The Marginal Syllabus Project
Abstract: Annotation is confluence. The addition of a note to a text—as when a reader authors book marginalia or a group uses a digital application for social reading—demonstrates a confluence among primary source, reader response, and multiple people and ideas across texts and contexts. Annotation is a collaborative and multimodal literacy practice that exemplifies confluence. This session will examine how annotation enables confluences within the Marginal Syllabus (http://marginalsyllab.us/), a project that sparks and sustains public conversation about educational equity through collaborative technologies and partnerships. The project’s growth since 2016, which includes ongoing collaboration with the National Writing Project and NCTE, has inspired researchers to examine how publicly accessible annotation conversation productively strengthens intersections among literacy, learning, and educational equity. The Marginal Syllabus has been described as advocating “non-traditional approaches to online 2 collaborative reading of texts… [to] promote transformative learning as dialogue” (Bali & Caines, 2018, p. 14-15), while also helping “to imagine a different paradigm for conducting, consuming, and responding to research” (Mirra, 2018, par. 5). Other researchers have suggested the Marginal Syllabus enacts a participatory form of public discourse that exemplifies the “social scholarship of teaching” (Greenhow et al., 2019) whereby educators share their knowledge and produce new meaning about teaching through the annotation of academic literature.