AWAC has been granted a sponsored session at the European Writing Centers Association conference to take place in person in Graz, Austria, from July 6-9, 2022. The theme of the conference is “Writing Centers as Spaces of Empowerment” (the conference website is at https://europeanwritingcenters-2022.uni-graz.at/en/). For this panel, we solicit proposals based on the following CPF:

Writing Centers and WAC: Relationships Between Students and Faculty/Academic Staff

The mission of writing centers typically supports both the improvement of students’ writing projects and the more general enhancement of their writing abilities through face-to-face and online tutorial consultations, workshops and seminars, and visits to classes for brief presentations on tailored topics. Indirectly, faculty/academic staff learn about students’ writing challenges from these consultations and visits, and may adjust their own assignment design or other aspects of their pedagogy from this knowledge. But it is not usually in the main purview of writing centers to work systematically and transformationally with faculty/academic staff across the curriculum on deeper areas of writing support, such as the creation of learning-based writing activities; support for the development of larger projects such as the inclusion of student peer review or the scaffolding of writing episodes; or the development of clear, principled evaluation criteria. Such faculty-development work is normally in the province of writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) or writing-in-the-disciplines (WID) programs, which are designed to enhance writing pedagogy through the support and intervention of the instructors themselves.

This panel, sponsored by the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (https://www.wacassociation.org/), will bring together scholar-educators to discuss current and potential interconnections between writing centers and WAC/WID programs, or potential expansions of student-facing writing centers to include significant work with faculty/academic staff for their increased and enhanced involvement in the development of their students’ discipline- or course/module-specific writing abilities. In particular, we seek presentations that might address the following questions, but these are by no means exhaustive:

• What role do writing centers play in the enhancement of discipline-based faculty/academic staff to intervene in and support their own students’ writing processes, activities, and development?
• How might or do existing WAC/WID programs partner effectively with writing centers to help an institution develop a “culture” of writing rather than locating writing support in specific programs or units?
• How can writing centers create a more equitable balance between their own student support and the support needed from instructors within specific courses/modules?
• What theoretical and practical challenges do leaders of writing centers and those who work in them face when they identify shortcomings in the way that faculty/academic staff assign, support, or evaluate their students’ writing? What programmatic efforts might work effectively between the writing center and the instructors to help reduce these challenges?

Proposals can be theoretically or empirically driven and should:

• Be approximately 300 words
• Include a title for the presentation
• Clearly address the focus of the session
• Be grounded in existing literature relevant to the topic
• State potential or demonstrated significance for the field
• Be inquiry- and evidence-based
• Identify the speaker(s) and their affiliations
• Include contact information (email, phone, address) for the lead or solo proposer
• Include 3-5 keywords

Please note that the preferred language of the conference is English but that in the interest of inclusivity, the EWCA welcomes those would feel more comfortable presenting in another language, in which case, please provide an English translation of your proposal.

Please submit proposals as attached Word files via email, with the subject line “AWAC-Sponsored Panel EWCA 2020,” NO LATER THAN MAR. 1, 2022, to:

Chris Anson:  ude.uscn@nosna_sirhc

Federico Navarro: lc.hou@orravan

Upon acceptance, panelists must be members of AWAC or become members.