Vol. 7 No. 2 (Spring, 2026)
For this post, a member of the CWCR/RCCR Editorial Collective, Julia Lane, interviewed Gillian Saunders and Natalie Boldt.
Gillian Saunders teaches in the Academic and Technical Writing Program and the Faculty of Education at UVic and works as an Advisor at the Academic Skills Centre (formerly the Centre for Academic Communication/Writing Centre. Gillian is also completing a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction at UVic, with a focus on undergraduate students’ academic discourse socialization experiences, in particular, their use of different forms of academic writing support.
Natalie Boldt (she/her) is a former Academic Skills Advisor and writing instructor at the University of Victoria where she now works as the Course Reserves Supervisor for UVic Libraries. She holds Master’s Degrees in Interdisciplinary Humanities and English, and is a graduate student in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta.
In the summer of 2024, Gillian and Natalie, two writing centre advisors, conducted an environmental scan of writing centre websites and publicly available materials related to messages about GenAI literacy support. Documents were assessed for 1) a “statement” or “policy” on GenAI use and assistance in the writing centre and 2) a stance toward using GenAI for writing, which were categorized broadly as able to assist with GenAI writing concerns (i.e., adopt) or disavowing use or assistance in the writing centre (i.e., avoid). The scan provides a snapshot of how writing centres, as well as the institutions they operate within, are positioning themselves within the current GenAI post-secondary landscape. Gillian and Natalie presented their results at the IWCA conference in October of 2024 and wrote an article the following summer that includes an update of the scan and contextualizes results within the current post-secondary landscape, where writing centres and academic support units are necessarily adapting in visible and not-so-visible ways to this new technology.
Julia Lane: Can you tell our blog readers about the inspiration for your article, “Avoid, Adopt, Adapt: Positions on GenAI in Canadian Writing Centres.”
Gillian Saunders: The original inspiration was a conference presentation that we gave at the International Writing Centres Association conference in fall 2024. At that point, ChatGPT had been with us for about a year, and we were still trying to figure out what that meant for writing centres. We were aware of the University of Waterloo’s really excellent resources on how to help students with AI concerns in their writing and how to do that, you know, well and ethically. And then we were also aware of at least one other university that had a really strong, “We will not help you learn how to use it or look at your work if you’re using it” kind of statement. So, we thought that contrast was really interesting, and we wanted to see what else was out there. And so that was our proposed topic for that conference and we started scanning other writing centre websites for these types of statements. We ended up looking at 31 in total, and we found… almost nothing.
Natalie Boldt: When we were thinking about how we could contribute to IWCA, we had wanted to present on writing centre responses to ChatGPT because we had had some students coming in to see us about things, or submitting things, particularly asynchronously, that we were fairly certain had been created using GenAI. And so, just figuring out and maneuvering how to respond, especially when the student’s not in the room with you, how to respond to suspicions about AI when policies around AI were not thick on the ground yet. And our unit in particular, and our division, our portfolio even, the whole university was waiting for a capital P policy. And so, we were likewise sort of waiting for that policy to be finalized before we could position ourselves relative to it and articulate how we could help students navigate AI use. But, in the meantime, we were like, “what do we do when stuff like this happens?” And Gillian, because she’s Gillian, started doing some preliminary research and was like, I think we could present on something like this.
Gillian: And I think maybe at that point, we had just learned that we were not going to get a capital P policy, which came as a surprise to some people in our division.
Julia: And how did you make the time to research and write this article possible?
Gillian: Well, I saw the call for papers from Discourse and Writing for a special issue on the future of writing. At the time I think I mentioned to Natalie that maybe we could write something, but also neither of us had time to do that. So, we kind of let it go. It’s not possible for us usually to do something like this. But then the CFP deadline kept getting extended. So by that point in the summer, I was on what I like to call my “dissercation” [a portmanteau of “dissertation” and “vacation”]. I took five weeks off from work, and I was trying to make some progress on my dissertation, which is on academic discourse socialization and undergraduate students’ experiences with accessing writing support. And I’m in year seven: I collected my data in 2020 and 2021. And I thought incorporating this topic would be a great way to bring the dissertation up to date in that area. So I decided to write the article as a chapter of the dissertation and kind of tack it on to the end.
Natalie: I want to go on record to say that Gillian is superwoman. I went away for a couple of weeks on vacation. I came back, and she had a whole article written basically.
Gillian: So, I wrote the thing in 2 1/2 weeks. It’s the only part of my dissertation that’s currently completed. And I have no idea why I can’t just do the same for the rest of it, but that’s how it goes.
Julia: Not all writing is the same in terms of how it emerges from us, right?
Gillian: This girl needs a deadline.
Julia: Is there anything you want to share about your process of co-authorship and working together on this article?
Natalie: I think, for me, joy was a key ingredient. The pleasure of working together, of working with Gillian. But also, the sort of pressing nature of the topic. I say this when, again, I went away for a break and came back and Gillian had most of a draft completed. So, I will maybe let her speak to, like, the bulk of the writing process. But in terms of the research, we were able to collaborate in our capacity as advisors at the Academic Skills Centre. And so, we kind of were able to build bits and pieces of the project into our schedules. And we were in adjacent offices, and so we would just, like, pop in and out and kind of do it piecemeal, the research part of it and preparing for IWCA.
Gillian: Yeah, that part of it was completely half and half collaborative. We just split up the institutions, and Natalie made this beautiful spreadsheet, and we just kind of worked through issues as we went. And we did have issues because we needed to expand the scan. We found so few writing centre resources that we had to expand then to institutional ones and related ones from the library and learning and teaching centres and so on and kind of see what else might be influencing writing centres when they didn’t have any of their own statements or resources. And then the writing of the article I did myself while Natalie was away, and then she gave it a review before I submitted it, and then we worked on the revisions together. At the end I think we had like three weeks or a month to get the changes done at the very end of November and we were both teaching. Doing that was a bit of a challenge, but it was also a really joyful process just because the feedback that we received was so positive and encouraging and constructive and easy to implement. We were also encouraged to update the scan to see if anything had changed since the summer of 2024, which resulted in some interesting findings. And Cara Violini was our wonderful editor and gave us a few days extra, so that helped, and working with her was also like very, I don’t know how to describe it, but like just easy and pleasant and helpful. And her comments really strengthened the paper a lot and helped us deal with some problematic areas.
Natalie: I agree.
Julia: What do you hope people will take away from the article? How do you hope it might impact our writing centre colleagues and our writing centre work and field?
Gillian: Do you have any hopes?
Natalie: I do, but I’ll let you go first.
Gillian: Well, I guess when our initial scan turned up so little, I had hoped to start a conversation about why that was the case. Reaching out to a few colleagues informally was very useful and one responded with some really thoughtful comments about not wanting to scare students away. So, how to write a statement in a way that is inclusive and not judgmental or stigmatizing and will still encourage students to come and have that conversation with us rather than, I don’t know, get them worried or in their heads about how we’ll respond. Just, like, what wording would we use to do that? Coming up with that should be a collaborative effort and requires really a lot of thought. So, my hope, in the broadest terms, was to find out, if you’re going to make a statement on GenAI for your writing centre, what should that look like?
And then in the second scan that we’ve started now, we found two other strongly avoidant stances. So, we don’t want to be critical or say that that’s necessarily the wrong approach. Though, we do think there are like maybe some potential risks, whatever you want to call it. If writing centres don’t take a consistent approach, then that might be problematic in some ways. But I’m mostly curious about where those responses have come from. I guess I’m still just hoping that others will be inspired to make their willingness to help more visible to students, so that they know what to expect. And it would just be better for everybody if we were all on the same page with what students can expect from us, whether that’s, you know, help or no help.
What are you hoping, Natalie?
Natalie: Yes. So, I agree with Gillian. I think– Oh, I have so many thoughts. I hope that writing centres, more writing centres, will issue or provide clarity around how they help students maneuver questions about generative AI in addition to a whole host of things related to academic integrity in particular. Partly because I think that there’s a lot of curiosity. I think there’s a lot of, for some students, shame in asking questions about those things. And I think the most amazing thing about writing centres is that they can be really safe spaces for students to maneuver those questions because obviously we don’t submit claims about student academic misconduct. We keep students’ privacy, right? If they come to ask us a question about how they maybe used something or are intending to use something, we can guide them, but we’ll never report them. And so, I think helping students to know what they can ask for and what the parameters of that kind of engagement are is really helpful for them. Even if it’s like, we don’t go there as a writing centre, that’s also helpful for students to know,
I also think it’s helpful for writing centres to know what other centres are doing. I’m new, and when we started this research, I was even newer, to the writing centre game. And it’s a really robust and I would even say tight-knit community. But I also think that your mileage may vary depending on the institutional context. So not all writing centres are able to go to IWCA conferences or to be part of CWCA or be plugged in the way that Gillian is plugged in.
Gillian: I plug myself in by putting my fingers in everything.
Natalie: And we love that. But like, if you’re a writing centre that doesn’t have the ability to go to conferences and be part of those conversations, what do you have access to? You have access to the internet. And if the internet is not communicating to you the robust conversations that are happening around that topic, then you’re kind of in the dark. And that was kind of what we were so shocked to discover. Because again, there was this disconnect between–we were having these conversations amongst ourselves, and we were having them with our colleagues across campus and across institutions. And then if you looked at the internet landscape, it didn’t look like anything was happening. But I also want to qualify that to say I understand that there are all sorts of institutional reasons why you couldn’t have a statement, why you have to be careful about what that statement looks like, et cetera, et cetera.
Gillian: Yeah. Yeah, I think something else that I talked about in the article was that a lot of the questions that I’d had were from students who had never even been here before. one was a group project: “Somebody else in my group has used AI and I’m not happy about that. What am I gonna do?” And one had an instructor that had just blanket accused their whole class of using AI in a discussion forum. And so, she just showed up without an appointment and was really upset. So, I think, in a way, it was really good to know that even if a student had no idea, had never used this place for anything else, they, you know, they’re like, “I have this problem with this thing and I’m just going to go there and show up and ask this question.” So that kind of made me think , do we even need a statement? Do we need any public facing things on the internet? I still think that we do, but it’s nice to know that even in the absence of that, students have this idea of a writing centre as a place that they can go and ask these questions and, you know, at least talk to somebody who knows something about it and, yeah, hopefully have their concerns heard or find next steps.
Natalie: But I think too, like both of those situations involved students in crisis. So, if that’s what it takes for them to–
Gillian: We’d love for them to know that they can come before they’re in a crisis situation.
Natalie: Yeah, for sure.
Julia: For sure. Well, is there anything else that you’d like to share for the blog post?
Gillian: I don’t know if I have anything else to add. It’s my first first-author publication. So it was very motivating to have it published as part of my dissertation. And working with Natalie is obviously a dream always and also the publication process with Discourse and Writing was just so supportive and lovely. So yeah, all around, I think best possible writing and publication experience probably ever. I know they won’t all be like this, but yeah, it’s definitely very encouraging that this kind of thing is possible. And the response has been so positive from the writing centre community. So, I really appreciate all the support.
Julia: I love that. That’s such a nice note to end on as an encouragement for the publication process as motivating and supportive of why we do the work we do when we can feel so stuck in our own “who is this for and does it even matter?” And getting things out there, though it is vulnerable and challenging and time consuming and all of those things, of course, as well can also really be motivating and validating.
Gillian: At least I know this part of it is done. My committee can’t require any changes, right?
Natalie: It has been judged and deemed acceptable. That is perfect.
Julia: It has a stamp on it. I have the watermark on the back. Finished.
Gillian: Don’t touch this. Don’t even read it. It’s fine.