The Elephant in the Center: The Question of Workshops
By Jennifer Rupp, University of Kansas
Year: 2024
Video Narratives in Training
By Katie Layendecker, Carthage College—When our director asked my co-trainer and me if there was anything we’d like to change about our training program, we knew we wanted to modernize it in a way that was both informational and fun. We couldn’t forget that, for the most part, our audience is first-year students who don’t know what a writing center is like. The new tutor training program at our writing center is led by experienced tutors and has been more or less unchanged for the past four years. This means […]
Call for Proposals, 2024
Another Word is currently seeking proposals for blog posts to be published in 2024. We seek proposals from those invested in writing center studies on a broad range of topics related to administering, tutoring, training, and working in the writing center.
Rebuilding a Research Culture Of, By, and For Our Students
By Alexa Quezada, Indiana University Indianapolis—During the summer of 2022, my campus’s University Writing Center underwent a series of changes that massively impacted the culture of the Center, including our approach to research. We lost both our director and assistant director in rapid succession. Subsequently, roughly a third of our student consultants quit in a combination of solidarity and worry that the UWC—and their jobs—would not exist by the beginning of the fall semester. Just before the semester began […]
A Survey-Based Study Exploring Required Writing Center Visits at a SLAC
By Eve Brunell, Estella Davis, Jay Fowler, Caroline Host, Dylan Howell, Emily Jackson, Olivia Jackson, Evan Paden, Olivia Sparks, Ellie Thornsbury, Erika Williams (under the direction of Dr. Scott Whiddon, Transylvania University)—In Fall 2023, Transylvania University Writing Center (TUWC) partnered with four undergraduate courses—theater, philosophy, sociology, and writing/rhetoric/communication—to support writers working within a range of genres and assignment types. In each of these partnerships, enrolled students were required to work with a TUWC undergraduate peer writing consultant at least two times to support understanding prompts, brainstorming possible pathways, developing drafts, and considering revision strategies. […]
ChatGPT and Writing Center Tutors: Establishing a “both/and” Relationship
By Jun Akiyoshi, The Pennsylvania State University, and Rajwan Alshareefy, University of Delaware—Both of us, Jun and Rajwan, have similar backgrounds. We worked as EFL/ESL teachers, studied in an interdisciplinary area of Composition and Applied Linguistics, enjoyed talking about research and practice of writing education, and most importantly, we worked together at the same writing center when we were graduate students. Even after we earned our Ph.D.s, we continued to engage with, learn about, and research (writing) education. Throughout the years, we often talked about the theory and praxis of (college) writing, second language education, among many others. Our conversations became more heated when […]
A Collective Center for Communal Care
By Rachel Herzl-Betz and britty cox, Nevada State University—Once, my (Rachel’s) direct supervisor in the Provost’s Office asked whether we had ever presented on our writing center leadership structure. At the time, I laughed it off. Why would we talk about how we keep the trains running on time? As we (Rachel and britty) thought more, that idea connected to larger questions about writing center interdependence and the ways that we all get used to what we do. Like a grad student learning to teach […]
Looking Back, Looking Ahead: Analyzing the History of Lafayette’s College Writing Program
By McKenna Graf and Emma Hetrick, Lafayette College—Students and faculty of the Lafayette College Writing Program (CWP) have been embarking on a journey through their history. Leading with passion, we have been investigating how we operated in the past and how that might inform and improve our future. In Fall 2023, we started by gathering information on alumni, sorting through archival material about writing all over campus, and interviewing past employees of the program. With these seedlings of our project, we were able to present our research at the historic Hotel Bethlehem on Friday, January 12, 2024.
Tutor Identity: Learning from Preservice Teachers’ Tutoring Experiences
By Rasha Alkhateeb, Loren Jones, and Alison Jovanovic, University of Maryland, College Park—Writing center tutors are teachers of writing. As tutors identify their reflexive writing identities, or how they understand their identity as writers and teachers of writing, they negotiate how writing is positioned as a meaning-making process in their sessions (Ryan). The process of developing a writer and teacher identity makes writing tutoring spaces valuable for preservice teachers who are learning how to work alongside students.[…]
Honoring the Writing Center’s Instructors: 2024 Awards for Excellence in Teaching
Since 2016, the Writing Center has recognized the outstanding contributions of our teaching assistance through teaching excellence awards. Our team of over 30 highly skilled teaching assistants, who are enrolled in either master’s or doctoral degree programs, provide one-to-one writing instruction to students. In addition to this, they actively participate in campus-wide outreach initiatives, lead […]