[Building and room TBA in the NEWCA conference program]

All are welcome!

The spring NEWACC meeting is typically held on the Sunday of the Northeast Writing Centers Association Conference (NEWCA), and this year’s NEWCA conference theme is especially relevant for us: “Writing Enriched, Writing Enhanced: Writing Centers and Writing Across the Curriculum as Partners and Agents for Change.”  To register for NEWCA (either the whole conference or at a substantially reduced rate just the NEWCA meeting), please go to this page: http://www.northeastwca.org/2013-conference/

This meeting offers the opportunity to network with fellow WAC coordinators across the region. We typically have two informal presentations—one on research in process and one featuring an institutional practice—followed by discussion. Participants are invited to introduce new ideas, initiatives, and discussion topics.

To RSVP, please contact Tom Deans (tom.deans@uconn.edu)

This meeting will be part of Quinnipiac’s Fourth International Writing and Critical Thinking Conference: New Vistas: WAC/WID Intersections in the 21st Century

For more information on the conference and a link to the online registration form, please follow this link: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-centers/writing-across-the-curriculum/conferences

You’ll see that a wine & cheese reception, dinner and art exhibit/lecture will follow the Friday meeting. The conference keynote and concurrent sessions start on Saturday.

We encourage you to attend the conference, but if you wish to attend only the NEWACC meeting and none of the other Friday evening or conference events, that is OK too.

RSVP for the NEWACC meeting to Tom Deans (tom.deans@uconn.edu).

Conference Date: Nov. 16-17, 2012
Quinnipiac University (Mount Carmel Campus)
Hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences, QUWAC, and the Research and Writing Institute

Keynote Speaker: Barbara Walvoord, professor emerita (Notre Dame University)
Walvoord has consulted or led workshops at more than 350 institutions of higher education throughout the U.S. on WAC, WID, assessment, teaching, and learning.

Deadline for Proposals: June 29, 2012

Send your 250-300 word abstract to Paul Pasquaretta, Director the Research and Writing Institute: paul.pasquaretta@quinnipiac.edu. We welcome both individual proposals and panel proposals. Individual papers/presentations will be held to 20 minutes in length; panels will be held to 90 minutes total, with time left at the end of every session for questions.

Quinnipiac University’s fourth biennial international conference on critical thinking and writing will be framed around the effects WAC and WID programs have upon the teaching of critical thinking and writing in major programs of study, general education cores, and first-year composition. To advance a collaborative dialogue about writing across and within the disciplines, we invite disciplinary faculty and writing specialists to share their experience engaging WAC and WID programs and strategies. In addition to investigating theoretical concerns, presenters are encouraged to provide practical, research-based techniques and strategies that promote critical thinking and writing in a variety of contexts across the spectrum of liberal arts and sciences, business, health sciences, communications, and education. In focusing on these effects, organizers hope to create a forum to consider several related questions:

• How are WAC and WID programs implicated in critical thinking and writing pedagogies in the disciplines?
• If the responsibility for critical thinking and writing is being shifted over to the departments, where does the work of writing specialists and disciplinary faculty meet?
• Where and how might we work together in ways that support the global aims of undergraduate education and stronger learning outcomes in the majors?
• What is critical thinking within a given disciplinary context? What does the writing look like that captures that thinking?
• What specific writing strategies and techniques have been found to foster critical thinking and disciplinary expertise in the majors?

Presenters will be invited to submit their papers for review for publication in the inaugural edition of Double Helix: A Journal of Critical Thinking and Writing (http://qudoublehelixjournal.org/index.php/dh/index)

The registration fee for the full conference (Friday and Saturday) is $300 and includes receptions, dinner, and all meals; keynote address, and all presentations. The cost for Saturday only is $150.

Rooms are available at the Clarion Hotel and Suites on Whitney Avenue in Hamden for a conference rate of $109/night. Frequent shuttle service will be provided from the hotel to the conference site at no extra charge. For reservations, call the Clarion directly at 203-288-3831; or email Falisha Smith at fsmith@Clarion-Hamden.com.
For more information about New Vistas, contact Paul Pasquaretta, director of the Quinnipiac University Research and Writing Institute, at 203-582-8509, or paul.pasquaretta@quinnipiac.edu.

Conference Theme - New Vistas: WAC/WID Intersections in the 21st Century

Conference Date: November 16-17, 2012

Proposal Deadline: Monday, June 18th, 2012. Send your 250-300 word abstract to Paul.Pasquaretta@Quinnipiac.Edu. We welcome both individual proposals and panel proposals. Individual papers/presentations will be held to 15 minutes in length, panels will be held to 50 minutes total, with time left at the end of every session for questions. The registration cost for the full conference (Friday and Saturday) is $300 and includes all meals and receptions, shuttle service, keynote address, and presentations. The cost for Saturday only is $150.

Keynote: Barbara Waalvoord, Professor Emerita, Notre Dame University

Quinnipiac University’s fourth biennial international conference on critical thinking and writing will be framed around the effects WAC and WID programs have upon the teaching of critical thinking and writing in major programs of study, general education cores, and first-year composition. To advance a collaborative dialogue about writing across and within the disciplines, we invite disciplinary faculty and writing specialists to share their experience engaging WAC and WID programs and strategies. In addition to investigating theoretical concerns, presenters are encouraged to provide practical, research-based techniques and strategies that promote critical thinking and writing in a variety of contexts across the spectrum of liberal arts and sciences, business, health sciences, communications, and education. In focusing on these effects, organizers hope to create a forum to consider several related questions:

• How are WAC and WID programs implicated in critical thinking and writing pedagogies in the disciplines?
• If the responsibility for critical thinking and writing is being shifted over to the departments, where does the work of writing specialists and disciplinary faculty meet?
• Where and how might we work together in ways that support the global aims of undergraduate education and stronger learning outcomes in the majors?
• What is critical thinking within a given disciplinary context? What does the writing look like that captures that thinking?
• What specific writing strategies and techniques have been found to foster critical thinking and disciplinary expertise in the majors?

Presenters will be invited to submit their papers for review for publication in the inaugural edition of Double Helix: A Journal of Critical Thinking and Writing.

For more information about New Vistas, contact Paul Pasquaretta, Director of the Quinnipiac University Research and Writing Institute, at 203-582-8509, or Paul.Pasquaretta@Quinnipiac.edu, or visit the website: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-and-centers/writing-across-the-curriculum/conferences

NEWACC  will meet on April 15th from 9:30am to 11:30am St. John’s University, Queens.  We will meet in Room 401 of the D’Angelo Center. See NEWACC agenda below.

Registration information for the conference can be found at http://northeastwca.org/ and at http://www.amiando.com/NEWCA2012.html

Please register through the NEWCA registration process above and/or let Anne Geller  (gellera@stjohns.edu) know you will be attending. Contact Anne with any questions.

Breakfast will be available on Sunday, April 15, until 9:30am in the Institute for Writing Studies, in St. Augustine Hall.  Directions to St. John’s and maps of the St. John’s campus are below.

Agenda

• Introductions
• Program Presentation/Discussion
  • Matthew Parfitt on assessment pilots under way at Boston University’s College of General Studies
• Research Presentation/Discussion
  • Michelle Cox on multilingual writers and WAC/WID
• Brief Quinnipiac University presentation of a new journal, Double Helix (http://qudoublehelixjournal.org/index.php/dh)
• NEWACC Business (and any new business)
  • Welcome Tom Deans as new Chair, elect new associate chair, set date/location for Fall 2012 meeting

Directions to the St. John’s Queens campus:

http://www.stjohns.edu/about/general/directions/directions/queens

An interactive map: http://www.stjohns.edu/about/general/directions/directions/queens/interactivemap.stj

Location: Lender School of Business, Quinnipiac University

Registration: Free (Online Registration Required)

The Research and Writing Institute at Quinnipiac University will host “We Say/They Say, a Writing in the Disciplines Symposium,” at the Lender School of Business.

Keynote: Neal Lerner, Writing Center Director, Northeastern University

The event will feature WID case studies from the Yale University Writing Center, Southern Connecticut State University Writing Across the Curriculum Committee, University of Connecticut Writing Center, and Quinnipiac University Writing Across the Curriculum Committee. A panel of disciplinary faculty will be on hand to share their experiences and concerns about critical thinking and writing instruction in the majors.

The day will include WID workshops hosted by the co-presenting schools, the materials from which will be made available to all visitors for discussion, debate, and dissemination at their home institutions. The event is funded by a Davis Educational Foundation grant and co-sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs, College of Arts and Sciences, and QUWAC. For details and event registration information, contact Paul Pasquaretta, director of the RWI (Paul.Pasquaretta@Quinnipiac.Edu).

Attendance: Steve Corbett (Southern CT State University), Michelle LaFrance (UMass, Dartmouth), Neal Lerner (Northeastern University), Cynthia Gannett (Fairfield University), Sue Hudd (Quinnipiac University), Tom Deans (Univ. of Connecticut), Tianne Donahue (Dartmouth University), Kati Pletsch DeGarcia (Mt. Ida College), Anne Geller (St. John’s University), Maria Vitagliano (Mt. Ida College, School of Design), Lorainne Higgins (WPI), Catherine Savini (Westfield State University), Kathy Shine Cain (Merrimack College), Michael Cripps (University of New England), Ed Morgan (Mt. Ida College, Center for Learning and Teaching Assessment), Rich Murphy (Bay Path College).

Introductions. We began the meeting with introductions and explanations of our respective roles on our campuses.  Anne Geller outlined the theme for the day – how do students experience WAC.

NSSE. Michael Cripps provided an overview of the NSSE process and talked about the ways in which NSSE data are gathered, and the process by which institutions can join consortia to compare their students’ writing experiences with other like institutions, as well as with faculty perceptions of writing assigned at the institution.  As a result of work done by the Consortium of the Study of Writing in College, there are 27 new questions related to writing (a handout of these questions was provided, available at: http://comppile.org/wpa+nsse/).

The NSSE data can be broken down by major, and in a variety of ways that can be used to deepen understanding of the ways in which writing is experienced by students.  Michael highlighted the core findings of the NSSE data:  that there are strong correlations between WAC best practices and deep learning experiences and student engagement.  He provided a handout that offered additional details on the findings.  He ended by noting that the analysis of results on his campus has led him to consider how he might qualitatively assess the experience of students on campus and discern whether interviews and focus groups will affirm and help to explain the quantitative findings further.

The NEWACC members discussed at length the nature of the consortia to which their respective schools do (and in several cases, don’t) belong to.  There was a suggestion that for those without access to a consortium pool it might be useful to compare data among NEWACC members in some way.  Likewise there were concerns expressed about the response rate on some campuses.

Research on Reading. Lorraine Higgins presented preliminary findings from a small longitudinal study she is in the midst of conducting on students’ experience with reading in college.  The plan is to track the reading and writing of 23 students throughout their 4 years.  Some of her core questions include:  Where do different majors encounter academic reading and writing in their curriculum?  How much and what kind of academic reading and writing are they assigned?  To what extent do faculty scaffold this work or teach explicit strategies?  And how do students respond – what do we know about their compliance, time on task, attitudes, approaches or perceived changes?

Lorraine is working (unfunded) currently with three students to try to gather data on reading and writing for the academic year. Her preliminary findings with this pilot sample are intriguing:  1) in the first year, a full third of the coursework required no reading at all; reading compliance is split (students always/frequently do the reading in 43% of their courses that require it, and they seldom or never do it in 41% of the courses requiring it).  Almost all of the courses where compliance is high are humanities courses.   The print textbook still dominates (57% of courses require a textbook).  Students report only 9% of all courses assigning reading offered explicit instruction in how to read and/or take notes on the sources.  Lorraine hypothesizes that students might perceive a disciplinary split early on in their studies (i.e., between reading in the humanities and reading in the sciences).

A rich discussion regarding the connections between good writing and reading followed.  It was noted that instruction in reading is even less thought of than instruction in writing.  There was a great deal of interest in the project, and Lorraine indicated her potential interest in perhaps expanding the study to multiple institutions and her intent to apply for grant funding to sustain the larger project.

Suggested Readings and Discussion of the Student Experience of WAC. After lunch, the NEWACC members shared the written pieces that they had brought that inspired them as they think about the “student experience of WAC.”  A list appears at the end of the minutes.

The discussion considered options for accessing/working with data in the Institutional Research office on our various campuses to examine questions of interest.  The discussion ranged across a variety of possibilities.  One institution compares WI and non-WI courses as a means to examine where students experience writing.  Collections of syllabi at another institution revealed that writing is not always noted in detail in the syllabus, that data gathering to address the question of where/what kind of writing must be broad.  There was a lengthy discussion about failure rates (v. melt rates – i.e., students who drop out prior to completing the course).  It was suggested that the melt rate can be higher, and that multi-method evaluation (triangulation) of data is key to addressing concerns about these issues.  It was also noted that admission criteria need to be considered (i.e., the extent to which the students admitted had test scores that suggest the potential for success, as opposed to attributing failures to poor performance of the writing program.

New Business and Agenda for Next Meeting. There was a discussion about whether it was feasible to complete the biography/photograph directory of NEWACC members on the website.  Michael Cripps agreed to send the request again to all members, as there was much interest in completing this.  There was a brief discussion about perhaps also providing a brief template of each institutional program on the website as well.  It was suggested that perhaps at each meeting, the host program could take an hour or so to do an in depth description of its program.  Other possibilities for the next meeting agenda included:  1) a discussion of strategies for expanding NEWACC membership; 2) structuring the meeting in a similar way (i.e., half on some sort of institutional practice related to writing and half on a discussion of someone’s ongoing research); 3) the relationship between writing centers and WAC programs; 4) a discussion of institutional research/funding perspectives related to writing; 5) learning communities as a means for WAC; 6) portfolios and WAC.  Other suggestions for meeting topics can be forwarded to Anne Geller and Tom Deans (gellera@stjohns.edu and tom.deans@uconn.edu).

It was noted that the conference at MIT is upcoming and the information is posted on the NEWACC website.  The possibility of a collaborative presentation at IWAC was raised as well.  To our knowledge, we are still the only regional WAC group in the country.

Next Meeting:  April 15^th, 2012 (NEWCA Conference April 13-15, 2012), St. John’s University, Queens, NY with the NEWCA meeting.  The call for papers for NEWCA is currently posted.  The meeting was adjourned.

List of Suggested Readings (in order of how they were offered when we went around the table): Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition by Russell Durst; Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire Theresa Lillis; Mckinney and Naseri, “A Longitudinal Descriptive Study of Sociology Majors:  The Development of Engagement, the Sociological Imagination, Identity and Autonomy,” in Teaching Sociology April 2011; Engaged Writers/Dynamic Disciplines by Chris Thaiss and Terry Zawacki; Articles by Kevin Roozen and Elizabeth Moje; “Writing Fellows as WAC Change Agents: Changing What? Changing Whom? Changing How?” from Across the Disciplines, 5: How Writing Shapes Thinking: A Study of Teaching and Learning Arthur Applebee and Judith Langer; Sharing and Responding by Peter Elbow/Pat Belanoff; The Idea of a Writing Laboratory by Neal Lerner; Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines by Mary Soliday; Becoming W-Faculty in a New Writing Curriculum by Wendy Strachan; Persons in Process: Four Stories of Writing and Personal Development in College by Anne Herrington and Marcia Curtis; The Lab – Creativity and Culture by David Edwards.

St. John’s University, Queens, NY

April 13 – April 15, 2012

Keynote Speaker: Deborah Brandt

Proposals are now being accepted and are due by December 31, 2011

Download the official CFP at the NEWCA website (http://northeastwca.org).

NEWACC meets on the Sunday morning of the NEWCA conference.

Date: September 23
Time: 11am to 2pm
Location: Mount Ida College, Newton, Massachusetts
RSVP: RoseMary Brooks (rmbrooks@mountida.edu) for a lunch count
Directions: http://www.mountida.edu/sp.cfm?pageid=373

Kati Pletsch de Garcia will host our meeting. Mount Ida College will provide lunch.

NEWACC Meeting Schedule and Agenda

11:00am – Introductions
11:15am to 12:30pm – Presenters and Discussion
12:30pm – Lunch
1pm – Open time for questions, members’ issues, NEWACC plans for the coming year

Working from the minutes of the spring 2011 NEWACC meeting (http://newacc.wac.colostate.edu/minutes/), Tom Deans and Anne Geller  have decided to shape the first part of our meeting with these overarching questions:

* What are students’ experiences of WAC/WID?  And what are ways we can explore this question?

Lorraine Higgins (Director of Communication Across the Curriculum, Worcester Polytechnic Institute) will share preliminary findings from a longitudinal pilot study of the ways that undergraduates at WPI encounter reading and writing, employing survey data and journals to track what they do and where. The focus in the pilot study is science and engineering students.

Michael J. Cripps (Director of Composition, University of New England) will briefly explore the National Survey of Student Engagement as a lens for answering the question “What are students’ experiences of WAC/WID?”

We would also like to ask all NEWACC members attending the meeting on the 23rd come with:

1. some thinking about these questions (What are students’ experiences of WAC/WID?  And what are ways we can explore this question?); and,
2. an article/a reference to an article that helps you think about these questions.

After our discussion, we would like to compile a bibliography of the texts that help members think about these questions.

In July, Les Perelman announced that MIT would host an all day symposium on academic writing in the 21st century. Given the list of speakers and respondents assembled for the symposium, this event promises to be a great day-long discussion of writing in the university.

Featured Speakers and Respondents

• Robert Scholes, Brown University (Keynote)
• Gerald Graff (University of Illinois, Chicago)
• Cathy Birkenstein-Graff (University of Illinois, Chicago)
• Chris Anson (North Carolina State University)
• John Brereton (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
• Nancy Sommers (Harvard University)
• Joseph Bizup (Boston University)

According to the conference registration page, the featured speakers will address the following questions:

1. What is the relationship of reading to academic writing? of one text to others?  How will these relationships change during the twenty-first century with the advent of new media, digital archives, open access publishing, and googlization of knowledge?
2. How will the move toward interdisciplinarity in academic inquiry shape discourse conventions within specific discourse communities?
3. How will the globalization of academic communities shape academic writing?
4. How might the relationship among academic writing, civic discourse and literacy, and professional writing change with these other social, technological, and political changes?
5. What will be the relationship of academic writing to rhetoric?