Writing Across the Curriculum

REGISTER NOW! for this year's Writing Across Institutions conference will be on April 10, 2026 from 9am - 4pm. We're excited to feature Amanda Berardi Tennant from West Virginia University. You can view the day's agenda, presentation descriptions, and other shared resources on the WAI 2026 website [updates ongoing].

Dr. Tennant's morning talk will focus on her research regarding how people from the Appalachian region negotiate cultural identity in different rhetorical situations and how they respond to stereotypes. Appalachian college students can bring rich forms of cultural knowledge to the writing classroom. For example, students who have attended Appalachian high schools may have knowledge of the affordances and drawbacks of public education in rural regions. Students who hunt or fish can bring firsthand experience with the outdoors that motivate their commitments to environmental conservation. However, students can hesitate to share their experiences or write about topics relevant to their backgrounds because they do not wish to evoke stereotypes of Appalachians as impoverished, uncultured, and even illiterate. In this talk, Dr. Amanda Tennant reports on her research with high-achieving Appalachian students to describe how these students use key moves, which she calls “moves of rhetorical (in)visibiliy,” to strategically draw on Appalachian cultural knowledge across different writing genres (Tennant, “Rhetorical (In)visibility,” College Composition and Communication). 

In her afternoon workshop, Dr. Tennant will describe how writing teachers can support students’ agency to practice these moves, which include self-identifying aspects of Appalachian identity that translate into forms of experiential knowledge and negotiating the risks of deploying identity markers in relation to their audience and potential stereotypes. Specifically, Dr. Tennant will describe a three-part sequence of assignments she has used to support Appalachian students in first-year writing where students compose narratives about a place that is meaningful to them, identify research questions related to their narratives that they explore through research arguments, and adapt their research into a public writing genre. Attendees will discuss how they can adapt these assignments to serve Appalachian, rural, and working-class students at their institutions.

REGISTER NOW! for this year's Writing Across Institutions conference will be on March 28, 2024 from 9am - 4pm. We're excited to feature Dr. April Baker-Bell from the University of Michigan. You can view the day's agenda, presentation descriptions, and other shared resources on the WAI 2025 website. 

Dr. April Baker-Bell's morning talk, "Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy" will discuss how anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy get normalized in teacher attitudes, curriculum and instruction, pedagogical approaches, disciplinary discourses, and research, and she will discuss the impact these decisions have on Black students’ language education and their linguistic, racial, and intellectual identities. Dr. Baker-Bell will introduce a new way forward through Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy, a pedagogical approach that intentionally and unapologetically places Black Language at the center to critically interrogate white linguistic hegemony and anti-Black linguistic racism. Her afternoon workshop, "Linguistic Justice: From Theory to Praxis" deepens Linguistic Justice practice with an interactive session that supports participants in thinking about how to integrate the ideas from Linguistic Justice into their curriculum and instruction. This guided workshop will include activity-based exercises, such as reflection/preflection activities, syllabus design, and strategies for teaching. Workshops come with a digital workbook that participants can download to continue to learn from.

REGISTER NOW! for this year's Writing Across Institutions conference will be on April 12, 2024 from 9am - 4pm. We're excited to feature Britney Smith from Wilson Community College and a panel of writing in the disciplines faculty from Appalachian State. You can view the day's agenda, presentation descriptions, and other shared resources on the WAI 2024 website. 

This year's Writing Across Institutions conference will be on April 14, 2023 from 9am - 4pm. We're excited to feature Michelle LaFrance from George Mason University and a panel of writing in the disciplines faculty from Appalachian State. To view the day's agenda, presentation descriptions, and other shared resources, please visit the WAI 2023 website. 

While the face-to-face WAI Conference had to be canceled due to COVID-19, we enjoyed a virtual RISE session with Dr. Davonna Thomas and Ashley Ess from Coastal Carolina Community College. Their presentation, which addressed the transition center and the co-requisite course, can be viewed below. You can also read our notes from the session here.