Dear colleagues,
I am pleased to circulate the following CFP for UF’s Writing Program’s annual Pedagogy, Practice, and Philosophy conference. This year’s theme is "Writing Transfer." Come join us for beautiful February weather and great company and conversations!
Call for Proposals
University of Florida’s Writing Program
Spring 2027 Conference on Pedagogy, Practice, and Philosophy
Conference date: Saturday, February 27, 2027
Theme: Writing Transfer
The University of Florida’s Writing Program invites proposals for our annual Conference on Pedagogy, Practice, and Philosophy. This year’s theme, Writing Transfer, asks us to consider how writing knowledge moves with our students beyond the classroom.
Drawing on the work of Alexander, Davis, Mina, and Shepherd’s Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer (2023), we understand writing transfer to be the process by which writers draw on prior knowledge, including content, genre, process, discourse community, rhetorical, and reflective knowledge, to meet new meaning-making tasks across time and contexts beyond the classroom where that knowledge was first developed. But transfer isn’t automatic. It’s cultivated through pedagogies that help students recognize what they know, reflect on how and why it works, and adapt it across genres, modes, media, disciplines, and communities.
As composing increasingly happens across modes, we also have to ask what helps transfer and what gets in its way. Students write essays, but they also design slides, produce videos, build websites, and work with AI tools that change how texts get made. Does knowledge carry over to multimodal composing? Do new technologies open new paths for transfer, or do they hide the rhetorical thinking on which transfer depends? How do we teach for the context our students will actually write in, including ones we can’t predict yet?
We invite proposals that explore the theory and practice of writing transfer in college composition. How do you help students carry writing knowledge into other courses, workplaces, and public life? How do you design assignments, courses, or feedback practices that encourage reflection, adaptation, and rhetorical awareness? What role does multimodal composing play in helping students transfer what they learn? And how can writing programs, teacher training, and curricula be built to support transfer across a student’s entire education and beyond?
Keynote Speaker
Dr. Ryan Shepherd is an Associate Professor and Director of First-Year Composition in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University. His research looks at composition, multimodality, and learning transfer. His work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Computers and Composition, and WPA: Writing Program Administration, among others. He co-edited Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer (2023) and Multimodal Transfer Pedagogy (2027).
Conference Format
Because this conference will focus on connections and conversations, we’ll meet in person on the University of Florida campus. Our goal is to foster collaborative, inclusive, and practical conversations about writing pedagogy. We welcome proposals from graduate students, post-docs, faculty, and experienced instructors alike.
We invite four types of proposals:
- Activity Swap: Share one activity, lesson, or technique that fosters writing transfer. Each presenter will have 15 minutes, followed by a discussion.
- Themed Roundtables: 3–4 speakers discussing a specific topic related to writing transfer. Talks should be 15 minutes each, with time for audience engagement.
- Pedagogy Workshops: Practical sessions on course design or assignment creation that promote writing transfer. Each presenter will lead a 15-minute workshop.
- Research Papers: Present a 15-minute scholarly paper on writing transfer, pedagogy, or related topics.
Proposal Topics May Include (but are not limited to):
- Experiential learning as a site for transfer
- Multimodal composing and transfer across modes and media
- Assessing transfer, including ways to recognize, document, and evaluate it
- AI and writing technologies as aids to or barriers against transfer
- Adapting writing knowledge to new genres, audiences, and situations
- Feedback practices that prepare students for future writing
- Public writing and transfer into civic and professional contexts
- Graduate teaching assistants and transfer, including how GTAs use their own experiences as writers and learners in their teaching
- Reflection and metacognition as tools for transfer
- Connecting writing knowledge across courses, disciplines, and contexts
Submission Guidelines
To submit a proposal, email a 250-word abstract with your contact information, affiliation, and position/title to Scott Thompson at sc.thompson. For roundtables or workshops, please include information for each participant.
Deadline for submissions: December 18, 2026
Notification of acceptance: December 30, 2026
Conference date: Saturday, February 27, 2027
For more information about UF’s Writing Program, visit: https://writing.ufl.edu
Questions? Email Scott Thompson at sc.thompson
Scott C. Thompson
Assistant Instructional Professor
First-Year Writing Coordinator
Executive Editor, Journal of Writing and Artificial Intelligence
CLAS | University Writing Program
University of Florida
sc.thompson