Welcome to Compendium, a blog looking to connect instructors across the University of Washington’s Expository Writing Program to ongoing resources, teaching materials, events, and more!
Compendium was originally piloted in 2018 (under the working title “The EWP blog”) as a space for our staff and instructors to share news, materials, and program updates. Over the past few years, the blog has been reimagined to better respond to the needs of our instructors, has been placed on hold during a global pandemic when everything became an online space, and has finally launched today. We’re excited to see where these community conversations take us this year!
From its origins as “the EWP blog,” this site eventually settled on (with some debate and much punnery) the name Compendium. Programmatically, the compendium is a familiar framework for EWP instructors: each quarter we ask students to build a compendium to highlight their work across the course.
Etymologically, “compendium” is derived from the Latin “compendĕre,” meaning that which is weighed together, from com (together) and pendĕre (to weigh). Definitions of “compendium” are numerous, but this online community resonates especially with the definition provided by Oxford Languages: “a collection of concise but detailed information about a particular subject, especially in a book or other publication.”
In framing this online space as a compendium, we hope to evoke the shared teaching context that connects our community and to create a collection of the work happening in our classrooms and our research, all centered around our commitment to critical, equitable, and antiracist writing praxis. It’s very easy—especially in the quarter system—to get buried in one’s own work, whether administrative or teaching, whether on-campus or off. We hope that this blog will provide an easily accessible platform for everyone to see the fantastic work our instructors have done across this program, to provide access to ready-to-use classroom resources like template lesson plans and activities, and, most importantly, to collaborate.
Thank you for reading, and again, welcome to Compendium!
–Alycia Gilbert, CIC AD 2021
Interested in contributing to Compendium or participating in other EWP events? Check out our Resources menu to Get Involved!