WAC Symposium 2026: Making Writing Meaningful as an HSI

On August 13, Writing Across the Curriculum welcomed 30 faculty, staff, and graduate students from across the University of Arizona for the 2026 WAC Symposium, Making Writing Meaningful as an HSI.

Held at the Main Library, the symposium brought our WAC community together to explore how writing instruction can support meaningful, inclusive learning while responding to the University of Arizona’s mission as a Hispanic-Serving Institution and land-grant university. 

WAC Fellows Panel

The symposium began with a panel featuring the 2025-2026 WAC Faculty Fellows: Sarah Refi Hind, Evan Martin-Casler, and Amritha Wickramage.

Representing Plant Sciences and Business Communication, the Fellows reflected on how their year as WAC Fellows shaped their approaches to teaching writing. Their conversation focused on how WAC principles changed their approach to writing in their courses, what they learned from colleagues throughout the year, and how they have worked to create more meaningful writing experiences for students.

The panel made visible one of the strengths of the Faculty Fellows program: instructors across disciplines do not need to teach the same courses, genres, or students to learn from one another. Fellows shared how conversations across disciplinary boundaries led them to reconsider assessment, assignment design, writing expectations, and how students’ existing knowledge and experiences can serve as resources for learning.

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    Explore WAC Faculty Fellows

From Conversation to Practice

Following the panel, participants moved into two rounds of interactive table sessions. Attendees could select topics according to their interest and join a smaller discussion group for discussion and hands-on examples, and then rotated to another table.

The three sessions focused on asset-based approaches, alternative assessment, and supporting Graduate Teaching Assistants and instructional teams. Across the sessions, faculty, staff, and graduate students shared resources, compared experiences, and discussed how ideas developed in one teaching context might be adapted for another.

• At the asset-based table, participants considered how writing instruction and assessment can recognize students’ linguistic, cultural, and rhetorical knowledge as resources;
• The assessment table explored approaches such as specifications grading as an alternative to traditional point-based systems.  make expectations clearer and creates more opportunities for learning and revision.
• At the instructional teams table, participants discussed GTA preparation, feedback practices, and the value of making expectations explicit for instructors who may be navigating new disciplinary, institutional, or cultural teaching contexts.

The rotations created space for connections across campus and for conversations centered on a shared question: How can we better serve our students through writing?

    Browse WAC Teaching Resources

We are grateful to the participants who joined us and generously shared their experiences and questions throughout the morning. We also extend our thanks to the UCATT Operations & Communications team, whose support helped the WAC team make the symposium possible.

We look forward to continuing these conversations across campus throughout the 2026–2027 academic year.