The 2026 CWCA/ACCR Virtual Conference starts June 16! View the events page for more details and to register.
Please register using the email you plan to use to attend the conference.
If you have questions, email cwcaconference@gmail.com.
Registration Categories
(Costs listed below are before tax.)
Full Conference Registration – $150 CAD
Full Conference Registration – Student – $25 CAD
Full Conference Registration – Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) students and staff/faculty – Free
Full Conference Registration – Attendees without institutional funding – Free
Full Conference Registration – International Students – Free
Annual General Meeting Attendance – Free
Keynote Spotlight
We are excited to announce that our 2026 Keynote Speaker is Margaret Procter.
Margaret Procter served as University of Toronto
Coordinator, Writing Support, from 1994 until retirement in 2012, with the mandate of developing writing programs across the university to solve the perceived issue of student illiteracy. Studying and teaching literature was considered qualification for that role, but
teaching in writing centres and their offshoots led to better understanding of both university aims and student development. That experience became the basis of new programs, widely-used teaching material, and scholarly publications. It continues to invite periodic reexamination.
“What Can We Do Now? Retaining Our Principles, Deepening Our Reach”
This talk will examine the theme of change and universality by remembering my experiences in developing writing programs across a huge multifaceted university, and by commenting on ways writing instructors at U of T and beyond used our opportunities. It will offer comparisons of writing-centre work then and now, while relying on the Q&A session to fill those in more solidly.
To start with, though, I won’t assume that current writing-centre work mirrors my experience thirty years ago. I benefitted from a time of expansion in a relatively rich university with a huge range of disciplines, situated in a big city with a strong supply of brilliant people looking for academic work.
But I will claim that some challenges we faced then are comparable to the ones facing writing centres now. Technology weighs on us all—back then it was the internet, with its apparent invitation to plagiarism; now, it’s AI and its threats to reading and critical thinking. We used to worry about “ESL” students but came to see the advantages of a multilingual and multicultural student body, as CWCA members have done too, though it’s still not easy to formulate aims or fulfil them. Assessment remains important to writing centres even though we evade the role of assessor: students come to us largely out of concern for their grades, and our work with them is measured against institutional outcomes along with cost. Individual instruction is central to writing centres, but we’ve all developed group instruction too: is that a loss or a gain? Canadian universities have sometimes secured reasonable employment conditions for writing instructors, including those in writing centres, but the erosion of job security is not news. Most essentially, securing respect for writing-centre work remains challenging.
To animate my analysis I’ll tell some stories from experience, cite a few statistics, and refer to readings and discussions that enriched sessions like this one. As colleagues across time and distance, let’s share knowledge about what we do and why it matters.
Assistant Conference Chair
We are excited to introduce Rebecca DeWael as this year’s Assistant Conference Chair.
Hello! My name is Rebecca DeWael, and I am thrilled to be the Assistant Chair for the 2026 CWCA/ACCR conference. I’m a PhD candidate at McMaster University in the Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies program, and am also pursuing a graduate diploma in Gender and Social Justice. My research is in the Oscars Best Picture competition, specifically looking at the way we talk about what makes a movie “best”, and how discourses of representation and diversity influence that space. I’ve been a Teaching Assistant in the Communication and Media Arts Department at McMaster for many years, as well as a Writing Advisor in the Writing and Academic Skills office, where most of my time is spent planning and facilitating graduate writing supports, like our Graduate Writing Intensives. I’m looking forward to meeting you all at the conference this June!