WAC Awards Recipients: 2023

The committee also recognizes Writing Enriched Curricula: Models of Faculty-Driven and Departmental Transformation (The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado), edited by Chris M. Anson and Pamela Flash, with an honorable mention. This is an excellent resource for WAC faculty looking to bring writing-enriched curriculums to their institutions as it combines both big-picture discussions of frameworks as well as specific accounts and examples.

The book is available in open-access formats on the WAC Clearinghouse.

Lauriellen Stankavich, Southern Adventist University

Comments from the Selection Committee: Lauriellen Stankavitch’s dissertation, A Nexus of Literate Activity: The Design of Writing Assignments in the Disciplines, is a rigorous and thoughtful study exploring the design processes WAC instructors use in composing assignments. This work, as Stakavitch’s recommender noted, exemplifies “a rich theory of practice that applies far beyond its immediate object of study . . . . Stankavich’s theory portrays the WAC instructor as an embodied reservoir of disciplinary knowledge and an arbiter of literate practices who employs the mediating capacity of writing assignments as a potent pedagogical nexus.” The committee agreed that the dissertation was both eloquently written and offered novel insights into design and embodiment that WAC scholars and administrators will find useful in practical ways. View the dissertation at the Old Dominion University Digital Commons.

Dana Driscoll and Omar Ahmed Yacoub, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Comments from the Selection Committee: Driscoll and Yacoub’s contribution in their article to a disciplinary understanding of threshold genre is significant. “Threshold Genres: A 10-Year Exploration of a Medical Writer’s Development and Social Apprenticeship Through the Patient SOAP Note” reports on a case study—the longest longitudinal study in the field. The authors share insights into the participant’s experiences developing writing expertise over a ten-year span, beginning with first-year composition, to novice medical student, and, ultimately, to that of expert medical practitioner. The authors argue that the SOAP note serves as a dynamic, required genre for the participant’s mastery of professional thinking and practice. Driscoll and Yacoub make a compelling case for longitudinal threshold genre research as a means of deepening our understanding of how and why writing expertise develops over time. View the article in Written Communication on the Sage Journals website.

Angela Rounsaville, University of Central Florida, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Rebecca S. Nowacek, Marquette University

Comments from the Selection Committee:In “Relationality in the Transfer of Writing Knowledge,” Rounsaville, Leonard, and Nowacek provide a collaborative transdisciplinary analysis of transfer scholarship. We were impressed with the authors’ focused and expertly handled synthesis of interdisciplinary transfer research, which we believe enriches our field’s understanding of transfer and offers new and refined concepts that will drive future research and teaching in first year composition, writing centers, and writing across the curriculum. It impressively integrates scholarship from aviation, medicine, human resources and many other fields in order to help readers make sense of transfer’s paradoxical nature, which is crucial for WAC scholars and teachers looking to activate transfer in disciplinary courses. It is a great example of what WAC scholars can do to involve themselves in ambitious, theoretically sophisticated, thoughtful argument. View the article in CCC on the NCTE website.

Michael Carter is a highly regarded scholar, educator, and advocate for the teaching of writing across the curriculum. Over the past 41 years, he has made substantial contributions to writing across and in the disciplines, and his impact on students, colleagues, and the broader academic community is undeniable.

Mike’s scholarship is marked by a deep commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry and an unwavering dedication to improving writing pedagogy across diverse contexts. He has published extensively on topics ranging from the rhetorical analysis of scientific discourse to the role of writing in STEM education, and his work has been widely cited and celebrated within and beyond the field of writing studies. In 2007 he received the Richard Braddock Award for his highly influential article published in College Composition and Communication, “Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines.” In 2008 he received the NCTE's award for Best Article on Pedagogy or Curriculum in Technical or Scientific Communication for “Writing to Learn by Learning to Write in the Disciplines” (co-authored with Miriam Ferzli and Eric N. Wiebe). He was successful in obtaining an astonishing $5.5 million in grants that generated widely adopted materials such as the influential LabWrite: A National Web-Based Initiative to Use the Lab Report to Improve the Way Students Write, Visualize, and Understand Science (supported by the National Science Foundation). His dozens of presentations and workshops across the United States and in many other countries have helped to inform scholars and educators on a wide range of writing- and communication-related topics. Mike's research has not only advanced our understanding of writing as a critical component of disciplinary learning, but also provided valuable insights into how writing instruction can be integrated into a range of academic contexts.

Mike's contributions to the teaching of writing across the curriculum are equally impressive. He helped to establish the first departmentally-focused writing and oral communication program in the United States, the Campus Writing and Speaking Program, at North Carolina State University, and was its interim director for two years as a national search was mounted for a permanent director. Subsequently he served for eight years as its Associate Director. The program has had a significant positive effect on the role of writing and oral communication across NC State’s large and diverse curriculum, which supports 34,000 students, and led to NC State being included multiple times in U.S. News and World Report’s list of universities with the best programs for writing across the curriculum. The model of communication across the curriculum that Mike helped to establish has influenced many other universities and is documented in Anson and Flash’s recent collection, Writing-Enriched Curricula: Models of Faculty-Driven and Departmental Transformation (WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado, 2021), for which Mike wrote the Foreword. For thirteen years, Mike served as Associate Dean of the Graduate School at NC State, where he continued his implementation of WAC and WID using the departmentally-focused model that he helped to establish.

As a teacher, mentor, and curriculum designer, Mike has worked tirelessly to help students develop their writing skills and learn how to communicate effectively within their respective fields. His courses became known for their rigor, creativity, and commitment to student-centered learning, and his students have consistently praised him for his ability to foster critical thinking and intellectual curiosity. Mike's approach to teaching is grounded in his belief that writing is not just a tool for communication, but also a means of generating knowledge and fostering collaboration across disciplines. In 2006 he received the Ephraim I. Schechter Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Assessment at NC State and, in 2002, he received the University’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. Finally, Mike’s commitment to the field of writing studies extends beyond his scholarship and teaching. He has served on numerous editorial boards, professional organizations, and accreditation committees, and has conducted external reviews and consultations at universities such as Wayne State, Miami, Iowa State, and King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. In addition, Mike has been a leading voice in efforts to make writing instruction more accessible and responsive to the needs of all students.

For these reasons and many more, I believe that Mike Carter is an exceptional candidate for AWAC’s Distinguished Fellow Award. His contributions to the field are profound and his impact on students, colleagues, and the academic community at large is immeasurable. I whole-heartedly endorse his nomination and encourage the committee to consider him for this prestigious award.
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Professor Donahue has an impressive WAC-oriented CV (attached) and more than 20 years of WAC-related experience. In the US higher education context, she has served in multiple functions across writing programme designs from first year writing programmes, WAC programmes, WID programmes, and programmes for pursuing transfer to post-university writing development. But the core reason for the nomination is her work outside the US higher education arena and its impact on both helping transfer and adapt WAC/WID philosophies to higher education systems in Europe. This work has, however, had the double function of also introducing ideas, language awareness, and philosophies from European contexts to the US educational arena.

Donahue’s projects, workshops and publications testify to a long and deep WAC commitment within and outside the US. My two main reasons for the nomination, though, are two activities she has initiated that both have the signature potential of her work. The Dartmouth summer seminar, which she started with Charles Bazerman in 2011, has offered first of all a retreat for writing studies professionals to focus on their projects, collaborate via extended conversation and dialogue, and even start up new collaborative projects. More importantly, the seminar brings WAC-scholars together from around the globe and that enriched perspective on WAC is important. Her work with the CCCC standing group for International Researchers Consortium, while less ambitious in terms of time and the length of the retreat, has had very similar impact. To give up on the conference presentation format and design a workshop where papers are shared and read months before and discussed with engaged reader during a one-day workshop has proven to be a very effective concept. Since 2018 that workshop has not only attracted international scholars and their projects, but it has also been offered three times in Europe without any connection to the CCCC conference.
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Toby Fulwiler is among the founding leaders of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement. He played a central role in promoting journal writing early in the WAC movement, and his book The Journal Book was a seminal publication for the field and inspired a generation of faculty to adopt journal writing in their courses. With Art Young, he authored a number of important books that made major contributions to WAC scholarship: Programs that Work, which offered early models for effective WAC programs; Writing Across the Disciplines, which shared the experiences of faculty at the influential WAC program at Michigan Technological University that Dr. Fulwiler and Dr. Young led, and Language Connections, one of the first books to share WAC pedagogies with a broader audience of writing scholars and teachers across disciplines. Dr. Fulwiler was a highly visible advocate for WAC process pedagogies, and he visited countless institutions over his career and led faculty development workshops across the U.S.
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Dr. Ganobcsik-Williams has a long track-record of important work and outstanding academic leadership in European writing development and the work of introducing as well as adapting US WAC ideas and philosophies into the UK and the European educational scene. She has been running the Centre for Academic Writing at Coventry university since 2004. The centre is a good example of adjusting writing centre pedagogy to new contexts and environments and adapting to the European Higher Education Arena. As a European writing studies professional she has been active in IWCA, EWCA and EATAW. She was on the EATAW board from 2007 to 2017 and has been an ex-offcio member since 2017. Together with other EATAW board members, she started and developed the Journal of Academic Writing and has been an editor for it since 2009. JoAW was established as a journal for EATAW members and has hosted special issues for the EATAW conferences since 2011.

An additional example of her substantial influence and impact on European writing development is the development and research of two post-graduate programmes for writing development pedagogy in Europe. There is a one-year programme largely oriented towards to the UK-scene and a two-year programme that has attracted many European teacher-scholars. The topics in the programme are central to the field with “Teaching and Supporting Academic Writing”; “Contextual Issues in Developing Research Communication”; “Writing Centre and Writing Programme Development and Management” and “Supporting Research-Active Staff with Research Communication.”
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I am pleased to nominate Dr. Anne Ruggles Gere, professor of English and Education at the University of Michigan, for Distinguished Fellow of the Association of Writing Across the Curriculum. Dr. Gere is well known in writing studies for her impressive list of leadership positions, including a former president of NCTE, former Chair of College Composition and Communication, and past president of MLA. Perhaps less well known to those in Writing Across the Curriculum are her many scholarly contributions to our field and her mentoring of doctoral students who then go on to make meaningful WAC contributions themselves. I’ll detail both of these areas shortly, but first I want to describe her University of Michigan programmatic accomplishments.

Before stepping down in 2019, Dr. Gere developed and directed the Sweetland Center for Writing, a comprehensive, cross-curricular center that not only oversees the first-year and cross-college advanced writing requirements and the writing minor but also serves students and faculty across the university through a writing tutoring center, a writing fellows program, specialized support for multilingual and international students, and a cross-disciplinary faculty-facing Fellows Seminar offering consultations, workshops, and funding for research on writing.

Dr. Gere’s most recent scholarship is evidence of the cross-disciplinary reach of the faculty-facing services, particularly collaborative research on writing. From just 2017 to the present, for example, I counted on her CV twenty-two multiply-authored articles with STEM faculty in Chemistry, Engineering, and Biology, published in both writing studies and science journals. Here are just two examples: Gere, A.R., Knutson, A.V., & McCarty, R., (2018). Rewriting disciplines: STEM students’ longitudinal approaches to writing in (and across) the disciplines.” Across the Disciplines, 15(3), 63-75. And Moon, A., Gere, A. R., Shultz, G. V. (2018). Writing in the STEM classroom: Faculty conceptions of writing and its role in the classroom. Science Education, 102(5), 1007-1028.

In addition and as an example of her generous mentoring, Dr. Gere frequently co-authors on cross-disciplinary topics with her past and present doctoral students, often on large-scale corpus research involving writing development and writing assessment. Of particular interest to those of us in WAC is the 2019 edited collection Writing Development in Higher Education: A Longitudinal Study, which I had the opportunity to review in manuscript form. The volume includes chapters by current and former graduate students. Of the latter, a number have gone on to lead WID-focused writing programs, e.g. Zach Lancaster, who inaugurated a WAC initiative at Wake Forest and is now mentoring assistant professor Dr. Alisa Russell in that role.

Before closing, I want to mention two other Sweetland Center faculty development initiatives— MWrite, which assists instructors in implementing writing-to-learn pedagogies in large introductory lecture courses across the curriculum and the Topics in Writing Podcasts. The podcasts, developed and overseen by Dr. Gere, feature hour-long interviews with invited experts in writing studies, including many WAC scholars, e.g. Charles Bazerman, Dan Melzer, Marty Townsend, Mike Palmquist, Linda Adler-Kassner, Liz Wardle, Carl Withaus, and me (honored to be in such good company). A gift to our field, the podcasts are offered open access at https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/projects/topics-in-writing-podcast.html
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Since the 1990s, Otto Kruse helped establish substantial discourses and institutional practices in academic writing in his home country, Germany, and later also in Switzerland and other parts of Europe. In several positions, first as a psychological counsellor for students, then as a professor of psychology and applied linguistics, he found various access points to the study and teaching of writing, from tutoring and training students to train-the-trainer offers for faculty and writing teachers. He was an initiator and co-founder of EATAW and later also of the Swiss Forum for Academic Writing. His publications, both in English and German, received wide attention in academic contexts and paved the way for institutional solutions for supporting writers and improving the teaching of writing. He helped build bridges to connect European traditions with the US-American writing movement and its university programs. A topic Otto Kruse covered exclusively for German-speaking audiences is his work on critical thinking. Building on John Bean’s seminal work Engaging Ideas, he got interested in transferring John’s ideas to the context of German higher education, where educational reforms were pointing in the wrong direction. By a textbook for students and several scholarly publications on critical thinking, he helped get this topic back on the agenda of university teaching. Finally, Otto Kruse made substantial contributions to the theory and practice of the digitalization of academic writing.The result of which is to be published in “Digital Writing Technologies in Higher Education: Theory, Research, and Practice” in 2023, adapting the concepts of seamless learning and technology mapping to writing studies.
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I exuberantly nominate Professor Margot Soven of LaSalle University for the honor of Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum. Dr. Soven, who is Professor of English at LaSalle, developed and has led the WAC program at LaSalle since the early 1980s, while also leading the Writing Center there for many years. In 2012, she received LaSalle University’s Faculty Service Award.

Even after forty years of vital service to writing at LaSalle, she continues to serve her institution in important and progressive ways. She directs the Writing Fellows Program, a key component of WAC, and through the office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, she directs the entire Core Curriculum. Moreover, she continues to teach introductory and advanced writing courses and methods courses in the teaching of writing—as well as to have developed new courses in turn-of-the century American women writers and in post-fifties American writers.

She is the co-editor of several books that have become classics of the WAC literature, including Writing across the Curriculum: A Guide to Developing Programs (with Susan McLeod; Sage, 1992; Composing a Community: A History of Writing Across the Curriculum (with Susan McLeod; Parlor Press, 2006); and WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for Continuing Writing Across the Curriculum Programs (with Susan McLeod, Eric Miraglia, and Christopher Thaiss; NCTE, 2001).

For thirty years she was a key contributor to the growth of WAC/WID nationally, not only through her publications, but also through service from the 1980s to 2015 as a member of the Board of Consultants of the National (then International) Network of WAC Programs. Each year she led or co-led program-development groups at the annual meetings of the Network at CCCC. She has served as a consultant, both formally and informally, to many developers of WAC programs across the US.

In addition to the books listed above, Professor Soven is the author, co-author, or editor of several other WAC-relevant books, including Write to Learn: A Guide to Writing across the Curriculum (South-Western Publishers, 1995); Writings from the Workplace: Documents, Models, Cases (with Carolyn Boiarsky; Allyn and Bacon, 1996; Teaching Writing in Middle and Secondary Schools: Theory, Research and Practice (Allyn and Bacon, 1999); What the Writing Tutor Needs to Know (Cengage, 2005); and Linked Courses for General Education and Integrative Learning: A Guide for Faculty and Administrators (edited, with D. Lehr, S. Naynaha, and W. Olson; Stylus Publishers, 2013).

For her many contributions to WAC scholarship and WAC program development nationally over many years, and for her varied, creative, and dedicated WAC-related service and teaching at La Salle University for more than forty years, Professor Margot Soven richly deserves the honor of being named Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum.
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