“The Impact of the Writing Classroom Just Before 2025 or, The Teaching of Writing Has Ethical Implications” by Professor Laura Wilder

Laura Wilder, the Chair of the English Department and an associate professor at SUNY Albany, was a keynote speaker at our October 2025 conference at SUNY Adirondack in Queensbury. Conference workshops, panels, and discussions reexamined the space of the writing classroom post-pandemic and in the age of AI, guided by the theme, Now What? What Now?: The ‘Writing’ Classroom after 2025.

Professor Wilder’s recent book, Tracing the Impact of First-Year Writing: Identity, Process, and Transfer at a Public University (Utah State UP, 2024), received the 2025 Best WAC Monograph award from the Association for Writing across the Curriculum and the WAC Clearinghouse. For over five years, Wilder conducted 143 interviews with, and collected 774 pages of writing from, 58 students, half of whom had taken a new first-year writing course and half who had not. In addition to documenting the impact of a first-year writing course, Wilder documents how students’ experiences with writing can be highly divergent across the curriculum and unequal across campuses.

The slides below, which are from Wilder’s keynote, share some of the results of Wilder’s longitudinal study of college students’ experiences with writing and explore the impact of a required first-year writing course.