“I Passed First-Year Writing—What Now?” Adapting Strategies from First-Year Writing to Writing in the Disciplines

This chapter foreshadows challenges you can experience as you adapt your writing beyond your first-year writing course to become a writer in your discipline.1 The essay contains a student scenario, defines key rhetorical concepts within discipline-specific writing situations, and gives you strategies for adapting these rhetorical concepts to new writing situations. After reading this chapter, you will better understand how the concepts introduced in first-year writing connect to the writing you will encounter in your upper-level, disciplinary courses and identify strategies that will help you intentionally adapt writing knowledge to new discipline-specific contexts

Blurred boundaries: Sussing out thresholds between WAC and WPA in administrative professionalization

Over the past 50 years, the field of WAC has increasingly shifted from discussions of starting programs to efforts of sustaining programs (Cox, Galin, & Melzer, 2018). Similarly, WAC pedagogical support has moved from the oneoff workshop model of “writing-to-learn” pedagogy (Walvoord, 1996) to other models of effecting long-term change with faculty (Glotfelter, Updike, & Wardle, 2020; Martin, 2021). Alongside these programmatic and pedagogical trends, we argue that WAC administrative support and professionalization need to similarly grow. To work toward sustainability as a field, we need to (re)consider the professionalization of WAC administrators—both in graduate school and throughout their careers

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