By Rebecca Lorimer Leonard Rebecca Lorimer Leonard is an assistant professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a former UW-Madison Writing Center tutor and Assistant Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program. You can read about her work at http://blogs.umass.edu/rlorimer/. In late November, CNN aired Ivory Tower, […]
By Elisabeth Miller—Each semester during Welcome Week, the Writing Across the Curriculum program at UW-Madison runs a two-day training for new teaching assistants in Communication-B (Comm-B) courses. Comm-B courses are writing-intensive, exposing students to conventions of writing in disciplines from anthropology to biology to journalism to psychology. The training, with 70 TAs every fall and 40 every spring, is energetic and packed with advice preparing TAs to conference with student writers […]
By Mackenzie McDermit and Kevin Mullen Mackenzie McDermit is a recent alumna of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she participated in the university’s Writing Fellows program. She spent a humbling and inspiring semester researching writing pedagogy in the Odyssey Project and has been hooked ever since. This is her first year as a tutor for […]
By Chris Earle Jackie Grutsch McKinney is an associate professor of English at Ball State University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric and composition. Over the last eighteen years, she has worked at three different writing centers as a tutor, assistant director, and then as a director. Her book, Peripheral Visions for […]
By Rachel Carrales Rachel Carrales has worked in the writing center at UW-Madison since 2010. She is a PhD candidate in Composition and Rhetoric at UW-Madison, where she studies how middle-class mothers use their literacy practices to respond to the ideology of domesticity. In addition to working as a tutor in the writing center at […]
By KimMarie Cole, State University of New York at Fredonia My thanks to Brad Hughes for the invitation and opportunity to share these ideas with you and to my colleague Heather McEntarfer who provided helpful comments and insights on early drafts of this post. My family and I are building a house. For more than […]
By Becca Tarsa In addition to teaching both first-year and intermediate composition for the English Department, Becca Tarsa has worked in the UW-Madison Writing Center for five years, and is currently serving as TA Coordinator. She is in the final year of her PhD in UW’s Composition and Rhetoric program. In her article “Composition’s Imagined […]
by Julia Dauer Julia Dauer has worked at the Writing Center since 2012. She is a graduate student in literary studies at UW-Madison, where she writes about American literature and teaches literature and composition courses. I went to a small liberal arts college, where writing spaces were relatively uniform. The Writing Center was housed on the […]
By Rachel Herzl-Betz Rachel Herzl-Betz is the T.A. Coordinator of Outreach for the Writing Center at UW-Madison, where she has been a tutor since 2012. She is also a PhD candidate in Literary Studies, with a focus on Victorian Literature, Disability Studies, and Rhetoric. This August, when I began my work as the Outreach Coordinator […]
By Annika Conrad—I was always wary of stepping outside the classroom. As someone who moved straight from college to graduate school, I’ve felt most comfortable working with students. I had a lot of questions about what it would mean for me to bring my skills as a writing instructor to communities outside the university: Would people trust me? Would they view me as a know-it-all academic? Would my university experiences actually translate into helping community members with their writing? For a long time, questions like these prevented me from taking the leap. But when I joined a support […]
