Tristan Beach, University of Nevada, Reno
November 16, 2025
As part of the Dual Enrollment Collective Standing Group’s series of articles and sessions on professional development, this blog post addresses what we see as parallel to and overlapping with professionalizing ourselves as faculty: professionalizing students in our curriculum. Many of our programs—often depending on where we encounter students, who our students are, and who ultimately delivers the curriculum—expose students to the kinds of professionalizing opportunities that are provided to fully matriculated first-year writing students. For concurrent enrollment programs, these opportunities are crucial to supporting students’ access to a college-level writing curriculum, given that the delivery of the curriculum is distributed across partnerships that are developed remotely from the sponsor institution.
In this blog post, we describe a professionalizing experience for students in the University of Nevada, Reno’s (UNR) Dual Credit in English program. The program is directed by the DE Collective’s associate chair Jim Webber, PhD, and employs our group’s graduate student representative, Jacob Eckrich, and myself, research and assessment coordinator, Tristan Beach. As a concurrent enrollment program housed in UNR’s Collegiate Academy, we’ve sought to develop and sustain strong partnerships with high schools across the state of Nevada. Providing students with professionalizing experiences is one way we do this.
The Annual Writer’s Conference
Each year, our program hosts an annual writer’s conference celebrating students’ literacy experiences over the past school year. The conference was developed as a means of connecting students, faculty, parents, and administrators across program partnerships. When the program was first piloted in a handful of schools in Clark County, 2021, we sought to accomplish two things through the writer’s conference: provide professionalizing experiences for students by allowing them to present on panels about their literacy experiences; and celebrate student writers and their communities, joining together schools across the district for a single, public-facing event.
Additionally, the conference is built directly into the curriculum, designed to support students’ completion of their final projects, a letter essay students address to their respective communities in which they describe significant writing experiences, reflect on course learning outcomes, and share advice and encouragement to future students entering the program. Students present their experiences at the conference and later revise/adapt their panel presentation scripts into their final project letters. Thus, the conference offers opportunities for students to connect their learning experiences with different student learning outcomes or core concepts, and their community letters extend these experiences post-presentation. Students also receive real-time feedback through the presentations and Q&A sessions, engaging one another in creating and testing emerging writing knowledge in a community setting. This is often what we do at professional conferences in our field.
Challenges and Changes
Such events are not uncommon among writing programs (Adler-Kassner and Estrem, 2009), but the conference always proved to be a logistical challenge. Aside from coordinating hundreds of people across the partnerships for a single event, our program coordinators and supporting instructors would also fly out to Clark County, in the southern part of the state, the week prior to the event for site visits, where we observed classroom instruction, modeled lessons, and conducted “mock” panels on our own significant writing experiences.
And as the program expanded into Washoe County (2023–2024), where UNR is located in the north part of the state, the challenge of conducting the writer’s conference also expanded. We were faced with the question, How do we continue having a single event across two school districts? While an immediate solution might be to host it on Zoom, each school has different digital infrastructures and uses different platforms. Further, hosting this as a virtual event would require a digital infrastructure to accommodate thousands of people in a single day. Thus, one loss with our program’s rapid growth has been a loss of a single community-building event at a larger scale.
Last year (2024–2025), our annual writer’s conference shifted. Rather than a single event it was more feasible to hold it as a series of smaller conferences in classrooms with other teachers, students, and administrators invited to attend. The shift from a decidedly public space to a classroom space subsequently scaled down our initial aims—to building community in the classroom and in individual schools instead of at the district-level.
The limitations didn’t prevent students from delivering impressive presentations on their experiences. As we often tell our students, context and audience matter—the context of these conferences scaled down, and the audiences narrowed to familiar faces. This seems like a far cry from the district wide writing conferences, but these events have been effective in helping us meet both aims, yet with more constraints.
Understanding the Shift
Questions emerged from this shift of scale, context, and audience:
How did students frame their learning experiences according to the occasion of the event and who their audiences might be?
Based on this framing, did students recognize this event as a professional one, not just as a professionalizing activity?
Tackling that First Question: What Students Said
A quick perusal of students’ final projects collected for last year’s program assessment reveals, especially among ENG102 students, that students frequently framed their experiences according to what they understood as the purpose of their education: to prepare them for college and workplace writing situations. This framing was more concrete for students who drew on prior or current workplace experiences when composing their panel scripts and final project letters, and more directly described how this preparation mattered to them, especially if they recognized themselves as college students or committed to a career track.
For instance, in three samples I’ve collected as part of my dissertative work (which investigates students’ values in writing and learning to articulate new student learning outcomes), students self-described their career/college tracks: a “medical student,” a “psychology major,” and a future “ultrasound technician.” In doing so, each one framed the purpose of the curriculum and their literacy experiences over the past year as preparing them for concrete current and future applications of the rhetorical situation in both work and school. While demonstrating transfer doesn’t necessarily indicate whether the conference professionalized students, many students commented on the choices they made when composing their scripts to connect with specific audiences at the conference.
Students often shared future career plans or identified being in the workforce or doing an internship to show how the curriculum transfers into other situations and thus reinforce what they saw as that primary purpose for their education. In one sample, a student identified with their audience “as working students in this job economy.” Such framing according to audience and context supports this connection with purpose, as from another sample, “This course doesn’t teach reading or writing directly. It teaches communication. This is something you want to take out of your college education because … [every] workplace is a community.” Thus, the occasion of the event and who students understood as their actual audiences helped them articulate emerging identities as workers or professionals-in-training, already enrolled in college.
Now to That Second Question: What Students Understood
Considering how students were interpreting and responding to the rhetorical situation of the conference, many likely understood the conference as a professionalizing event. But, given the shift in scale, context, and audience to the classroom, I imagine students more likely understood this as a simulation of a professional event compared to the public, large-scale event the writer’s conference once was. Because so much of the framing was based on “preparation,” I would argue that students recognized their classroom audiences as “real” but not “public” and, except for their teachers and any administrator in attendance, not professional.
While the writer’s conference as a district-wide, public event had nevertheless retained the residue of what Nagelhout and Blalock (2004) described as the paradox of authenticity between the classroom as a “‘not-real’ space” and the “real world” beyond the classroom (p. 135), the shift to smaller scale, individual classroom events likely cemented this attitude. Why does this matter? In past years, our writer’s conference has been an explicitly professional event modeled after other professional conferences with “real audiences.” The earnestness and intentionality students demonstrated in making specific rhetorical choices to communicate with in-person audiences, across different years, attest to students’ own understanding of themselves at the threshold of professional life. But by shifting from a larger, less predictable and more diverse audience, students may be less inclined to consider potential, and not just familiar, audiences. Further, one hallmark of professional conferences, such as prior years’ writer’s conferences, has been the development of community at the district-level and broadening networking opportunities, putting students in contact with one another and across different levels of the program and its partnerships—aspects missing at the classroom level.
Questions for Discussion
This description of UNR’s writer’s conference and its history generates more questions, which I invite further discussion on:
What are the long-term, post-curricular aims of professionalizing activities like the one described above, and how do we assess whether students are progressing toward these aims?
How are we distinguishing between a professionalizing experience and a professional experience in the activities and events we develop through our curricula—and when does this distinction matter?
How do these activities reinforce or disrupt more functionalist or “curriculum as preparation” attitudes toward writing instruction and literacy education in dual and concurrent enrollment programs?
How do these activities influence students’ recognition of their own emergent identities as professionals-in-training or as students with workforce experiences; further, do we notice students articulating a “dual” identity, such as “student and worker” or “high school and college student,” in these activities, or might these experiences lead students to claim one status or identity while foreclosing another?
Should we acknowledge students as workers in our classrooms when designing writing curricula and professionalizing activities, especially when many of them have already entered the workforce?
References
Adler-Kassner, L., & Estrem, H. (2009). The Journey Is the Destination: The Place of Assessment in an Activist Writing Program. In B. Broad, L. Adler-Kassner, B. Alford, J. Detweiler, H. Estrem, S. Harrington, M. McBride, E. Stallions, & S. Weeden. Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping in Action (pp. 14–35). Utah State University Press.
Nagelhout, E., & Blalock, G. (2004). Spaces for the Activity of Writing Instruction. In E. Nagelhout & C. Rutz (Eds.), Classroom Spaces and Writing Instruction (pp. 133–151). Hampton Press, Inc.