Registration is now open for the 2009 MWCA conference to be held October 22-24 at the Rushmore Plaza Holiday Inn in Rapid City, SD. The conference website is at http://pages.usiouxfalls.edu/mwca/mwca09/index.htm . Early bird registration is September 15. The conference offers pre-conference workshops, two post-conference outings (Rushmore & Crazy Horse or a walking tour of historic Deadwood), Friday evening dinner discussions, a closing plenary and response to the conference that will be facilitated through Twitter, and many exciting engagement opportunities for writing center newbies and veterans alike. We hope to see you there.

25th Annual Conference
October 22-24, 2009
Rapid City, SD

For its 25th annual conference, the Midwest Writing Centers Association is heading west. The Black Hills of South Dakota—held sacred by the Lakota peoples and treasured by others for its natural resources and beauty—clings to the westernmost edge of the MWCA region. A curious blend of the Midwest and West, where irrigated river-bottom farms give way abruptly to high plains, forested hills, and scarified badlands, western South Dakota defies easy categorization and simple definition. From the natural wonders of Spearfish Canyon and Devil’s Tower to the granite carvings of Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse, the Black Hills is a place both simple and complicated, a place of eternal constants and constant surprises.

Having chosen in Rapid City a new location for this historic meeting, we designed the 2009 MWCA Annual Conference to both honor and challenge some of our best traditions. This conference is modeled in some ways on the “unconference,” a format that traces its roots to internet technology conferences of the late 1990s. In its purest form, the unconference program is loosely structured and designed collaboratively during the conference’s opening session. Participants propose session topics that interest them, lead those sessions in which they are experienced, and participate in other ways when they have something to learn or share. The unconference privileges participation over presentation, dialogue over monologue, and spontaneity over structure. However, the objectives of the unconference—active engagement of all participants; dialogue with professionals across geographic, institutional, and cultural lines; and socially-constructed knowledge—are much the same as any of MWCA’s past conferences.

What is different for MWCA 2009 is a vision, both simple and complex, of a “higher-risk, higher-yield” conference. At the core of this vision is a conference program that will foreground dynamic, interactive sessions but one that will also embrace spontaneous meetings and unplanned dialogue. To that end, we call not for papers on a broad, generalized theme, but for participation in nearly any form. We welcome proposals for everything from works-in-progress to fully polished presentations; from roundtable discussions to interactive, multimedia sessions; from informal discussions of current research in our discipline to engagement with other disciplines that inform our work. We hope to support and encourage those new to writing centers as well as to provide engaging, dynamic experiences for veteran professionals. We especially encourage proposals that allow the discipline’s veteran and newer scholars, including the large number of our undergraduate colleagues who attend every MWCA conference, to engage in meaningful dialogue. And finally, though we have suggested various approaches to participation in the list on the other side of this CFP, we assume that some of you will propose activities and events we have not imagined. No one format will be privileged over another, but successful proposals will explain how the presenters intend to engage other participants and advance the knowledge of writing center theory, practice, and research.

Possible Session Formats
Facilitated Group Discussions
• Panel Presentation: 2-3 speakers followed by Q&A
• Roundtable: discussion between 3-5 featured participants, including time for audience participation
• Knowledge Café: discussions of finished papers/articles. (Texts to be distributed two weeks in advance to interested participants.)
• Fishbowl: Session leaders begin discussion but rotate off panel, replaced by audience participants
• Lighting Talks: 5-minute presentations by 3-5 presenters, followed by break-out sessions
• Workshop: one or more specific activities for participants facilitated by presenters
• Pre-conference workshops: collaborative half-day workshops held Wednesday
• Special Interest Groups: narrowly focused discussions hosted by participants on-location
• Dinner discussions: focused sessions hosted by participants at a local restaurant

One-to-one
• Undergraduate/graduate student research posters
• Speed geeking: poster fair format mirroring speed dating

Works-in-Progress and Professional Development
• Research workshop: Presentations of work-in-progress to a group prepared to give substantive feedback. (Drafts must be distributed to the group two weeks prior to the conference.)
• Conference Writing Center
• Mock interviews, mentoring, and feedback on letters, CVs, personal statements, and statements of teaching philosophy for graduate school applicants and those going on the job market for the first time

Questions about the conference may be directed to Deaver Traywick (deavertraywick@bhsu.edu), Christopher Ervin (christopher.ervin@wku.edu) or Greg Dyer (greg.dyer@usiouxfalls.edu).