Note: Proposals for the conference will be accepted beginning this fall. Please check this page or look for announcements via email, social media, and related websites.
The Writing Across the Curriculum movement is at an inflection point. IWAC 2025 offers an opportunity to explore how best we might support the work of teachers, administrators, and students with the flexibility required to address challenging and often vexing issues and with action built on innovative and respectful approaches to teaching and learning.
IWAC 2025 is centered on questions shaped by global and national shifts and the debates that surround them. These questions are associated with long-standing concerns about how best to use writing to support teaching and learning and how best to prepare students for the writing and speaking situations they will encounter in their professional, personal, and civic lives; how best to design, manage, grow, assess, and sustain WAC programs; movements for and against diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice; and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence applications that challenge our understanding of what it means to write and to be a writer. These questions continue discussions at previous IWAC conferences, in particular those that took place in 2021 and 2023.
As an educational movement, WAC is both successful and widely recognized. Early in the effort to identify high-impact practices, under the phrase “writing-intensive courses,” it was included in a list of several educational practices that had been shown to contribute to student learning and success (Kuh, 2008). Since its founding in 1970, the conditions under which writing is used to support teaching and learning have changed, and we can anticipate that the rate of change will only increase in coming years. Questions to explore in this area include:
The work of designing, funding, managing, growing, assessing, and sustaining WAC programs remains both challenging and rewarding. As we look forward, what considerations should we make to adapt to changing conditions and what lessons have we learned over more than five decades of the WAC movement that can help us sustain our efforts? We can benefit from continued inquiry and discussion of innovative approaches to WAC program design and development and from efforts to recover and deepen our understanding of WAC histories. Questions to consider in this area include:
In their plenary presentations at the 2021 IWAC Conference, Pamela Flash, Al Harahap, Federico Navarro, Teresa Redd, and Alisa Russell considered the current and future status of WAC through a collective perspective on coloniality, equity, and sustainability. Russell argued for flexibility as we work to make visible—and expand—the ways in which we enact WAC, an argument that is particularly significant in light of tensions surrounding higher education across the globe. Flash and Redd described these tensions—including the growing number of anti-DEI laws and regulations enacted recently in the United States—as “forces of pushback” that challenge members of the WAC community who have put into practice or are developing innovative responses to national and local challenges. Harahap, pointing to a disconnect between our ideals and our actions, called for situating our research and pedagogies in ways that demonstrate our commitment to action. And Navarro highlighted the extent to which shifting student populations and communities are challenging the structures of higher education.
Questions addressed in relation to this area might include:
Scholars have described generative AI as a “tool” or “aid” to research and communication while wondering whether students will lose the educational value of developing their critical thinking abilities (Werse, 2023). This challenge implicates the need for innovative practices that will support the use of writing, learning, and critical thinking at a time when technologies are reshaping our understanding of writing itself. Shifts in technology, particularly in generative and even general artificial intelligence, will continue to challenge our conceptions of what it means to position humanistic values at the center of education. Questions to consider in this area include:
At IWAC 2025, we will consider questions about flexibility, action, and innovation in ways that respect traditions that span continents and cultures. As we attend to these questions, we will necessarily explore how best to address the needs and goals of faculty in different types of institutions, in different global and national regions, and in different language contexts and language traditions—all of whom are working with students who have a wide range of needs, interests, and learning goals. Questions to address in this area might include:
As we imagine WAC’s global future, we point to the following themes relevant to IWAC 2025:
As WAC continues to shape teaching and learning across various disciplines, it is clear that making connections to the issues and questions raised above must emerge out of “people’s individual and collective reflection” in questioning and reflecting upon the “kind of WAC future we want to build” (Harahap, Navarro, & Russell, 2023). Equally important, as Navarro and others have called for, we urge the field to engage in a greater transnational exchange and dialogue, one that centers the knowledges and practices of WAC scholars and practitioners across the world. We encourage various linguistic exchanges, modes of presentation, and what Natalia Avila Reyes coined “building a dynamic of influence” that will continue to foster respect, exchange of knowledge, and a broader shift in how we, as scholars, teachers, and administrators, consider what it means to write and be a writer across the curriculum.
We welcome submissions for:
We ask presenters to limit themselves to one speaking role in panels, roundtables and teaching demonstrations (excluding service as a chair or respondent to a panel). In addition to a speaking role on a panel, roundtable or teaching demonstration, we also encourage participants to consider participation as a workshop leader and as a presenter of a poster session.
We also ask presenters to consider issues of accessibility as they develop their presentation. Useful information about accessible presentations can be found on the Composing Access site at https://u.osu.edu/composingaccess/.
IWAC 2025 centers the significant role of languages and the ways in which we, as a movement, might better facilitate conversations between scholars from the U.S. and around the world who speak a variety of languages. In keeping with that commitment, we are developing a statement on language inclusion that will be available on this site.