The Writing Showcase is an event that BGSU’s University Writing Program (UWP) holds for students to showcase their work—based on a writing project for a WRIT course—in a professional, yet casual, setting. This event invites all who attend to celebrate the excellence and efforts of the student writers who step forward to share their writing, knowledge, and discoveries with a public audience.
This year’s Writing Showcase is the UWP’s sixth Writing Showcase—and the first to be held entirely online. While the Showcase in the past has been like a small, one-day professional conference, with students presenting posters and giving talks, the University’s shift to distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic has moved the Writing Showcase online.
Fortunately, the UWP and the Writing Showcase Committee had already made plans to extend the reach of the event beyond the physical spaces within East Hall, where the Writing Showcase had normally been held. Recognizing the growing population of students taking WRIT courses online, we made plans to live-stream the sixth Showcase and to include digital presentations, made by online students, that could be displayed during the event.
The preparations for that transition helped pave the way for the fully online Writing Showcase that you are now visiting. In making the decision to continue to host the event during a time when students and teachers alike were adjusting to countless new realities, we recognized that the first online Showcase would be a new frontier for the UWP. As such, we didn’t know what to expect, and we relied on students’ openness to new experiences, curiosity about their presentation topics, and creativity in ways of writing.
And as you will soon discover as you browse the presentations in this Writing Showcase, the students sure delivered. Six students accepted the challenge, in what is surely the toughest semester to date, to share their work with us here. Please come on in and see what brilliant creations these students have made.
Brian Urias
Chair, 2020 Writing Showcase