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Interdisciplinary Writing Center Collaborations
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Lee, Jade Caines Caronia, Nancy Beltran, Diane M. Quaglia |
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Abstract | This article discusses approaches and attitudes toward writing center outreach amid misconceptions surrounding writing centers across many college campuses. Through the experiences of one land grant institution, the authors advocate interdisciplinary cooperation across campus to combat faulty perceptions of writing centers’ offerings. Students and faculty alike benefit from a new understanding of the writing center’s mission to strengthen students’ writing and processes. Introduction Like many writing centers, the University of Rhode Island (URI) writing center mission is to assist all writers, at all levels, disciplines, and stages of writing. During Academic Year (AY) 2013-2014, positive catalysts for rethinking our idea of a writing center, including a newly achieved budget line and staffing changes, allowed the Interim Director, J. C. Lee, and Assistant Director, Nancy Caronia, to actively seek and respond to faculty concerns about writers. These interdisciplinary interactions strengthened alliances and created new campus-wide connections. This essay shares our experience of aligning the writing center into a campus-wide resource for students and faculty. We recognized the foundation of tutoring and writing assistance as a discursive practice that actively framed the center’s mission. We enhanced visibility by expanding services to the university community through outreach, communication, and collaboration with faculty, and campus-wide workshops. These changes shifted perception, promoting the center’s mission and increasing awareness of its offerings across campus. This paper will discuss the need and implementation for collaborative, interdisciplinary changes across the campus. Rethinking Past Efforts As we shifted and re-centered, we realized that we inherited misconceptions about the mission and work of a writing center that plague many campus centers--including those who view the writing center as a place of remediation or a fix-it shop for poorly written papers. In his landmark work “The Idea of a Writing Center,” Stephen North expressed his frustration at the “[i]gnorance” of those who “do not understand ... what can happen, in a writing center” (“Idea” 433). North originally wanted autonomy for writing centers (“Idea” 438; 446), but later on, he advocated a “carefully distanced relationship between classroom teachers and the writing center” (“Revisiting” 16). He admitted that this notion may create “as many new tensions as new opportunities,” but thought the method both promising and necessary (“Revisiting” 16). In the twenty-first century, writing centers are being tasked with even more interdisciplinary responsibilities while tackling the same misconceptions about its role. In an interview with Elizabeth Threadgill, Muriel Harris points out writing centers have become “resource centers for teachers and students” (Threadgill 20). At URI, such expectations led to an ever more complicated, if more expansive, relationship between the writing center and campus-wide departments. As a writing center, we engaged with these complexities in an effort to rectify widespread misconceptions that it was a place of remediation. We re-positioned ourselves as a campus-wide resource for students, instructors, and disciplines. Like Elizabeth Boquet and Neal Lerner, we embrace the notion that “[t]here is no separate but equal” when it comes to classroom and nonclassroom teaching (186). Difficulties changing this discursive rhetoric often begin with faculty expectations of tutoring sessions. Shannon Carter explains, “The writing center is made up of a series of rhetorical spaces in which tutors and students attempt to negotiate academic projects assigned by and evaluated by individuals who are not directly associated with/involved in the writing center’s daily activities” (136). Interdisciplinary outreach helped us to decrease the distance between faculty expectations and tutoring; we focused on students and faculty as separate need-based groups with overlapping aims to create better writing. We addressed the misunderstanding of the writing center’s mission because, during AY 20132104, the URI Writing Center had financial support for the first time. With our new funding, we hired more tutors to work more hours, which included collaborative workshops and outreach with both students and faculty that increased awareness and understanding of the writing center. Our endeavors were most successful at the individual level, where we fostered connections with faculty members across disciplines. In this regard, we propose an Idea of a Writing Center as a space with a secondary mission: interdisciplinary campus-wide collaboration countering widespread misconceptions of writing centers’ work. Outreach North originally disliked outreach, describing such efforts as “public relations,” which he worried would lead to other departments co-opting the writing center (North, “Idea” 445). Later reflections by North acknowledged his early “romantic idealization” (North, “Revisiting” 9). It is common in academic spheres for outreach and public relations to be viewed as selling out, and as a result, discussions of outreach are muted amid the larger conversation of writing center theory and practice. This lack of discourse is evidenced by the presence of only one article that is indexed by the search term “outreach” in the Writing Center Journal’s online archives. Still, outreach is essential if we are to rectify misunderstandings about writing centers and attract a wide base of students to our services. Since the students who visit the center come from across the disciplines, they informed our efforts at fostering collaboration and interdisciplinarity across campus. We engaged in outreach endeavors that promoted the center as a campus-wide resource. Since URI’s writing center is under the aegis of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, but is physically located in the university's Academic Enhancement Center (AEC), we realized a need to change perceptions. Our location perpetuated the inaccurate view of the center as a fix-it shop, since the AEC serves as a campus-wide resource for assistance with time management, learning strategies, and subject specific tutoring. Whether students visiting the AEC are referrals from instructors or counselors, the AEC exists as a location for intervention, and remediation, by design, and this difference in designation was one that we worked to address through class visits and tours of the writing center, email and face-to-face communication with faculty members, and workshops focused on specific topics of interest to student writers. Our efforts to create the distinction between the writing center mission and the AEC objectives increased an understanding of who we are and what we do. We chose to use a campus-wide awareness campaign through event promotion and offerings. We posted upcoming events to university calendars, emailed faculty and students through list-serves and our new WConline scheduling system, and distributed flyers. We were aware, as Kevin Davis suggests that writing center tutors are more aware than most of how students “share ... a lack of confidence, a fear of the audition, a distaste for being judged” (67) as bad writers in need of being fixed through remediation. We had our undergraduate tutors do outreach across the campus’ public spaces to field queries and hand out information as part of their weekly hours. Their knowledge and understanding of the undergraduate mindset was also assisted our tutors in gaining professional development experience. As Kathleen Welsch suggests, “Administrators need to be educated about the two groups of students who benefit from a writing center: those who walk through the door for assistance and those who work on the front line providing the assistance” (7). Such efforts parallel other programs, including the University of Wisconsin at Madison, whose center offers “Co-Teaching,” “Group Meetings,” and “Orientations” at both the classroom and the campus-wide scales (“About Writing Center Outreach” n. pag.). We adopted Carter’s notion of “different rhetorical spaces for different rhetorical purposes” in order to communicate with the various groups of the campus and give our tutors professional development experience (150). Interdisciplinary Faculty Work: Campus Visits To work toward university-wide collaboration, our writing center has always offered classroom visits, which are geared to attracting students to the writing center, as North originally suggested (“Idea” 440-441). This year, directors Lee and Caronia worked with instructors and students, modifying the objectives of the class visits/tours to cover a broader range of disciplines than previously targeted. Students from all disciplines seek writing tutoring, but historically, the largest population of tutees has been first year writing students, whose composition instructors directly encourage their attendance. We encountered misconceptions, which prompted us to increase campus visits outside of our department. Through inviting conversations with faculty, which began in e-mail and continued during class visits—or vice versa— we familiarized interdisciplinary faculty with the writing center. The more we communicated directly and worked with faculty, the more they understood what a writing center actually does. With this base of understanding, instructors would be more likely to encourage their students toward the center as a supportive and welcoming resource, rather than as remediation, punishment, or editing service. Typically, our staff conducts between 70-80 tours and visits during the first two weeks of every term. Writing and Rhetoric courses comprised the majority of these visits/tours, which were developed through the department’s faculty meeting, the week before classes began. We also attended the new faculty orientation, which garnered some new classroom visits and new alliances in the Kine |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=honors_prog_facpubs |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=honors_prog_facpubs&httpsredir=1&referer= |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/5514z4.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
