Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Week
February 2-6, 2026 | Free | Fully Virtual via Zoom
Founded in 1984, Colorado State University’s Writing Across the Curriculum program has long championed a transformative approach to teaching and learning: writing isn’t just a way to assess what students know—it’s a powerful tool for helping them learn, think critically, and engage deeply with course material. Whether through quick reflections that solidify understanding, assignments that challenge students to apply and evaluate concepts, or discipline-specific projects that prepare them for professional communication, writing helps students master content while developing skills they’ll carry beyond the classroom. This year’s WAC Week brings together faculty from across institutions to explore how integrating writing across disciplines can strengthen student learning and better prepare graduates for the challenges they’ll face in their careers and communities. Join us in celebrating and advancing this essential dimension of university teaching.
Writing to Learn
Short, informal tasks like quick summaries or reflections that help students consolidate and remember key concepts. In the classroom, this could be as simple as pausing during a lecture and asking students to summarize key ideas.
Writing to Engage
Assignments that prompt students to think critically and creatively about course content, such as applying theories or evaluating different perspectives. Writing tasks might ask students to apply knowledge they’ve learned, analyze alternative approaches to a subject and evaluate alternatives.
Writing in the Disciplines
Longer, more structured projects that mimic professional practices within specific fields, preparing students for the writing they’ll do in their careers.
What's Up Next?
WAC Week Full Schedule
Towards Place- and Land-Based Writing Across the Curriculum Programming
Presenters: Dr. Vani Kannan, PhD (Associate Teaching Professor and Director of Writing Across Emory, Emory University) & Alice Michelle Augustine, JD (Founding Director, Campus Honors and Scholars Engagement, Lehman College, CUNY)
Monday, February 2 | 11:00 am – 12:00 pm MST
TEF Alignment: Instructional Strategies
This presentation reflects on a community-based writing across the curriculum partnership in the Bronx, NY. The project brought together student archival researchers, a community archive, and a project to commemorate a local African Burial Ground. Together, we reflect on the place- and land-based possibilities of Writing Across the Curriculum programming.
Using Writing Across the Curriculum to Foster Learning and Critical Thinking
Presenters: Dr. Mike Palmquist, PhD (Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University), Annie Halseth (Instructor, Colorado State University), & Jake Sherlock (Instructor, Colorado State University)
Monday, February 2 | 1:00 – 2:00 pm MST
TEF Alignment: Instructional Strategies
This interactive workshop will explore the ways in which writing across the curriculum activities (WAC) –in particular, writing to learn and writing to engage assignments — can support active teaching and learning in courses across the disciplines. Building on the observation that writing and speaking are among the most effective ways of engaging students in critical engagement with course content and disciplinary practices — in particular, through the added cognitive processing required to transform knowledge into writing or speaking — this workshop will help participants consider the role WAC can play in engaging students more deeply in their courses. The speakers will provide a brief overview of key approaches to using writing activities and assignments to support learning and engagement and then report and reflect on activities they’ve used in their own courses. Attendees can expect to leave the workshop with an understanding of key approaches to WAC, the role these approaches can play in supporting active teaching and learning, and the role they can play in supporting the development of learners’ critical thinking skills.
Classroom AI Policies for a Writing-Enriched Curriculum: Balancing Assessment, Integrity and Learning
Presenter: Leslie Davis (Co-Director, CSU Writing Center)
Monday, February 2 | 3:00-4:00 pm MST
TEF Alignment: Classroom Climate
As generative AI becomes more commonplace, faculty can be left wondering how writing can maintain its place in the classroom to support learning and assessment. This workshop will begin with a discussion of the purpose of classroom policies, followed by a brief discussion of the possibilities of classroom AI policies, informed by students and professional organizations. We will then spend time discussing what goals we want our policies to outline. We will weigh potential revisions in order to emphasize our own pedagogical priorities, while retaining writing as a learning and assessment tool in the midst of generative AI use and protecting our own time as faculty.
Transfer, Reflection, and Writing Across the Curriculum in the Age of Generative AI
Presenter: Dr. Kara Taczak, PhD (Assistant Professor, University of Central Florida)
Tuesday, February 3 | 10:00 – 11:00 am MST
TEF Alignment: Instructional Strategies
This workshop explores strategies for helping students make meaningful connections across writing experiences in an era shaped by generative AI. Drawing on research in writing transfer, this presentation examines reflection as a vital practice for adaptability and the development of rhetorical knowledge. Together, we’ll discuss how to create assignments that encourage students to apply writing concepts across disciplines, while also engaging critically and creatively with AI tools to strengthen their ability to transfer knowledge into new contexts and experiences.
Indispensible Impact: Graduate Students and Writing Across the Curriculum
Presenters: Dr. Kelly Bradbury, PhD (Associate Professor, gtPathways Writing Integration Initiative, Colorado State University), Dr. David Korostyshevsky, PhD (Instructor, Colorado State University), Brendan Davidson, ABD (Colorado State University), and Georgia Plotkin (Colorado State University)
Tuesday, February 3 | 3:00 – 4:00 pm MST
Join this panel for a discussion about the important role graduate students play in supporting meaningful writing across the curriculum and the benefits and challenges that come along with that work. Hear from two PhD candidates who have supported undergraduates’ writing experiences in varied roles from grader to instructor of record, a history professor who mentors GTAs who comment on and grade undergraduate writing, and a writing studies specialist who trains GTAs across the curriculum to respond to and grade undergraduate writing. Come with your questions, ideas, and lived experiences and leave with a greater understanding of graduate students as impactful practitioners of WAC and ways we can assist them in that work.
Writing Assessments to Maximize Student Learning
Presenter: Dr. Naitnaphit Limlamai, PhD (Assistant Professor, Colorado State University)
Wednesday, February 4 | 10:00 – 11:00 am MST
TEF Alignment: Feedback and Assessment
Writing is a powerful tool for learning, but just because students are writing doesn’t necessarily mean that they are learning. How instructors conceptualize writing and how they actualize those conceptualizations in writing assignments matters. In this session, we will first consider a course concept you’d like students to understand and then build an effective writing assessment around that concept, focusing on components of assignments associated with the greatest learning gains: meaning making, clear expectations, interactive writing processes, and metacognition. Participants will come away from this interactive session with a better understanding of effective assessment design and a draft of a writing assessment that can yield learning gains for students.
Assigning Course Texts: Meaningful Text Selection and Engagement to Support Student Learning
Presenter: Dr. Andrea Glaws, PhD (Colorado State University)
Wednesday, February 4 | 12:00 – 1:00 pm MST
TEF Alignment: Instructional Strategies
This workshop will describe common reasons students do not read assigned course texts and provide ways to support students in engaging with course texts in meaningful ways. Text selection and engagement strategies will be overviewed, and participants will have a chance to consider the texts assigned in the courses they teach.
Bringing It Home: Feasible Strategies for Integrating Relevant Writing Activity Into The Courses You Teach
Presenter: Pamela Flash (Founding Director of WEC Program at University of Minnesota)
Wednesday, February 4 | 2:00 – 3:00 pm MST
TEF Alignment: Instructional Strategies
Recognizing the important role that writing plays in academic knowledge and learning is one thing. Figuring out how to incorporate meaningful writing activity into already-busy courses and stacked programs of study is quite another. In this session, we’ll consider and address factors that can block (or at least discourage) us from integrating more writing activities into our semesters. Participants will identify high-priority, course-relevant writing abilities they expect of students along with logistical factors such as the course’s place in departmental curricula, its structure, and the students who enroll. From there, we’ll look at a low-stakes, high-potency instructional strategy that has proven adaptable across disciplines: the five-minute workshop. Here, regularized but brief writing activities enhance (rather than distract from) already scheduled, course-specific learning. Examples and evidence will be drawn from the University of Minnesota’s award-winning Teaching with Writing Program and the Writing-Enriched Curriculum (WEC) method.
WAC as a Vehicle for Critical Thinking, Community, and Joy in the Classroom
Presenters: Annie Halseth (Instructor, Colorado State University) & Dr. Annie Krieg, PhD (Assistant Teaching Professor, Colorado State University)
Thursday, February 5 | 10:00 – 11:00 am MST
TEF Alignment: Classroom Climate
This workshop focuses on the partnership between Dr. Annie Krieg, an art historian, and Annie Halseth, a composition instructor, as they collaborated to integrate Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) pedagogy into the Art 100 curriculum. At the center of their partnership emerged discoveries about the potential of WAC as a vehicle for critical thinking, community, and joy in the classroom. During this interactive session, Krieg and Halseth will share their experiences designing writing-to-learn and writing-to-engage activities that invited students to engage more deeply with visual analysis, personal interpretation, and collaborative meaning-making. Through examples of assignment design, reflective prompts, and classroom practices, participants will consider how writing can transform disciplinary learning and student engagement. Attendees will leave with concrete ideas for incorporating writing as a tool for critical thinking, student engagement, and joy in their own classrooms.
Making Meaning of Your Emerging Minority-Serving Institutional Designation Through Writing Prompts in the Disciplines
Presenter: Dr. Caleb González, PhD (Assistant Teaching Professor, University of Santa Clara)
Thursday, February 5 | 2:00 – 3:00 pm MST
TEF Alignment: Inclusive Pedagogy
In this session, Dr. Caleb González will discuss the meaning of culturally sustaining pedagogical (CSP) frameworks in the design of writing prompts and write to learn and engage assignments. CSP is defined as “centering and sustaining the cultural and linguistic identities, experiences, and ways of knowing of students” (Django Paris and H. Samy Alim, 2019).
By deepening our knowledge of what it means to lean into students’ funds of knowledge and engage them through writing, this session examines stepping into spaces of write-to-learn and write-to-engage design in ways that draw upon the assets that students bring to the disciplines.
Writing to Persuade: Constructing Evidence-Based Arguments In The Natural Sciences
Presenters: Dr. Meena Balgopal, PhD (Professor, Colorado State University)
Friday, February 6 | 10:00 – 11:00 am MST
TEF Alignment: Instructional Strategies
Natural scientists communicate with peers through argumentative text. Hence, learning how to both interpret and construct written scientific arguments is critical for students in the natural sciences. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to structures of scientific arguments, especially the Toulmin Model (claims, qualifiers, evidence, backing, warrants, and rebuttals). Participants will then explore how writing-to-learn strategies (prompts, graphic organizers, peer-review, and self-evaluation rubrics) can support students’ argumentative writing. Instructors in large courses are often overwhelmed with assigning writing; however, through prompts, graphic organizers, peer and self-review, writing can be integrated into curricula in ways that support student learning outcomes. The workshop leader will draw share examples of prompts and rubrics that she and colleagues co-developed for life science courses as part of NSF-funded projects. Participants will use these as a starting place to revise for their own courses.
From First-Year Writing to Writing in the Major: Enhancing Student Self-Efficacy for Writing Across the Curriculum
Presenter: Dr. Heather Falconer, PhD (Assistant Professor, The University of Maine)
Friday, February 6 | 12:00 – 1:00 pm MST
TEF Alignment: Student Motivation
Understanding how the First-Year Writing curriculum relates to other courses in their degree is often a point of friction for undergraduate students. Yet, when instructors can make clear to students how the literacy concepts learned in one space relate to those used in another, students tend to become more engaged and have greater confidence as writers. This workshop will explore how instructors can align their reading and writing expectations with the skills taught in First-Year Writing courses by emphasizing writing as a high-impact educational practice in disciplinary courses. We’ll discuss what this looks like at one institution and then develop a plan for how to do something similar in your own classes.
Writing to Discern: Naming What We Value in the Age of GenAI
Presenter: Dr. Christopher Basgier, PhD (Director of University Writing, Auburn University)
Friday, February 6 | 3:00 – 4:00 pm MST
TEF Alignment: Pedagogical Content Knowledge
In the age of generative artificial intelligence (genAI), many faculty find themselves in an “unsettled middle,” seeing both potential benefits and real risks in the technology (Basgier & Wilkes, 2025). This middle space can be generative for ethical discernment. This workshop will introduce participants to a practice of writing to discern. Based on pragmatist ethical philosophy, the practice centers on writing about the values that form the basis of our ethical commitments. When left unwritten, values can lead to conflict. When made explicit, they facilitate open “ethical deliberation” about our commitments and the tradeoffs we are willing to make (Watson et al., 2025, n.p.). By engaging in this practice of ethical discernment, faculty across disciplines can guide their students towards systematic reflections on situated use and situated refusal of genAI so they can adjust practices as necessary to better align with their values.
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