Pre Conference Workshops

Type of Session: Preconference Workshop (No Registration Required)

Area: WAC Pedagogy and Practices

Delivery Mode: Live

Jenae Cohn, California State University, Sacramento

Jimmy Fleming, PowerNotes

Abstract: After a year of emergency remote instruction, instructors and students alike are increasingly aware of how experiences of teaching and learning online impact their engagement with reading and writing in digital spaces. In this workshop, we will focus on how we encourage focus and engagement with digital reading across the curriculum. By the end of this workshop, instructors will learn about a digital reading framework and some possible activities for helping students think with and through the work of reading on-screen.

This workshop is sponsored by PowerNotes. It is available to all who have registered for the IWAC Conference. A recording of the workshop will be available later in the conference. 

Type of Session: Preconference Workshop (No Registration Required)

Area: WAC Pedagogy and Practices

Delivery Mode: Live

Susan Miller-Cochran, University of Arizona

Vivian Garcia, Bedford/St. Martin's (Macmillan Learning)

Abstract:This workshop will address how and why first-year writing instructors should prepare students for discipline-specific writing. The session considers that first-year writing instructors are not necessarily experts in writing disciplinary genres, such as lab reports or theory response papers, and suggests strategies for helping students write in multiple genres. Among the strategies considered are equipping students with special rhetorical lenses through which they can view the genres and conventions they will be expected to read and produce in other courses.The workshop will also provide instructors with a rhetorical toolkit for teaching writing in the disciplines to first-year writing students.

This workshop is sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin's. It is available to all who have registered for the IWAC Conference. A recording of the workshop will be available later in the conference. 

Type of Session: Preconference Workshop

Area: WAC Pedagogy and Practices

Delivery Mode: Live. Pre-registration required.

Amy Cicchino, Auburn University

Lindsay Clark , Sam Houston State University

Justin Nicholes, University of Wisconsin, Stout

Abstract: The WAC Mentoring Workshop, presented by members of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum Mentoring Committee, will provide attendees guidance from experienced WAC leaders in a small-group setting. Attendees will be able to choose among breakout groups on various topics related to WAC programs: launching a new program, further developing an existing program, preparing graduate writers across disciplines, conducting WAC program assessment, supporting multilingual writers and WAC, strengthening WAC/writing center connections, bringing WAC into K-12 settings, growing WAC in two-year colleges, engaging in WAC research. Attendees will share their experiences and questions in small groups and receive feedback from their peers and the group leader. We hope providing this opportunity for friendly, cross-institutional mentoring will begin conversations that can continue throughout IWAC. The workshop will be run in two rounds, with each topic repeated so that attendees may choose two topics of interest to them: the first round of discussions will run from 8:00-9:30 and the second will run from 9:45-11:15.The workshop will be facilitated by AWAC Mentoring Committee members Lindsay Clark, Justin Nicholes, and Amy Cicchino. Each breakout group will be led by an experienced WAC leader from AWAC.

Type of Session: Preconference Workshop

Area: WAC Program Design and Leadership

Delivery Mode: Live. Pre-registration required.

Coordinator: Rick R. Fisher, University of Wyoming

Abstract: This workshop is designed for beginners and those who would benefit from reviewing some of the basic issues that shape programmatic assessment. This session will invite attendees to revisit their larger institutional needs, pressures, and resources; map relationships among course, program, and institutional-scale assessment activity; identify objects and objectives of their local efforts; and discuss strategies for "closing the assessment loop." Attendees will have multiple opportunities to share ideas with others during the workshop and will go home with action items for short- and long-term progress.

Type of Session: Preconference Workshop

Area: WAC and Institutional and Interdisciplinary Dynamics

Delivery Mode: Live. Pre-registration required.

Coordinator: Magnus K. H. Gustafsson, Chalmers University of Technology

Abstract: Collaboration between two European universities allowed participants to share practices and articulate approaches for how we support the development of students' disciplinary discourse in science and engineering. We arrived at seven shared dimensions that we needed to be able to negotiate and adjust in each situation. The seven dimensions are 'Developing or revising pedagogy'; 'Developing or revising instructions'; 'Developing or revising rubrics'; 'Feedback design and focus'; 'Focus and division of labor for work with texts'; 'Focus and division of labor in marking'; 'Mandate'. The workshop invites participants to explore the dimensions of the approaches and try them on for their own sites irrespective of what discipline they are in. The objective of the workshop is for participants to get a sense of a strategy and first steps toward a longitudinal WID-approach.

Type of Session: Preconference Workshop

Area: WAC Pedagogy and Practices

Delivery Mode: Live. Pre-registration required.

Coordinator: Anna Alexis Larsson, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Rachael Benavidez, Queens College CUNY

Anna Alexis Larsson, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Abstract: We created a web application called BlabRyte to capture the labor of private writing and will introduce the variety of ways it can be used in writing-intensive classes across the disciplines. Emphasizing frequency and exploration, BlabRyte gives structure to Peter Elbow's advice that writers sometimes ignore their audience, and it promotes an assessment model that values the labor of writing (Inoue). In this hands-on workshop, we will review the benefits of private writing and offer a variety of disciplinary uses for BlabRyte, giving participants pedagogical strategies to successfully integrate private writing that go beyond assigning a private journal. We will explore the ways in which BlabRyte addresses common writing and discussion challenges across the curriculum in conversations with students, instructors, and tutors from diverse disciplines. The facilitators will present specific examples from US History, Science, Technical Writing, and Film courses, along with potential applications for any course. Participants will experience student and instructor modes and practice using the tool, including developing community writing prompts to understand modes of student experiences. Participants will leave with numerous diverse ideas for low-stakes assignments that mix and remix forms of audience and response.

Type of Session: Preconference Workshop

Area: WAC Pedagogy and Practices

Delivery Mode: Live. Pre-registration required.

Coordinator: Jason C. Tham, Texas Tech University

Joe Moses, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Jason Tham, Texas Tech University

Abstract: Our workshop on interdependent roles and tasks for collaborative writing teams helps attendees address calls for improved career readiness by providing resources for increasing student learning in writing teams. This session is for faculty and graduate instructors who are 1) thinking about using team writing projects in their courses, 2) have used team writing projects in the past and would like to make them more effective, or 3) would take advantage of team writing projects if they had tools for creating effective assignments and supporting team productivity.

Type of Session: Preconference Workshop

Area: WAC and Institutional and Interdisciplinary Dynamics

Delivery Mode: Live. Pre-registration required.

Coordinator: Sarah Pittock, Stanford University

Kathleen Tarr, Stanford University

Abstract: WAC has experimented with various rebrands, among others, WEC, CAC, and LAC. This workshop will explore why in a moment when cultural rhetorics, digital rhetoric, and political rhetoric are so prominently at issue, WAC practitioners' theory, practice, and self presentation to institutional, faculty, and national partners do or do not invoke rhetorical concepts. The conversation will make explicit the affordances and limitations of what we might call RAC: Rhetoric Across the Curriculum. What do we lose, if anything, when we minimize the history and critical vocabulary of rhetoric in our work? What might we gain if we make rhetorical education an explicit goal of undergraduate education? To answer these questions, we will briefly reflect on how we bring in rhetorical concepts and theories to our work as writing specialists in spite of the resistance we face. We will then lead you through a series of exercises to surface how your current practice names rhetorical concepts, what rhetoric helps you achieve programmatically and in terms of student learning, and what challenges it raises. Our goal is to spark a lively conversation and facilitate the sharing of new strategies.

Type of Session: Preconference Workshop

Area: WAC Pedagogy and Practices

Delivery Mode: Live. Pre-registration required.

Coordinator: Suzanne Lane, MIT

Malcah Effron, MIT

Leslie Roldan, MIT

Michael Trice, MIT

Abstract: We have designed a visual tool that helps students learn to communicate disciplinary knowledge to a variety of audiences and in a variety genres. The tool, which we call a "Reasoning Diagram," maps central concepts in a discipline, as well as the reasoned relationship between them, and thus reveals communication pathways that a speaker/writer can take through the material. These diagrams are discipline-specific, and we have developed a methodology (which includes structured interviews with experts in the discipline as well various forms of textual coding) that allows us to create them in many disciplines. This workshop will introduce the theory and methodology that led us to create the diagrams, which we now have completed in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Comparative Media Studies, Computer Systems, Materials Science and Engineering, Mathematics, and Mechanical Engineering. We will also explain how we use these diagrams with students, and provide assessment data on their effectiveness. Participants will gain hands-on experience with the methodology and in-class activities, as well as a complete set of our reasoning diagrams.

Type of Session: Preconference Workshop

Area: WAC Pedagogy and Practices

Delivery Mode: Live. Pre-registration required.

Susan Lawrence, George Mason University

Terry Myers Zawacki, George Mason University

Abstract: Graduate student writers are increasingly becoming part of the scope of WAC initiatives, as research uncovers the complexity of graduate writing and the need for support. We briefly review the research before leading participants in thinking through ways to provide graduate-level writing support on their campuses. Participants will be introduced to a framework for understanding the complexity of graduate-level writing, the writing support needs of different demographics of graduate students (i.e. professional masters students, doctoral students, international students), and graduate-writing support models and approaches to faculty development. With this context, participants will map the state of graduate writing support on their campuses (if any), identify potential campus allies, and generate a list of feasible approaches for their institutions for building and/or expanding WAC/WID student and faculty support. In the concluding "gallery walk" activity, participants will share their maps, the potential campus allies they've identified, and a list of programmatic practices that may be achievable at their institutions, either within existing programs and budgets or through other means. The goal is that participants will leave with an understanding of the possibilities and some viable steps for increasing graduate writing support within WAC/writing center programs or through WAC-informed programming.