Building and Sustaining Thriving Corequisite Communities
Friday, Dec. 4, 2026, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Location: Trutter Center, LLCC-Springfield
With generous support from an Illinois Community College Board Advancing Developmental Education Reform grant, Lincoln Land Community College is pleased to host a one-day English Corequisite Convening open to faculty, academic support partners, department chairs and academic deans across central Illinois. This year’s convening will focus on practices and resources to build and sustain thriving corequisite faculty communities, including results from a faculty mentorship program pilot, as well as sharing effective resources and strategies from a variety of institutional contexts.
This free, one-day convening will include panel-style presentations punctuated by dedicated time for institutional teams and attendees to engage in meaningful discussions about their own program needs and goals.
Sessions and presenters
The event will feature in-person and/or virtual presentations from community college faculty across Illinois.
- Olabisi Adenekan, Oakton College
- Teresa Carillo, Joliet Junior College
- Jeannette Garceau, Lincoln Land Community College
- Jenni Giangrego, McHenry County College
- Jess Jaenicke, Kankakee Community College
- Lauren Johnson, Lincoln Land Community College
- David Leitner, Lincoln Land Community College
- Brittani Miller, Kaskaskia College
- Marina Palladinetti, Oakton College
- Amy Sailer, Richland Community College
- Ethan Stephenson, John A. Logan College
- Becca Werland, Spoon River College
Sessions will present experiences from our faculty mentorship program pairs in areas including student engagement, meaningful writing/assignment design, integrated reading and writing, assessment and/or metacognition.
Virtual Lunch Keynote Speaker
Professor Ellen Carillo
Ellen C. Carillo is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of "Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer"; "Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America"; "The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading"; the "MLA Guide to Digital Literacy"; and "The Radical Case for Teaching Skim Reading in First-Year Writing". She is also the editor or co-editor of several textbooks and collections. Her scholarship on reading-writing connections, writing centers, assessment and transfer has appeared in various journals. Ellen has been awarded grants from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA).
Agenda
- 9 a.m. — Arrival, check-in, breakfast
- 9:30 a.m. — Institute Welcome, logistics, overview
- 9:45-10:45 a.m. — Session One: Integrated Reading and Writing
- 10:45 a.m. — Break
- 11 a.m.-12 p.m. — Session Two: Meaningful Writing and Assignment Design
- 12-1:30 p.m. — Lunch (Institutional Team or Cross-Institutional Table Talk)
- 1:30-2:30 p.m. — Session Three: Student Engagement and Metacognition
- 2:30 p.m. — Break
- 2:45-3:30 p.m. — Institutional Team or Cross Institutional Networking
- 3:30-4 p.m. — Debrief, next steps and goodbyes