Group items tagged

■ "We Also Ofer Online Services at Interpellation.edu": Althusserian Hails and Online Writing Centers Alan Benson ■ Situated Design for Multiliteracy Centers: A Rhetorical Approach to Visual Design Sohui Lee ■ Back to the Center: University of North Carolina Greensboro's Digital ACT Studio Lindsay Sabatino ■ Yes...And With Me: Mutuality and Improvisation as Methods for Consultant Development Kerri Bright Flinchbaugh ■ Training Speech Center Consultants: Moving Forward with a Backward Glance Linda Hobgood ■ Promoting Independence: Conducting Efcient Sessions with Learning-Disabled Students Ory Alexander Owen

From Praxis: "Welcome to Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. We are a new publication devoted to the interests of writing consultants: labor issues, writing center news, training, consultant initiatives, and scholarship. Because this is a publication whose first issue's theme is "Who We Are," introductions are in order."

From Praxis: "Consultant trainers are also finding that they don't always have to look off campus to shake up their training practices. Conventional boundaries for who receives training and who offers it are also expanding. A tenet of writing center practice is that it makes consultants better teachers and better writers."

discussing students who have standing weekly appointments with designated consultants

discussing outcomes for tutor/consultant staff

Suggests that writing centers should look to Long's Reactive Behavior Patters in order to better understand writer and writing center consultant behavior.

From ABSTRACT: "For teaching practices in the Writing Center, the findings raise questions about how writing center pedagogy can empower L2 writers on their language control when the writing consultants have the ultimate control in language and the L2 learners have the inherent uncertainty. While writing center work draws on the advantages of collaborative dialogues and effects better language control for ESL writers based on a sociocultural learning perspective, writing center pedagogy needs to continue reconsidering the needs and beliefs of ESL writers (Blau & Hall, 2002; Powers, 1993). The language issue in ESL writing is not a lower order concern in the writing, but more likely a primary concern for the writer. As also found in this study, when the broader contextual factors such as the focus of writing and writers' beliefs are taken into account, language knowledge and control are not just about linguistic correctness to ESL writer development. In striving to create better writers but not just better writing for any writers, it is crucial for writing centers to continue rethinking their staff training on the topic of language issues with their diverse multilingual clientele who speaks English as a second language."

a discussion of the ethical implications of tutors offering unpaid tutoring "after hours" (i.e. providing additional email consultations to students)

This video communicates how Westminster College's Writing Center operates and instructs students how to prepare for a consultation.

Faculty and writing center tutors bring expertise to writing as practice and pro-cess. Yet at many institutions, the two groups work in relative isolation, missing opportunities to learn from each other. In this article, I describe a faculty de-velopment initiative in a multidisciplinary writing program that brings together new faculty and experienced undergraduate tutors to workshop instructors' com-ments on first-year writing. The purpose of these workshops is to assist faculty in crafting inquiry-driven written responses that pave the way for collaborative faculty-student conferences. By bringing together scholarly conversations on tu-tor expertise and the role of faculty comments in student learning, I argue for the value of extending partnerships between writing centers and programs. Such ac-counts are important to the field for challenging what Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls the "writing center grand narrative," which limits the scope of writing center work by imagining centers primarily as "comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing" to the exclusion of lived realities (p. 3). In this case, I describe a writing center where tutors bring their expertise outside the center and into the faculty office, consulting in small groups with faculty with the aim of enriching the quality of instructor feedback in first-year seminars.

Grand Valley State University's Self-Study Format. Self Study Format The University Assessment Committee, in consultation with the Dean's Council and the Provost, have identified the following attachments as the format for the GVSU Program Self-Study. This document is intended as an opportunity for a unit to examine its Strategic Plan as well as identify and evaluate its progresses, successes, and areas of concern.

how do you encourage students to "reflect on their own tutoring/consulting practices"?

This video, created by members of Oakland University's Writing Center, portrays a frustrated student and a tutor's attempt to calm the student and begin the consultation. The video is not promotional or instructive, but could be used to start a conversation among tutors about how to handle a difficult student.

A consulting article from the Praxis back issues.

Jay D Sloan - Kent State University - From Praxis: "Consultants in the Kent State University Stark Campus Writing Center enter the "contact zone" in order to help each other and the writers they work with wrestle with diversity. Like many universities, Kent State University's Stark campus has taken "embracing diversity" as one of its primary initiatives."

From Praxis: "Writing centers are feeling the effects of budget reductions across higher education nationwide. Like other student services that don't offer credits or produce revenue, writing centers are particularly vulnerable to budget cuts. Community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities across the country are asking writing centers to make hard choices- choices that will affect consultant hiring, pay, and benefits as well as hours of operation, services, technological resources, and administration."

a discussion of the types of WC work beyond tutoring that tutors perform