Year: 2020

Undergraduate Research as Transformation: Writing Fellows Build and Share Knowledge

Big 10 Writing Centers, Collaborative Learning, Peer Tutoring, Undergraduate Students, Writing Fellows

By Brenna Swift—Hello from the UW-Madison Writing Center as the summer term begins! In this uncertain time, we have both continued to serve our students and considered the ways our work might fit into the big picture—of a transformed world, of education for social justice, and of new practices in teaching of writing. As one of the assistant directors of the undergraduate Writing Fellows program and an instructor for English 403, our peer tutor education class, I have found myself thinking […]

May 18, 2020

An Approach to Understanding and Designing an Inclusivity Statement

Collaborative Learning, Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate Students, Social Justice Committee

By Chris Castillo—The inclusivity statement is an increasingly prevalent genre in academic and nonacademic spaces. Inclusivity statements have become staples in most academic institutions—and even within specific departments in those institutions. The individual departments that take the initiative to develop inclusivity statements make it a point to […]

April 6, 2020

Adapting to Our New Reality

Uncategorized

By Nancy Linh Karls and Emily Hall—The last two weeks have been tumultuous on many fronts, for our students, tutors, and staff at the UW-Madison Writing Center and at other writing centers around the country. We write this brief post to let you know of the decisions that we’ve made to adapt our writing center to the array of current challenges Our response, of course, may shift going forward, but this is our starting point for continued instruction this spring […]

March 24, 2020

Time, Space, and Energy: Graduate Student Tutor Experiences in the Writing Center

Uncategorized

By Amanda Pratt—As graduate students who work in writing centers, we tend to juggle many responsibilities. Our coursework, our dissertation research, our other jobs—the classes we teach, the professors we are tasked with supporting, the programs we run. Our families and personal lives. Oftentimes, and especially for neurodiverse and otherwise marginalized graduate students, this balancing act compounds the unseen emotional and psychic labor of existing in the academy […]

March 9, 2020

Writing with Others: Renaissance Coteries, the Writing Center, and Community

Collaborative Learning, Writing Center Theory, Writing Groups

By Emily Loney—When Sir Philip Sidney sent the manuscript of his prose romance, the Arcadia, to his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, sometime in the 1580s, he sent a letter along as well. Apologizing for the imperfections of his tale, Sidney tells Pembroke in his letter that the Arcadia was written for her, and he reminds her […]

February 17, 2020

Madison Writing Assistance: Spotlighting Three Writers

Uncategorized

By Tim Cavnar—One of the many programs administered by UW-Madison’s Writing Center is called Madison Writing Assistance (MWA). MWA could be described in many different ways—a local literacy program, the Writing Center’s public outreach branch, a tutoring service. Co-founded by former Writing Center Director Brad Hughes in 1999 and offering writing tutoring out of Madison’s Goodman South Library branch, it has grown significantly since that time. Currently, MWA offers […]

February 3, 2020