Write@UGA 2025: Afternoon Keynote Address—A Pluralistic Vision for Writing Across the Curriculum

General: On Thursday, February 20, 2025, Write@UGA at the University of Georgia will proudly host this year’s guest speaker event series. The events will take place in person (with other accommodations by request), featuring keynote speaker Dr. Christopher Basgier, Director of University Writing at Auburn University, where he consults with departments about integrating writing and high-impact practices throughout undergraduate and graduate curricula.

Morning Workshop: How can faculty respond to generative artificial intelligence (genAI) without outright banning it or openly permitting it at the expense of student learning? In this workshop, Christopher Basgier will introduce ways to adapt the pedagogies of writing-to-learn and writing-to-engage in the age of genAI. He will lead participants through a structured process of identifying disciplinary concepts that students struggle to learn and creating AI-engaged activities that can help students deepen their understanding of those concepts. Participants will leave with a plan for integrating an AI-engaged activity into a course to aid students’ learning.

Afternoon Keynote: Faculty and campus leaders are regularly confronted with questions about beginning, growing, and sustaining writing-related programming and pedagogy, especially in the midst of uncertain political and educational futures. In this keynote, Christopher Basgier will suggest that a university’s culture of writing can thrive when its stakeholders adopt pluralism as a central value and mode of operation. Successful writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs must account for plural people (e.g., faculty, students, staff, and administrators) with the shared responsibility to teach and learn plural disciplines (e.g., humanities, social sciences, STEM, business, and medicine) that use plural kinds of writing (e.g., historical narratives, laboratory reports, slide decks, and ePortfolios) to accomplish plural ends (e.g., knowledge building, problem-solving, performance, or social change). In the face of such plurality, an institution that employs a single mode of intervention (e.g., a writing-intensive course requirement or a weeklong summer workshop alone) may struggle to sustain strong writing programming across campus. Basgier will illustrate how an implicit value of pluralism has informed his program’s work to integrate and sustain WAC at Auburn University through multiple, complementary initiatives focused on faculty development, departmental collaboration, and university-wide assessment. He will conclude by suggesting that such varied approaches to campus-wide efforts around writing instruction and support can also bolster an effective response to generative artificial intelligence, which threatens to reduce the abundant pluralism of writing to the merely statistically probabilistic if not engaged critically.

Speaker: Christopher Basgier is Director of University Writing at Auburn University. In that role, he consults with departments about integrating writing and high-impact practices throughout undergraduate and graduate curricula. His research, which spans writing across the curriculum, writing centers, genre, threshold concepts, and digital rhetoric, has appeared in venues like Across the Disciplines, Composition Forum, Studies in Higher Education, The WAC Journal, and The Writing Center Journal. He is also active in national organizations like the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the WAC Clearinghouse.