Welcome!

Welcome to Digital WPA—a place with numerous and varied resources (e.g. assignment sheets, handbooks for students and faculty, syllabi, lesson plans) from six institutions with First-Year Writing programs that require students to complete digital projects and that received the CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence (WPCE) between 2004 to 2018. (An overview of the institutions can be found in the table below.)

Aligned with Ecologies of Writing Programs: Program Profiles in Context and Writing Program Architecture, we were interested in doing research on writing programs and offering an overview of diverse model programs. As WPA-types ourselves, we’ve spent hours searching across and through multiple websites, trying to find syllabi, training materials, any trace of the repurposable! Thus, the goal of this teaching resource is to provide modest program profiles and brief conclusions, but even more so, to ensure that resources—actual pedagogical and professional development materials—live in an open access space online. If you’re a reader who finds themself/ves often flipping to the appendices of books and journal articles on writing programs and curricula, DigitalWPA.com was created with you in mind! 

To learn more about the research that generated this pedagogical tool, please see our About Page, which includes information about the project’s origins and development, the researchers, related publications and presentations, and contributors. 

To learn more about each of the institutions, please see our Exhibits. Exhibits for the six institutions featured include: 

1. Program Profile: an overview with the institution’s demographic characteristics and information about the participants in our project 
2. Curriculum: a description of the program’s positioning and required course(s), and a deep-dive into the required digital assignment(s), including any teaching materials
3. Program Training & Development: insight into unique approaches to techno-pedagogy professional development facilitated by the program, including any professional development and administrative materials
4. Experiential Learning: a collection of techno-ecological maps made by our participants

The Resource Repository includes five collections, allowing you to directly access (1) teaching materials, (2) professional development materials, (3) administrative materials, (4) techno-ecological maps, and (5) research materials. Collections 1-4 include materials we gathered from site visits, while Collection 5, the research materials, are what we created for our research project. Alternatively, visitors can use the Resource Repository to search all materials on this site by tag, title, creator, or date added.

If you are interested in viewing other repositories of pedagogical materials, you might visit the Corpus & Repository of Writing (CROW), the Gayle Morris Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative's Syllabus Repository, the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) or the Assignments across Disciplines Collection.

Snapshot: Comparison of Participating Writing Programs by Institution Type and Digital Writing Program at Time of Study