We are excited to share with you all on behalf of the Conference Planning Committee for the University of Connecticut First-Year Writing Program that we are holding our 21st Annual Conference on the Teaching of Writing on Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24, 2026, on our campus in Storrs, CT. Our theme for the upcoming conference is: “Wicked Reading for Wicked Problems." As those who have collaborated with us in the past, we are once again inviting you to help us explore ways of approaching these 'wicked problems', such as those that evade consensus, offer multiple solutions, or may even resist resolution at all. Instead, such dilemmas invite us to open space to collaborate, engage, and challenge ourselves within the classroom and our discussions of academic freedom. We are excited to share that our keynote speaker, Dr. Kendall Gerdes, will be leading us in exploring the role of writing education in connection with academic freedom during times of emergent crises. They are an Associate Professor at the University of Utah and a winner of the 2025 Conference on College Composition & Communication's (CCCC) Outstanding Book Award for their book Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024). Dr. Gerdes will also be hosting a teaching workshop that will engage participants in exploring the possibilities for teaching sensitive and contentious topics in times of polycrisis. 

We seek proposals of 250 to 300 words for accessible and active presentations. We strongly encourage proposals that describe how material will be interactive, participatory, and/or engaging for the audience. Presentations and sessions should be designed to be accessible from the outset. Proposals may take the following forms: 

• Research presentations: Propose an individual presentation or fully formed session. Proposals for fully formed sessions should include a brief description and all individual proposals. 

• Teaching workshops: Propose to lead a one-hour teaching workshop on a specified topic. All conference attendees will have the opportunity later to sign up for accepted workshops. 

• Research Slam: A free-flowing, participatory session made up of interactive digital exhibitions, posters, skill and resource shares, engaged play, and other alternative formats for sharing research, teaching, or creative practice.

Please submit your proposals here The deadline for proposal submissions has been extended to Sunday, February 15, 2026. Please see our website for more details on submission guidelines and formats.

Participants might consider proposals that deepen, extend, or complicate these and similar ideas, amongst others: 

Crisis and Wicked Problems in the Classroom:

• How do we invite students into the questions of a course and hand over the responsibility of investigating those “wicked problems”? 

• How do we encourage students to consider perspectives or ideologies outside of their common experiences? 

• How do we address students’ anxieties and fears with confronting “wicked” problems? 

• How might the frameworks of “wicked problems” and “wicked reading” impose upon and reshape students’ writing identities? 

• How does writing mediate wicked problems? 

• What is the role of creativity and creative writing in helping students investigate wicked problems? 

• How do we encourage students to incorporate disparate knowledge into their own rhetorical stances on crises that intersect and overlap? 

• How can we support student writers as problem solvers while also remaining critical of the ways they are hailed as managers of crisis? 

The Stakes of Academic Freedom:

• What is at stake for secondary classroom educators when working within frameworks of “wicked problems” and “polycrises”? 

• How does the writing classroom handle questions and anxieties around academic freedom? 

Students as Readers: 

• How do literacy crises—both real and imagined—that begin in the earliest stages of formal education complicate efforts to get students to see themselves as writers who are capable of responding to complex problems? 

• How do we foster student engagement with reading as administrators, instructors, mentors, and instructional designers? 

• How do we foster engagement with texts that encourage either competing or complicated answers? 

• How do we encourage student autonomy in investigating their own approaches to engagement with reading? 

• How do we prepare students to read with wicked problems in mind when those problems involve incommensurate interpretive frames? 

• How do texts implicate their readers?

 We believe that your participation will help provide important, fruitful, and engaging ways of approaching these topics and we eagerly look forward to your submissions. If you have any questions, please email us at FYWConference@uconn.edu.