Welcome to our second special issue focused on assignments from a single writing program. This time up, we are featuring the University of Arizona’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, which offers articles from across the disciplines that underscore the program’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion and real-world writing assignments. Guest edited by program directors Aimee Mapes and Emily Jo Schwaller, the articles in this issue span diverse disciplines, including environmental education, public health, the natural sciences, nursing, and cybersecurity. We are excited to feature such an eclectic array of prompts and impressed by the ways that this WAC program has brought writing studies principles to faculty who might not otherwise develop such engaging and sophisticated writing assignments. Given U of A’s Hispanic-serving institutional mission and diverse socio-economic student body, we see the essays featured in this issue as exemplars for faculty committed to sustaining diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in an era when such efforts are continuously under threat.
As the guest editors further explain, the first two articles by Leona Davis (environmental education) and Laura Gronewold, Alyssa Norris, and Sylvia Persin (public health) seek to validate students' home, ancestral, and community knowledges by helping them connect content with lived experiences. Incorporating writing-to-learn and reflection-based pedagogies, these authors invite students to explore their disciplines and themselves. Collaborating directly with students and highlighting examples from their written work, both contributions demonstrate how writing assignments can build classroom trust while expanding disciplinary understanding. We invite instructors across the disciplines to image how they might develop related assignments that value what students know and how they know it through explicit disciplinary lenses.
The remaining three articles in this issue by Theresa Crimmins and Kathleen Prudic (natural sciences), Lateefah Collingwood and Aimee Mapes (nursing and writing studies), and Ryan Straight (cybersecurity) demonstrate how real-world genres support learning transfer in general education and major-specific courses. These pieces examine innovative assignments in artificial intelligence, multimodal writing, and collaborative writing, and engage writers with concrete and discipline-situated rhetorical contexts (Bean and Melzer 2021, 59–93). In part inspired by Michelle Eodice, Anne E. Geller, and Neal Lerner’s corpus of scholarship devoted to the Meaningful Writing Project (e.g., Eodice, Geller, & Lerner (2016; 2025, 2019), we are again impressed by the ways U of A is engaging faculty from across the disciplines to embrace writing studies, helping them design assignments that connect to students’ lives as they explore disciplinary content in meaningful ways.
But before you dive into these provocative articles, please don’t miss out on Aimee Mapes and Emily Jo Schwaller’s insightful scholarly introduction, which highlights how the assignments featured here make writing meaningful across the University of Arizona curriculum. Grounded in equitable, participatory pedagogy and the unique teaching realities of the Mexico-Arizona border, these prompts reflect the WAC program’s mission to support inclusivity. In our view, the assembly of teacher-scholars featured in this special issue help students build resilience as writers through sustained engagement with diversity and, through the process, represent some of the best practices writing studies has to offer diverse disciplinary contexts.
Like this University of Arizona WAC special issue and the NYU Expository Writing program special issue before it, our next special issue will feature writing assignments from a single writing program, the University Writing Program at George Washington University. Guest edited by GWU faculty members Jessica McCaughey and Rachel Riedner, issue 12.1 is slated for early 2028, and the assignments it will showcase will be sure to please.
In housekeeping news, we are excited to announce that Jonathan Marine has moved into a Managing Editor role with Prompt; this move, alongside related efforts to update our reviewer list and revamp the role of our excellent Associate Editor team, should help us improve communication with authors and shorten the timeline to acceptance with the journal.
As a final note, we want to express our concern with NCTE’s recent decision to de-charter the Conference on College Composition and Communication (NCTE, email to members, July 24, 2026). The editorial team of Prompt is deeply dismayed by NCTE’s sudden announcement to dissolve the CCCC, a cornerstone of our discipline for 77 years. We stand in firm solidarity with CCCC’s membership, its leadership, and the editorial teams of CCC and the SWR book series. The impacts of this decision will certainly reverberate across scholars, instructors, authors, editors, and readers who, like us, have seen CCCC as a valuable locus for disciplinary growth and change throughout our entire careers.
NCTE’s shocking decision ignores the severe disruption this causes to CCCC’s members and the broader academic ecosystem. De-chartering the field’s largest conference and a flagship journal destabilizes related professional organizations, conferences, and journals. We especially empathize with the authors and editors whose labor and publication efforts will now be disrupted—and we are grateful to the WAC Clearinghouse, Composition Studies, WPA Journal, CWPA, and other journals and organizations who have indicated their commitment to carrying on the scholarly, pedagogical, theoretical, and political work of college composition and compositionists. The editors of Prompt pledge our full support to building a new future rooted in our discipline’s shared values.