{"id":5884,"date":"2015-04-14T08:30:21","date_gmt":"2015-04-14T13:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/?p=5884"},"modified":"2017-07-12T14:52:15","modified_gmt":"2017-07-12T19:52:15","slug":"wont-you-be-more-than-my-neighbor-writing-centerlibrary-partnerships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/wont-you-be-more-than-my-neighbor-writing-centerlibrary-partnerships\/","title":{"rendered":"Won\u2019t You Be (More Than) My Neighbor? Writing Center\/Library Partnerships"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Heather James and Rebecca S. Nowacek<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Rebecca
Rebecca (left) and Heather (right) inside the Ott Memorial Writing Center<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Heather is a Research & Instruction Librarian at Marquette University\u2019s Raynor Memorial Libraries. She works to develop and promote information literacy instruction for courses and is the liaison for the departments of Biology, Biomedical Science, Chemistry, and English. She also holds an MFA in Poetry from San Diego State University.<\/em><\/p>\n

Rebecca is the Director of Marquette University\u2019s Ott Memorial Writing Center and an associate professor in the Department of English.\u00a0\u00a0 She\u2019s also a former grad tutor and Assistant Director of the L&S Program in Writing Across the Curriculum at UW-Madison.<\/em><\/p>\n

When a writing center is located inside of a library, it can be easy to feel like a renter: an interloper in someone else\u2019s space rather than a partner in building and inhabiting that space.\u00a0 And it can be a challenge to develop professional relationships that shift this feeling.\u00a0 Here at Marquette, we feel lucky.\u00a0 That \u201cwe\u201d is both of us\u2014Rebecca (the writing center director) and Heather (a research and instruction librarian).\u00a0 Our jobs are busy ones\u2014intellectually demanding and constantly in motion\u2014but over the years we have developed a relationship that allows us to rely on each other, share the load, make each other laugh, and be our best professional selves.\u00a0 People often speak colloquially of their \u201cwork spouses\u201d and we\u2019re happy to report that our \u201cmarriage\u201d is three years strong.<\/p>\n

The focus of our post is the ongoing and deeply rewarding collaboration that has emerged between the writing center and the library at Marquette University: it began as a somewhat impromptu bit of cooperation based on an idiosyncratic personal connection, but has grown into a collaboration that informs in very deep and often ambitious ways our ideas about how both of our programs can continue to grow within our university community.\u00a0 We recognize, of course, that there\u2019s a fair amount of scholarship on the relationships between writing centers and libraries\u2014both published (O\u2019Kelly, Garrison, Meyer, & Torreano<\/a>; Elmborg and Hook<\/a>) and unpublished (we\u2019ve attended panels at the International Writing Centers Association, Conference on College Composition and Communication, Association of Research Libraries, and LOEX); the common motive in these publications and presentations is to share the structures of and conditions for successful collaborations.\u00a0 We\u2019re hardly the first to experience such a positive collaboration and while we won\u2019t make the claim that what we\u2019ve experienced is unique, we aim to share in this post the circumstances that have fostered our collaboration, the forms this collaboration has taken, and the ways in which this collaboration influences how we think about the future of both our programs.<\/p>\n

Our Context<\/h3>\n
\"The<\/a>
The hallway to the Ott, nestled in a corner of the Ott<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Marquette\u2019s Ott Memorial Writing Center hasn\u2019t always been located within the university library.\u00a0 For many years, the writing center was located in a building on a far corner of campus, shared with the speech pathology clinic. When the university opened the new Raynor Library in the center of campus in 2003, the writing center was granted a prime piece of real estate on the second floor, near the student computer labs and study areas.\u00a0 Administratively, the writing center doesn\u2019t report to the library (but instead through the College of Arts and Sciences), but geographically the writing center is very happily nestled into the same corner as the offices for Raynor\u2019s research and instruction librarians.<\/p>\n

More personally, Rebecca began at Marquette in 2001 as a faculty member in the English Department; when I became director of the writing center in 2011, I packed up my things and moved into a lovely office located inside the writing center\u2014and thus inside the library.\u00a0 Although I\u2019d been at the university for a decade, moving into the library meant building new relationships and friendships: every morning, I now walk through the turnstiles and wave to the folks staffing the circulation desk; when I need to use space for a workshop, I rely on the library\u2019s facilities and tech support; when I need to make copies, I shuttle up to the third floor to use the machine in the Dean of Libraries\u2019 office.\u00a0 During my first year as director, I was happily settling into the new social space of the library.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t until Fall 2012 that I started to recognize the ways in which the librarians could be my partners as well as my neighbors.<\/p>\n

Heather took the circuitous route to becoming a librarian and had previously worked in writing centers and as an adjunct composition instructor. So as a librarian, I\u2019ve always thought there were great opportunities for librarians to collaborate with writing centers and writing programs, bringing information literacy to the table. As a subject liaison librarian for Biology, Biomedical Science, Chemistry, I aim to be the \u201cone-stop\u201d contact for the departments\u2019 faculty and students in any of their information seeking and access needs. In line with my previous work, though, I\u2019m most excited and interested in working closely with courses to incorporate information literacy into the curriculum. When I came to Marquette in 2012, I had a personal recommendation from a former colleague to seek out Rebecca, and it was the beginning of a beautiful thing.<\/p>\n

A Variety of Partnerships<\/h3>\n

Our work together over the past several years has been, if we\u2019re honest, largely a matter of kairos, responding to a number of (often unexpected) opportunities.\u00a0 At the beginning Rebecca asked Heather to collaborate on a single 75-minute workshop in response to student demand; we were then paired to work on a project by the university administration\u2014who saw an overlap between our areas of expertise.\u00a0 Since then, we\u2019ve become more proactive, working together to conduct teaching outreaches in classrooms across campus\u2014a step that has helped the writing center\u2019s writing across the curriculum work grow by leaps and bounds.<\/p>\n

Getting started: Collaborating on workshops<\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Rebecca and Heather leading a consideration of research and writing lit reviews<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our collaboration started modestly enough.\u00a0 During the Fall 2012 semester, Rebecca was rolling out a series of workshops for writers\u2014one of which was \u201cWriting Effective Lit Reviews.\u201d\u00a0 She began the workshop by asking writers if they had any particular questions; five of the six students came hoping to learn more about research strategies: how to get started, how to know if they had found the best research, how to know when they had enough.\u00a0 Her heart sank as she realized how ill prepared she was to answer those questions.\u00a0 Her first thought after leaving that workshop was that she needed to tap the wisdom of her neighbor librarians, so she emailed her new acquaintance Heather to ask if she might be willing to help revise and maybe even co-lead the next iteration of the workshop.\u00a0 Heather was game.<\/p>\n

We revised the workshop, advertised it as being co-led by the writing center director and a research librarian, and had nearly 40 people packed into the room.\u00a0 The feedback we received was full of praise and this workshop continues to draw large registrations every single semester.\u00a0 Clearly, we\u2019d found a niche of writers who already felt how intertwined their writing, researching, and reading processes were.\u00a0 Nudged into collaboration by the grad student writers of lit reviews and encouraged by our success, we continued in this modest vein until our next big collaborative project: an academic integrity tutorial.<\/p>\n

Gaining momentum: Co-authoring the academic integrity tutorial<\/h4>\n

In Spring 2014, we were asked to co-author the online tutorial on academic integrity that would be required of all undergraduate students.\u00a0 We were tasked with covering issues of plagiarism, paraphrase, cheating, misrepresentation of credentials, falsifying data, and general ethical conduct in a catchy 60-minute format.<\/p>\n

During the process we learned that both the writing center and the library have similar challenges in the university.\u00a0 Too often, our colleagues and administrators see writing instruction and information literacy as contentless and contextless, as a skill to be acquired at one point in time and then simply applied subsequently.\u00a0 In contrast, we found camaraderie as we discussed our work as a process of helping students develop richer understandings of information literacy and of writing\u2014to help students see themselves as acquiring knowledge and strategies that may be used, but must often be adjusted and repurposed, as they enter into new contexts.<\/p>\n

Two themes, key to both our areas, emerged as we worked.\u00a0 First, the processes of finding, using, and attributing information (broadly defined) are subtle and complex.\u00a0 It was easy to address the most basic expectations of academic writing and say that violating them can bring trouble\u2014but these expectations are variable and can\u2019t easily be codified into a short list of do\u2019s and don\u2019ts for an hour-long tutorial.\u00a0\u00a0 For instance, we drafted a nuanced discussion of paraphrase that included many<\/em> examples as well as a distinction between plagiarism and copyright infringement.\u00a0 Second, we agreed that students\u2019 choices around issues of academic integrity are wildly contextual and impacted by many variables including the course design, the writer\u2019s legacy of schooling and cultural expectations, and their levels of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.\u00a0 For this reason, we were united in advocating an approach that worked to understand and address the reasons student choose, for example, to cheat on exams, rather than taking a \u201cjust say no\u201d approach.<\/p>\n

In the end, this project threw into relief for us how very much in synch those of us working in the writing center and in the library are when it comes to engaging writers in the complicated processes of researching, writing, and revising. The process was foundational for us.<\/p>\n

Reaching out, together: Co-teaching in classrooms<\/h4>\n

As we began this most recent academic year (the third year of our collaboration) we began to see opportunities for partnership everywhere–particularly in the synergy between Heather\u2019s work as a liaison librarian and Rebecca\u2019s desire to reach more writers beyond FYE.\u00a0 Marquette University does not have a formal writing across the curriculum program, but our partnership has helped the Ott build an emergent WAC program in three specific ways.<\/p>\n

First, we have taken our partnership into classrooms.\u00a0 At the request of a colleague in psychology, we have undertaken a model of instruction that is new on our campus.\u00a0 Namely, we transformed our 75-minute, one-shot lit review workshop into ongoing, scaffolded instruction within a classroom throughout the semester.\u00a0 This approach\u2014which involved us visiting the classroom individually and together at least five times during the semester\u2014consciously drew on and integrated our separate areas of expertise.\u00a0 The feedback from the instructor and the students showed positive impacts of our joint inclusion in the course.<\/p>\n

Based on that experience, we were inspired to launch a second innovation: a new Course-Embedded Tutors (CET) program.\u00a0 In many ways our program is modeled on the Writing Fellows program at UW-Madison (which Rebecca observed and occasionally helped with as a grad tutor)\u2014but it also crucially builds on the Embedded Librarian (EL) program that Heather has been forwarding since 2012.\u00a0 This EL program, like many others across the country, moves away from the one-shot \u201cfield trip\u201d or guest speaker approach and towards more extended co-teaching.\u00a0\u00a0 Spring 2015 has been the pilot semester of the CET program; because this cohort of CETs is the first at our university, Heather is their go-to resource for what it\u2019s like to be embedded in a class.\u00a0 We\u2019re developing a system that coordinates the work of the embedded librarian and embedded tutors\u2014sequencing feedback, being in communication about what students are struggling with, trying when possible to use common vocabulary and to prompt writers to make connections to previous conversations and drafts.\u00a0\u00a0 Not only has our Embedded Tutor \/ Embedded Librarian collaboration been a tremendous advantage to the CETs who benefit from Heather\u2019s experience, we find it also helps our writers experience more clearly the ongoing interrelations between research and writing.<\/p>\n

Finally, we\u2019ve brought our collaboration back into the writing center by offering co-consultations with writing tutors and a librarian during a single \u201cwriting center\u201d conference.\u00a0 Specifically, through Heather\u2019s liaison relationship with the Department of Biology, the instructor of a grad level epigenetics course has committed his students to a semester-long research and writing project.\u00a0 Working in groups of 4-6, these grad students have met repeatedly, as a group, with both Heather and a writing center tutor.\u00a0 Piloting these joint consultations with small groups of highly motivated, advanced students has given us an ideal environment to test-drive the types of collaborative and integrative pedagogies that we hope will become increasingly central to the work of both our programs.<\/p>\n

Looking Forward: Scaling Up to Make the Personal Systemic (and Sustainable)<\/h3>\n

As our descriptions no doubt make clear, Marquette\u2019s writing center benefits enormously from Heather\u2019s seemingly boundless energy.\u00a0 And to some degree the depth and the scope of our collaboration is made possible by our personal connections: we like each other, we work well together, our offices are just across the hall from each other which makes all sorts of impromptu conversations and spot-checking possible.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019re mindful that we need to build a program that runs deeper than one person\u2019s energy or one friendship.\u00a0 At this moment, we\u2019re looking forward and working to build deeper connections not just between the two of us, but between our programs.\u00a0 We\u2019re just getting started on this stage of our collaboration, but we\u2019ll conclude by sharing some of our ideas on how to distribute our points of connection more broadly.\u00a0 Perhaps some readers will find these helpful as they consider how to build and sustain collaborations on their own campuses; perhaps some readers will have suggestions to offer us based on their own experiences.\u00a0 We welcome all of your feedback in the comments.<\/p>\n