Proposal Guidelines
We are Chairs, Coordinators, Directors, Leads. We might not be called WPAs though we are doing important writing program work. Because I was an Assistant Chair working at a community college, I didn't immediately join the CWPA or identify with the WPA community. At the open-access institution where I currently teach, we don’t use the WPA title. I am a “Faculty Lead.” For this year’s annual conference, I invite the CWPA to shift its approach by highlighting our colleagues who do valuable WPA work with titles other than WPA.
You are invited to join our 2025 conference and share the ways your leadership and administrative work around the teaching of writing is stretching and changing. Perhaps you work with dual credit students, or you run the campus writing center. Maybe you onboard new faculty for their developmental reading courses. Perhaps you specialize in multilingual writing and mentor faculty on this topic. Or you are a course lead at a community college, which might mean that you manage staffing or maintain a course shell for the hybrid composition course that students seem to prefer these days. Perhaps you are a portfolio director at an entirely online institution. Or a gWPA or Assistant WPA with important research and insights to share today.
Maybe you are a traditional WPA and wonder whether your institution will rehire your role when you decide to retire–or how being a junior faculty member who is also a WPA will impact your tenure and promotion process. Perhaps you are struggling to get faculty across the disciplines on board with your WAC program, or trying to defend the value of your writing center. In some way, you need support from the CWPA to help you make your role and valuable programmatic labor visible to others.
The variety of titles and responsibilities in our field mirrors the complex and shifting nature of WPA work today. These changes include the widespread availability and uptake of machine-writing tools by students and faculty; the increasingly politicized teaching environment fueled by anti-DEI legislation; and concomitantly, the ongoing necessity of supporting student writers through culturally-affirming and sustaining policies, pedagogies, and practices–including real conversations about linguistic prejudice and discrimination. I wonder whether to describe these shifts as rich and varied, or splintering and fractured. As Chairs, Coordinators, Directors, Leads, and WPAs, we are working in the midst of a world that is shifting–and our students, classrooms, and field are inevitably shifting, too.
I’m interested in learning about the here and now and what you see happening in our field. What trends are impacting your program, faculty, and students? What are you encountering and examining in our new, altered landscape? Our conference theme highlights the varied voices that speak to our rich and varied, splintered and fractured, shifting WPA labor.
To invite all of our colleagues to join these important conversations, we offer a brief bibliography that highlights WPA: Writing Program Administration and key pieces of scholarship that are driving current conversations. Below you’ll find three buckets for thinking through submissions to the conference: hierarchies, upheaval, and fostering belonging. We invite your participation in these discussions, and hope that seeing some ongoing conversations we find especially pertinent to the shifting nature of WPA work feels welcoming and invitational.
We invite you to share the WPA: Writing Program Administration article or key piece of scholarship that has helped you with your shifting role and responsibilities. We will accept your suggestions to create bibliography for our 2025 conference at the button below.
Proposal Types:
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- 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.
- 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.
- Poster presentations: You may 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.
- A Work in Progress: We invite presenters to submit work at any stage of development. You may submit a proposal regarding a research project, curricular project, or writing program assessment or professional development activity in progress. Presenters will receive feedback from workshop leaders and conference attendees.
The purpose of our conference theme, “Chairs, Coordinators, Directors, Leads, WPAs: The Shifting Nature of WPA Work,” is to highlight the varied voices that are doing WPA work and have important insights to share. Your experiences and expertise are valuable, and you are invited to be part of the CWPA. We hope you will submit a proposal and share your programmatic expertise at our virtual conference this July 10-11, 2025.
Proposals are due March 31, 2025.
On behalf of CWPA
Respectfully submitted by Erin Lehman, with generous assistance from the CWPA Conference Planning Committee (Kelly Blewett, Daryl Lynn Dance, Callie Kostelich, Amanda Presswood, Christal Seahorn, and Mary Lourdes Silva). The committee wishes to thank the CWPA Executive Board, especially Darci Thoune, for helpful feedback in developing this CFP.
