vocal range of spiritual rhetoric, which has always been an avenue for change, resilience, and hope in the world. Participants in the workshop will have access to assignments, text lists, syllabi, and other documents to do their own adapting for their own teaching experiences.
Writing for Dramatic Performance in Community and the Classroom
Friday, December 1, 3:00–4:30 p.m. (Eastern)
Led by Sarah Moon
In this workshop, we’ll discuss teaching community writing for performance. This talk will describe the food-centered community writing and performance workshop, Write Your Roots. Sarah will discuss the meaningful opportunities that rehearsal and performance afford the writing process, as well as the community discourse spurred by live performance. In addition, Sarah will discuss the ways this project has been adapted for the first-year writing classroom to help establish mutual identification at the beginning of the semester, serving the ideal of creating a true classroom community.
Presenter Biographies
RAsheda Young, an assistant teaching professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, was one of 13 faculty members from the School of Arts and Sciences awarded the Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education award in October 2022. One year prior, she was inducted into Asbury Park High School’s Distinguished Hall of Fame for exemplary teaching, dedicated community service, and ongoing activism within the Black Lives Matter movement. RAsheda has presented her research at numerous conferences that focus on integrating critical play, radical love, autoethnography, and contemplative writing pedagogy as instructional strategies to humanize learning experiences for all learners. She has held national leadership positions within the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning and is currently serving as an executive board member for the National Council of Basic Writing. She is a graduate of the language and literacy MA at the City College of New York, a published writer, and a PhD candidate at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Joonna Smitherman Trapp retires from Emory University in December of 2023. She has served as the director of the writing program and the WAC program there. She was department chair at two other universities as well before moving to Emory. She and Brad Peters co-edited the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (JAEPL) for seven years. As a rhetorician, she has long been working on an archival project attempting to recover the antebellum lyceum movement in the Old South. In addition to vampires, Flannery O’Connor, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, pedagogy is her passion, and she loves to talk to other teachers about their teaching.
Sarah Moon is an assistant professor of humanities at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, a community writing facilitator, and an award-winning playwright. Her Write Your Roots projects have taken place in Willimantic, CT, and Providence, RI, and her plays have been produced in Washington, DC, Boston, and New York City. Her newest play, Apostates, PA, will receive a public reading this fall at Eastern CT Center for History, Art, and Performance, where she is the 2023 artist-in-residence. Her scholarly work is published in Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and is forthcoming in Pedagogy. She lives in rural Eastern Connecticut with her husband and three children.
Poetry Reading and Workshop with Libby Falk Jones – Open to all writers
Part 1:
- Friday, August 4
- 3:00–4:30 p.m. Eastern
Part 2:
- Friday, August 11
- 3:00–4:30 p.m. Eastern
Former AEPL Chair Libby Falk Jones will share some poems from her new collection, For Your Good Health, Drink Flowers (Bass Clef Books, 2023)*, as invitations for you to explore family relationships, landscapes, and language. Your writing may take any form—poetry or prose. Attend either or both sessions.
AEPL Conversation Circle: Autoethnography as Resistance in the Academy
- Friday, September 15
- 3:00–4:30 p.m. Eastern
Join AEPL board members Liz DeBetta, PhD and RAsheda Young, PhD candidate, for a conversation about Liz’s new book, Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness, and how autoethnography can be used to disrupt the canon and provide opportunities for critical writing that is humanizing, reflective, and grounded in theory.
The purpose of Conversation Circle is to give all members the chance to share their publications or works in progress with their colleagues. Let us know if you’d like to be next!
*Praise for Libby Falk Jones’s For Your Good Health, Drink Flowers:
“Season your milkshake with anemones/bubbling from a silver faucet,” Libby Falk Jones advises in For Your Good Health, Drink Flowers, and we know we are in the presence of a poet alert to the natural world, serene at the shimmering edge of the surreal—secure in her poetic vision. These are earthly, embodied poems, imbued with the energy of a woman in motion—traveling, hiking, pocketing stones so alive they feel like her “own mortality jingling.” “This is how I want to die,” she declares in the collection’s penultimate poem, “grounded, held//by a body, . . . feeling flesh . . .[the] weight of earth—//we matter.” Her poetry renders the visceral joy and sorrow of familial love alongside vivid experiences of aloneness. Distilled from a lifetime of close observation, the poems in this capacious collection embrace stillness and motion, relationship and solitude, declaring the necessary sustenance in each.
—Leatha Kendrick, author of And Luckier
Libby Falk Jones’s latest collection is a compendium of wonder. Wonder of snow geese in flight looking down on the viewer as an exploded milkweed, wonder in the taste of mulberries that are a “sunset in the mouth,“ wonder in mountain shadows of Death Valley that reflect a “riotous impermanence.” It is also a testament of the heart in which the human voice can attend to what it means to be human. As a bonus, it is a glossary of poetic forms masterfully embodied in ghazals and pantoums, cinquains, and deft villanelles as well as more familiar haikus and sonnets, a demo of the ways an accomplished poet catches the world in all its shimmering immediacy. This is a read that awards all of us ample dividends.
—Richard Taylor, Kentucky Poet Laureate 1999–2001
Please join us!
Announcing the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning Symposia Archive
Paid AEPL members and honorary scholars may now access archived materials and recordings from AEPL’s online symposia by going to the AEPL Symposia Archive website and entering the password they should have received. If you have not received this password, please contact membership director Jonathan Marine at jonathanmmarine@gmail.com with your payment receipt or confirmation of your honorary scholarship status.