Catch Up on Everything that Happened at WPA 2022!

Find recordings of all of the WPA sessions below to watch as a refresher, or in case you missed them!

Stress Resilience: How To Care For Yourself and Your Students Using Achieve and Other Tools

Presenter: Denise Cady Arbeau

Taking time to manage your stress helps you to create a calm and caring environment within the classroom. What you do for yourself can carry over into your classroom—allowing your students to learn self-care and stress management through your example. In this session, we will discuss stress and the nervous system and how to quickly and effectively interrupt the stress response in the body making you feel calmer and more in control. We will look at how tools such as Achieve can help you in the classroom as you strive to maintain a calming environment. Finally, we’ll practice some breathing and movement that, over time, can make you (and your students!) more stress-resilient.

Creating Co-Curricular Activist Writing Projects for Students in Writing Programs: The Case of the Neurodiversity Celebration Collaborative (NCC)

Presenters: Cathryn Molloy

In this talk, Dr. Molloy will share the case of the James Madison University (JMU) Neurodiversity Celebration Collaborative (NCC)—a student-led group that originated in JMU’s School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication (WRTC). She suggests that the NCC provides evidence for how writing programs can center mental well-being by creating space and leadership opportunities for students who are marginalized due to their mental health and/or disability statuses; co-curricular programs like the NCC allow such students to intervene in mental well-being for themselves and on their campuses. The talk will outline how the group was started with an emphasis on successes and failures along the way. She’ll also provide information and advice for others who’d like to undertake similar initiatives at their own institutions.

Building Support for Compassionate Teaching
Presenters: Michelle Day

This workshop invites participants to explore trauma-informed teaching practices that benefit all students and contribute to a "compassionate" teaching environment. It begins with an overview of trauma, its impact on learning, and trauma-informed teaching principles before addressing strategies administrators can use to support trauma-informed teaching. Participants will be invited to use this information to revise a policy, document, or practice at their own institutions to support instructors to implement compassionate teaching practices. Participants will then discuss their revisions with peers and conclude by posing "mobilizing questions" for moving forward.

Aligning Writing Outcomes and Well-being in Writing Programs

Presenters: Susan Miller-Cochran and Stacey Cochran

In this workshop, the presenters share the PREMISE model of developing well-being in educational contexts (Cochran, 2019) and demonstrate connections to current theories and principles of teaching writing. They provide an example of an assignment sequence designed to meet writing outcomes that align with the WPA Outcomes Statement, and they walk through the process of redesigning a literacy narrative to support well-being. Finally, participants will be invited to creatively rethink possibilities in their own writing programs that would support student (and teacher) well-being.

Well-being through Debunking Writing Myths

Presenters: Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs

Student well-being in writing courses often relates to reducing anxiety that arises from fear of failure and unrealistically high expectations on the part of both students and teachers. In this session, we'll look at sources of such anxiety through the lens of myths and misconceptions of writing, such as the ideas that writing is perfectible or that writing well requires a gift. Drawing from attendees' experiences as teachers, writers, and former writing students, we'll work as a group to identify double standards that teachers might unintentionally create and share ways of using threshold concepts in classrooms to debunk myths and reduce students' anxiety around writing

Using a Multi-faceted Approach to Bridging the Gap for Non-cognitive and Academic Issues: Resources, Relevance, and Reach

Presenters: Kendra Mitchell and Robert Randolph, Jr.

Drawing upon their award-winning 2018 International Writing Center Association keynote address, the presenters will discuss the strategies and techniques they employ in their writing programs to promote mindfulness, motivation, and meaningful work at HBCUs. Through their narratives about their HBCU experiences pre- and post-quarantine, they will provide insight into ways WPAs and writing instructors can survive--and arguably thrive--despite global crises.

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Corequisite Courses in Achieve

Achieve - our fully mobile, accessible, and flexible online learning system - now supports corequisite writing courses from within your Achieve course, or your LMS.

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