Mission: This project seeks to bring EWP students’ own voices, insights, and writing on issues of “equity” into public view. As editors of Process: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Scholarship, we want to publish a Spring special issue titled: On Equity. The issue will showcase exemplary student writing on issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion—as they connect with students’ own investments, course content, and instructor goals
Participants: Stephanie Hankinson, Elizabeth Janssen, and Alexandra Smith
Process is a national journal that, as our mission states, “seeks to engage and cultivate timely and stakes-driven conversations among undergraduates across campuses, encouraging students to actively participate in contemporary academia and public scholarship. These conversations cover a range of topics, but we are especially committed to submissions that demonstrate rigorous engagement with issues of social justice, transformative education, politics, identity, and cultural production.” This special issue would seek papers just from UW students in EWP courses taught by participating instructors.
A Winter workshop will serve as a collaborative, preparatory session for interested instructors, offering a space to think about equity in relation to course content and classroom dynamics. Drawing on our collective leadership experience as EWP Assistant Directors—and as frequent teachers of course content that deliberately addresses issues of equity and diversity in a variety of ways—we will prompt instructors toward concrete strategies. Together, we will brainstorm a set of questions and guidelines to help generate student writing on issues of equity, and in ways that intersect with course content and goals. With help from the instructors, and from our own courses, we will solicit and select exemplary papers for publication in the special issue.
In addition to the workshop opportunity for instructors, this project will provide opportunities for students to reflect on, research, and write about how issues of equity—in regards to class, race, gender, sexuality, education, ability, or in any other sense—apply to their learning and investments within and beyond the classroom. It also offers students the opportunity for publication in a national journal—working to address the underrepresentation of undergraduate writing in published scholarship. The special issue itself will serve as a resource for future instructors, by way of samples of exemplary student writing on issues that matter. (We’ve noted that of the many resources available to EWP instructors, student samples are hardest to come by—and are extremely valuable.)