Second Annual National Advanced Writing Symposium (NAWS) - Innovative Pedagogies and Student Engagement in Advanced Writing

Friday, January 31, 2025

The pandemic years have shown us that writing instruction needs to become more inclusive, more robust, and more compassionate. However, it has also challenged us to find new and innovative ways to maintain student engagement, foster participation, and address declining student attendance, among other concerns. 

Please consider submitting to the Second Annual National Advanced Writing Symposium, which will be held January 31st, 2025. This year's virtual conference will be guided by collaboration and thoughtful discussion of your teaching innovations and considerations about student engagement.

The National Advanced Writing Symposium is looking for papers that broach pedagogical practices in writing as a means of advancing student engagement in both in-person and virtual classrooms across the spectrum of courses within writing programs from freshmen to upper division students. Further, the conference seeks to provide a space to share innovative and equitable practices, discuss praxis, and build a supportive and inclusive teaching community. 

We encourage individual or team proposals from those who are working in any teaching, research, or administrative positions related to advanced writing. Submissions for presentations, discussion roundtables, workshop ideas, or other forms of conversation-starters are all welcome. 

 Below are some suggestions to begin (but not limit) the conversation:

• How do we frame assignments across the disciplines that emphasize student agency and encourage individual creativity as we prepare our student writers for the next level?

• How do we create equitable and inclusive environments in our courses at all levels of instruction? 

• How might we engage with each other about how recent innovations support and/or challenge inclusivity in our classes?  

• What collaborative, inventive modalities can we learn from and build on?

• How does the teaching of rhetoric and writing look outside of the conventional in-person classrooms that are often the focus of rhetoric and writing pedagogy and the field’s scholarship, especially as fewer students are consistently present in these spaces as a result of increasing absences? 

• What alternative modes of assessment practices (collaborative grading; ungrading; unilateral, labor-based, and empathy-based grading contracts; specification grading) best align with the needs of students and teachers in this ever-changing educational landscape? 

• What innovative assignments can we integrate into the classroom to promote student participation, inclusivity, and agency? 

We also welcome presentations on pedagogical concepts or practices that are still in their creation phase, including, but not limited to an idea you have brewing for publication, or a larger conference, or the beginning stages of an IRB study that you’d like feedback for. 

We are also open to discussion roundtables that involve large or small group dialogue around a central theme or subtopic. These can include case studies, “problem/solution” scenarios, or practical applications that benefit from group discussions. Responses to published think pieces related to our field or provoking questions that help usher meaningful reflection are also invited.

Additional list of topics:

• Multimodal classrooms

• Multilingual engagement

• Ethical AI use

• Multiethnic inclusion 

• Experimental pedagogy

• Pedagogical challenges

• Translation practices

• Grading/ungrading methodologies

• Student engagement 

Session Types:

• Panel proposals: 3-4 speakers organized around a theme or issue of your choice
• Individual presentation proposals: 1-2 speakers delivering a single talk/paper
• Workshop proposals: Sessions focused on discussion, collaboration, audience
participation, and workshop activities
• Discussion roundtable proposals: propose co-leading a roundtable on a topic of your choice or join one of our pre-set roundtables on innovative pedagogies and student engagement by telling us about your relationship to and expertise in the topic and what you would contribute to the conversation.

What To Submit: We ask for proposals of 200-500 words along with a title and abstract (no more than 400 characters or spaces).

Proposal Deadline: Sunday, November 10, 2024

Google Form Link for Proposal Submissions: Click Here!

In the Google Form, please indicate the type of session and include your proposal elements (title, abstracted description, and proposal).

For any questions about developing your proposal, contact Christene d’Anca at christene_danca@ucsb.edu with the subject line “Advanced Writing Symposium.”