Writing Beyond the University: Preparing Lifelong Learners for Lifewide Writing extends the burgeoning scholarly conversation regarding the role of writing in lifelong and lifewide learning. The collection introduces higher education faculty, staff, and administrators to research on how all members of a campus community can prepare learners to be effective writers beyond the university, in personal, professional, and civic contexts.

The collection also discusses how to teach writing and teach with writing across the academic disciplines and in a variety of co-curricular spaces, such as student life, student employment, and career services, and in internship, co-ops, and work-integrated learning opportunities.

Chapters include the perspectives of faculty/staff, learners, and alumni from a variety of international contexts, and chapter authors in our collection study and report on:

• innovative ways to teach writing and to teach content with writing to prepare learners to be lifelong and lifewide writers;
• co-curricular experiences like internships, co-ops, and work-integrated learning that offer scaffolded practice with “real-world” writing; and
• student life and on-campus employment experiences that deepen students’ practice with writing for varied audiences and purposes.

In the context of plentiful scholarship on writing in academic settings, this expertly edited volume offers new insights into the transitions writers make into nonacademic settings and the nature of their development and interactions as writers in those settings. Researchers and teachers of writing will find in its pages a variety of context-specific explorations of how writing can be understood not only as professional practice but as a lifelong activity.

Expanding on previous writing transfer research, this important new book demonstrates the power of connecting writing that takes place inside and outside the university. The editors and authors provide us with diverse research, experience, and insights from around the world to help us to envisage possible and desirable writing practices. We are encouraged to value the writing students do outside the university, which can be built upon to inform their university writing. Importantly, this book also provides evidence and impetus for university colleagues to ensure that we embed the best writing approaches and resources to enable students to maximise the benefits of writerly practices for their future lives and careers.

Writing Beyond the University contains the best kind of ambition emanating from the academy—and that is—investing in a type of collective inquiry that expands our horizons of possibility.  On this occasion, “writing” and “writing’s mobility” are, for me, the objects of inquiry. This book calls us to think, and act, in more complex ways about the practices, spaces, cultures, identities, contexts, and lives of writers, their writing, and the multiple purposes their writing serves. There so many compelling and urgent questions on offer here: about how universities organise their pedagogical and curriculum practices to engage writers at all stages of development; about the capabilities of writers to transition and transfer their work for futures elsewhere; about the learning experiences of specific cohorts of writers; and about the continuing importance of writing as social and collective practice. Anyone who is interested in a contemporary portrait of how universities are responding to the challenges and peculiarities of writing won’t be at all disappointed.

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