Program for Writing Across Campus Mission and Values

Students conversing at table with laptops.

Our Mission: 

The Program for Writing Across Campus (PWAC) offers discipline-linked writing courses that create small intellectual communities focused on students' development as writers. Through personalized instruction, including conferencing over writing in progress, we partner with our students to help them cultivate disciplinary knowledge, communication skills, and confidence. We acknowledge varied communities of belonging and see collaborative engagement over context-specific writing as an important means of fostering students' academic, professional, and personal success. All PWAC courses satisfy the C or W requirement.

Key Value: Collaboration and Intellectual Community

ActionsOutcomes
  • Discover and welcome students' interests, challenges, and knowledge
  • Engage students in peer feedback/peer review
  • Guide collective criteria generation
  • Foster collaborative writing and research projects
  • Design, teach, and provide mentorship for anti-racist curricula and equitable classroom practices
  • Support students academically and personally
  • Understanding of disciplinary knowledge as contested and communal
  • Empowered ability to draft, assess, and revise writing in multiple contexts
  • Confidence in critically participating in various academic and professional writing occasions
  • Sense of personal belonging within and beyond the PWAC
  • Curricula that subvert oppressive norms vis à vis race, gender, sexuality, language, and other social identities

Key Value: Teacher Development

ActionsOutcomes
  • Provide instructional guidance through the IWP Workshop and ENGL 592
  • Include formal and informal graduate instructor mentoring
  • Encourage collaboration among disciplinary faculty, graduate instructors, librarians, and other professional staff on curriculum & assignment design
  • Strategically use course evaluations (formal and informal) for continued development
  • Sustained, supportive teaching communities
  • High quality courses that draw on expertise of many
  • Ongoing reflective practice by core faculty

Key Value: Partnerships Across and Beyond the University

ActionsOutcomes
  • Collaborate on curriculum and scholarship with other university faculty, TAs, librarians, advisers, professional staff, and centers, including initiatives such as the Praxis Conference
  • Engage Writing in the Disciplines scholarship in order to inform our teaching with accepted theory and practice and to create program visibility in the field
  • Develop career, internship, and community-based opportunities for students and TAs
  • Serve on program, departmental, and institutional committees and initiatives
  • Foster partnerships with various publics beyond the immediate university community
  • Interdisciplinary and interdepartmental initiatives
  • Ongoing civic participation from students, faculty, and staff
  • Public scholarship and outreach to communities underserved by U.S. institutions of higher learning.

Please download a PDF of our Mission & Values Statement.

Share