Category: Graduate Students

Colorful globe sitting on a desk

Empathetic Listening and Collaborative Learning: My Experience as an International Writing Center Tutor

Collaborative Learning, Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate Students, Multilingual Writers, Peer Tutoring, Social Justice, Tutor Publications, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Kuhelika Ghosh—When I work with international undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center, I often find myself taking a moment or two to acknowledge the specific challenges that the student shares with me. During some of these conversations, I end up briefly sharing my own experiences during my undergraduate degree when I struggled with writing within certain academic genres as a new international student. I still remember the first time I […]

March 21, 2023
world map with pins in it

I’m So Sorry, English Is Not My First Language

Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate Students, Multilingual Writers, Social Justice, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Robert Zatryb, University of Connecticut—‘I’m so sorry, English is not my first language.’ Have you ever heard this sentence in your tutoring sessions? Have you read it among the information provided by the student writer ahead of the appointment? I certainly did, with a surprising regularity and always in a similar, apologetic wording. To some tutors and administrators, this tone might go unnoticed and be trivialised, but it actually should be very striking. The writers are […]

March 7, 2023
close up on two laptops and two pairs of hand sitting side-by-side

Spotlighting the Role of Shadowing Co-Teaching Sessions in a Writing Center’s Outreach Program

Graduate Students, Outreach, Tutor Training, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Nattaporn Luangpipat—The outreach program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center was  established to promote a strong culture of writing across the curriculum by supporting faculty, staff, and students in all disciplines and programs throughout the University. It connects the Writing Center and various campus communities to share our skilled instruction and learn from our partners about their areas of expertise. The Writing Center offers  four major kinds of outreach […]

January 24, 2023
Five people holding up a colorful, cutout speech bubble that covers their face.

Illuminating the Writer Behind the Draft: Insights on Written Feedback Appointments

Graduate Students, Multilingual Writers, Technology, The Online Writing Center, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Center Research, Writing Center Tutors

By Samitha Senanayake—After completing an asynchronous feedback appointment and glancing, often with tired eyes, at the neat blocks of paragraphs in the global or summary comment, I feel good: job done! But it’s only recently that I’ve begun to wonder what the same paragraphs might make a student feel. Even before they read the text, what must feedback in the form of  paragraphs feel like, sound like? In the same way, does a track change on Microsoft Word […]

November 29, 2022
Vancouver, British Columbia city scape against a bright cloudy sky and reflective lake

Writing Center Affiliates’ Recent Conference Participation 

Diversity and Inclusion, Events, Graduate Students, IWCA, Multilingual Writers, Peer Tutoring, Social Justice, Writing Center Conference, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Center Research, Writing Center Tutors

By Ellen Cecil-Lemkin—The first in-person International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) Conference since 2019 was held from October 26 to 29, 2022 at Vancouver, British Columbia. Sherry Wynn Perdue, IWCA president, wrote, “Attended by almost 500 members from all over the world, our annual conference offered presenters and attendees an opportunity to converse and conspire, so we may reconceive our roles as […]

November 8, 2022
in this photo collage, a woman walks along a yellow wall; on the wall, the phrase "ongoing education" appears, along with a graphic depicting a neural network

Learning Together Through Ongoing Education

Collaborative Learning, Graduate Students, Tutor Training

By Seth Umbaugh—In “The Tutoring Corona,” Brad Hughes provided an overview of our writing center’s practice of providing professional development opportunities for our graduate tutors through ongoing education. As the Writing Center’s TA Assistant Director this academic year, I worked with our administrative leadership team to coordinate an exciting series of ongoing education seminars (OGEs) that offered graduate tutors a range of professionalization opportunities and aided the development of our center’s values and pedagogical practices. […]

April 14, 2022
Isabella Robinson designed this brightly colored and modern banner advertising the UW-Madison Writing Center. Featured is a collage of trees, a lake, pencils, and a location indicator.

New Tutors Enrich Our Writing Center

Big 10 Writing Centers, Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate Students, Peer Tutoring, Staff Introductions, Updates, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Emily Bouza—During this academic year, we have added many new tutors to the Writing Center that have brought an increased diversity of perspectives and experiences to our team. We now have tutors from fields including Applied Linguistics, Art History, African Cultural Studies, Composition and Rhetoric, Curriculum Instruction, English, English as a Second Language, Folklore Studies […]

February 8, 2022
Bree Newsome climbing up a flag poll and removing a Confederate flag.

Allyship & Co-Conspiracy in an Antiracist Writing Center

Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate Students, Peer Tutoring, Racial Justice, Social Justice, Tutor Training, Writing Center Theory, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Gabrielle Isabel Kelenyi and Seth Umbaugh—This fall, the Writing Center offered an ongoing education group (OGE) about being an ally versus a co-conspirator in an antiracist writing center, which was co-facilitated by the TA Assistant Director of the Writing Center, Seth Umbaugh, and the TA Coordinator of Multicultural and Social Justice Initiatives, Gabrielle Kelenyi. We assembled […]

December 7, 2021
decorative flower image

Honoring the Writing Center’s Instructors: 2021 Awards for Excellence in Teaching

Awards and Honors, Graduate Students, Peer Tutoring, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Writing Center Tutors

By the Writing Center Leadership Team TA Award Committee—For the past five years, the Writing Center has celebrated our excellent instructors by honoring selected students with teaching awards. Each semester, we have between 45 and 50 doctoral-level teaching assistants who work with our students in one-to-one writing instruction, provide outreach across campus, lead workshops, and more. To select our award winners, we invite our teaching assistants to nominate their colleagues or themselves for these awards. Nominees are invited to apply by submitting […]

April 27, 2021
Worn tools for building laid out on a white background.

Developing a Multimodal Toolkit for Greater Writing Center Accessibility

Disability and Writing Centers, Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate Students, Peer Tutoring, Writing Center Research, Writing Center Theory, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Ellen Cecil-Lemkin and Lisa Marvel Johnson—As several scholars have already pointed out (Dembsey; Hitt; Kiedaisch and Dinitz to name a few), historically, the scholarship on disability in the writing center is… not great (to put it lightly). It’s seeped in ableism by positioning disabled writers as “other” and problems that need to be solved. This framing leads to positioning disabled students “as so radically different from other students that they are beyond help—that they require too much time, resources, or special knowledge” (Hitt). This perspective, however, goes beyond ableism that occurs on an individual level. […]

April 20, 2021