17 | Join our bi-weekly chats!

Join our bi-weekly chats!

The start of the academic year is one of the most important times for institutions, including writing centers. Training, routines, and center management become focal points; effective practices in these areas helps foster growth and efficient operations for the center. It’s an important, and sometimes stressful, time for centers, making it a vital topic for discussion for writing center professionals. For this week’s chat, we’ll focus on the role that training takes in starting our academic years, discussing specifically what we do, why we do those things, and what we struggle with in training. Through discussion, we will be able to share ideas for what works for our own centers, as well as offer ideas for others.

~ Kyle Boswell @boskm

Chat norms:

Follow the moderator (@boskm).
Questions are tweeted out with “Q” and question number.
Respond with “A” and corresponding question number at the front of your tweet.
Don’t forget the hashtag! #wcchat
Use an app that allows you to follow more than one stream. Set a column for #wcchat
Favorite tools include Tweetdeck and HootSuite
Follow those you connected with and/or learned from to grow your PLN.
Be respectful of others.
Focus on quality responses and questions that generate discussions that focus on our writing center practices.

Questions:

Q1: Describe the training consultants go through at the beginning of the year.
Q2: If you use journal articles for training, what articles do you find most useful? If you don’t, why don’t you use journal articles for training?
Q3: What are your biggest concerns during the initial training process? Why?
Q4: Describe your strategies for teaching consultation basics.
Q5: What initial struggles are most typical for consultants in your center? Why?
Q6: What is your favorite training activity? Why is it necessary?
Q7: What is your least favorite aspect of training? (Comment ideas for others that might spice up their training methods.)

WLN News Round-Up

Assistant blog editor, Amber Slater, shares some of what’s on the WLN news radar this week:

College of Charleston and Citadel Writing Centers Connect. The College of Charleston Writing Lab consultants created presentations for their Citadel peers, and the staff members discussed similarities and differences between their two writing centers. [CofC]

It’s the year of the emoji. In the wake of the OED choosing the “face with tears of joy” emoji as the word of the year, this article traces their history and offers a crash course on some key emojis. My question is: have you seen any projects in your Writing Centers using emojis? [The Guardian]

Long Night Against Procrastination event celebrates students’ academic work. Dr. Allison D. Carr reflects on Coe College’s first Long Night Against Procrastination event, in which students logged 546.25 combined hours writing, reading, and working together. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

What writing and tutoring-related news do you have to share with us this week? Let us know in the comments!

CFP: CCCC Workshop on Research About Writing in Higher Education Outside the US

We are inviting brief proposals for up to twenty-four researcher-participant roles in a U.S. College Conference on Composition and Communication (CCCC) workshop focused on research about writing in higher education outside of the U.S.

We know that researchers around the world are interested in finding sites, physical and figurative, for serious cross-national conversation that includes multiple research traditions.

For the eighth year, we are planning to propose a workshop that (if accepted) will take place at the annual CCCC conference. The conference next year is in Tampa, Florida, US, from March 18-21, 2015.

The workshop is tentatively titled Deep Rewards and Serious Risks in International Higher Education Writing Research: Comfort Zones and Contact Zones.

This workshop, along with the exchanges we have before meeting at the conference, is designed to make space available at the CCCC conference for extended time to read, process, think through, and discuss in detail each other’s work. We have learned, through seven previous workshops and other international exchanges, that we all need this kind of time for real exchange, given that we come from different linguistic, institutional, political, geographic, theoretical and pedagogical places.

We want to engage researcher-participants from many countries and research traditions in an equal exchange dialogue, learning from each other: the primary focus is on the writing research itself.

The research can be focused on teaching or studying writing in any language. We are willing to help with translation of a text into English as needed, if the paper is accepted for the workshop.

The brief proposal should describe a research project you would be interested in sharing with other facilitators and participants. It can be completed or in process. By research, we mean a project with a focused research question, an identified methodology (qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic, historical, discourse analysis, etc), and the collection of data in some form.

The project should be “international” for a U.S. audience, by which we mean (*only* for the purposes of this U.S. call!!) carried out by either scholars in countries other than the U.S. or scholars collaborating deeply across borders, including U.S. borders, in any language. Your role in the workshop would be to provide a draft text about the research by the end of December 2014, to read the other facilitators’ texts before attending the CCCC conference, and to participate in the day-long workshop by leading a discussion about your project and participating in discussions of a subset of others’ projects.

View the 2014 Workshop Proposal to get an idea of what the overall proposal will look like. We’ve included the titles from last year’s workshop to give you an idea of the kinds of work we’ve exchanged in past sessions. We will send out a draft of the 2015 overall proposal when you send in your project description. You will be welcome to suggest changes to the overall proposal at that point. You may notice that the proposal is written with a U.S. readership in mind–this is because the proposal review committee is comprised primarily of U.S. scholars. We seek to convince this audience that many CCCC attendees have much to learn from writing research in traditions other than the ones they find most familiar–that writing research needs multiple perspectives from multiple contexts and traditions. We also know how critical it is for all scholars to be directly engaged with projects and research models from multiple research traditions.

Please submit your proposal by April 25th. The International Workshop Proposal Template includes the questions you will need to answer as you prepare your proposal. This proposal can be quite informal (it serves to help us determine appropriate projects, and only the title will appear in the program), so please feel free to send something along.

We strongly encourage you to submit a proposal to the CCCC as individual presenters, as well. The CCCC format does allow individuals to present at both a workshop and a concurrent session (it does not allow individuals to present at more than one concurrent session).

Thank you! Please write with any questions at all.

Cinthia Gannett and Tiane (Christiane) Donahue

Call for Participation – Global Writing Centers Course

Colleagues,

I am teaching a graduate/advanced undergraduate course at DePaul University (Chicago) beginning in late March that will focus on writing centers and writing programs WORLDWIDE. As one of our projects, I’d like my students, who are themselves writing tutors in our writing center here at DePaul, to forge connections with others doing similar work (working with students and their writing, working within WID programs of any variety—in English and in the home languages) to exchange ideas about approaches, practices, challenges, and issues. This communication/collaboration/participation would be done on an informal basis, using asynchronous or synchronous conferencing (email, Skype, etc.).

Right now, course planning is a work-in-progress. If any of you are interested, I would love to hear from you.

Darsie Bowden
dbowden@depaul.edu

Words and their Meanings Project (A Staff-Student Collaboration Project)

I would like to share my news of the forthcoming exhibition organised by the Academic Writing Centre.

The information below is from our website, and will be updated once the exhibition is launched. I would be grateful for any comments, feedback, and (always) suggestions for future collaboration.

Words and Their Meanings

This project, funded through the EXPLORE initiative, will bring artistically inclined students, alumni, and staff of NUIG into close collaboration with the Academic Writing Centre to create a visual exhibition that would engage with the changing meanings of commonly used words.

Words such as ‘advertisement’, ‘gossip’, or ‘glamour’, to give a few examples, have a rich and surprising history which is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word ‘glamour’, now associated primarily with pop culture, used to mean enchantment. Tennyson defined glamour as a ‘species of witchcraft’. At its source, moreover, ‘glamour’ is a corrupt form of ‘grammar’. The Academic Writing Centre would enable artists to provide a visual commentary on such changes.

Exploring the role of language in an increasingly visual culture, the exhibition will draw attention to the importance of words and to the facts that their meanings are historically and culturally conditioned.

The exhibition will opn on June 1 and run for three weeks. We hope to return for another three weeks in September. An on-line exhibition will also be created after June 22.