[ATTW-L] CWPA Reno 2023 Call for Proposals

Mon Oct 31 15:51:00 UTC 2022

Dear Colleagues,

I'm pleased to share CWPA 2023 summer conference Call for proposals. Please
share widely and let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks
Lilian
_______________________

Council of Writing Program Administrators

Summer 2023 Conference Call for Proposals

Reno, NV 2023

*Social Justice WPAing: Talking the Talk AND Walking the Walk*

Conference: Sunday July 16 – Tuesday July 18, 2023

Institutes: Wednesday July 19, 2023

Workshop: Wednesday July 19 – Saturday July 22, 2023

*“**Social justice is a communal effort dedicated to creating and
sustaining a fair and equal society in which each person and all groups are
valued and affirmed …. Social justice imperatives also push us to create a
civic space defined by universal education and reason and dedicated to
increasing democratic participation.” *

*The John Lewis Institute for Social Justice*

After four turbulent years that split us apart on many issues and brought
us together on others, we will meet again. We will get together to ponder
and contemplate the imprints these four years have left on us as
individuals, on our writing programs, and on our organization.

I’ll start from the last point: our organization. For the past year and a
half, the organization, as represented by its Executive Board and Officers,
has engaged in rigorous “communal effort” to become a more “civic space”
for ALL writing program administrators. We suspended our operations and
events and sought professional guidance to become a more equitable and
inclusive professional organization, as reflected in our documents,
regulations, activities, and practices. We took the numerous calls for
social justice seriously, and we started with ourselves. We know we were
not alone, and that so many WPAs have been walking the social justice
walk whether
they talked the talk or preferred to work on the ground silently and
reflectively.

As we launch our call for proposals for our first in-person conference in
four years, our hope is to meet to acknowledge, discuss, critique, and
inspire the “communal effort dedicated to creating and sustaining a fair
and equitable” classroom, program, and organization. We will meet again in
Reno where we hope to create a “civic space” of “increasing democratic
participation” from all WPAs from all institutional types and at all
academic ranks.

The conference theme, “Social Justice WPAing: Talking the Talk AND Walking
the Walk” invites and challenges all WPAs from all types of institutions to
think of all the ways we have done social justice work in all aspects of
our administration and leadership roles. It asks about our commitment to
social justice of all individuals and groups in our programs, especially
those whose voice has never been heard or whose presence hasn’t mattered in
our programs in the past. It encourages us to critique, plan, transform,
and reflect.

Below are some thoughts and questions for both reflection and consideration
as you think about your proposal.

Rasha Diab, Thomas Ferrel, Beth Godbee, and Neil Sompkins remind us that
critique is “an essential condition to making change” (1). They note that
critique should always include “an action plan” that inspires and initiates
the change that critique aims for. Perhaps you’re still at the critique
stage of social justice WPAing.

º  What recent changes in social justice scholarship have inspired you to
critique your WPA work the most? How? In which aspects of your
administrative work?

º  What did you choose to critique in your WPA work?

º  What methods have you used to initiate that critique?

º  What areas have you found to be needing the most change and thus the
most critique?

º  What strategies did you use to entice and invite others to engage in
that critique?

º  What discomforts did you and others involved in that critique experience
throughout the process?

º  What are the next steps following that critique?

º  Were you able to move to creating “an action plan” for change?

One possible action plan may be curriculum development, revision, and
updates that “make room for nontraditional and/or disadvantaged minority
students in the writing classroom” (Sanchez and Branson, 50).

º  What curricular changes have you made or proposed to make in your
program?

º  How did you negotiate those changes?

º  What obstacles have you encountered to make those changes possible?

º  How do you envision these changes will nurture equity and inclusion of
minority and disadvantaged students in the writing classroom in your
program?

º  Have these changes mandated adopting different and more equitable
assessment practices? What conversations have you had around these issues?

Successful and meaningful social justice work is transformative. It
contributes meaningfully to the community members or the individuals with
whom we work: students, full- and part-time faculty, graduate students,
community members. This is the ultimate goal of the “action plan” Diab et
al. challenge us to pursue. They acknowledge that change “requires new
stories, new ways of collaborating, and new ways of living” because
critique doesn’t have the power to change much at our institutions or
communities (2).

º  What new ways of doing your WPA work were inspired by your social
justice WPAing? Curriculum revisions and updates? Different professional
development approaches and programs? Collaborations with other members of
the program/department? Collaborations with other units across your campus?
Collaborations with community partners?

º  How did your social justice WPAing transform the lives of stakeholders
in your program: students, faculty, graduate students?

º  What new stories have emerged from your social justice WPAing?

º  How did you amplify and celebrate those stories?

º  Who was featured in those stories?

Successful and meaningful social-justice work does not rely on labor from
minority and marginalized colleagues or community members. Any contribution
from those individuals or communities should be “recognized, valued, and
compensated” (Jones, Gonzales, and Haas 33).

º  Who did you recognize and value in your social justice WPAing work?

º  How did you demonstrate your recognition of them?

º  How did they respond to that recognition?

º  Have graduate programs changed their training of gWPAs to be more
equitable and inclusive and less exploitative? How?

º  How have gWPAs responded to those changes?

º  Have mentoring practices of graduate students changed to include
traditionally under-served and under-recognized graduate students (BIPOC,
queer, neurodiverse, differently abled, older, parents, care-givers)?

º  What other ways can WPAs recognize and value minority individuals and/or
communities in their work?

Natasha Jones, Laura Gonzales, and Angela Haas invite us to think of
community and care as key concepts in building any anti-racist initiatives
that “centralize the desires and experiences of those most oppressed” (31).

º  How has the concept of community (broadly defined) shaped your
programmatic work to be more inclusive and equitable?

º  How did you (re)configure professional development offerings and
programming opportunities to include traditionally excluded or marginalized
groups: part-time adjuncts, faculty who are caregivers, faculty who are
(single) parents?

º  How did you extend care to both individuals and communities as you
engaged in social justice WPAing?

º  Who and what became centralized in your social justice WPAing
initiatives?

º  Conversely, who and what was pushed to the periphery of your work? How
did you negotiate these decisions?

Finally, successful and meaningful social-justice work is reflective.

º  What are your reflections on the work you have done or have attempted to
do at your program?

º  What insights have you gleaned from those reflections? What
opportunities do you see possible based on your reflections?

º  What’s the path forward based on those insights?

º  Which changes are you planning to continue now that the pandemic is no
longer a force that shapes and influences our practices and policies?

º  What can other WPAs transfer from your reflections to their local
programs and contexts?

*Conference Proposals *

*A.   **Presentation Formats*

*1.   **15-minute individual presentations*. You may submit individual
paper or presentation proposals; these will be combined into
panels/sessions with around three presenters. We’ll once again try to put
you in touch with one another in advance of the conference so that you can
develop a coherent panel.

*2.   **Full-session proposals*. You may submit a proposal for a session
with groups of 3 or more presenters/facilitators. We encourage you to
consider innovative, interactive delivery methods.

*3.   **Roundtable discussions*: You may submit a proposal for a roundtable
discussion in groups of 3 or more presenters. The format means presenters
introduce the topic and ask questions that engage the audience in a
discussion for the big part of the session.

*4.   **Show-Not-Tell Workshops*: A group of two – five presenters design a
75-minute workshop to demonstrate “how” they do a WPA task. Think about
using spreadsheets, leading an innovative, interactive professional
development event on zoom, planning for a limited curriculum revision …
that kind of thing. You may ask participants to bring their own device.

*5.   **Poster presentations*. You may to develop a poster presentation by
yourself or with others. You could either work with a group to develop a
full session with 4 – 6 posters, or propose an individual poster
presentation, and we will form sessions on related topics.

*6.   **Digital Stories*: Share the story of your program in a digital
exhibition and have an interactive discussion with your audience about what
you’ve done or want to do. Although the modality is open, we’d ask that you
plan for a digital story that’s not longer than 10 minutes to allow for an
interactive, engaged discussion with your audience.

Proposal Topics/Strands

At the Reno 2023 conference, we ask that you indicate the strand that best
matches your proposal topic.

(The list of topics below is used with permission from *WPA: Writing
Program Administration *editors)

o   Writing faculty professional development

o   Labor conditions: material, practical, fiscal

o   Anti-racists WPA work

o   Teaching writing with electronic texts (multimodality) and teaching in
digital spaces

o   Theory, practice, and philosophy of writing program administration

o   Outreach and advocacy

o   Curriculum development

o   Writing program assessment

o   Social justice through WPA work

o   National and regional trends in education and their impact on WPA work

o   Issues of professional advancement and writing program administration

o   Diversity and WPA work

*B.    **Institute Proposals*

In the spirit of welcoming a range of voices and perspectives, we invite
proposals for full-day post-conference institutes. We will offer three
institutes on the program. Institutes are interactive and practical spaces
for WPAs to learn about topics such as program assessment, preparing for
the job market, conducting administrative research, working with various
student populations, writing grant proposals, writing as a WPA, leading
effective professional development activities in a writing program (to name
a few). Each instituts typically has two leaders.

*Conference Dates*

As we listened to our members’ concerns about conference cost, we have
flipped the traditional model so that the conference is during the week
when conference hotel rates are the cheapest.

Conference: Sunday 7/16 – Tuesday 7/18

Institutes: Wednesday 7/19

Workshop: Wednesday 7/19 – Saturday 7/22

*Proposal Submission Timeline*

If you plan to apply for travel fund, we encourage you to *submit your
proposal for an early decision* by January 15, 2023. Decisions will be made
by February 6, 2023.

*The proposal submission deadline* is March 6, 2023, with decisions
expected by April 3, 2023.

For Proposal Guidelines and Submissions, please visit our website
<https://wpacouncil.org/aws/CWPA/pt/sp/conference_home_page>.

For proposal questions email Lilian Mina at cwpareno2023 at gmail.com

For local Reno, NV questions email Jim Webber, Todd Ruecker, and Katie
Miller at cwpareno2023local at gmail.com

On behalf of CWPA

Lilian Mina, Ph.D.

CWPA Vice President

Associate Professor and Director of Composition

The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Works Cited and Consulted

Diab, Rasha et al. "Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable." *Across
the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning and Academic Writing*,
vol. 10, no. 3, 2013.

Grayson, Mara Lee. "Racial Literacy Is Literacy: Locating Racial Literacy
in the College Composition Classroom." *The Journal of the Assembly for
Expanded Perspectives on Learning*, vol. 24, no. 4, 2019, pp. 17-46.

Jones, Natasha N. et al. "So You Think You’re Ready to Build New Social
Justice Initiatives?: Intentional and Coalitional Pro-Black Programmatic
and Organizational Leadership in Writing Studies." *WPA: Writing Program
Administration*, vol. 44, no. 3, 2021, pp. 29-35.

Kynard, Carmen. "“Troubling the Boundaries” of Anti-Racism: The Clarity of
Black Radical Visions Amid Racial Erasure." *WPA: Writing Program
Administration*, vol. 44, no. 3, 2021, pp. 185-92.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your
Own." *College
Composition and Communication*, vol. 47, no. 1, 1996, pp. 29-40.

Sanchez, James Chase and Tyler S. Branson. "The Role of Composition
Programs in De-Normalizing Whiteness in the University: Programmatic
Approaches to Anti-Racist Pedagogies." *WPA: Writing Program Administration*,
vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 47-52

*Lilian W. Mina*
*, Ph.D.*Vice President/President Elect, Council of Writing Program
Administrators
Associate Professor of English, Rhetoric and Composition
Director of Freshman English
Department of English
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)
To schedule a meeting: https://calendly.com/lilianmina/meeting-with-lilian
<lilian.mina at gmail.com>
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