In this third WLN webinar in the workshop series, we’ll talk about how to find ideas for research and publication in the everyday happenings of your writing center. We will focus on how to recognize what you can contribute to the scholarly conversation, and how to frame your contribution in ways that fit WLN and are useful to other writing center practitioners. We will encourage interactive discussion at the end of this workshop and will invite your ideas to test our heuristic questions or strategies for preparing ideas for publication.
This webinar will be recorded. Participants can register up to the day/time of the workshop, but registration is required.
For the twelfth year, the International Researcher’s Consortium will host a workshop at the annual College Conference on Composition and Communication (CCCC) conference located in the U.S. We are inviting brief proposals for up to twenty-four researcher-participant roles focused on international or transnational research about writing in higher education from all over the world (see details below about what this might include). By research, we mean a project with a focused research question, an identified methodology (qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic, historical, discourse analysis, corpus, etc), and the collection of data in some form.This research can be at any stage and does not need to be final.Your role in the workshop would be to provide a draft text about the research by the end of December 2019, to read the other workshop 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.
We know that researchers around the world are interested in finding sites for serious cross-national conversation that includes multiple research traditions. This workshop is designed to make space available for extended time to read, process, think through, and discuss in detail each other’s work at theCollege Conference on Composition and Communication,March 25-28, 2020, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. See the overall conference Call for Proposals themehere.Though your research is not required to connect to conference themes, this year’s theme is about inclusivity, tradition, innovation and the commonplace. We see this kind of workshop as a form of “inclusivity,” a means of articulating the commonplace to become more aware. Making research about writing connect across cultures, higher education systems and languages is an activity that pushes the boundaries of tradition and enables inclusivity. It leads to the creation of many different kinds of texts and informs our future scholarly and praxis-based efforts toward inclusivity.
By Steve Sherwood, Director, TCU Center for Writing; Joe Law, WAC Director, Wright State University and professor of English (retired); Bonnie Devet, Professor of English / Director of the Writing Lab Department of English College of Charleston; Pam Childers, endowed chair as Director of the Writing Center at the McCallie School in Chattanooga (retired)
One of the greats in our field has died, and a lot of those who loved and admired her found out only recently about her passing.
Steve Sherwood:
Dr. Christina Murphy, the inaugural director of Texas Christian University’s Writing Center and the author or coauthor of a number of notable and award-winning works about writing centers, died on October 13, 2018, of a brief illness.
After directing TCU’s William L. Adams Center for Writing from 1988-1996, she left TCU to become the chair of the English Department at University of Memphis and later accepted positions as Associate Dean of William Patterson University and Dean of Marshall University. Nevertheless, she continued to contribute to writing center scholarship and to maintain friendships with a number of writing center professionals.
The Writing Center Journal seeks contributions for a special issue, co-edited with Katrin Girgensohn from Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, focusing on the transatlantic writing center conversation. Originally created in the United States to address US-based educational concerns (Boquet, 1999; Lerner 2009), writing centers have now expanded globally, as has accompanying scholarship (Bräuer, Carlino, Ganobcsik-Williams, Sinha, 2012). Christiane Donahue has identified a tendency among US theorists towards “‘othering’ countries that have different, complex, but well-established traditions in both writing research and writing instruction” (2009). We recognize this othering tendency in the writing center community, as well. Because the first writing centers outside the US were established in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s (Graves, 2017) and in Europe in the 1990s (Bräuer, 2002), they have a decades-long sustained engagement in writing center studies–with both reformulations and novel practices emerging (e.g., Scott, 2017). Study of transatlantic writing centers, which have evolved in their own right, thus has much to offer our increasingly globalized writing center community.
The deadline for submitting a proposal is January 30, 2019.
Dear Writing Center Colleagues in the Pacific Northwest and Beyond,
Join us April 26-27 in beautiful Yakima, Washington for the 2019 joint conference of the Pacific Northwest Writing Centers Association / Two-year College English Association of the Pacific Northwest.
The extended deadline for proposals is December 21. PNWCA has some scholarship funding for tutors to attend and share their work — check out the www.pnwca.org website for more details.
Misty Anne Winzenried, PhD
Director / Odegaard Writing & Research Center
Affiliate Assistant Professor / Department of English University of Washington Seattle
We are excited to share the CFP for our annual Canadian Writing Centres Association Conference, which will take place at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design on May 30 and 31, 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Our theme this year is “The Writing Centre Multiverse,” and we welcome proposals that explore how Writing Centres navigate, respond to, and negotiate the multiverse we all inhabit – in our spaces, our practices, and our research.
The University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and Community College of Denver are pleased to host the 2019 Tutor Con, a joint conference of the Colorado and Wyoming Writing Tutors Conference (CWWTC) and the Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association (RMWCA).
The theme for the 2019 Tutor Con is “Interdisciplinarity, Diversity, and Collaboration.” The conference begins on February 15, 2019, with interactive workshops both for tutors/consultants and professionals/administrators. On February 16, 2019, Dr. Tobi Jacobi, Director of the Center for Community Literacy, Research and Outreach in the Department of English at Colorado State University, will deliver the keynote address before a full day of presentations and special sessions.
The deadline for registration is January 18, 2019. Learn more at either cwwtc.org or rmwca.org. Contact the conference chair at Justin.Bain@ucdenver.edu.
WLN Blog: Tell me a bit about your background, and how you got started in writing center work?
Adam: As a new graduate student in the English program at Washington State University, I was quickly met with imposter syndrome and felt a bit lost trying to think of what I wanted to do with my career. Despite focusing my thesis on multimodality, I worked closely with the Writing Center Director there and enjoyed my time tutoring in the center. I excelled at tutoring almost immediately and was soon asked to begin mentoring at-risk reinstatement students at the college. The initiative I put forth toward organizing and leading these sessions led to me being awarded The Harold and Jeanna Rounds Olson Fellowship for Writing Across the Curriculum Award, a competitive, university-wide award given to a single student for their contributions to the university each year.
Adam working with a student in the Success Center
Still, I continued down the path of researching multimodality as a doctoral student at Bowling Green State University (BGSU). There I taught Composition, as well as English as a Second Language courses, but it was what happened outside of the classroom that reignited my passion for tutoring.
To this day, the most rewarding experience I had as a tutor was visiting with an entire family who relocated from Japan to Bowling Green, Ohio. Though there were many language barriers and challenges along the way (as the family spoke nearly no English whatsoever), I particularly wanted to help the mother of the family who broke down into tears because she could not figure out how to communicate effectively enough in English to obtain a library card to be able to check out children’s books and DVDs for her young daughter and son. After months of work, I still tear up thinking about the image of her crying tears of joy, library card in hand, with two very happy children.
The Writing Centre Multiverse: Vancouver May 30-31, 2019
For our 2019 conference, the Canadian Writing Centres Association/L’Association canadienne des centres de rédaction welcomes proposals on any writing-centre-related subject, but particularly invites proposals that explore how Writing Centres navigate, respond to, and negotiate the “multiverse” we all inhabit—in our spaces, our practices, and our research.
How, for example, do any of the following multis inform, enrich, and/or limit our work in the context of our own institutions? How do they intersect or overlap with practical, political, and/or personal concerns around training, pedagogy, administration, decolonization, or wellness? How do we as writing centre practitioners respond to, negotiate, or resist, any or all of these?
Ashley Squires is Director, Writing and Communication Center, New Economic School, Moscow.
When I arrived in Moscow in 2013 to begin my job as Associate Director of the Writing and Communication Center at the New Economic School, it was with a sense of purpose and adventure. I felt that the work I was doing—teaching communication and critical thinking skills to Russian students—would be challenging and urgent. But I could not have guessed that my time here would overlap with the emergence of writing and writing pedagogy as a genuine academic discipline in a place where it hadn’t previously existed.
The WCC at NES is usually considered to be the first American-style writing center in the Russian Federation. Founded in 2011, it coincided with the creation of an American-style liberal arts program at the New Economic School and the Higher School of Economics. The latter university, which, like NES, was founded in the years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, began its own writing center in the very same year. Since then, between 14 and 16 writing centers have popped up across the country (the number depends on how we define an “active” writing center). However, the NES WCC remains the only writing center that, in the American mode, primarily serves the needs of students, especially undergraduate students.
Though inspired by American writing centers and Anglophone writing pedagogy, Russian writing programs are taking new forms. Many of them were founded with money distributed as part of Project 5-100 (Проекта 5-100), a state-sponsored effort to raise the international profile of Russian universities by encouraging faculty to publish in international venues. This has created the conditions for writing to emerge as a genuine discipline focused as it is on raising the general level of scientific communication, not only in English but in Russian as well. Interesting new approaches and research projects are emerging in this environment, and parallel efforts are ongoing in Central Asia and other parts of Eastern Europe. But across such a vast territory, scholars need help finding one another, and the West as yet knows little about the work being done here.
In cooperation with the WAC Clearinghouse, I am looking to bring attention to this important work and to increase the possibility of collaboration across borders. We are seeking proposals for contributions to an edited volume that will cover the history and current practice of writing programs throughout the former Soviet Union. This collection seeks to address the following questions:
How are teachers, students, researchers and administrators in the region working to further progressive writing pedagogy?
What ideas about writing and writing instruction—both new and old, foreign and domestic— inform, assist or complicate this work?
How does writing shape knowledge and practice within specific regional cultures, academic or otherwise? How might writing function as a bridge or barrier?
How is writing being used as a learning tool, within disciplines, within the university, or at a national or international level?
Possible submissions might include:
Studies of past language / educational practices in the region and the impact these practices have on contemporary writing pedagogy.
Analyses of institutions (writing centers, language departments, universities) and the forces, both internal and external, with which stakeholders must contend in reforming writing pedagogy.
Analyses of the region’s unique cultural, economic and political challenges, and how these challenges affect the teaching of writing.
Stories of success (or failure) in attempting to incorporate methods and materials from other countries’ research traditions.
Analyses of international collaboration efforts, the challenges faced and knowledges produced.
Research studies (either qualitative or quantitative) that test the feasibility of various teaching methods.
Stories or studies which understand local experience through broad theoretical concepts (translingualism; World Englishes; genre studies, activity systems and communities of practice; writing to learn and WAC/WID theory; academic literacies, etc.).
The deadline for proposals (200-300 word abstracts) is October 31, but we will continue to look at submissions after that point. Final essays will be due in late Spring of 2019. To submit an abstract or ask a question, contact Ashley Squires at asquires@nes.ru.
A few years ago, Scott Whiddon (Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Communication, Transylvania University) and Graham Stowe (Assistant Professor of English, Canisius College) became friends because of writing centers and a shared love of music. Both are songwriters, guitar players, active musicians, and writing center directors. For the past few years, they’ve played various writing center gatherings as Stamp+Ink, performing at spaces such as The Carson McCullers Center (Columbus, GA), the Burns-Belfry Museum (Oxford, MS), and Gallery 5 (Richmond, VA). Along the way, Whiddon and Stowe recorded a digital album called Beautiful Scenes and are releasing it as a fundraiser for undergraduate and graduate student scholarships.
Please welcome to the blog our new associate editor for the Middle East and North Africa, Anna Habib – editor.
Anna S. Habib is the Associate Director of Composition, at both the George Mason University home campus and at the branch campus in Songdo, South Korea & coordinator and instructor in the Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines courses for INTO Mason, Mason’s pathway program for graduate and undergraduate international students.
Anna Habib
Anna S. Habib was born in Beirut, Lebanon, during the civil war to a Lebanese father and American mother. When she was four years old, her family fled to the neighboring island of Cyprus where she grew up in a community of refugees from surrounding countries. As a bi-cultural, bi-national child from a post-colonial context, she grew up with English, Arabic and French as native languages and Greek as a second language. These intercultural, translingual experiences inspired her to pursue a BA in English with a concentration in Cultural Studies, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at George Mason University. She graduated from the MFA program in 2006. Her thesis, which she hopes to continue working on someday, is titled “A Block from Bliss Street: Growing up as a child of the Lebanese civil war.” She is currently pursuing her PhD in Writing and Rhetoric also at Mason, where she served as the Associate Director of the Writing Center for five years until she transitioned to her current position as Associate Director of Composition for Multilingual Writers.
Her research and publications have focused on the experiences of multilingual writers adapting to the expectations of the U.S. academy, faculty perceptions of writing by multilingual students, and designing writing courses that are attuned to the diverse needs of this population. She is currently working on an auto-ethnography that aims to explore and theorize individual experiences of trauma and displacement.
WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship is proud to announce our second webinar: “WCA as Hero: A Scholar’s Journey to Publication.”
This event, covering strategies for drafting an article for WLN, including how to find time to write, how to understand the lit review process, and how to find or start a writing group, will be held on Friday, October 26, 2018, 3:00pm to 4:00pm E.S.T. and is hosted by WLN Associate Editors Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Sohui Lee, and Julie Prebel. There will be opportunities for Q & A.
Please welcome to the blog our new associate editor for Asia, Lingshan Song – editor.
Lingshan Song, Assistant Director, Writing Center
Mississippi College
Lingshan Song
Lingshan is the assistant director of the Writing Center at Mississippi College (MC). She also teaches freshmen composition courses and the tutor training course at MC. Her research interests include writing center theory and practice, ESL tutoring, and cultural studies. Currently she has been a strong advocate for advancing writing center movement in China and connecting writing center professionals from China and US. Lingshan also serves as Outreach Coordinator on the Southeastern Writing Center Association (SWCA) board, TESOL Representative for the Association of Christians in Writing Centers (ACWC), and Oversea Representative for the Writing Center Association of China (WCAC).
As a native Chinese, Lingshan is trilingual (Mandarin, English, and Fuzhou Dialect). She enjoys reading, writing, teaching, travelling, making friends from different countries, and exploring diverse cultures. She feels honored to join the WLN editor team this year and very much looking forward to contributing to the community that seeks to connect writing centers across borders.
Tomoyo Okuda graduated with a Ph.D. in Teaching English as a Second Language from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research interests include second language writing, writing center studies, internationalization of higher education, and language policy.
Christiane Donahue (2009) once praised the writing center community as having the “strongest development in terms of exchange of teaching practice and pedagogical framing, always explored in context” (p. 222). This is evident from the fact that we can find writing centers in 63 countries, according to the St. Cloud State University’s Writing Center Directory.
I was always interested in why writing centers became so popular around the world and started collecting literature written about writing centers in different countries (as a side note, I focused on writing center development in Japan for my dissertation research, “The Writing Center as a Global Pedagogy: A Case Study of a Japanese University Seeking Internationalization”). A common topic found in international writing center literature was how the idea of the writing center needed adjustments to suit the cultural, religion, existing literacy practices of each country or institution. But I was more interested in the bigger picture—the socio-political/economic imperatives of writing center initiation, namely, the political landscape of higher education discourses and reforms fed into the decision to initiate or sustain a writing center (Salem, 2014). In this blog post, I would like to discuss three imperatives identified from my reading of international writing center literature (book chapters, articles, reports, websites).
Internationalization has become a powerful agenda for many universities around the world, and for non-English speaking countries, this means internationalizing higher education through the medium of English. Thus, we can see English-medium instruction programs (courses and programs taught in English) in what Harbord (2010) calls US-style universities: universities with “US accreditation, US charter, US-style curriculum, US grading system, a liberal arts approach, and some faculty from the US” (para. 9). Examples of US-style universities would be liberal arts colleges in Hungary, India, and Japan, and American branch universities such as in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, France, Bulgaria, where the writing center is usually managed in conjunction with first year composition courses. Another internationalization initiative for universities is scholarly publications in English and for this purpose, some writing centers in East Asia offer services to help scholars write research manuscripts in English. For instance, according to Kim (2017), the government-supported globalization initiative called ‘Brain Korea 21’, which aims to foster international scholars, led to a wave of new writing centers in South Korean universities. Continue reading “Internationalization, Massification, and the Knowledge Economy: A Comparison of International Writing Center Trends”→
In spring 2017, St. Cloud State University’s Writing Center Administration certificate program offered its first two courses, “Writing Center Theory and Practice” and “Issues in Writing Center Administration.” Students became bonded early on. Friendships and collaborations for research projects and conference presentations grew during that semester and continued into summer term with the final two classes, “Staffing and Training” and “Case Studies in Writing Center Administration.” Because the program is delivered entirely online, I was surprised at the strength of the community, which was much more than I’d hoped for during the 2 ½ years it took me to slog through the morass of bureaucratic speed bumps on the way to program approval. As I said in the earlier article/interview, I’d had to secure approvals from 14 different individuals and committees along the way. This was an intense, real-world lesson in discovering audience expectations, a topic we discuss throughout the WCA program in all of the courses.
The most significant challenge in designing the WCA program has been providing sources, instruction, and assignments that allow students to personalize a learning experience most beneficial to each one of them. Last year’s students represented a range of experience from zero to nine years in WC administration. Some were new MA students; some were PhD students; some were professionals in the field. They represented public and private institutions at the high school, 2-year, and 4-year college levels. One student had developed an independent writing center and had tax-exempt status and a board of directors in place. One, a high school teacher, had never worked in a writing center before and knew just a little about them, but hoped to help build one at her school. This year, there are more graduate students and fewer professionals; however, we have, for the first time, an administrator from a private high school boys’ preparatory school and also an assistant director from a writing center in China. Caswell, McKinney, and Jackson note the development and variety of non-standard writing centers in their book, The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, a longitudinal study of nine new writing center directors.
That our participants include writing center directors in a charter school and in a European boarding school is emblematic of the times. Writing centers have been sprouting up in secondary schools and in non-US settings at a growing rate. As this happens, we think we’ll see that more alternatives to the US university model will emerge as different though effective, ways to do writing center work. (199)
To reflect this diversity in the WCA certificate program, course materials cover a variety of common contexts and issues pertaining to writing center administration, like navigating institutional relationships, researching the writing center, creating assessment activities and reports, grant writing, hiring, training, and other shorter units. Assignments are flexible enough so students can create individualized documents that might be included in an application portfolio or provide a model for their home institution or for the type of writing center setting they are most interested in.
National University of Ireland, Galway || 17 April 2017 || Registration
Innovation is seen as a key ingredient for success in academia, but we often taken good academic writing for granted as a crucial skill in this process. We know from the work of Peter Elbow that writing is a creative and imaginative process, irrespective of the subject. Janet Giltrow has argued that ‘style is meaningful’ and impacts the development of ideas. More recently, Helen Sword has drawn attention to ‘stylish academic writing’, arguing that ‘intellectual creativity thrives best in an atmosphere of experimentation rather than conformity’. Yet the precise relationship between academic writing and innovation remains to be explored; to do so means to highlight the crucial importance of writing centres, writing instructors, and pedagogical initiatives to academia at large.
This seminar will examine the connection between academic writing and innovation from a variety of perspectives, including the use of the Project Based Learning (PBL) and other innovative methodologies, the switch from assessing to improving student writing, the role of writing centres in academia, the ideology of writing spaces, and new ways to support librarians on the path towards publication.
Confirmed Speakers
Tom Deans, University of Connecticut
Steven Engel, University of Michigan
Hellen Fallon, Maynooth University
Adrian Frazier, NUI Galway
Megan Jewel, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio
Ann Nowak, Touro Law Center
Laura McLoughlin, NUI Galway
At the 2015 IWCA Conference, we presented “Creating a Writing Center in Brazil: Revolutionizing the Unknown” (p. 25) in an ignite session. This blog post summarizes the evolution of the project and the exciting results our effort to establish a writing center in Salvador-Bahia, Brazil.
When Fernanda Queirós was pursuing a PhD in Maternal & Child Health from UNC Chapel Hill, she was an avid user of writing center resources, including individual tutoring, English language support programs, and dissertation boot camp. Throughout her time there, she worked closely with Gigi Taylor, the Writing Center’s Senior English Language Specialist. Upon returning to Brazil in a postdoctoral position, Fernanda realized that many of the students who expected to graduate in three months were behind on writing their theses. When she described her experience at UNC, her lead professor, Abrahão Baptista, asked if she would be willing to develop similar writing support for graduate students at Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA).
Fernanda had plenty of experience as a writing center user but had no training as a teacher of writing. Nonetheless, she accepted the challenge and committed to starting a group in two weeks because she was convinced that even limited support would be better than nothing. Abrahão enlisted Prof. Kátia Sá of the Escola Bahiana de Medicina e Saúde Pública (EBMSP) and the Catholic University of Salvador (UCSal). While Abrahão and Kátia shared a deep interest in writing, neither of them knew anything about writing centers and could offer no specific help.
Unable to find information online about writing centers in Brazil, Fernanda reached out to Gigi at the UNC Writing Center. They had a long skype conversation about things to consider, how to set student expectations, how get them accustomed to writing center pedagogy, and about the wealth of resources available through the IWCA. Continue reading “Creating a Writing Center in Salvador-Bahia, Brazil”→
