Adapting the Past to Reimagine Possible Futures: Celebrating and Critiquing WAC at 50

Developed from presentations at the Fifteenth International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference, this edited collection celebrates the 50th anniversary of the WAC movement while also identifying innovative directions for writing pedagogies, program building and impact, and program mobilization. Contributors reflect on the evolution of WAC as an educational movement as well as the challenges and possibilities facing WAC programs as they respond to the shifting contexts of higher education. The chapters in this collection—found in sections on faculty development, classroom implications, and institutional considerations—offer a range of practices, pedagogies, frameworks, and models for readers who are invested in building and sustaining WAC programs that impact their college and university campuses through cultures of writing. Adapting the Past to Reimagine Possible Futures engages topics such as program assessment, professionalization, and interdisciplinary collaborations, and connections with creative writing. Its 17 chapters testify to WAC’s persistence, resilience, and impact in a dynamic educational landscape.

Megan J. Kelly is Teaching Professor in the Writing Program and Assistant Director of the Writing Center at the University of Denver. Her teaching and research focus on writing and storytelling for social change, with a particular emphasis on the narrative and rhetorical strategies of student activists in the climate justice movement, and on training peer tutors of writing in antiracist and anti-ableist practices. She also facilitates writing groups and retreats for faculty. Her work has been published in WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship.

Heather M. Falconer is an Assistant Professor of Professional and Technical Writing and faculty member of the Maine Center for Research in STEM Education at the University of Maine, Orono. She is a Co-Editor for the Perspectives on Writing book series, is Co-Chair of the Research and Publications Committee of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum, and serves on multiple editorial and regional boards. Falconer’s research has appeared in journals such as Written Communication, The WAC Journal, and the Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, as well as in multiple edited collections. Her book, Masking Inequality with Good Intentions, is available through the Practices & Possibilities series at The WAC Clearinghouse.

Caleb Lee González is a fifth-year doctoral candidate specializing in Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy at The Ohio State University. He is a 2022 national recipient of the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award in Higher Education from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). He currently serves as a Graduate Teaching Associate for the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Program, and in 2020-2021, he was an Associate Director for the Fifteenth Biennial International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction with a specialty in travel writing and creative writing studies. His cross-disciplinary work is in composition studies, writing program administration, writing across the curriculum, and higher education studies. He has previously published in Writing on the Edge and in a collaborative chapter in Self+Culture+Writing: Autoethnography for/as Writing Studies edited by Rebecca Jackson and Jackie Grutsch McKinney (Utah State University Press).

Jill Dahlman, Assistant Professor of English at California Northstate University College of Health Sciences, is a product of the University of Hawaii system: Hilo for undergraduate and Manoa for graduate. In addition to teaching and creating classes, she is the co-director of the writing center and coordinator of its burgeoning WAC program. She is a first-year specialist researching the pedagogy of raising student self-efficacy in writing, and she coordinates partnerships with national parks as part of that vision. She has been included in collections as diverse as Comics and the Punk Aesthetics and Composition as Big Data. She is the primary editor for the Beyond the Frontier: Innovations in First-Year Composition series, currently in its third volume. She sits on the editorial board of the Rocky Mountain Review and the peer-reviewed Journal of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, for which she also serves on its executive board.