Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS

Registration is open.

We are please to announce two keynotes:

Suresh Canagarajah, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics, English, and Asian Studies
Dr. Canagarajah, named as one of the top 50 scholars who have shaped the field of TESOL by TESOL International, is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor in the Departments of Applied Linguistics and English at Pennsylvania State University, as well as the Director of the Migration Studies Project. Among many other awards, Dr. Canagarajah is a recipient of the Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award by the American Association of Applied Linguistics; the Mina P. Shaughnessy Award (2015) by the Modern Language Association for the Outstanding Scholarly Book in the Fields of Language, Culture, Literacy, or Literature for his book Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations (2013); Best Book Award (2016) from the American Association of Applied Linguistics for Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations (2013). He is the author of more than 10 books and dozens of book chapters, academic articles, and other publications, both in English and Tamil. His book, Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students (2002), is required reading in the field of academic writing and multilingual instruction.

Stephanie Bell,
Writing Centre Director, York University

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On March 12, 2018 from 12:00-8:30 PM CST an exciting lineup of current and future leaders will facilitate interactive sessions on this year’s theme:

“Stories from the Center: Activism, Outreach, and Research”

Register today and join the presenters and other participants from 4 different countries and 20 different states as we embark on the first-ever #IWCACollaborative online event.

Please register by Friday, March 9th, so we can send you log in and set up instructions for joining us in the Adobe Connect meeting space before Monday.

Registration is only $30 and with it you also get exclusive post-event access to the recorded sessions. That means you can watch on demand sessions you missed and attended!

If you have any questions, please email us at IWCACollaborative2018@gmail.com

See you Online in Realtime!

Lauri Dietz & Joseph Cheatle

Register
IWCA Collaborative Agenda
Meet the Speakers

WLN is proud to announce our first webinar:  “Introduction to Publishing in WLN:  A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship.”

Friday, February 23, 2018, 3:00pm to 4:00pm E.S.T.

This event will cover WLN’s process of publishing, scholarly genres, and other information, hosted by WLN Associate Editors Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Julie Prebel, and Sohui Lee.

There will be opportunities for Q & A.

If you’ve thought of submitting to WLN, this is an excellent opportunity to hear from us on the process.

The webinar is free, but please R.S.V.P. at:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-publishing-in-wln-a-journal-of-writing-center-scholarship-tickets-41031721985.

Here’s how it works.

Getting Started:

• Each bi-weekly session, questions will be posted to Write Centered Monday of that week.
• At 8:00PM on Thursday, @write_centered will tweet out a welcome.
• Follow the Chat Norms below for the rest.

Chat norms:

• Follow the moderator (@write_centered)
• Questions are tweeted out with “Q” and question number.
• Responses should start with “A” and corresponding Q# at the start of your tweet
• Always use the hashtag #wcjoy to keep us organized!

Rules:

• Kindness and respect, always.
• Users who attack or harm others will be blocked by participants.
• Use the #wcjoy tag OFTEN and WELL! No need to reserve use for just the chat.
• If you can’t attend the chat on time but want to answer questions, that’s totally cool. Just follow the chat norms, so we can still trace where you’re coming from and where you’re headed in your replies.

Kate Hutton is the director of the Herndon Writing Center at Herndon High School in Fairfax County, VA, and the Vice President of the Capital Area Peer Tutoring Association. She served on an IWCA-sponsored panel of Secondary School Writing Center Directors at NCTE 2016 entitled, “Writing Centers as Sites of Advocacy.”

In the past decade, the Secondary School Writing Center (SSWC) movement has gained tremendous momentum and traction, and perhaps no region has seen such rapid growth in the establishment of SSWCs as the greater Washington, D.C. area. When I became co-director of the Herndon Writing Center in 2012, I was excited about what our center could do within our school. It wasn’t until I became involved with the network of SSWCs that eventually became the Capital Area Peer Tutoring Association (CAPTA) that I recognized how important it is for me to engage in a professional community dedicated to celebrating and supporting the work that SSWCs do. In an effort to highlight the ways in which CAPTA has unified and amplified the voices of SSWCs, I reached out to long-time and new CAPTA members to ask them to share how our network has helped them to legitimize and sustain the work we all do in our SSWCs.

CAPTA has grown out of what was once an informal network of SSWCs that began in Fairfax County, Virginia. Amber Jensen established one of the first area SSWCs at Edison High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, in 2009, and by 2011, SSWCs had established enough of a presence in the region to warrant partnering with the University of Maryland and George Mason University in hosting what has become an annual peer tutoring conference hosted by CAPTA. “From the beginning, it was evident that the sustainability of our centers would require working together to develop a vision for the role of an SSWC director and to collaborate on creating and sharing resources specifically tailored to our contexts,” Jensen explains. “The growth of SSWCs in our area, I think, is directly related to the work of this informal network of directors to create and share replicable implementation models, to collaborate in creating and modifying resources, and to support and share the emotional labor of defining and continually negotiating our positions in our schools and within the greater writing center scholarly community.”

In 2014, six SSWC Directors—Amber Jensen of Edison High School; Beth Blankenship of Oakton High School; Alison Hughes of Centreville High School; Jenny Goransson of West Springfield High School; Hannah Baran of Albemarle High School; and me—officially founded CAPTA, an organization dedicated to building community among, promoting advocacy for, and supporting the development and sharing of resources for new and existing SSWCs in the greater Washington, DC, area.

The CAPTA Executive Board at CAPTA 2016

While many of us acknowledged the need for and sought out opportunities to connect with other university writing centers around the country via existing peer tutoring networks, we quickly realized that SSWCs, their directors, and their tutors faced challenges and opportunities unique to the world of secondary schools. CAPTA was born of the need to create a sustainable network that specifically catered to our needs, that legitimized our work, and that encouraged scholarship in the field of SSWCs.

Janice Jewell, founder of the Herndon Writing Center, reflects, “The creation of CAPTA gave a wider sense of legitimacy to the fledgling writing centers. I think that as centers become established, participation in CAPTA normalizes these programs, so that once established, they become part of their communities, and the impulse to do away with them can subside.” As a diverse group of directors from schools with diverse needs, the formalization of the CAPTA network helped us to establish norms and identify our own best practices for sustaining successful SSWCs.

Trisha Vamosi, Director of the Eagle Writing Center at Osbourn High School in Manassas, VA, and CAPTA’s website curator, has found “the resources and guidance from other directors to be overwhelmingly supportive. CAPTA has provided not only an irreplaceable resource toolkit, but a space inviting constant networking” among directors in the field.

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WLN editor, Dr. Mickey Harris, writes with a special announcement:

More and more writing centers now exist within or are moving into learning centers (or Student Success Centers or Academic Skills Centers, or whatever name they are given), but how are they faring? This complex question needs to be explored from numerous perspectives and by numerous voices, so we at WLN have decided to ask you to identify problems you’re solving and write about positive aspects of existing within a learning center and how you achieved success.

What wisdom, insights, solutions can you pass along to others? What are conditions that could prove to be problematic? Consider your audience as other writing center directors who are wondering how to fit in or improve their writing center and want to learn from colleagues who have clarified problems and found solutions. This will be a collaborative effort of as many voices as we can fit in to an issue of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship.

Please send your 1500-word (Works Cited included in that number) responses to the editors:
Kim Ballard: <kim.ballard@wmich.edu>
Lee Ann Glowzenski <laglowzenski@gmail.com>
Muriel Harris <harrism@purdue.edu>

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Karen Johnson, Associate Professor at Shippensburg University, and Ted Roggenbuck, Associate Professor at Bloomsburg University, direct writing centers in the same state system. Over the past several years, they have collaborated to develop cross-institutional trainings and research. Their ongoing discussions and scholarship about educating writing tutors span several publications, conferences, and workshops, piquing their thirst for topics surrounding tutor education.

Key to our success in the important work of writing centers is our effectiveness in providing tutor education. Our field has over three decades of scholarship on how to educate writing tutors in a multitude of settings, but the wealth and variety of resources can create challenges for those seeking guidance. However, that we also have a number of excellent and popular (though not universally used) resources such as The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring, and The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors does suggest at least some consistency in how we educate tutors. But to what degree do we share core beliefs about tutor education, how do we know what aspects of our programs to prepare writing tutors are most effective, and to what areas are we not paying adequate attention? Moreover, what are effective contexts for educating tutors? Although credit-bearing courses appear to be ideal contexts for tutor education, what particular aspects of a course make it effective? And for directors who are unable to offer a course or even paid time for educating tutors, how can they effectively prepare tutors for the different rhetorical situations and writers they will encounter?

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