Call for Proposals: SUNYCoW Conference
Now What? What Now: The ‘Writing’ Classroom after 2025
Fall 2025 Conference
October 24-25, 2025
Hosted by SUNY Adirondack
Queensbury, NY
Now What? What Now?: The 'Writing' Classroom after 2025
Call for Proposals
Seismic developments in technology, politics, and cognition are radically transforming the traditional writing classroom, which has been a site of contradiction (and at times controversy) since its formation after the GI Bill and the “democratization” of the university. Whether one starts with Raymond Williams or the New Critics through the Sputnik era, the cultural interventions of the late ’60s and the process movement, or the cultural turn of the ’80s, the “field” on which “the writing classroom” is founded has been a contested zone all along.
Though the disruptions of the Covid-era educational experience anticipated much of this shift, 2025 may well be remembered as the year when long-standing assumptions about writing, reading, thinking, and conversing were fundamentally challenged. Like 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008, the pandemic appears as an upending “event,” drawing power from anxieties about both the advent of AI and whether college remains "worth it" to most undergraduates, either financially or intellectually, leading us to the questions: what, if anything, has changed? What are the ongoing issues that have been with us all along, what are the developing problems, and what are the potentialities? What do composition students need–and why?
For some, this moment of upheaval sparks profound anxiety; for others, it may present an opportunity for radical transformation.
This year’s conference of the SUNY Council on Writing engages both the what and the now, registering not only what has happened but what can be done.
The organizing committee invites papers, panels, and workshops on a range of issues, including but not limited to the following:
Developments in technology: How far are the developments in technology allowed within the classroom, and how might accessibility be considered in its use? How is AI impacting students and their work in the composition classroom?
Issues of course design: How do modality, technologies, and Universal Design impact questions of accessibility and diversity (including intersections with DEI/SJ)?
The limits and possibilities of online learning: What are the endemic issues of digital platforms for, and as, classrooms?
Trends and challenges in literacy and reading comprehension: What changes in the curriculum/classroom environment result in higher levels of literacy?
Civic discourse in the classroom as a figure of the public sphere: What is the space for informed exchange (not only bloviating), debate (not only expression), and critique (not only persuasion)?
Creative writing or its elements in the composition classroom: Is there a place for creative writing as resistance to a culture of strictly academic essays? How can we engage literary techniques and creative writing-related assignments in the composition classroom?
Gamification and its discontents: When are games pedagogical engagements and when are they mere entertainment?
The high school/college nexus: How do we navigate the transition from high school learning to college learning in the classroom? What about college in the high school and high school in the college?
Second semester writing courses beyond ENG 101: What skills or concepts are the most transferable to other institutions? What do we expect of the second semester writing course today? What are the skills, knowledges, or moves that we expect will transfer not only from Writing 1 to Writing 2 but also into other coursework, other disciplines, or into future writing?
NY State’s move towards “free” tuition: What are the implications of New York State's move toward "free" tuition for adult students for the college/university writing classroom?
Cost/benefit analysis of institutional assessment: How does institutional assessment differ from formative assessment in terms of the costs and benefits? What are the impacts of the institutional assessment mandated by SUNY?
How do campus writing centers align with any of the above issues?
What are current challenges faced within the writing center tutor-training programs? What are issues not yet dealt with within tutor-training courses that could affect future student learning?
Campus partnerships: What collaborations with administrations, faculty, departments, writing centers, or third parties could/have recently benefited student learning?
Proposals of 300 words should be submitted via this Google Form by June 1.
Questions should be directed to sunycouncilonwriting@gmail.com.
