BREAKFAST 7:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m. A continental breakfast will be served in Behrakis Hall in the Creese Student Center. See campus map here. P1. Innovative Scheduling System Increases Graduate-Student Consultations This poster presents one writing center’s scheduling innovation and how its enhanced usability and accessibility for graduate, online, and off-campus students led to an increase in writing center appointments.
Various brainstorming techniques will be displayed and altered to portray which are the most effective in guiding a tutee depending on the tutee’s learning style or assignment type.
This poster presents issues surrounding marketing in the writing center in the context of a writing center’s educational mission.
Christian Lopez-Ashby, Jouvanna Brame, Tanique Philogène We explore how the merging of different divisions can influence the identities seen in the writing center. Also, by understanding the definition of diversity we promote collaboration between discourses.
Daniel Magerman, Genevieve Stafforei, Lyndsay Goldfarb, Kayla Dusing Does the relative authority of student coordinators over other peer tutors interrupt or enhance the collaborative goals of a writing center? This poster presentation will explore this question and more. P6. Collaborative Literacy Practices Erika Germann This poster examines the overlaps between librarian and tutor discourses and offers concrete suggestions for how the groups can learn from one another and work toward improving students’ literacy.
Michael Raup This poster presents the Writing Center’s efforts to better reach and serve its transfer students, a large population that often feels underprepared for writing at a four-year institution today.
Kira Marshall-McKelvey and Mira Landschoot This poster presentation will explore the synergistic relationship between peer tutoring and copy-editing in a professional setting. The goal of our presentation is to shed some light on how tutors can successfully transfer and apply various skill sets to any professional context as well as tutoring. P9. An Unlikely Site: Defining the Writing Center in a Proprietary School George Asimos This poster presentation details one experience of conceiving and implementing a Writing Center in the unique site of a for-profit career school. The circumstances of this particular school, including the fragile internal political climate, and the students that form the economic base of this type of education will be presented. SESSION A 9:00 a.m. - 9:50 a.m. A1. Innovating the Tutor-Tutor Relationship through the Lens of a Non-Native English Speaker Ryan Stevens and Rhea Arora In this presentation, we will argue that our writing center should reconfigure the seminar curriculum for greater involvement from non-native speakers to familiarize other tutors with language codes. MacAlister Hall 4016
Voices from a Conservatory: Motivational Scaffolding in Writing Center Tutoring and Beyond Jelena Runic, Joshua Hughes, Ben Kapilow We explore collaboration and innovation through motivational scaffolding in our Writing Center, and extend our findings to other collaborative spaces within the conservatory such as studio classes. A Social Work Approach to Writing Center Practice: Using Self to Scaffold Student Learning Adam Pellegrini This presentation considers how social work scholarship on the “use of self” by clinicians might inform innovative approaches to writing center practice that scaffold student learning and impact social justice.
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Women as Innovators: Navigating the Female Tutor Role in a Male-Dominated Institution Lucy Manley, Flora Xavier Panelists will present data and experience from a larger research project about female cadets at a military college. The research offers pedagogical implications for minority tutors in majority-dominated writing centers. with "Rudy" or "Rodolfo": The Effect of the Perceived Ethnic Identity of Tutors’ Names on Scheduled Writing Consultations Rodolfo Barrett Through analyzing the scheduling history of tutors with ethnically identifying names and preliminary results from an informal social experiment, we explore tutor naming and trends of inclusivity/discrimination in scheduled consultations and directions for future research.
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The Dean, the Professor, the Administrator and Pew: How a Writing Center was Launched at Our University Lori Salem This presentation offers a historical account (based on oral interviews and archival research) of the creation of Temple University's writing center. with The Ethics of Access: Our University’s New Writing Center in Philadelphia’s Center City Margaret Ervin, Ben Morgan, Sean Landia, Diane Greenwood In 2014, West Chester University started a new writing center in Philadelphia to support our Center City programs. Our presentation will tell the story of the development of a partnership with faculty in which instruction in "research writing" is moving beyond "knowing APA." MacAlister Hall 4014
Cooperative Borders: Reaching Multilingual Tutees Lisa Farley and Lauren Patterson A peer tutor and ESL specialist share their strategies for collaboration to more effectively reach multilingual tutees; they describe how tutors and tutees can both benefit from this synergy. with Navigating English Writing with Arabic
speakers: Creating a New Synergy Shannon McGinley This presentation focuses on strategies for tutoring Arabic-speaking second language writers. Differences between
the alphabets and grammatical points will be introduced for a better understanding of the challenges faced by this audience.
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J. Christian Tatu, Mathew Marlin, Sarah Pavlini, Leah Wasacz This presentation will explore various kinds of collaborations between writing center personnel, students, faculty, and professional staff aimed toward supporting multimodal composition in the writing center.
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Tom
Polk I
intend to describe how we might use a perspective of productive failure,
inherent to our writing center practice, to inform the teaching, learning, and
assessment practices in our (writing) classrooms. with Does Collaboration, Rather than Directivity, Work with English Language Learners? David
Dzaka This presentation challenges the view that directivity rather than collaboration is the better approach to working with English Language Learners. It proposes active-learning activities as the way to go. MacAlister Hall 4011
Jenny Spinner, Aimee Knight, Alicia Clark-Barnes We’ll show audience members how to conduct a self-critique of their writing center websites by examining ways in which their websites craft and anchor their centers’ identities through design, tone, definitions, and descriptions of tutorials, among other things. We'll engage participants in a short heuristic evaluation of their own sites (and send them home with a longer version as well.) We’ll also discuss challenges, and work-arounds, in our efforts to re-imagine these crucial digital spaces.
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Ariel Slotter, Jessica Weidner, Hilary Miller, Dr. Karen Johnson Graduate students hold misconceptions that may prevent them from using writing centers. We will share how innovative marketing and reshaped tutoring practices impacted student perceptions and revitalized our tutoring program.
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Serena Grant, Sydney Palmer, Caroline Beston, Sean Krazit This panel describes research methods (survey, interview, theory, and discourse analysis), demonstrating their use to innovate in areas including tutor-talk, writer attitude, assignment explication and tutor/writer cultural assumptions.
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Sarah Pasternak, Erica Buckley, Mamako Johnson, Anne McDermott Student-athletes and Writing Assistants share the similar skills it takes to progress in competition and in the writing center, including engaging in creative problem-solving and working efficiently as a team. Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building 107 SESSION B 10:00 a.m. – 10:50 a.m. B1. Paired Presentations on Interdisciplinarity and Mentoring Our Interdisciplinary Style: The Lensed Approach to Tutoring Brennan Thomas, April Taylor, Lisa Casale, Jodi Kutzner This presentation demonstrates how tutors utilize discipline-specific critical lenses to advance writers’ ability to synthesize disciplinary knowledge and discourse conventions in order to address effectively the expectations of interdisciplinary audiences. with Adding A Spark: Creating Synergy with a Mentor for Tutor Training Sandra Eckard, Katelin Delano This presentation will outline a mentor-led training program to supplement regular tutor training activities. The director and the mentor will present the set-up and process as well as results from this innovative twist on tutor training.
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Synergized Missions: Writing Centers and Their Institutions Allison Hutchison What happens when writing center and institutional mission statements are aligned? This presentation focuses on what writing centers and their institutions value. with Making Synergy Manifest: Communicating How High School Writing Centers Develop the Learners Schools Want Susan Frenck This presentation explores how framing a high school writing center's work in alignment with the school's vision of successful learners can generate a synergistic relationship.
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Lexie Pankowski, Erika German This roundtable discussion focuses on collaborative efforts of tutors and office workers in the hope of prompting more innovation and synergy within writing centers.
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Elisabeth Ursell, Leslie Allison This presentation will present preliminary results of a study on how second-year non-native-English-speaking students who use the writing center perceive their adjustment to academic and cultural aspects of U.S. academia.
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Kurt Schick, Madison Kreber We propose to establish a research network among centers that that will collaborate to study the effectiveness of tutoring techniques across contexts.
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Doing Grammar: A Comparison of Writing Consultant Training in Morphosyntax Evan DeFrancesco Conventional wisdom holds that writing centers don’t “do grammar,” but in practice they do “do grammar.” Is introducing explicit morphosyntactic instruction to consultant training programs an innovation or a regression? with Cross-Training Between Centers: Collaboration Working with English Language Learners Kassandra Collazo This session presents cross-training between writing tutors and language tutors to address tutor anxiety with English language learners. Pearlstein Business Learning Center 102
B7. Interdisciplinary Catalyst: Songwriting in the Writing Center Caroline Ferrante, Caroline Thompson, Ashley Culp Participants will experience the synergistic effect of interdisciplinary pursuits in the writing center through lyric-writing, peer feedback, and student presentations. The final discussion will explore data-driven methods for workshop design. Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building 107 B8. The Creative Conversation Lindsey Rogers, Emily Goff Delve into writing creatively, learn how to create a space within writing centers for creative writing to flourish, and practice strategies to tutor this unique style.
Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building 109 B9. We and Our Shadows: Tutors Discuss the Synergy of Jane Tompkins and Writing Center Work Ron DePeter, Taylor Blasko, Katelyn Lucas, Wendy Peterson Tutors discuss literary scholar Jane Tompkins’ relevancy to writing centers, and invite participants to explore and share how concepts like fear, risk-taking, and the performance model inform their tutoring experiences.
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Bridge, Telephone, Window: Viewing the Writing Center Through an Interpreting Studies Lens Anissa Sorokin This presentation engages the discipline of language interpreting studies to add dimension to the ways in which we theorize and frame the idea of writing tutors as interpreters. with Beyond the Byline: Using Collaborative Techniques from the Newsroom to Create Synergy in the Classroom David Healey Reporting and writing for the news media is often a collaborative effort. This presentation will examine some of the lessons of the newsroom that can apply to the classroom.
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Jen Jolles and Lauren Lowe Writers Room at Dornsife is a place for writing, reading, thinking, and being that unites members of the Mantua, Powelton, and university communities. This type of relationship asks a profound, yet simple question: what happens when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom?
Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building 108 SESSION C 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. C1. Paired Presentations: Positivity and Working with Graduate Students YesAndthropy: The Importance of Humanity and Positivity in the Writing Center Matt Jacobi, Andre Jones, Christina Mastroeni, Dave Veloso In the spirit of improvisational theater, we say “yes, and” to students’ ideas, to their identities, to their struggles and realities, and to each other. with Working with Graduate Students When They Need It the Most (But Think They Need It the Least) Lorraine Savage This presentation discusses the graduate support programs at one university and explores how the programs addressed the needs of advanced writers and built relationships across units at that university.
MacAlister Hall 4016 C2. Paired Presentations: Google Hangouts and Learning Commons Hangout with the EWC: Creating Synergy in the Writing Center Experience Daniel Gallagher, David Taylor, Michelle Bowman, Aimee Maxfield, Anna Dumonchelle The Effective Writing Center uses Google Hangouts on Air to interact with our worldwide student body synchronously and asynchronously, thanks to automatic YouTube video capture and posting. with The Synergistic Surge: What We've Learned in Our First Three Years in the Learning Commons Mary Beth Simmons Learning Commons are a hot topic these days. And they should be. What our Writing Center staff learned about becoming part of a Learning Commons will be instructive to any attendee.
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Tara Friedman and Patricia Dyer Collaboration has helped us understand the value of experiential learning and synergy as we think beyond the boundaries of the Writing Center and continue to watch our “Idea” of our Center evolve.
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How We Operate: Structured and Unstructured Collaboration within the Writing Center Kathryn Inskeep, Maria Miranda, Katherine Marzinsky This panel will explore how structured and unstructured collaborative activities empowered, invigorated, and unified our writing center and lead to innovations in services, marketing, and effectiveness. with Social Media as Community Building Tool: How #WritingCenter Promotes Access, Invites Diversity through Transparency Liz Mathews Social media builds the writing center community. How might #writingcenter synergize with writers’ voices? Gain insights about digital community organizing from 2015’s #writingcenter campaign. It’s a #writingcenter Tweetup!
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Meg Mikovits, Meghan Cote, Chris Hassay, Tori Danner This presentation explores how undergraduate writing fellows can work closely with composition classes to improve student engagement, familiarity with the writing process, and knowledge about writing at the college level.
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Chandler McGowan and Zoey Mills Two-year colleges are consistently overlooked in writing center pedagogy and representation. The panel examines this marginalization and calls for greater interaction and safe spaces for all centers to present themselves.
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Of Asking and Acting: The Value of an Assessment Committee Jessa Wood and Capria Fish Our presentation will discuss the value of an undergraduate assessment committee in encouraging and facilitating assessment work in our center in hopes that it will inspire and assist other centers. with Quantitative Assessment of Specific Course Learning Objectives Based upon Specifically Implemented Faculty/Fellow Co-teaching Strategies Samuel Waddell and McKenzie Raver Presentation will cover quantitative research conducted in collaboration between a faculty member and undergraduate fellow in a first year communications course to determine the type of and significance of any measurable difference realized by adding a fellow into a first year classroom.
Pearlstein Business Learning Center 102 C8. ReConnect: Meeting Your Neighbors - Outreach & Collaboration Lisa Farley, Elise Ferer, Katherine Housman The presenters share the rationale and logistics of the writing center’s collaboration called LWR (Language, Writing, and Research), where three specialists streamline the process of providing feedback for students.
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Kelsey Hixson-Bowles, Roger Powell, Ciara Irwin This interactive panel will lead participants through a discussion about how tutors can better enhance transfer of learning through positive feedback rooted in a strengths-based philosophy.
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Tutors Training Tutors: Setting Up a Writing Center at My Local Middle School Sydney Hamrick Our presenter presents on setting up a writing center at the middle school level and the mentoring component that she’s included between her school’s and the middle school’s centers. with
Synergistic
Writing Center Spaces Lisa Zimmerelli and Amy Myers In this panel, a tutor and a director will share how we intentionally designed our writing center (newly relocated) to foster student learning, promote efficiency, and create an open and accepting environment. Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building 108
C11. Collaboration in Creative Context Laurel Kandianis Using collaboration to find innovative solutions to tutoring problems, this program emphasizes synergy between the superficially dissimilar practices of lawyers and tutors.
Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building 107 SESSION D 2:30 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. D1. Paired Presentations on Learning Disabilities and Logical Fallacies Understanding Learning Disabilities Within Writing Centers: Strategies to Encourage Students Savannah Brown This presentation discusses how strategies aimed at helping individuals manage ADHD can be utilized in tutoring sessions for all writers through the exploration or reinforcment of productive writing habits and executive functioning skills suitable to each writer's needs. with When Trump Visits the Writing Center: Logical Fallacies in Student Writing and the Writing Center David Halliwell Recognizing fallacies as crucial learning sites for student writers, this session shows surveyed literature and faculty experience with student writing, and seeks input and ideas for continuing research. MacAlister 4011 D2. Invasion of the Third Space: Problematizing Collaboration to Innovate the Studio Model Celeste Del Russo, Andrew Davison, Michael Fotos, Andrea Quinn How might we innovate the writing center studio model? Our panel explores the disconnect between the idealized pedagogy of third space and the pragmatic reality of writing center/writing program collaborations.
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Indirect Fire Megan FitzGerald Receiving indirect fire during a ROTC field exercise is different from receiving indirect fire from a client. This paper discusses how synthesizing leadership makes better consultants and better clients. with A Framework of Feelings: Reflective Tutoring Beyond the Writing Center Olivia Barrow A writing center consultant is likened to a public official; both figures realize collaborative skills and empathetic leadership through a culture of self-reflection MacAlister 4014
Richard Severe, Ameer Cooper, Marcus Garcia, Kevin Agyawka It is noted that "writing center work is collaborative in a synergistic way." Our panel seeks to begin conversations on how collaborating with often marginalized communities create new writing center synergies.
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Susan Lawrence, Alisa Russell, Kelsey Duquaine, Holly Mason The tutors on this panel explore how enrollment tutoring, video tutoring, and tutor-led writing groups create synergies different from those manifested in established one-on-one, face-to-face tutoring sessions.
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Terry Smith, Colleen Hendrickson, Jessica Land, Elizabeth Ranger
University of Maryland Eastern Shore We discuss five collaborative relationships that exist within our center and the synergies and innovations that result from each: tutors and clients, professors, tutors, and director; writing center and university.
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Janeen White and Cassandra Modica This workshop invites participants to consider their social identities in relation to international multilingual students and discuss possibilities for more egalitarian collaborations with these students in their writing center consultations.
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Craig Medvecky, Madison Nicolao, Jean Gillingham As tutors, how do you adjust your approach to tutoring while working with different students? In this workshop, explore different approaches of tutoring by becoming the tutor and tutee yourself. Pearlstein Business Learning Center 102 D9. Paired Presentations on Transfer of Tutoring Skills to the Workplace What We Take With Us When Tutoring Ends: Transfer of Learning, RAD, and Writing Centers Roger Powell and Julia Mohn This collaborative, individual presentation will describe how one RAD study helped the co-presenters transfer knowledge and skills to other contexts. As time allows, the presenters will discuss how RAD could help audience members do the same. with Mad Skills: Can Tutor Pedagogy Transfer to the Workplace? Craig Moreau This presentation aims to extend the tutor training timeline by offering 1) professional development strategies beyond initial training practicums, and 2) reflective strategies for tutors to invent connections between WC skills and the application of those
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Leigh Ryan, Lena Stypeck and Abigail Shantzis, Because internal and external educational communities cooperated, students at a Baltimore inner-city high school can now heed Michelle Obama’s advice and “get yourself to the writing center.” Here’s the backstory—complete with college visits, writing workshops, award-winning conference presentations, and slam poetry.
Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building 105 SIG1. Writing Center Realities: A Community College Special Interest Group Angela Rhoe and Miriam Läufer Participants are invited to engage in facilitated conversation on relevant issues in community college Writing Centers, using IWCA’s 2015 Position Statement for Two-Year College Writing Centers to guide the discussion.
Jessica Reyes and Kelsey Hixon-Bowles This SIG will provide a space for tutors and administrators to share their interest in anti-oppression work and to discuss how to make social justice an integral part of our centers.
Catherine Siemann, Beth Rees, Eurih Lee, Nancy Margolis, Seth Pollins, Steven Schultz, Mary Weatherup Professional writing tutors invite writing center professionals, writing specialists, and administrators to discuss the unique collaborative roles we play in our centers and institutions. Works-In-Progress Workshop Lisa Zimmerelli Dr. Zimmerelli will lead a workshop dedicated to moving research projects forward. |
Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association, West Chester University English Department, West Chester, PA 19383
MAWCA is a 509(a)(2) public charity.
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