By Sarah Tinker Perrault, WIC Director
Spring is exciting and bittersweet—exciting because of the spring lunch series and the Culture of Writing Awards, and bittersweet because some members of the WIC team graduate and leave for their next adventures.
This spring we had fewer lunch events than in previous years, balancing out a greater-than-usual number in winter (see especially the recording of a workshop on AI tools such as ChatGPT), but the lack of numbers was more than made up for in quality. We started out with Patti Sakurai leading a conversation about responding to student writing and finished with one led by Sydney Elliot on trauma-informed teaching. In between we had a roundtable of Fall 2022 WIC Seminar graduates talking about how they are applying their learnings from seminar in their WIC classes. You can read overviews of these events here, and find recordings of them on the Workshops & Talks page.
As for the Culture of Writing Awards, this year we are celebrating 28 students in 26 majors; you can read about them here.
I also want to celebrate the excellent work done by the WIC team this year. Thank you to WIC Operations Manager Caryn Stoess; to WIC Graduate Assistant Olivia Rowland; to graduate interns Madeline Hurwitz, Yvette Rosales, Jarrett Steel Webster, and Casey Dawson; and to undergraduate assistants Lucinda Garcia and Elizabeth Nguyen.
Looking ahead, we have some exciting things coming up.
First, thanks to some extra funding from the Office of Academic Affairs, we will be able to run the WIC Faculty Seminar multiple times in the next two years. The seminar is open to all OSU faculty at all campuses; if you are interested, please ask your unit head to nominate you.
In addition, thanks to extraordinary work by the team this year, especially by Olivia, we will soon be rolling out a redesigned WIC website. Related to this, we are in the process of developing a set of research-supported tip sheets on best practices for specific aspects of teaching writing. Each tip sheet will be paired with an annotated bibliography for readers who want to learn more about the research behind the tips. The first three tip sheets and annotated bibliographies on anti-racist pedagogy, inclusive pedagogies/disability studies, and socially just and feminist pedagogies, also by Olivia, will be shared on the new website. Others are in progress and will be added next year.
