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MAWCA

The Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association

Featured Workshops

The conference kicks off on Friday, March 3, with two workshops, which run concurrently from 3:30-5 p.m. Choose one workshop when you register for the conference.

Cost: $25 for professionals and $20 for students (added to the cost of registration for Saturday)


Workshop I
Tutoring Across Difference: Toward a Translingual Writing Center Practice

Noreen Lape, Associate Provost of Academic Affairs and Director of the Writing Program, Dickinson College

This workshop will consider what a translingual writing center practice might look like. The “Introduction to Translingual Writing” on the Purdue OWL defines the translingual approach: “The translingual writing approach invites students coming from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds to acknowledge and negotiate the various languages and rhetorical styles they bring into their writing.” Yet who “invites” these students into this dialogue? Who helps them “acknowledge and negotiate” their linguistic and rhetorical diversity?

In this interactive workshop, we will examine how writing tutors can be trained to support students’ translingual explorations. We will consider how the translingual privileging of linguistic inclusivity, dialogue across difference, student agency, and collaboration translate into tutoring practice and, by extension, tutor training. I have planned three interactive exercises that demonstrate how tutors can 1.) foster writers’ agency around the second language learning experience, 2.) optimize dialogues that “examine what the writer is doing with language and why” (Horner), and 3.) and apply the heuristics of intercultural competence to both global and sentence-level concerns. Through the techniques I will share, writing tutors can learn to help writers develop a translingual writing process and grow as writers.


Workshop II
World Englishes and Beyond: Engaging and Supporting Linguistic Diversity through Campus Collaboration

Susannah Bien-Gund, Multilingual Specialist and Faculty Writing Tutor, Haverford College
Natalie Mera Ford, Assistant Professor of English and Multilingual Writing Specialist, Swarthmore College

In this workshop, we will focus on collaborative strategies to engage and support speakers of World Englishes and other language varieties in academic spaces that begin with but move beyond the Writing Center. Valuing linguistic diversity and advancing linguistic inclusion are essential to the social justice work that educators must undertake to create more equitable learning for international and domestic students in the globalized contexts of higher education today. What specific, practical strategies can Writing Program administrators, faculty, and staff use to move this critical work forward? How can we spread the impact of our efforts by engaging colleagues, as well as student tutors and writers, in productive discussion and advocacy at our institutions? What cross-community working groups might further enable us to promote global linguistic justice in tangible, culture-shifting ways?

Workshop participants will be invited to read an optional article beforehand that highlights the frequent racialization of World Englishes in academic writing contexts. During the session, participants will reflect on this intersection of linguistic and racial biases; discuss the effectiveness of inclusive language practices in place at our Centers; identify curricular or institutional challenges to increasing linguistic equity on our campuses; envision innovative local and regional partnerships; and plan concrete next steps to take after our time together at MAWCA has ended.  


MAWCA is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt public charity. 
Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association

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