Writers Across the Curriculum: A Speaker Series

The Writing Center at Michigan State University’s 2023 virtual speaker series  brought together conversations about Tier II writing and writers, writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing in the disciplines (WID) work, this series addressed both pragmatic and human responses to these two questions: What does it mean to be a writer in the academy? And what support do teachers (or tutors) of writing need to empower their students? At the core of writing pedagogy is the practice of centering the writer – the centering of process over simplified product. This series seeks to think through and critically analyze how WAC/WID programming can better engage and support writers themselves – not just their writing – through considering intersections of identities ranging from personal to professional.

This series featured WAC/WID scholars, colleagues who lead WAC/WID initiatives at our fellow Big 10 Institutions, and researchers who study the relationship between writing and anti-ableism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism. By thinking both broadly – in terms of globalism, multilingualism, and intersectionality – and specifically – in terms of programming, structure, resources, and support – we fostered a robust conversation about the ways in which personhood deeply affects both writers and their writing. As people across the world grapple with their experience of the pandemic, their hopes for their future, and the ways they contextualize or describe their experience of their “places” – whether academic, internal, or literal – we see powerful connections between identity and story. We bring our whole selves to our work, and we bring our whole selves to the page. This series explored those connections as they play out in classrooms and in writers themselves.

Videos of these talks are available on our YouTube channel.