David Slomp is an Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Lethbridge who works with student language arts teachers in the southern area of the province. His research interests include the development of writing abilities of high school students. He previously worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Alberta where he co-chaired the university Writing Task Force. As part of that task force he investigated the contexts for students learning to write at the university level. A former high school language arts teacher himself, he is uniquely positioned to guide discussions of the teaching and learning of writing in high school and post-secondary contexts in Alberta.

Roger Graves is Professor of English and Film Studies and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum and author of  Writing Instruction in Canadian Universities (1994), co-editor of “Writing Centres, Writing Seminars, Writing Culture: Writing Instruction in Anglo-Canadian Universities” (2006) and “Interdisciplinarity: Thinking and Writing Beyond Borders” (2010),  and co-author of 8 textbooks on writing. He has given over 100 presentations to undergraduate classes at the University of Alberta working with those students to help them understand the assignment their instructor has crafted and the criteria that instructor will use to evaluate student writing. He is uniquely qualified, as both a current writing instructor at the post-secondary level and a former high school teacher, to facilitate and negotiate the educational terrain on both sides of the higher education border. The conversations at these workshops have important implications for university instruction and for the retention and success of all post-secondary students.

Heather Graves is the author of “Rhetoric In(to) Science: Style as Invention in Inquiry” (2005), co-editor of “Writing Centres, Writing Seminars, Writing Culture: Writing Instruction in Anglo-Canadian Universities” (2006)and “Interdisciplinarity: Thinking and Writing Beyond Borders” (2010),  co-author of 8 textbooks on writing. Her specific interests lie in teaching writing in scientific contexts such as physics, nanotechnology, and the resource sector. Her participation ensures that we take a broad view of writing–a view that transcends literary writing as the norm or dominant context for student writing.

Bob Broad is the author of “What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing” (2003) and co-author of “Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping in Action” (2009). He is a  leading authority in the field of assessing the writing of high school and university students and frequently conducts workshops that take his ideas about “mapping” curricular expectations of writing into actions that enable instructors to see what those expectations are and then to critique, revise, or verifiy them.

Robin Bright has conducted school-based research over the past twenty years and written two books on the topic of teaching writing in the elementary and secondary grades and am working on a third focused on the middle school grades. In addition, with colleagues here at the U of L, she has collaborated to produce a Canadian-version of a comprehensive textbook for use with Education majors on the topic of teaching literacy in K-8 classrooms, published by Pearson. Her area of expertise/interest is literacy and students’ use of technology in middle school which has lead to a number of publications and presentations related to teens and the Internet (their habits and perceptions and experiences with cyberbullying). I will be working on this topic from the point of view of “new literacies” and out of-of school literacy in the coming year.

Leah Fowler‘s interest is in secondary writing pedagogy and particularly effective practices and things we most value in writers and writing. She has published extensively on the use of narrative in secondary student’s writing.