The Bright Light of Undergraduate Writing

[guest_blogger]

by Jenn Fishman

This is a post in an occasional series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach held annually in Milwaukee, WI. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”

On the 5th anniversary of the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), we held a series of conversations for a 2023 issue of Community Literacy Journal. In one of them, a dialogue about “Takeaways,” WIS Steering Committee member Aleisha Balestri describes the 5-minute flashtalk she gave at WIS ‘22. It was about her efforts to “vex” faculty-only conversations about students’ engagement with writing at the College of DuPage, where she teaches. Her strategy was as direct as it was elegant in its simplicity: she invited students to participate, resulting in “a very powerful conversation.” 

Aleisha concludes her remarks by saying: “I would love to see WIS bring students to the forefront,” and all of us on the WIS Steering Committee agreed. Although undergraduate writers participated in the first three symposia (2018-2020), they did not return when WIS came back from a year-long, COVID-compelled hiatus. As a result, undergraduate writers were not part of the first hybrid symposium, “Writing As ______,” in 2022 or “Write it Out” in 2023. Likewise, they did not benefit from the company of the first two cohorts of Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows or the first international WIS attendees. 

The literature on undergraduate research in writing studies helps explain what happened. In The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies, Sophia Abbot, Hannah Bellowoar, and Eric E. Hall discuss some of the many internal and external challenges that mentors of undergraduate researchers face. The list includes everything from lack of time outside the classroom to lack of material support. Writing instructors and administrators who organize course- or program-related showcases experience similar difficulties, even though the rewards for helping undergraduate writers go public are great. It’s no mistake that undergraduate research is one of the original high impact educational practices, and we’ve all seen students gain not only confidence but also intellectual and proto-professional insight when their writing circulates through publications or presentations delivered beyond the classroom

With all of the above in mind, we committed to welcoming undergraduates back to the symposium in 2024. Full credit goes to Max Gray, a digital scholarship librarian at Marquette University and a WIS Steering Committee member, for the lightbulb moment that made it possible. Max suggested going digital and inviting undergrads to share pre-recorded, audio and video compositions, which could be featured both during and after each WIS. Running with that idea, Aleisha, Max, and I dreamt up a new program genre, the 3-minute flare, and the rest is WIS history.

In 2024 the WIS theme was “Writing Human/s,” and the flares we received were a testament to how much humanness can be conveyed in 120 seconds of writing. Click through our digital showcase and find a love letter, a villanelle, and other poetry. Listen to ruminations on AI, COVID, and group communication as well as penmanship and writing in nature. Meet students who are haunted by writing and tormented by writer’s block. Their flares burn alongside those by students who are grounded and comforted by writing as “the light [they] turn to in the darkness.” Contributors span first-year students and super seniors. They are majors in everything from English to engineering and psychology, and they identify many ways, including as writers and readers-turned-writers. Together, the first cache of WIS flares confirms there may be no more powerful string of words than the declaration: “I am a writer.”

Looking ahead to WIS ‘25, we invite you and your students to contribute. The importance of writing educators—teachers, mentors, and advisors—is legible in the flares we received as well as the shoutouts that authors gave to the teachers and mentors who supported their efforts, including Darcie Thoune at UW-La Crosse, Kat O’Meara and Laurie MacDiarmid at St. Norbert College, and Nila Horner at Michigan Tech. 

The WIS ‘25 theme is mise en place, the culinary term for putting everything in place before starting to cook, especially in a professional kitchen. We’ve adopted this phrase as not only a metaphor for getting ready to write but also a pathway to exploring the interrelationships between writing and food. In addition, we have cooked up a second genre for undergraduate writers. To complement 3-minute flares we are also inviting 30-second sparks. 

You and yours are cordially invited to join us. The prompts for flares and sparks as well as a proposal guide are available online, and submissions are due 12/13. Proposals for other WIS genres—flashtalks, workshops, posters, artifacts, displays, performances, and installations—are due 10/25. Registration opens in early November.