11/23/2019

Nominations Open for CWPA Graduate Research Award

2020 CWPA Graduate Research Award for Writing in WPA Studies Call for Submissions 

The Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) is pleased to announce the call for submissions for its award recognizing outstanding scholarship by graduate students writing on issues in writing program administration. 

Submissions are due January 10, 2020 at 11:59pm (PST). 

Eligibility: Submissions should be (co-)authored by students currently enrolled in graduate classes or graduate programs or by those who have recently completed their graduate degrees. Submissions should have been completed as a graduate student between January 01, 2019 and Dec. 31, 2019. 

Submissions: Submissions should be manuscripts of 5,000–8,000 words or an equivalent multimedia and/or web-based project that are unpublished or not already accepted for publication. These projects could include but are not limited to historical/archival studies of WPA-related issues, writing program assessment, faculty development, classroom ethnography, or composition curriculum analysis. In order to represent the full scholarship of our field as well as to reflect the CWPA’s commitment to underrepresented groups, the committee especially welcomes submissions that explore issues of diversity and identity formation, and address issues of relevance to diverse populations that interrogate power structures and privilege. 

The committee will consider seminar papers, websites, multimedia projects, dissertation chapters, collaborative work, and theses. Theses and dissertation chapters should be appropriately modified and contextualized to stand alone as cohesive texts (i.e., as if you were submitting them to a journal for publication). In all cases, submissions should demonstrate exemplary scholarship; reflect the theory, praxis, and values of writing program administration; and articulate how the project contributes to the ongoing investigative interests of WPA work. To ensure anonymity, please remove all identifying information from a project prior to submission. Manuscript submissions should conform to the editorial and stylistic guidelines of the journal WPA: Writing Program Administration (http://wpacouncil.org/info-for-authors); other kinds of projects should be publication-ready as appropriate. 

Cover Letter: Please submit a cover letter and your manuscript in one Word document. (Multimedia projects should include a cover letter in Word.) The cover letter should be one page. Your audience is the selection committee. Provide contact information (which will be made anonymous) and briefly describe your specific project, articulating its significance to your local institutional context and/or WPA work broadly defined, framing it in the scholarship and theory of writing program administration. 

Application Deadline and Timeline: Applicants should submit materials via email to Irwin Weiser (iweiser@purdue.edu), Chair of the CWPA Graduate Research Award Committee, with the subject line “2020 CWPA Graduate Research Award” by January 10, 2020 at 11:59pm (PST). Entries will be reviewed and a winner selected by February 

2020. The winner will be notified as soon as possible thereafter. The winner of the award will be publicly recognized at the 2020 WPA Summer Conference. 

Prize: A certificate and total cash prize of $300 will be awarded to the winning project. In accepting the award and prize, the author(s) agree to submit a proposal for a presentation based on the project for inclusion in the WPA Summer Conference program in the same year the award is received. Upon the acceptance of the presentation proposal, one conference registration fee will be waived for the winning project (whether single- or co-authored). 

Evaluation Criteria: Submissions will be judged in a blind review by the Graduate Research Awards Committee composed of CWPA members. An excellent submission 

• reflects the CWPA commitment to underrepresented groups; explores issues of diversity and identity formation, and addresses issues of relevance to diverse populations that interrogate power structures and privilege. 
• has a clearly stated purpose. 
• is innovative and timely in the way it addresses a gap in the WPA literature or expands ongoing interests in the literature. 
• is clearly informed by and in conversation with relevant WPA scholarship, both current and canonical. 
• provides a clear description of the theoretical framework or methodology used to accomplish one’s purpose and how it was applied. 
• is sound in its argument; claims or conclusions are clearly supported by evidence and effectively developed. 
• is written in a style that serves to strengthen the ethos of the author(s). 
• is well organized. 
• is appropriately modified and contextualized to stand alone as a cohesive text. 

If you have any questions about the above, please contact Irwin Weiser at iweiser@purdue.edu. 

CWPA Graduate Research Award Committee Irwin Weiser (Chair), Purdue University Meaghan Brewer, Pace University Dominic DelliCarpini, York College of Pennsylvania Cristyn Elder, University of New Mexico Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Morgan McDougall, Bowling Green State University Katherine Daily O’Meara, Emporia State University Erica Stone, Texas Tech University Carolyn Wisniewski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign