By: Sarah Tinker Perrault, WIC Director
This quarter, WIC lost its founding director, Lisa Ede, and many of us in the program, at OSU, and in the field lost a guiding light. Lisa has been memorialized beautifully by her long-time friend and co-author, Andrea Lunsford.
The WIC program is part of Lisa’s enormous legacy, and one of our current projects is to digitize and share the program archives, which date back to the 1980s. The paper archive will be housed here in the OSU library, and an international organization, the WAC Clearinghouse, is interested in hosting the digital archive. WIC is one of the earliest and most successful WAC programs in the country, a testament to the work of Lisa and of long-term director Vicki Tolar Burton, and the archives should be of interest to scholars and to faculty working on creating or sustaining their own programs.
The work of WIC also continues, with some exciting things to report from fall:
- We had two events this quarter. In September, designers Christine Gallagher, Deann Garcia, and Andrea Marks gave a workshop on how to create readable and accessible student-facing documents; they will offer a similar workshop through CTL’s “Tuesday Teaching & Tech Talks” in February and May. Next, in October’s fall kickoff event, faculty learned about how to use informal writing to support students’ content learning and give them practice with academic writing. A recording and materials from this event can be found on the Past WIC Events page.
- WIC graduate assistant Jessica Al-Faqih and graduate intern Olivia Rowland have been working on new web materials. Both are M.A. students in Rhetoric & Writing in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film.
- We have a Visiting WIC Affiliate, Hannah Whitley, who graduated from OSU with a triple major in Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Sociology, and is now a PhD candidate in Rural Sociology and Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Environment at Penn State.
As we head into winter quarter, we are looking forward to virtually hosting renowned scholar, speaker, and performer Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young, for a public talk on linguistic justice and code meshing, and a faculty workshop on linguistic inclusiveness in teaching.
Finally, don’t forget to identify strong papers from your fall WIC course as possible nominees for the WIC Culture of Writing Award in your discipline.
Nominations will be due May 23rd, 2022.
