Black History Month: Black-Authored Resources for Writing Centres

Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter 2021)
CWCR/ACCR Editorial Board


Canadian writing centre involvement
While Canada recognizes Black History Month, as Writing Centre professionals, it is our responsibility to address the gaps in our own education in February and beyond. Furthermore, we must confront the fact that these gaps were created intentionally to exclude learning about Black excellence, both historical and contemporary. It is our work to both name anti-Black racism as a force that has shaped our knowledge and our field, and to take up antiracist practices to re-shape our knowledge and our field. 

Many Black writers, thinkers, scholars, and educators have made and are continuing to make significant contributions to Writing Centres, both as places of practice and as spaces for theorizing. We are taking this opportunity to amplify this work and to acknowledge and thank our Black colleagues for their contributions, which have been made in environments that are too often exclusionary, hostile, racist, and traumatic. Continue reading “Black History Month: Black-Authored Resources for Writing Centres”

Announcement || Procrastination Avoidance Week, March 8-14, 2021

Julia Lane is Writing Services Coordinator at Simon Fraser University

We’d like to invite you to join in the pan-Canadian, collaborative, cross-institutional Procrastination Avoidance Week from March 8-14 2021, coinciding with National Procrastination Week.

Our concept is that we will host a week of shared programming and virtual support, with themes for each day. Our small committee including me and Ruth Silverman of Simon Fraser University, as well as Sandra Smith from the University of the Fraser Valley, have fleshed out this idea and produced this Google Doc that for everyone to participate. Please fill in the google doc by February 16th at midnight Pacific Time if your institution would like to join in the fun. Details are provided below about what we are looking for institutions to contribute. We hope that many institutions from across the country will participate. Continue reading “Announcement || Procrastination Avoidance Week, March 8-14, 2021”

Centre Spotlight: The ECP Tutoring Centre

Vol. 2, No. 3 (Winter 2021)
Stephanie Bell, CWCR/RCCR Co-Editor


Editor’s Introduction

The CWCR/RCCR’s Centre Spotlight series showcases the diversity of Canadian centres of writing support across education institutions. Beginning with Kristen Welbourn’s exposé on one of Nova Scotia’s first and only high school writing centres, this series takes a snapshot of our community today and prompts us to ask questions about the historical forces that have shaped its development.

This Centre Spotlight casts light on a tutoring centre embedded within the writing-in-the-disciplines program founded by Robert Irish in 1995: the Engineering Communication Program or ECP. Interestingly, the ECP originated, in part, from a Writing Centre (see: Weiss, Irish, Chong, & Wilkinson, 2019). In this way, it may be considered a model of success in terms of the vision that Canadian leaders in writing studies had when they turned away from the American trend toward First-Year Composition.

P. Weiss, R. K. Irish, A. Chong, & L. Wilkinson, (2019), We Have Changed: Reflections on 20+ Years of Teaching Communication in Engineering. 2019 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm). pp. 286-287. doi: 10.1109/ProComm.2019.00064

Continue reading “Centre Spotlight: The ECP Tutoring Centre”