Council of Writing Program Administrators

The following Professional Development Workshops, Program Development Workshops, and WPA Working Sessions will be part of the program for the 2007 WPA Summer Conference in Tempe (for more information about the conference: http://wpacouncil.org/conference2007).

WPAs are encouraged to request funding from their institutions for participation in these special workshops.

Professional Development Workshops for WPAs:

Mapping WPA Spaces: Creative Approaches to Creative Work

Leaders: Rita Malenczyk, Lauren Fitzgerald New and experienced WPAs will have the opportunity, using postmodern mapping, to discover and tap new imaginative resources for creative and scholarly writing.

Crafting a WPA Peer Review Process: Part 1, Reasonable Criteria

Leaders: E. Shelley Reid and Irwin Weiser When WPAs want peer feedback on our administrative work outside of (often unshared) tenure review letters or a consultant-evaluator visit, we have very few options. This session will ask participants' help in designing a menu of criteria for possible use in outside peer reviews of WPAs by WPAs. (Part 2 is planned for WPA 2008 in Denver)

Untenured WPAs as Change Agents: When to Rule, When to Run, When to Hide

Leaders: Doug Downs, Shelley Reid, Rita Malenczyk, Barry Maid How can untenured WPAs respond to calls for their participation in institutional change? Assistant Professor Administrators (APAs) will share scenarios concerning changes at their institutions, consult with other APAs, and hear responses from tenured WPAs. Participants are encouraged to email short scenarios to Doug Downs (downsdo@uvsc.edu) by July 6.

Reconstructing the WPA: Building an Inclusive Paradigm

Leaders: Suellen Duffey, William Klein The paradigm that defines the WPA has remained relatively static over the past two decades, and has become characterized by common workplace issues and tasks that do not capture the diverse realities in which WPAs find themselves. In this workshop participants will begin building a new, more inclusive paradigm.

Writing for the WPA Journal

Deirdre Pettipiece, Timothy Ray, Bill Macauley, the WPA Journal Editorial Team will meet with prospective authors and prospective guest editors of special issues

Writing Program Development Workshops

Preparing a Writing Program Self-Study

Leaders: Doug Hesse and Ed White, (with Shirley Rose, Chris Anson, Joan Mullin, Bill Condon, and Joe Janangelo) Sponsored by the WPA Consultant-Evaluator Service, the session covers writing and using writing program self-studies for a variety of contexts, not just in preparation for a WPA C-E visit.

The History, Theory, and Practice of Good Program Assessments

Leaders: Brian Huot, Peggy O'Neill, Bill Macauley, Cindy Moore This two-part workshop will engage participants in discussion about the writing assessment history, theory, and research that inform available assessment practices and provide an opportunity to meet in small-group workshops to apply new knowledge to individual assessment projects.

Reviewing, Revamping, and Creating Undergraduate Majors

Leaders: Susan McLeod, Deborah Balzhiser Morton, Sandra Jamieson, Barbara L’Eplattenier, Keith Miller Members of the CCCC Committee on Writing and Rhetoric Majors will work with participants in small groups to discuss models and strategies for undergraduate majors. If you are considering or developing such majors, please feel free to email Thomas Miller (tpm@Email.arizona.edu )or bring your curricular materials.

Reinventing A Small College Writing Program: Studying Our Scratch

Leaders: Lisa Lebduska and Carol Peterson Haviland Using a small liberal arts college’s experience reinventing a writing program to engage in collaborative program building, participants will work with the documents that have emerged from each department—from biology to classics to economics to religion—and then the draft of the new program as a basis for discussion. The emphasis will be on participants’ using these documents as a model as they engage in studying their own "scratch" and thus revising their programs.

Special WPA Working Sessions:

Writing and Student Engagement/ WPA Collaboration with NSSE

Coordinator: Chuck Paine Meeting with Robert Gonyea to discuss NSSE (National Survey of Student Engagement), how it works, how questions are made and tested, and how NSSE might be improved if it more effectively surveyed students' writing experiences. For more information see http://wpacouncil.org/node/852

National Conversation on Writing/ WPA Network for Media Action

Leaders: Linda Adler-Kassner, Dominic Delli Carpini, Darsie Bowden, Pete Vandenberg National Conversation on Writing contributors will gather to view video footage and discuss final plans for completing the NCoW video (for NCTE 2007).

All of these sessions will be held during the concurrent sessions time slots in the conference program on Friday and Saturday.