WAC Symposium
Bringing WAC Ideas Into Practice
The WAC Symposium is an annual late-summer gathering that brings faculty, staff, and campus partners together to prepare for the fall semester through hands-on conversations about writing, teaching, assignment design, assessment, and emerging classroom challenges.
The symposium also serves as a culminating space for the WAC Faculty Fellows program. Each year, WAC Faculty Fellows share the projects, strategies, and teaching materials they developed throughout their year-long work with WAC. Participants are invited to reflect on WAC principles across disciplines and leave with practical ideas they can adapt for their syllabi, assignments, classroom activities, and course policies.
The WAC Symposium is an interdisciplinary event that invites faculty to:
- connect writing pedagogy with course goals, disciplinary expectations, and student learning.
- design meaningful writing assignments that students experience as purposeful, relevant, and connected.
- develop inclusive approaches to assessment.
- create opportunities for students to write for real audiences, purposes, and genres.
- reflect on the role of AI and other technologies in writing instruction.
- revise syllabi, assignment prompts, rubrics, and classroom policies before the fall semester begins.
- build cross-disciplinary conversations about writing across the curriculum.
Register for the 2026 WAC Symposium
Symposium Format
The WAC Symposium is typically held in August and can include:
- interactive sessions,
- table conversations,
- panels, and
- peer feedback opportunities.
Our event creates space for participants to work with real teaching materials, such as assignment prompts, syllabus language, AI policies, grading criteria, and course activities. Read about our 2025 Symposium event
Participant Takeaways from our Last Symposium:
“I learned about structuring peer review into a writing assignment.”
“I can incorporate AI in a manageable way!”
“I’m thinking more about real and meaningful audience in our short writing assignments… it makes them more engaging.”
“I am reminded of how important scaffolding is, creating enough time in and across classes for students.”
“Writing should be meaningful for students.”
“Generative AI is a tool, but we need to teach students how to use it responsibly and ethically.”
Contact
For any questions about the symposium, reach out to any of our WAC team members: