The Formation of a Professional Organization for Writing across the Curriculum

In this chapter, we describe the rationale for and development of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (AWAC), which held its first meeting for members at the 2018 International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference. We first provide a historiography of previous WAC/WID-related efforts, including the specific contributions of each one, leading up to the more formalized process of establishing this new organization. Finally, we explain our aspirations of AWAC’s role in supporting a sustainable and inclusive scholarly WAC/WID community

Beyond Transactional Narratives of Agency: Peer Consultants’ Antiracist Professionalization

Social justice movements, especially Black Lives Matter, inspired many writing center administrators to reflect on their commitments to antiracism and engage with antiracist professional development with their staff. However, there is continued need to study the impact antiracist professional development has on writing center consultants’ ability to practice antiracism in sessions. This article presents a predominantly white institution (PWI) writing center’s attempt to do this work, with a particular emphasis on how antiracist professional development complicates portrayals of consultant agency within the writing center. The study analyzes qualitative data collected from consultants’ reflective writing, survey, and interview responses. Results illustrate that, in the context of enacting antiracism in and beyond the writing center, consultants showed messy, partial, and incomplete forms of agency with the professional development curriculum impacting consultants of color and white consultants differently. These findings suggest writing center studies must embrace an understanding of antiracist professional development that is reflective, fragmented, and iterative, and identify more concrete practices of antiracist consulting

Contemplative Correspondence and the Muscle of Metaphor: An Interview with Rev. Karen Hering

Karen Hering, a Unitarian Universalist minister serving Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul, Minnesota, is author of Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening the Sacred Conversation Within. In her book, Rev. Hering leads readers through the practice of contemplative correspondence, which she describes as “a spiritual practice of writing rooted in theology and story; drawn to the surface by questions, prompts, and ellipses; and most fully experienced when its words are accepted as invitations into conversations and relationships with others” (xx). A committed Unitarian Universalist myself, I first learned about Rev. Hering and her book from my own minister, Rev. Chris Rothbauer, after I delivered a lay-led service at Auburn Unitarian Universalist Fellowship titled “Writing as a Way of Being Human,” inspired by Robert Yagelski’s Writing as a Way of Being. I bought her book and began working my way through it, writing from its myriad prompts on topics like love, grace, and redemption. I was nearly finished with it when I had opportunity to interview Rev. Hering about the ways writing can serve as a meaningful contemplative practice in our present moment. We spoke via Zoom on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, she in her garret office, me in my kitchen. Our conversation ranged far, from her experiences reading while bedridden during her childhood, to the power of metaphor for expanding our spiritual purview, to the ways embodied writing can counteract the detrimental effects of whiteness. We began our conversation with a traditional Unitarian Universalist ritual: a chalice lighting and a reading. The chalice itself symbolizes “the light of reason, the warmth of community, and the flame of hope” (“Flaming Chalice”)