Written by Layli Miron
Writing is a form of active learning that is key to gaining understanding of subject matter, building new knowledge, and communicating with others. The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Hub, formerly known as the Campus Writing Program, supports student success by helping faculty members and associate instructors to consider how writing can enable their students’ growth. In 2025–26, in conversation with the advisory board and my CITL colleagues, I facilitated programs that supported goals of both broadening the reach and deepening pedagogical conversations. This report provides a brief overview of these programs and discusses how to build on their success in the upcoming academic year.
Broadening the Reach: Workshops and Roundtables
These programs, offered both online and in person, allow busy instructors to attend a single session and gain a new insight or technique that they can implement, while inviting deeper engagement.
Writing Across the Curriculum Workshop Series
Each workshop in this monthly series explores a timely topic that IUB faculty and associate instructors have expressed interest in. Offerings in the 2025-26 series included developing and articulating an AI philosophy, managing the grading load, in-class writing, assignment design, and rubric development.
- Total attendance across all the workshops: 226 faculty and associate instructors (non-unique)
- Faculty collaborators: 12 faculty members, who represented diverse disciplines, guest facilitated WAC workshops: Abigail Rawleigh, John Robison, Roberto Garcia, Julia Calderón, Sarah Clark, Tim Bell, Heather Reynolds, Tatiana Saburova, Angela Perry, Dawn Wisher, Franziska Krueger, and Fain Riopelle.
The number and diversity of co-facilitators represent the program’s success in cultivating relationships and energizing the discourse around writing pedagogy at IUB. Participant feedback was largely positive, with two common requests: more time in the workshops, which I typically cap at an hour, and dividing the in-person and Zoom modalities, rather than facilitating in a hybrid manner.
Roundtables on Intensive Writing in the College of Arts & Sciences
To extend my outreach efforts, I invited the 100+ faculty members who teach intensive writing courses in the College of Arts & Sciences to roundtables focused on current challenges and successes in supporting student writing in their field. These conversations surfaced shared challenges, like over-reliance on generative AI and shifting literacies of incoming students, as well as many innovative teaching techniques. I plan to draw from my conversation summaries in blog posts in 2026–27 to help other instructors.
- Total attendance: 25 faculty members (unique)
- Departments represented: Media School, History, Chemistry, African American and African Diaspora Studies, Criminal Justice and Criminology, International Studies, Jewish Studies, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Biotechnology, and Liberal Arts Management.
Deepening Pedagogical Insights: Learning Communities & Projects
These programs invite faculty and associate instructors into small groups that engage in sustained, robust thinking and dialogue about pedagogical issues related to writing. Their longer-term, interdisciplinary format grants participants time to consider the teaching philosophy that drives their daily teaching decisions.
Graduate Student Learning Community on Teaching Writing (Fall 2025)
In this online community, Mary Helen Truglia and I co-facilitated seven sessions for a cohort of five associate instructors, investigating foundational elements of writing pedagogy ranging from students’ relationship with writing to the logistics of structuring peer review workshops.
Faculty Learning Community on Writing in the Disciplines (Spring 2026)
This learning community guided five participants through a rigorous nine-session curriculum adapted from the nationally recognized Howe Center for Writing Excellence. Drawing on the educational theory we read and discussed, each participant created a writing guide for students new to their discipline. They will pilot these writing guides in fall semester, and I also plan to publish some of them on the CITL website as the first step toward building a discipline-specific resource repository for IUB. Participant feedback was laudatory.
Thought Partners (Spring 2026)
This pilot program, the brainchild of one of the Campus Writing Program (now WAC Hub) advisory board members, provided a loose structure for three interdisciplinary pairs of faculty members to hold regular conversations around teaching. Participants reported that they found this program both enjoyable and informative, and recommended that I continue it past its pilot phase. A consistent recommendation is for future iterations to build toward a deliverable or other defined outcome (see full feedback).
Grant to Support Learning through Writing Cohort (Summer 2026)
The Grant to Support Learning through Writing gives four faculty members per year a structure and community in which to make writing-focused curriculum revisions to a course in any field, while recognizing their work with $1,500 in research funding. I run the program as a learning community, with the cohort meeting monthly throughout summer term to discuss pedagogical concepts pertinent to their projects and to provide each other feedback and support on their curriculum development.
Reading Group with the Scholarly Writing Program (Summer 2026)
Over summer term, I collaborated with the Scholarly Writing Program to provide a four-session reading group on Write Like You Teach, a book by James Lang that helps faculty members apply their teaching skills to writing for wider audiences. Co-facilitator Gen Creedon marketed the program through the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs, and it has reached 19 participants representing diverse fields.
O'Neill Iterative Writing Program Assessment (Yearlong)
The O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs has an iterative writing (IW) requirement, which aims to ensure its several thousand undergraduate students get discipline-specific writing experience before they graduate. I have collaborated with Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Affairs Andrea Need to assess this curricular requirement. Over this academic year, Andrea and I gathered student, faculty, and employer input, in collaboration with the 22 faculty members tasked with teaching IW assignments. In spring 2026, after reviewing the data, they voted to keep the requirement. The project’s next phase entails encouraging consistency across IW courses and sections to guarantee that all students have robust writing experiences.
Looking Forward to Another Year of Teaching Support
The landscape of writing at IUB is shifting, reshaped by rapidly advancing technology, changes in incoming students’ literacies, and internal policy decisions (most germanely, the general education curriculum reform that eliminates the “shared goals,” which had included intensive writing). Amidst these changes, faculty and associate instructors tell me they want to see WAC persist at IUB, recognizing that, alongside reading, it remains the bedrock of learning and critical thinking.
Advisory Board Members
The advisory board meets once per semester to offer suggestions for my work, as well as that of Writing Tutorial Services. In an effort to work toward broader disciplinary representation, I re-form the board each fall after an open call. Thank you to the following board members for their service in 2025-26: Angela Perry, Ben Kravitz, Candis Smith, Deborah Cohn, Katie Silvester, Laura Brown, Leslie Robinson, Mahasweta Baxipatra, Nancy Magill, Polly Graham, and Xin Chen.