WAC and Writing Centers: Finding Space to Work on Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Abstract

The Fifteenth International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference, which was postponed until August 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, provided an opportunity to celebrate 50 years of WAC. As noted in this collection's call for submissions, "The Fifteenth International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference offers a space for us to come together as a community to consider the complex and complicated histories of WAC and the potential evolutions of the field." The conference was a time to collectively reflect on the past so that we could envision WAC's future. It did bring us together, on Whova rather than in Fort Collins, Colorado, but what visions of the future did this conference imagine? How much change-as people, an organization, a discipline, a world community-have we enacted or innovated since Barbara Walvoord hosted the first WAC seminar at Central College during the 1969-1970 academic year? This is a crucial question especially as WAC seeks to sustain itself in meaningful ways that impact not only our college campuses but our communities, and higher education at large.As we (the editors) attended conference sessions-gathering in a virtual community, but never once meeting in person-and as we read through subsequent submissions to this edited collection, we began to recognize that the impact of the last few years has brought these lofty goals of the conference into question. At least, the pandemic has demonstrated how truly complex and complicated WAC work is. Al Harahap noted as much during the final plenary on envisioning the future of WAC, during which he offered this disclaimer: "What we are charged 4 4Kelly, Falconer, González, and Dahlman to talk about, the future of WAC, is a huge cross to bear" (Harahap, Navarro, & Russell, 2021). His words deserve our thoughtful attention as higher education continues to experience challenges related to student enrollment, institutional closures, budget cuts sparked by a global pandemic, and major shifts to the ways in which writing is taught across the curriculum globally. These realities create an increased exigency to amplify the field by forwarding tropes toward a better future for WAC and leading a movement that exemplifies greater access, equity, inclusion, and justice.COVID-19 initiated a massive and consequential pause and shift that reverberated around the world-not just in our individual homes and daily practices, but in our collective organizations and academic institutions. We also note that due to the pandemic's global impact, the international WAC community experienced a pause and shift in many different ways and in various educational situations. Anecdotally, WAC coordinators were called on to help think through the sudden gymnastics faculty were asked to perform: What did we know about using discussion boards to assess disciplinary content? How do we manage the writing in our classes now that we're fully virtual, or HyFlex, or hybrid? How do we accommodate or account for students without access to the internet or who don't have a space to work...