The Campus Writing & Communication Coordinator (CWCC) offers awards ($5,000 each) to support graduate students with their engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The graduate students –recognized as WAC+WID Graduate Scholars—are drawn from undergraduate teaching units across campus. View the student profiles and research projects from last year’s cohort here.

Applications for the 2024-2025 cohort of WAC+WID Graduate Scholars are now open. The deadline to submit applications is October 31, 2024. Notifications will be sent out in mid November.

Purpose: The WAC+WID Graduate Scholars Program supports graduate students with these goals: 

(1) developing, assessing, and sharing writing pedagogical skills and practices 

(2) fostering an interdisciplinary community of graduate students and faculty focused on supporting undergraduate writing in the disciplines 

(3) preparing competitive teaching and SoTL materials for the job market. 

Eligibility: The position of WAC+WID Graduate Scholar may be held concurrently with a GSRship, TAship, or other fellowships. Graduate students who are members of an academic or professional unit that teaches undergraduate students are eligible to apply. Preference is given to those graduate students who have had experience working directly with undergraduate students as graduate instructors, teaching assistants, or advisors. The review committee selects a cohort that represents a diverse range of disciplines and perspectives.

Application & Selection Process: As part of the application process, graduate students are asked to reflect on their experience teaching writing in their discipline and to identify a pedagogical research question and inquiry project related to writing and undergraduate student learning. Applicants are encouraged to confer with colleagues in their home departments to identify promising and feasible inquiry projects. Projects might include, but are not limited to:

• Designing and sequencing writing tasks that align with discipline-specific learning goals and assessing their impacts
• Developing, practicing, and assessing strategies for providing students with effective and actionable feedback on their writing
• Designing, implementing, and assessing the effects of writing assignments that utilize multimodal features
• Building, refining, and assessing collaborative and team-based writing projects
• Developing and assessing pedagogical approaches that support undergraduate student writers with writing about quantitative data and data visualization
• Developing and assessing strategies that support multilingual students in discipline-specific writing contexts
• Developing and assessing  activities that integrate AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies with undergraduate writing assignments
• Integrating and assessing writing pedagogies that foster equitable, inclusive, and accessible learning environments

Expectations: WAC+WID Graduate Scholars meet in person as a cohort 6 times over the appointment to workshop their projects. Each meeting lasts 2 hours. In between cohort sessions, Scholars consult with members of the CWCC, WAC+WID Program, and faculty within their own disciplines. Scholars are expected to complete the Writing Pedagogy Certificate by the end of the academic year. Finally, each Scholar presents a culminating artifact that reflects their SoTL research. Artifacts may include a portfolio of new or redesigned teaching materials, a series of blog posts or online teaching resources for the DTEI, CWCC, WAC+WID or CEWC, or an article or conference paper for a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) forum. Graduate Scholars are encouraged to use and share their artifacts with colleagues in their home units and as part of a future colloquium hosted by the CWCC.

Applications for the WAC+WID Graduate Scholars Program are now available.