2026 Summer Workshop

CWPA Workshop for New, Prospective, and Continuing WPAs

Join new, prospective, and continuing national (and perhaps international) colleagues who administer writing programs of all kinds to discuss the theoretical, curricular, and political dimensions of our work. The 2026 CWPA workshop will build on the previous year’s workshop through a focus on navigating social and professional change in equitable ways. Change is a constant that impacts higher education and writing program administration with the consistency of weather. Technology, social policies, social injustice, discrimination, war, genocide all contribute to campus environment, student dispositions, and critical thought in ways that are difficult to predict, and sometimes difficult to navigate. We will engage in an interactive and dynamic workshop that focuses on the role of social impact on institutional mission to the development of a program profile that embraces and engages student voice, and the recognition of harm as a part of administrative literacies essential to navigating change at the ever-evolving modern institution.

Join us July 20-22, 2026 in Laramie, Wyoming!

Facilitators

Our 2026 facilitators will be Michelle Bachelor Robinson, Spelman College, and Darci Thoune, University of Wisconsin - LaCrosse.

Dr. Michelle Bachelor Robinson is the Director of the Comprehensive Writing Program at Spelman College and teaches courses in writing at various levels in the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing. Dr. Robinson’s work is most actively involved in community-engaged research and writing in historically Black spaces, and through service-learning and community-based research projects, she has also found ways to engage her students in this work. Her scholarly publications include the senior contributing author for OpenStax Writing Guide with Handbook and co-editor of The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric. Dr. Robinson also has articles in Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition and Council of Writing Program Administration (CWPA).

Dr. Darci L. Thoune (she/her) is First-Year Writing Program Coordinator and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse where she teaches first-year writing and a range of upper-level writing courses in the writing and rhetoric major. Her primary research interests are in writing program administration and curriculum, including writing program development, WPA identity, and writing pedagogy. She has published in several edited collections and in various rhetoric and composition journals, including Composition Studies, Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Across the Disciplines, WPA: Writing Program Administration, College English, and Community Literacy Journal.