We are excited to announce the publication of TACOMA: Thinking About Composing, Our Multivoice Approaches, a new Open Educational Resource (OER) for writing courses at UW Tacoma!

TACOMA, co-written by UW Tacoma Director of Writing Tabitha Espina and UWT student Paul Lam, takes a different approach to teaching writing. Rather than presenting academic discourse as a set of rigid rules to follow, the book invites students to explore writing as a dynamic practice shaped by context, audience, purpose, and community. Readers will encounter:

• Pedagogical essays from rhetoric and composition scholars that explain key concepts about writing, language, and power
• Faculty perspectives from across campus disciplines, showing how writing works differently in fields from biology to law to social work
• Student perspectives, including photography by current student Eli Gomez and alumnus Shay Serrano, whose images center student and Indigenous voices in how we think about learning in place and space
• Our multivoice approach with dual perspectives throughout each chapter from Dr. Tabitha Espina, Director of Writing and Assistant Professor of Writing Studies, and Paul Lam, former Undergraduate Student-Centered Research Fellow and graduate of the School of Education, models the collaborative learning we hope undergraduate students experience in their own courses
• Interactive exercises and reflection prompts that help students examine their own language choices and relationships to academic discourse

We're grateful for this campus-wide investment in a resource designed to support our student writers and reflect who we are as a community!