By Jennifer Rupp, University of Kansas—You’ve spent hours creating a new workshop that you are genuinely excited about – it’s both informative and fun! Then, it’s two minutes to go-time. One student walks through the door. You anxiously smile and say, “We’ll just wait a few more minutes to see if anyone else shows up.” They don’t. Now you both feel awkward […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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.[…]
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 […]
By Lucy McInerney and Jenna Morton-Aiken, Brown University—If you were to walk into the Writing Fellows training classroom at Brown University at three minutes past 1:00 p.m. on any given Tuesday, you would find a darkened room littered with the bodies of students in repose. As you blinked down in confusion at the student closest to you, her head propped […]
By Shaoxuan Tian, Wesleyan University—I forget when and how Lauren—my supervisor and colleague at Wesleyan University’s writing center—and I started to use the phrase “writing trauma.” // “Another sad one with some writing trauma,” she commented on one response to the “How do you describe your relationship with writing?” question in our Writing Mentor program’s application. […]
Introduction by Jennifer Conrad and Ellen Cecil-Lemkin—The 2023 IWCA Collaborative took place in Chicago on Wednesday, February 15 and marked our first return to in-person conferencing since 2019, the year prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The original call for proposals centered on a consideration of “writing center relationships, partnerships, and coalitions,” as well as the benefits of shared embodied presence with colleagues across the field of writing center studies. For us, there was a special energy about returning to a shared physical space, getting to see […]
In August 2023, thanks to the support of English Department and the College of Letters & Science (among others), UW-Madison’s Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum programs welcomed two full-time teaching faculty, Abigail (Abby) Letak and Seth Umbaugh.
By Mario Ramirez-Arrazola, University of Oklahoma—In writing center work, It is hard to refrain from thinking about the writing center as the client’s endpoint, and yet it is important to recognize the varied movements and progressions that bring writers to us. Before entering the space of the writing center, they have had to travel through a journey of self-contained experiences, which affected them in either grand or negligible ways. When they walk out, perhaps never to be seen again, their stories don’t stop there. […]
By Joseph Franklin, New York City College of Technology—I am writing this at a bamboo table and simple folding chair combo. I am using Microsoft Word on a Mac laptop mounted on a Roost laptop stand and using a Logitech ERGO K860 keyboard that supports my wrists. I am playing instrumental music by Grandbrothers through Sennheiser PXC 550 noise canceling headphones and I have notifications turned off on all devices. These tools (and others) have been curated […]
