Why Support the University Writing Program?
Each donation made to the UWP supports ALL student, staff, and faculty writers across every discipline at ECU, by providing support from the individual level through consultations that provide tailored support to each writers’ needs, resources to support every step of the writing process, workshops designed to improve writing and the teaching of writing in every discipline ECU serves, and much more.
How do we do this?
The UWP is the umbrella that houses both the University Writing Center, created to support student writers in the classroom and out, and Writing Across the Curriculum, created to support faculty and staff as writers and teachers of writing. Follow along as we take a deep dive into how each program serves the ECU community, and what impact your gift will have on our ability to serve.
Our Mission
The University Writing Center is a place for writers to share and discuss their projects at any stage of the writing process with our passionate writing consultants. We believe in providing individualized, tailored support for each UWC visitor; focusing not on remedial services, but on supporting Pirates on their journey to become better writers, no matter their background or discipline.
Read all about our mission at the UWC and our eight promises to all that cross our threshold here.
Our Impact
Beyond last year, the UWC sponsors and innovates initiatives at ECU designed to improve all aspects of collegiate life related to students and writing.
Purple Ink training explores the diverse language backgrounds of our students and highlights the need for academic respect of language and dialect in teaching and grading.
Our goal is to explore and support East Carolina University’s unique, diverse student languages to equip instructors with knowledge on how linguistic diversity may be valued and implemented in the classroom.
At the same time, we deconstruct and contextualize myths surrounding writing assessment in the writing classroom.
HOiST (Helping Our Students Thrive) is a series of workshops around creating a broader support network for our students.
Each session is led by a campus expert who will help facilitate a conversation around what campus resources are available and what appropriate levels of helping might look like for those working outside of that specialized area.
The UWC also seeks to enrich our professional and student staff through professional development designed to enrich and inform consultants on topics that not only empower them as consultants, but as writers themselves.
Beyond the physical, the UWC also curates guides for every step of the writing process, created by our student writing consultants for our student writers.
We at the UWC consider the writing center space as an incubation space for future leaders, and seek to create research and presentation opportunities for our student consultants, which is only possible through the generous donations of those that believe in our mission to support every Pirate writer.
We are committed to serving not only ECU, but the Pitt County community and Eastern North Carolina (ENC) with our Community Writing Center, which provides supports to writers of all ages with things like resume review, cover letters, and college applications, and more. Donations to the University Writing Program directly impact our ability to extend our network of support beyond ECU to ENC writers.
Our Mission
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is a program that sits at the heart of supporting students, faculty, and staff through innovating the way we think about and teach as writing instructors. While WAC began across the US in the 1970s and 1980s as a grassroots educational reform project, the goals of WAC remain central to our understanding and application of writing at ECU.
WAC is centered on three core assertions:
- Writing is both an art and a skill that requires ongoing practice; no one ever finishes learning how to write.
- Writing is a method of learning, not merely a method to report on learning; as we compose and revise, we make connections, we synthesize ideas, and we extrapolate from them. Writing (and revising) is a practice of continually thinking on paper.
- Writing is essential to a university education; all disciplines use writing to generate and distribute knowledge. Therefore, the teaching of writing is the responsibility of all faculty across the university.
At ECU, our WAC program encourages faculty engage with students in Writing Intensive courses through three interconnected approaches that increase the use and value of writing for students: writing to learn, writing to engage, and writing in the disciplines.
Read more about WAC and how we support students, staff, and faculty as writers and teachers of writing here.
Our Impact
Each semester, we offer a series of online and face-to-face WAC workshops to help you think through some of the major challenges that come with teaching writing.
Those that are ready to dive deeper into improving their abilities as teachers of writing are not disappointed with our Academies series ready to serve their needs each spring and summer:
The WAC Academy is a 6-week, face-to-face workshop in which faculty explore three key questions:
What is good writing?
What is effective writing instruction?
And who says so?
This professional development provides a unique opportunity for instructors to explore their own writing processes, study effective teaching and writing strategies, and connect with peers across disciplines.
Successful completion of WAC academy opens the door to the opportunity to participate in a focused core group of faculty each summer.The Advanced WAC Academy is designed provide faculty with the unique opportunity to re-evaluate their course curriculum of writing intensive courses, while at the same time creating useful guides and supplemental materials for other faculty in the future.Faculty who participate in the Advanced WAC Academy are also awarded a stipend to further their ability to research and present in their specialized fields.
Beyond our workshops and focused academies series, WAC brings a variety of initiatives to ECU to support faculty as writers and as teachers of writing.
Critical Friends is a peer review protocol we use each semester to help grant writers get feedback on their writing.This small group, online feedback sessions are open to writers at any point in their writing process.Critical Friends is a peer review protocol aiming to support the development of ideas and writing strategies to assure writing is clear and persuasive.
Not to be forgotten, our WAC-facilitated Writing Accountability Groups (WAGs) serve across disciplines on campus each semester. These groups function as a focused writing space for staff and faculty, creating a unique space of camaraderie and focus for faculty and staff to focus. In the last year alone, WAG writers reported 28 peer-reviewed articles and 6 book chapters published, 8 grants funded, and 53 conference presentations delivered.
The WAC program doesn’t just support with groups and initiatives, however! We also fund the existence of a Faculty Editing Consultant, creating a space for faculty to receive feedback on their written research and article submissions, improving not only the ability of our teachers as writers, but the quality of the research done at ECU as a whole.
In fall and spring semesters, WAC hand selects exciting new books for a cross-disciplinary Book Group series. Interested staff and faculty are able to read about teaching and writing with other faculty across the disciplines to learn and discuss new methods, struggles and successes, of teaching writing.
WAC also supports our teachers of writing by creating unique spaces designed to support writing, such as our Faculty Writing Retreat.
Beyond all of these things, WAC is the critical hub for evaluating and re-evaluating our efficacy as a college on writing and teaching writing, through the creation, maintenance, support, and evaluation of the University Writing Portfolio.
UWC
- Create funding to support further initiatives that improve the education of writing across disciplines at ECU (HOiST, Purple Ink.)
- Help the UWC reach more students with funding for material outreach (giveaways, prizes, retreats, printed information, and more.)
- Support our student consultants’ research dreams by sending them to present their research at writing conferences.
- Impact the entire ENC community with your support that funds our Community Writing Center initiatives.
WAC
- Help WAC provide support to faculty in their own fields of writing with stipends & unique opportunities to focus on their research (Writing Retreat, WAGs.)
- Help WAC provide material support to faculty (printouts, pamphlets, worksheets, etc.)
- Your funds will help us expand our writing & teaching support into digital mediums like podcasts, videos, and online workshops.