Call for Proposals
University of Florida’s Writing Program
Spring 2026 Conference on Pedagogy, Practice, and Philosophy

Conference date: Saturday, February 7, 2026
Theme: Meaningful Writing

The University of Florida’s Writing Program invites proposals for our annual Conference on Pedagogy, Practice, and Philosophy. This year’s theme, Meaningful Writing, asks us to reflect on the writing experiences that matter most to our students, our classrooms, and ourselves.

Drawing on the work of Eodice, Geller, and Lerner’s Making Writing Meaningful (2025), we understand meaningful writing as a writing process that fosters agency, engagement, and learning that connects to identity and aspiration. Meaningful writing is cultivated through expansive pedagogies that offer students autonomy, intentional guidance, authentic audiences, and time for reflection and revision.

In an era of rapid technological change, we must also ask: What threatens the meaningfulness of writing? While AI writing tools offer efficiency and support, they may also risk stripping writing of its personal, intellectual, and ethical dimensions. How do we preserve writing as human-centered in a digital age?

We invite proposals that explore the theory and practice of meaningful writing in college composition. What makes writing meaningful for your students? How do you design assignments, courses, or feedback practices that foster agency and engagement? How do you help students connect writing to their lives, communities, and futures? And how do we respond to technologies that may automate writing but not the thinking, feeling, or learning behind it?

Conference Format
Because this conference will focus on meaningful connections, we’ll all meet in person on the University of Florida campus. Our goal is to foster collaborative, inclusive, and practical conversations about writing pedagogy. We welcome proposals from graduate students, post-docs, junior faculty, and experienced instructors alike.

We invite four types of proposals:

1. Activity Swap – Share one activity, lesson, or technique that fosters meaningful writing. Each presenter will have 15 minutes, followed by a discussion.
2. Themed Roundtables – 3–4 speakers discussing a specific topic related to meaningful writing. Talks should be 15 minutes each, with time for audience engagement.
3. Pedagogy Workshops – Practical sessions on course design or assignment creation that promote meaningful writing. Each presenter will lead a 15-minute workshop.
4. Research Papers – Present a 15-minute scholarly paper on meaningful writing, pedagogy, or related topics.

Proposal Topics May Include (but are not limited to):

• Designing for agency, engagement, and identity
• Creating public-facing writing opportunities
• Preserving “human-centered” writing
• Fostering self-directed learners of writing
• Writing across disciplines and communities
• Inclusive and expansive pedagogies
• AI and the ethics of writing technologies
• Feedback, revision, and reflection practices
• Writing as identity work or social action
• Multilingual and translingual writing
• Disability studies and access in writing instruction
• Collaborative learning and peer assessment
• Writing beyond the classroom: networks, assemblages, publics

Submission Guidelines
 To submit a proposal, email a 250-word abstract with your contact information, affiliation, and position/title to Angela Brown at walther@ufl.edu. For roundtables or workshops, please include information for each participant.

Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2025
 Notification of acceptance: December 11, 2025
 Conference date: Saturday, February 7, 2026

For more information about UF’s Writing Program, visit: https://writing.ufl.edu
 Questions? Email Angela Brown at walther@ufl.edu

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Neal Lerner

We are pleased to announce that this year's keynote speaker is Dr. Neal Lerner. Dr. Lerner is a Professor of English at Northeastern University and a prolific scholar of writing centers and writing pedagogy, authoring over 40 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the theory, history, and practice of writing instruction. He has won the International Writing Centers Association’s Outstanding Scholarship Award three times with his work in cultivating writing centers as research sites, expanding outreach across campus, and advancing writing consultant development and peer consulting pedagogy. Dr. Lerner’s book, The Idea of a Writing Laboratory received the 2011 National Council of Teachers of English David H. Russell Award, and most recently, Dr. Lerner and his colleague Dr. Anne Ellen Geller, St. John’s University, received the 2025 IWAC award for Best WAC Article or Chapter Focused on Research recognizing their exceptional contributions to WAC.  His most recent work, The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching, and Writing in Higher Education (with Michele Eodice and Anne Ellen Geller, 2016), along with its follow-up Making Writing Meaningful: A Guide for Higher Education (with Michele Eodice and Anne Ellen Geller, 2025) further establishes Dr. Lerner as an educator who emphasizes writing as a social, collaborative process and engages with multilingual writers, disciplinary writing, and inclusive pedagogy. The Meaningful Writing Project’s expansive approach embodies the pedagogical principle of broadening learning environments to allow multiple dimensions of learning to occur simultaneously.