Call for Papers

Translating and Collaborating, Across Disciplinary, Educational and Geographic Borders

The very nature of WAC scholarship has led practitioners across disciplinary, educational and geographic borders. In doing the process of collaborating across these borders, we have learned as much as we have given: How has translating our work for those outside our field helped us reconceptualize WAC's mission, theories, pedagogy?  How has our presence in an institution, school system or country effected a cross-translation, a hybrid, an evolution of each? How does our movement across disciplinary and geographical spaces translate into effective pedagogies that prepare future generations—and how do we know they are effective?

This year's conference will focus on how working with other disciplines has influenced our theories of composing and communicating; how communicating across local (e.g. K-16), national  and international borders is changing our definitions of writing as well as our teaching and collaborative practices; how we translate what we do so that students, academic staff, administration, and those outside our institutions support the scholarship and curricular reform we promote. We invite proposals that investigate how our border crossings have affected the shape of our field, our institutions and our global WAC conversations. For example,  participants might explore

• How multiple forms of communication make up a discipline, particularly those that may not often be discussed (e.g., the genre and eventually employment of field notes within a discipline): How are these communicated to students? How do they shape (a) discipline(s) and our work with faculty? How does all of this compare across borders or educational levels? What are the implications of this cross-comparison?

• How do current technologies change, foster or pose challenges to writing and learning in the disciplines?  How does technology complicate our WAC practices (e.g., issues of plagiarism, technological equity through pedagogy)? How might technology open or complicate disciplinary research collaborations across educational or geographical borders?

• How have new knowledge and/or technology changed our evaluation of writing in and across disciplines? What practices of assessment differ across disciplines and/or across educational or geographic borders? How does that affect how we teach our students to communicate to audiences within (and outside of) disciplines?

• What new forms of faculty development have proven successful and how are we measuring their success? How do our cultural ideas about learning and education contain or foster particular practices and programs and what have we learned from others about improving each? How do we translate what we do; ;what forms do we use to successfully communicate our work to others (e.g., text, report forms, images, graphs); what constitutes the rhetoric that speaks to academic staff and administration?

• What applications of language theories successfully translate across disciplinary, educational or geographic borders,? How can these "crossings" promote teaching and learning and/or build mutual partnerships that help our students understand and respect the international conversations in which they will engage?

These questions and areas are meant to stimulate ideas for proposals not prevent other questions from shaping proposals.

We strongly encourage participants to propose thoughtful sessions or individual presentations that demonstrate or would be interactive, and that allow for questions. We suggest innovative and experiential presentations: for example, participants may want to "teach" a class during their session, recreating for participants a mock student or faculty experience. We encourage participants to submit a poster,  inviting participation by scientist, engineers and others who excel in and can teach us about this form of presentation. We invite forum sessions: collaboratively-run sessions during which participants and leaders explore a similar problem and work on solutions together.

IWACC 08 Call For Papers Download (PDF)

Proposal deadline is Friday, September 28, 2007.

Email proposals maximum length of one page (250 words) as an MS Word attachment to George Schorn at gsschorn@mail.utexas.edu. Please include in your email, your full name, institutional affiliation, contact information, and whether you are proposing a single submission, panel, or round table.

Also please use " IWAC 2008 Proposal" in your subject line.

Questions or information should be directed to George Schorn (gsschorn@mail.utexas.edu) or Joan Mullin (jmullin@mail.utexas.edu)