Category: CWCR/RCCR Blog

Working in the Thunderdome: Coalitions and Community as Resistance

image of a car driving through a desert, Mad Max-esque landscape
~ cwcrrccr

Vol. 8 No. 2 (Summer 2026)

Dr. Sara Humphreys is an associate teaching professor at the University of Victoria. Her primary area of interest lies within the fields of Rhetorical Genre Studies, Media and Game Studies, Composition, Rhetoric, and  Canadian Writing Studies, particularly in terms of how genres can function to accommodate, affect, oppress, and even liberate different audiences and negotiate multiple traditions of communication in varied social contexts. At the undergraduate and graduate levels, she teaches with the aim to open doors for students who might otherwise face barriers to reaching their academic goals. She encourages students to see composition and rhetoric(s) from the perspective of their own communities, narratives, knowledges, and histories.

In 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the eponymous main character ends up in a ragtag postapocalyptic community, Bartertown, where the main entertainment and resolution of political in-fighting is the Thunderdome. The leader of Bartertown, Auntie Entity (played by the late and incomparable Tina Turner), ziplines into the Thunderdome from above to pronounce a winner as the crowd chants “two men enter, one-man leaves.” Gendered language aside, postsecondary education in late 2020s Canada bears an uncanny resemblance to the Thunderdome where administrators “zipline” into the frontlines and judge as departments, libraries, and learning commons fight for scant resources. Arguably (or perhaps not-so-arguably), this scenario is even more brutal for writing centre specialists: They are professionally marginalized at every turn.

That’s a bleak analogy, but considering that many aspects of postsecondary education in Canada are undergoing existential threats, perhaps we haven’t gone far enough? But there is hope. Coalitions are a key ingredient to gaining institutional agency, empowerment, and yes, even job security (although this one often takes a frustrating combination of persistence and downright luck).

The other key is gaining access to academic freedom. Writing centres are centres of teaching and learning; therefore, those who work in writing centres require the very same protections via academic freedom and intellectual property rights university instructors receive (we recognize college instructors often have no academic freedom and work contract to contract).

These are conclusions drawn from our SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant (KSG) funded project Writing & Power. We are sure no one is surprised to learn that writing centres, learning commons, and writing programs (within and outside of English departments) struggle within ridiculously asymmetrical power relations that pervade postsecondary bureaucracies. But we also heard a great deal about developing and ongoing coalitions that work to ameliorate these hegemonic asymmetries.

How do we know? Our project sought to gather primary data from dozens of talented and dedicated writing centre staff, support staff, writing instructors, and writing program administrators. Again, we weren’t surprised that writing centres are undervalued and under-resourced, but we were blown away by their dedication and persistence in the face of consistent marginalization by administrators and faculty. Yet is persistence helping anyone gain ground? When is it time to move from persistence to resistance? We have no answers, but perhaps what our participants revealed can provide a starting point for you to consider your local context. If you are resisting (and many are), how can you do so safely?

There were four main areas that participants and interviewees returned to time and again:

  • Tension between postsecondary agendas and policies versus what’s needed for actual change.
  • Use of precarity to control writing centre staff (e.g., enforce restrictive labour practices, control behaviour, limit discourse).
  • The dedication of writing centre professionals to empower students, particularly students from marginalized and colonized student populations, despite resistance from (some) faculty, struggles with precarity, and an utter lack of resources (and, often, lack of respect from administrators in the form of job security, proper funding, and access to technology).
  • The impressive ways in which writing centre managers and professionals have found ways to counter academic hegemonies that threaten the crucial work writing centres perform.

Postsecondary Hegemony or the Thunderdome

Postsecondary strategic and academic plans change every three to five years, and wherever the winds blow, writing centre professionals must follow. Often designated as “staff,” writing centre professionals are really not “staff” in the classic sense. Writing centre professionals teach and perform scholarship (period), and we quickly realized that writing centre specialists are trapped in a type of linguistic prison or placeholder that hails their work into existence within university hegemonies as “less than” the work of faculty.

That is, “staff” is a placeholder for a certain type of employee in the postsecondary hegemony who does not have academic agency, much less academic freedom. Anyone who performs evidence-based teaching doesn’t just deserve academic freedom, they require it.

Just for a brief refresher, David Robinson, former Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT)—which is the umbrella organization for university teachers across Canada—defines academic freedom as

[F]reedom to teach, to engage in classroom discussion, choose your pedagogical approach and your materials and how you assess students. There’s the freedom to research and pursue knowledge where you think there will be new discoveries without any outside interference. There’s the freedom to engage in service to the institution which also means the ability to criticize the institution. And finally, the freedom to engage in what’s often called extramural academic freedom; public commentary, or to speak as a professor in the public realm.

Writing centre specialists (at the very least) need control over their pedagogical materials, yet as staff, their materials can be (and have been) vetted and reviewed to make sure they align with institutional values. Writing centre “staff” are governed by Human Resources policies and employment expectations that have almost nothing to do with the actual work writing centre professionals do—namely, a kind of instruction that is rigorous, responsive, and highly varied. Writing centre professionals are hamstrung by their common employment designation: staff.

As you probably noticed, we are shifting terminology to make a point: writing centre professionals are not staff. They engage with pedagogies from across the campus, and their work is also informed by writing centre-specific pedagogy. They are university-level instructors (indeed, many of them actually work simultaneously as sessionals) and need all the rights and privileges bestowed on faculty, especially academic freedom, to do their jobs effectively.

By saying that writing centre professors (we are now playing with different terms for this kind of work) require academic freedom, we mean that the participants and interviewees told us they cannot do their jobs effectively in their current employment genre. Genres are not easily budged. Like durable genres, they have a life of their own in complex systems, such as postsecondary education. Incremental, steady change is possible when enough voices come together to further a common purpose.

Change is happening, thanks to coalition building and inclusive community empowerment. Over at Wilfrid Laurier, for example, writing services director Christin Wright-Taylor and learning consultant Elizabeth Clarke are doing what they can to empower students and educate WLU professors through their centre’s Translingual Writing Bank: an online repository of linguistically diverse scholarly prose that pushes back against Standard Academic English (SAE). The bank provides models for students who want to experiment with translingual writing without pushback from faculty who are not ready and willing to accept linguistic equity.

A fantastic example of both student empowerment and coalition building is Wright-Taylor’s and Clarke’s email template that students can use to negotiate linguistic equity and justice with their professors—an addition they deemed necessary because, as Wright-Taylor pointed out in the interview, they’re in “an interesting spot”: “a weird rhetorical situation.” These efforts build coalitions with students who may view the writing centre as a space for remedial writing but find that they are invited to collaborate in a safe space where their cultures, histories and narratives are respected. Writing centre teaching professionals (another term shift) do not usually have a say in the curriculum and they typically have strict student-facing mandates, which means they cannot communicate directly with faculty about the needs of their students. Teaching students how to advocate for linguistic justice benefits faculty, students and the institution.

But the writing specialists (there’s another change in terminology) who work at these centres have a crucial perspective that faculty and admin would be wise to recognize and leverage. Writing centres see students from virtually every faculty and discipline. They are witness to a range of effective (and not–so-effective) assignments and pedagogies from across the institution. They have what amounts to a ground-level and panoramic view of the student body and, as such, can speak to general trends (e.g., what are students saying about GenAI?) as well as contextualize the specific struggles of the students who visit them. They are an incomparable resource to both students and faculty—and yet, they struggle to be seen and heard within an institutional structure that frequently downplays their expertise.

Precarity is a feature, not a bug

So why is this—why are writing centre professionals consistently overlooked? Well, for one thing, the level of sustained advocacy necessary for systemic change is difficult to achieve when your community is perennially splintered. Our project found that institutional precarity creates a “revolving door” effect in many writing centres and learning commons. Under-resourced and under-valued, writing centres are frequently staffed with folks who, out of necessity, have “other work going on”: they might be teaching, writing a thesis or dissertation, or, as Julia Lane observed in her interview “actually be in the hustle looking for other jobs.” For these reasons and more, writing centres experience high turnover rates and suffer the cumulative effects of a protracted precarity. What Lane so aptly deemed a “slow leak effect” brought on by such instability can be devastating to morale:

We/people in those positions, I don’t think can invest much of themselves into positions that are temporary because we’re always on shifting ground, and so we don’t feel the investment back to us, and thus it is vulnerable on an emotional and practical level to actually invest ourselves back into that role.

When staff leave to find stable, secure workplaces elsewhere or are pushed out because their contracts have ended, those left behind lose treasured friends and crucial support in the form of historical knowledge of the institution and the Centre. But as always, those who suffer the most are students who do not benefit from the nuance and richness of insights gleaned over time, forged in a stable community of practice.

Empowering Students

Despite these structural challenges, our participants and interviewees shared an array of experiences empowering students in their writing centre and support roles. What we learned on this front, though, is what you already know: writing centre work needs better job security, more protections, and improved overall working conditions. Just because the following experiences provide a snapshot of support excellence across the country does not mean the status quo is working. Rather, here’s what writing centre and support professionals are achieving, but what more could they do if given additional support?

Students as catalysts for change

The following insights are from writing centre professionals who requested to remain anonymous to protect their positions. [Redacted] sees students as catalysts for change: what if students are empowered to make small changes themselves, because these “small changes can encourage larger changes” (Appendix A). As a member of their institution’s writing centre, [redacted] tries to enact more change through student engagement because, as they explain,

While we are aligned with the institution, we don’t wait for change. And yet even saying something like that is dangerous because staff can’t push back. As well, students [and staff] can get into power imbalances with instructors, who want only APA citation or materials that have gone through Western publishing systems but not considered other knowledge sources, such as Indigenous ways of knowing. At the writing centre, we have conversations with students about bringing Traditional Knowledge (TK) into their work and how that can happen while meeting the instructor’s expectations. We give students the tools to have these kinds of discussions.

The above is an act of what is best called harm reduction; many of our interviewees decide that the best way to support students is bypass bureaucratic quicksand. As [redacted] pointed out, one of the issues in making change at the institutional level is the glacial pace of institutional change. Everything is hierarchical and has to trickle down: a policy is changed, then units enact the policy and staff and faculty put it in place. [Redacted] explains that postsecondary institutions really need to consider the emotional labour and toll in asking students and staff to take up this kind of work. The institution may “talk about diversity and inclusion” but there is a difference between “welcoming someone in and giving them a place to sit.” Brian Hotson, (former Writing Centre Specialist), explains, “The way to affect change is through students. The last thing the administration wants is bad press.” (The first part of this section has been excerpted from the report: Writing & Power).

To harken back to our rather clumsy Thunderdome analogy, there is no empowerment when we as professionals (instructors and writing centre professionals) are overburdened with ridiculous workloads; underfunded to the extent that we can’t keep up with rapid technological changes (hybrid human-AI writing, anyone?); and demoralized by faculty who order writing centre professionals to do their bidding (because writing support is “service”). Many are refusing to even enter the Thunderdome and are working instead to teach students self-advocacy and build coalitions with willing faculty, yet they do this work at great personal peril. They risk annoying administrators who demand compliance to party lines and may not renew the contracts of “problem staff.”

Coalition Building as Resistance

Writing support teaching professionals need more agency and additional protections when they are asked to tackle complex matters such as citational justice, linguistic equity, and anti-racist writing pedagogies. Without access to job security and academic freedom to push back, support staff can neither fully advocate for students nor suggest necessary changes when they see, for example, racist assignments. The following is also drawn from our project report and, again, even university leaders were fearful of identifying themselves. [Redacted], a university leader, explained that while a public controversy may be “unpleasant” for a stably employed faculty member, that same controversy may be devastating for a precarious faculty or staff member. Activism, according to [redacted], takes up resources and requires leaders to defend faculty who take positions on issues. But this type of defence is not available to writing support staff, who are, in point of fact, performing a type of teaching.

A possible solution is for writing centre professionals to join Faculty Associations where their teaching and research can be better understood and protected. Of course, a move like this takes even more coalition-building, but there is precedent at York University and Simon Fraser University. If writing centre specialists had access to the same types of protections and tenure that librarians enjoy, they could be more effective in empowering marginalized students and making suggestions to faculty about course and assignment design in terms of writing. Building on this point, Katja Thieme, Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, emphasizes that academic freedom is a privilege that is “not evenly distributed.”

Let’s return to where we started. Beyond the Thunderdome ends with a coalition of ragtag survivors comprising factions and characters Max encounters over the course of the film. Instead of focusing on Mad Max and his heroic feats, the coalition is what matters here. Despite their differences, this coalition ends up creating a thriving community that welcomes other survivors. We may not be working in a postapocalyptic landscape (yet), but these types of stories are really about how we imagine our future. Coalitions can be built in hallways, over coffee, or in committees: our research shows they work. Much like in Mad Max, coalitions don’t have to like each other; they just need a common goal.

 

 

Image credit: Photo by Sebastian Leonhardt on Unsplash

Paid Opportunity – Assistant Conference Chair for 2027

~ CWCA/ACCR

Access a PDF version of this Position Description.

Job Title: Assistant Conference Chair

Location: Remote

Position Type: Part-time, Contract

Term: October 1, 2026 – June 30, 2027

Compensation: $3,000

About Us: The Canadian Writing Centre Association/association canadienne des centres de rédaction (CWCA/ACCR) is dedicated to supporting writing centres across Canada through professional development, networking, and advocacy. As the Vice President of the CWCA/ACCR, we are seeking a motivated and organized individual to join the CWCA/ACCR board as the Assistant Conference Chair. The position runs from October 1, 2026 to June 30, 2027. This role is crucial in ensuring the success of our annual conference, which brings together writing centre professionals from across the country.
Job Summary: The Assistant Conference Chair will work closely with the Conference Chair and the CWCA/ACCR Vice President to plan, organize, and execute the annual conference. The hired applicant is expected to become a member of CWCA/ACCR.

Key Responsibilities:

● Assist in the development and implementation of the conference agenda and schedule.
● Facilitate the blind review process by communicating in a timely manner with reviewers, distributing the review materials, and coordinating the responses/decisions.
● Coordinate with speakers, presenters, and panelists to ensure timely submission of materials and adherence to deadlines.
● Manage conference registration, including processing registrations, sending confirmations, and handling inquiries.
● Assist in the creation and distribution of promotional materials and communications related to the conference.
● Support the Conference Chair in managing the conference budget and tracking expenses.
● Organize and participate in regular planning meetings with the Conference Chair.
● Provide synchronous support during the conference, including registration desk management and troubleshooting any issues that arise.
● Collect and analyze feedback from conference attendees to inform future planning.

Qualifications:

● Canadian residency and current work permit.
● Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field (e.g., Communications, Event Management, Education) or equivalent experience.
● Previous experience in event planning or conference coordination is highly desirable.
● Strong organizational and time management skills.
● Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
● Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
● Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite and familiarity with event management software.
● CWCA/ACCR is committed to putting on an inclusive, antiracist, accessible, decolonial, and liberatory conference. Experience with these approaches is an asset for the role, as are insights from lived experiences of the realities of exclusion, racism, inaccessibility, colonialism, and systematic injustice.

How to Apply: Interested candidates are invited to submit their resume and a cover letter outlining their qualifications and experience to chtaylor@wlu.ca. Please include “Assistant Conference Chair Application” in the subject line.

Application Deadline: July 31, 2026

Contact Information: Dr. Christin Wright-Taylor, Vice President, CWCA, chtaylor@wlu.ca

We look forward to receiving your application and thank all applicants for their interest. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

Clare Bermingham: Visionary Leadership and a Culture of Care

Photo of Clare Bermingham wearing a blue jacket against a grey backdrop
~ cwcrrccr

Vol. 8 No. 1 (Summer, 2026)

CWCA/ACCR Excellence in Leadership and Service Profile

The CWCA/ACCR Excellence in Leadership and Service Profile is a new CWCA/ACCR Board initiative that recognizes an individual or group who has made outstanding contributions to Canadian writing centre work. These are exceptional people who raise the bar and make all of us better. Profiles are published in the CWCR/RCCR blog and highlighted at the CWCA/ACCR AGM.

For more information on the Excellence in Leadership and Service Profile, please contact cwcaaccr@gmail.com

Written by Christin Wright-Taylor and Sarah King on behalf of the CWCA/ACCR Board.

When Clare Bermingham (she/they) first stepped into the role of Director of the Writing Centre at University of Waterloo (uWaterloo) in 2014, it was little more than a testing centre. Today, more than a decade later, the renamed Writing and Communication Centre (WCC) produces standard-bearing resources for writing centres and writing centre professionals across the country. Colleagues at uWaterloo celebrate Clare’s bold and inclusive leadership, while Canadian writing centre professionals look to the WCC for guidance and clarity on how to approach teaching and supporting student writing. 

Working with Clare means working with a leader who brings both strategic insight and genuine care for staff and students. –Jirina Poch

Current supervisors, staff, and campus partners unite in praising Clare’s ability to lead boldly and strategically while never sacrificing a people-centred ethos. Jirina Poch, who has worked with Clare for 12 years, states, “Working with Clare means working with a leader who brings both strategic insight and genuine care for staff and students.” Marlee Spafford, former Associate Dean of Science for Undergraduate Studies, says, “Clare helps make changes, while maintaining relationships. It is challenging to do either and much harder to do both.” Similarly, Nancy Collins, Head of Research and Learning at the University of Waterloo Libraries, summarizes Clare’s unique ability to balance strategy with care in this way: “Clare is a visionary and deeply compassionate leader who has transformed writing services and support at Waterloo.” Across interviews, three themes emerged: Clare’s ability to anticipate and lead dynamically through change, their ability to bring disparate campus partners together to effect meaningful collaboration, and their ability to prioritize inclusive student supports.

Clare Bermingham and the success of the WCC offer living proof that empathy, innovation, and excellence can be mutually reinforcing, not competing values.

As the leader of the WCC, Clare has not simply responded to change, but anticipated it. Nadine Fladd, who has worked with Clare since 2015, shares that Clare “is usually three to four steps ahead … when it comes to strategic thinking because [they have] a keen sense for what’s on the horizon.” Both staff and supervisors share examples of how Clare’s insights have proven prescient at key moments of transition for the WCC and broader uWaterloo community. When Clare took the helm of the WCC, they understood that in order for it to have longevity it must offer more proactive support programs in classrooms, more stable staffing models with permanent roles, and more substantial student-facing campus programming. Later, Clare could see the range of possibilities for supporting students with multimodal communication and implemented an identity change for the centre, moving it from the “Writing Centre” to the “Writing and Communication Centre.” 

Clare’s ability to lead strategically not only benefits their staff, but has set them apart as a respected leader among colleagues. Angela Rooke, Manager of Academic Success and Retention, has worked with Clare for 12 years and notes that, “under Clare’s leadership, the WCC was the first student support unit at Waterloo to publish guidance on generative AI, launching Using ChatGPT and Other Text-Generating Artificial Intelligence in 2023.” These resources not only positioned the WCC as a leader on campus but also as a leader in Canadian writing centre studies, providing valuable models for other writing centres to follow. CWCA/ACCR Past President and UTSC Writing Support Coordinator, Dr. Sarah King, writes that “our student support pages include links to many of WCC’s resources, and both librarians and writing instructors at UTSC regularly refer students.”

Clare … support[s] good ideas, no matter whose idea it [is]. – Jeff Casello, former Associate Vice President Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs

Over and over, supervisors praise Clare’s ability to lead dynamic, often complex, cross-functional teams. Mario Coniglio, former Associate Vice President, Academic, remarks that “Clare is a team player in every sense of the word.” He shares how Clare developed a strategic plan for the WCC that included much stakeholder consultation, noting how deftly Clare “guided the plan development to ensure that detractors would eventually get on board with the changes that were coming.” Jeff Casello, former Associate Vice President Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs, confirms this observation: “Clare … support[s] good ideas, no matter whose idea it [is]. [They] regularly explore novel ideas and, subject to realistic resource limitations, deliver remarkably impactful programming for the University.” Pam Charbonneau, Director of uWaterloo’s Student Success Office, agrees: “Two words I would use to describe Clare’s leadership style are thoughtful and collaborative. [They] bring a reflective, values-driven approach to [their] work and consistently engages colleagues in meaningful dialogue and shared problem-solving.” 

Finally, Clare’s leadership has redefined writing support as inclusive, developmental, and central to student success. Chris Read, Waterloo’s Associate Provost, Students, shares that “Clare shows up regularly with determination to improve our students’ experience and understands how to lead their team to do just that.” Pam Charbonneau has seen this firsthand, and observes that Clare “advance[s] a vision of writing support that is developmental, inclusive, and integrated across the academic journey. This has had a meaningful impact on how students and colleagues across campus understand and engage with writing as a core academic skill.” Maša Torbica, Manager of Undergraduate and Peer Tutor Programs at the WCC, sees this from a staff  position, and reflects that “Clare combines a people-first ethos with a proactive mindset. [Their] leadership reflects genuine care for colleagues and students, a sustained commitment to anti-oppressive pedagogies, and strategic application of [their] disciplinary expertise.” Sarah Menzies, a Writing and Communications Advisor in the WCC, also appreciates how Clare’s leadership broadens the work of their staff, saying that Clare’s leadership, “consistently reinforces the idea that writing support should not be about enforcing narrow or exclusionary standards, but about recognizing and valuing the diverse linguistic resources students bring to their work.” Clare’s commitment to inclusion extends to their work on the CWCA/ACCR Board, where as the President (2020-2022) they led the Board in responding constructively to calls for change from BIPOC members, and collaborated with the newly created BIPOC Caucus to revise the CWCA/ACCR Statement of Commitment to Antiracism.

Underpinning all of Clare’s strengths in proactive, strategic, people-centred leadership is the foundation of care they create for their staff. Repeatedly, staff  comment on the supportive and empowering culture Clare creates with their leadership. Under Clare’s mentorship, Nadine shares how her teaching practice and research interests were expanded and enriched. Jirina shares that Clare’s “thoughtful leadership with regular check-ins and approachability” make them a “trusted presence for the entire team.” Perhaps Maša says it best when she states, “I truly admire how Clare maintains high expectations for the quality of our work while placing equal emphasis on our wellbeing. That balance is rarer than it should be. The culture Clare has cultivated at the WCC demonstrates that excellence and empathy are not in tension; they are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. This is the standard all leaders should aspire to, and it is why Clare so fully deserves this recognition.”

Clare’s leadership offers both a touchstone and a guide, revealing that excellence is not simply about what is accomplished, but how our work is accomplished and who is empowered along the way.

In recognizing Clare Bermingham as the inaugural subject of the CWCA/ACCR Excellence in Leadership and Service profile, we at CWCA/ACCR celebrate their record of transformative achievement and a model of leadership that redefines what is possible in writing centre work. Through foresight, collaboration, and an unwavering commitment to people-centred practice, Clare has shaped the WCC into a national leader while fostering a culture in which staff and students alike can thrive. Beyond the WCC, their work demonstrates that meaningful institutional work is most enduring when it is grounded in relationships, care, and a shared sense of vision. As the field of writing centre studies continues to evolve in Canada, Clare’s leadership offers both a touchstone and a guide, revealing that excellence is not simply about what is accomplished, but how it is accomplished, and who is empowered along the way.

Avoid, Adopt, Adapt: An Interview with the Authors

A repeating pattern of a photograph of a silicon chip, recoloured so that it is multi-coloured, in the style of pop art.
~ cwcrrccr

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.

 

Decoding the Lab Report: Building STEM Genre Awareness

gloved hands writing in a lab notebook
~ cwcrrccr

Vol. 7 No. 1

Elisabeth van Stam is a Writing Advisor on the Graduate and Postdoctoral team and STEM Resource at the University of Waterloo’s Writing and Communication Centre (WCC). Trained as a professional biologist, she brings extensive experience conducting and communicating scientific research to her work supporting writers and colleagues at the WCC. Her pedagogical approach is student‑centered and genre‑aware, drawing on firsthand STEM writing experience to foreground global structure and meaning‑making while positioning students as experts in their disciplinary knowledge and communication goals.

Although STEM students frequently engage in diverse writing and communication tasks throughout their degree, feedback from instructors and supervisors primarily focuses on discipline‑specific content rather than the writing itself (Berdanier, 2019; Carter, 2007; Rollins et al., 2020; Russell, 1997; Zhu, 2004). As a result, many STEM students seek support at their university writing centre for guidance on STEM‑specific writing conventions. However, in writing centres that support students across disciplines, within the Canadian context, it seems that most writing centre staff come from Arts and Humanities backgrounds. This often means they have limited formal training in STEM writing conventions and little experience producing STEM‑specific writing. Subsequently, when a STEM student walks in with a lab report, it’s completely reasonable to feel unsure about how to navigate conversations and feedback around the organizational patterns of a genre that isn’t familiar.

However, supporting STEM writers does not mean writing centre staff must have STEM degrees or deep disciplinary expertise (Bryan Malenke et al., 2024; Soliday, 2005; Summers, 2016). What matters far more is having a working understanding of the structural conventions that govern how content is organized within STEM genres of communication (Bryan Malenke et al., 2024; Carter, 2007; Weissbach & Pflueger, 2018; Yeo, 2001). Put simply, effective STEM writing support doesn’t require mastery of scientific content—it requires recognition of how STEM genres work. When writing centre staff understand STEM genres, they can look past local sentence‑level issues to identify the organizational patterns shaping STEM writing, anticipate the recurring challenges STEM students encounter, and work with students to interpret the genres they’re using.

So, how do we strengthen our genre awareness to better support STEM students in the writing centre? To answer that question, I’ll draw on my background as a STEM researcher, communicator, and writing instructor and share how STEM genre knowledge has shaped the way I work with student writers. In this opening post, my goal is to highlight why genre awareness is foundational to supporting STEM writers and to introduce IMRaD—Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion—as a helpful framework for recognizing the structural patterns that underpin many of the STEM genres we encounter in the writing centre. This post also lays the groundwork for a series of subsequent posts, each exploring one major IMRaD section and offering practical, genre‑aware strategies that writing centre staff can use to support STEM writers with greater clarity and confidence.

From Intuition to STEM Genre Awareness

My background as a STEM researcher and communicator helps me build immediate trust with the STEM students who fill my writing centre appointment calendar. They often seek me out because they assume my disciplinary background means I am a subject expert who can follow their technical reasoning or that I “understand the statistics.” And while I am often familiar with their technical content and can follow their reasoning, my feedback is never about disciplinary knowledge or statistical tests. Still, students consistently leave appointments clearer on their writing goals and confident about next steps. Despite this consistent outcome, I couldn’t always articulate what, in my approach, makes my support so effective for STEM students.

That understanding began to take shape during an appointment with a student who arrived with a well‑structured Results section outline and wanted feedback on whether it was “good” before starting to write. At first glance, the outline appeared well-written and logical: writing centre staff unfamiliar with STEM writing might have asked about the student’s organizational choices—which the student could readily explain—and suggested a collaborative exploration of genre expectations—which the outline met. Instead, I asked to see their Methods section. Even without a shared disciplinary expertise, I knew that evaluating a Results outline requires comparing it to the research process described in the Methods. When the student and I reviewed the two sections side by side, we quickly identified missing content by noticing gaps between what the Methods promised and what the Results outline delivered. That comparison also revealed where the outline needed to be reorganized to create a clear, coherent narrative aligned with the described research process.

When the appointment ended, I felt briefly relieved—as if I had simply stumbled onto the right approach for supporting this student. But I quickly realized my support was not accidental. I had been supporting STEM students in this way for years, drawing on genre knowledge rather than disciplinary expertise. I was collaboratively establishing genre expectations, reading for structure, and assessing how well their writing aligned with the rhetorical patterns of academic STEM communication. Put simply, my guidance worked because I understood how genre shapes the presence, sequencing, and framing of information in STEM communication. This insight marked a turning point in my own understanding: genre awareness wasn’t new to me—it’s foundational to what we do in the writing centre—but this was the first time I could clearly articulate how that awareness functioned in STEM contexts.

Why STEM Genre Awareness Matters in Writing Support

Genre awareness plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of writing centre consultations (Bryan Malenke et al., 2024; Carter, 2007; Dinitz & Harrington, 2014; Gordon, 2014; Hill, 2016). Specifically, without a clear understanding of how STEM genres of communication are organized, it can be hard to see when writing diverges from expected structural patterns or when a student is struggling with a global‑level issue they cannot yet name (Kiedaisch & Dinitz, 1993; Mackiewicz, 2004; Shamoon & Burns, 1995; Summers, 2016). Consequently, those of us who are less familiar with STEM writing may feel unqualified or overwhelmed when we encounter unfamiliar disciplinary writing conventions in student writing (Dinitz & Harrington, 2014; Robinson & Hall, 2013). In these moments, it’s natural for us to focus on the writing features we can readily identify (Mackiewicz, 2004)—sentence‑level features such as whether to use first or third person or author‑vs. information‑prominent citations.

These sentence‑level features matter, but without STEM genre awareness it is easy to treat them as the defining characteristics of “STEM writing.”  When local writing features take precedence over global features, we risk missing the deeper organizational challenges that most often affect students’ clarity, logic, and confidence in their writing (Bryan Malenke et al., 2024; Dinitz & Harrington, 2014; Hill, 2016; Kiedaisch & Dinitz, 1993)

Developing a deeper understanding of STEM genres helps us shift our attention to the structural conventions that shape STEM communication. With this global‑level awareness, we can more easily recognize when student writing departs from disciplinary norms, identify underlying issues in logic or organization, and engage students in collaborative conversations that help them evaluate and strengthen their writing (Bryan Malenke et al., 2024; Dinitz & Harrington, 2014; Mackiewicz, 2004; Rollins et al., 2020; Velez, 2022).

Not only does this global‑level awareness enable more effective guidance, but it also enhances writing centre staff confidence—something students notice immediately (Yeo, 2001). As our confidence grows, so does student willingness to participate in meaningful discussion and engage in the collaborative work of revision (Gordon, 2014; Velez, 2022).  This creates a reinforcing cycle: as we apply our genre knowledge with confidence, students engage more deeply. In turn, increased student engagement opens space for more exploratory, student‑centered conversations—conversations where our core writing centre practices, such as asking curious questions, inquiring into disciplinary expectations, and positioning students as experts in their fields, become even more effective.

IMRaD as a Foundational Structure

One practical way to begin developing this STEM‑genre awareness is to start with the structural pattern post‑secondary writing instructors encounter most often: IMRaD. IMRaD is a foundational organizational pattern used in STEM communication (Mensh & Kording, 2017) and underpins a wide range of academic genres. Undergraduate STEM students—as emerging specialists—learn to report research using IMRaD as part of their disciplinary training. Graduate students use IMRaD—or a discipline‑specific iteration—to communicate their original research, extending these structural principles into advanced STEM writing.

STEM Writing is Not a Monolith

Before I go any further, I want to pause for a moment and clarify: STEM writing is not a monolith. Even though IMRaD plays a major role in STEM communication, not all STEM writing involves communicating research, and not all STEM disciplines use IMRaD in the same way. Students in applied fields like engineering or nursing often work within highly specialized professional genres that don’t follow IMRaD. Others write argumentative essays on STEM topics, which follow familiar academic structures across disciplines. And even within research‑based writing, IMRaD is adapted in different ways depending on the discipline (Moskovitz et al., 2024) and the expectations of instructors, supervisors, or journals. Because this is a blog post, not a book, I’m focusing on IMRaD as it applies to reporting empirical research—the structure we most often encounter with undergraduate and graduate students at the writing centre.

What to Expect in the Series

Over the next few months, I’ll share a post on each major IMRaD section as it appears in lab reports—and other IMRaD structured genres—we commonly see at the writing centre. Each post will:

  • outline the section’s purpose and structural logic
  • highlight common challenges for students and writing centre staff
  • offer practical strategies for giving clearer, more targeted, structure‑focused feedback

My goal with this series isn’t to prescribe rigid rules, but to offer flexible, foundational knowledge that helps writing centre staff ask thoughtful, genre‑aware questions and engage more confidently with STEM communications. STEM writing isn’t a foreign language; it’s another dialect in a conversation we already know how to have. When we understand the disciplinary structures students are working within, our existing writing centre practices become even more effective.

I look forward to sharing what I know about STEM communication, hearing your experiences and knowledge, and continuing to build a shared understanding of STEM communication in the writing centre community.

References

Berdanier, C. G. P. (2019). Genre maps as a method to visualize engineering writing and argumentation patterns. Journal of Engineering Education, 108(3), 377–393. https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20281

Bryan Malenke, L., Miller, L. K., Mabrey, P. E., & Featherstone, J. (2024). How genre-trained tutors affect student writing and perceptions of the writing center. The Writing Center Journal, 41(3). https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1336

Carter, M. (2007). Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines. College Composition and Communication, 58(3), 385–418.

Dinitz, S., & Harrington, S. (2014). The role of disciplinary expertise in shaping writing tutorials. The Writing Center Journal, 33(2). https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1769

Gordon, L. M. P. (2014). Beyond generalist vs. Specialist: Making connections between genre theory and writing center pedagogy. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.15781/T26970D7F

Hill, H. N. (2016). Tutoring for transfer: The benefits of teaching writing center tutors about transfer theory. The Writing Center Journal, 35(3). https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1842

Kiedaisch, J., & Dinitz, S. (1993). “Look back and say ‘So what’”:The limitations of the generalist tutor. The Writing Center Journal, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1286

Mackiewicz, J. (2004). The effects of tutor expertise in engineering writing: A linguistic analysis of writing tutors’ comments. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 47(4), 316–328. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2004.840485

Mensh, B., & Kording, K. (2017). Ten simple rules for structuring papers. PLoS Computational Biology, 13(9), e1005619. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005619

Moskovitz, C., Harmon, B., & Saha, S. (2024). The structure of scientific writing: An empirical analysis of recent research articles in STEM. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 54(3), 265–281. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472816231171851

Robinson, H. M., & Hall, J. (2013). Connecting WID and the writing center: Tools for collaboration. The WAC Journal, 24(1), 29–47. https://doi.org/10.37514/WAC-J.2013.24.1.02

Rollins, A., Lillvis, K., Diehl, S., Owens, S., & McComas, C. (2020). Improving students’ comprehension of STEM writing conventions. WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, 45(1), 10–17. https://doi.org/10.37514/WLN-J.2020.45.1.03

Russell, D. R. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society: An activity theory analysis. Written Communication, 14(4), 504–554. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088397014004004

Shamoon, L. K., & Burns, D. H. (1995). A critique of pure tutoring. The Writing Center Journal, 15(2). https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1287

Soliday, M. (2005). General readers and classroom tutors across the curriculum. In C. Spigelman & L. Grobman (Eds.), On location: Theory and practice in classroom-based writing tutoring (pp. 31–44). Utah State University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt46nxr5

Summers, S. (2016). Building expertise: The toolkit in UCLA’s graduate writing center. The Writing Center Journal, 35(2). https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1804

Velez, M. (2022). Like speaking a blueprint: STEM writing tutors’ disciplinary and writing identities. Across the Disciplines, 19(1–2), 47–61. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2022.19.1-2.04

Weissbach, R. S., & Pflueger, R. C. (2018). Collaborating with writing centers on interdisciplinary peer tutor training to improve writing support for engineering students. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 61(2), 206–220. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2017.2778949

Yeo, R. (2001). An integrative approach to the teaching of technical communication skills. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 38(1), 93–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/147032901300002891

Zhu, W. (2004). Faculty views on the importance of writing, the nature of academic writing, and teaching and responding to writing in the disciplines. Journal of Second Language Writing, 13(1), 29–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2004.04.004

Image credit: CSIRO lab notebook entry, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

A final post

~ CWCA/ACCR

Vol. 6 No. 6

Brian Hotson, Editor, CWCR/RCCR

This is the final post from me as editor of Canadian Writing Centre Review / revue Canadienne des centres de rédaction, as I am retiring from the position that I said I would last year. As I am no longer working in writing centres, I feel that I’m no longer qualified to continue in this position.

I see CWCR/RCCR as a project, which has been rewarding personally, but more importantly, the project has been a venue for those in the field of writing centres in Canada to speak and listen. While no one has agreed to take on the editorship of CWCR/RCCR, if this is the end, I feel that the project is successfully completed — 80+ posts over 6 years, which we collectively as a community should be proud. Continue reading “A final post” →

Proximate Chaos: An Agora Model of the Writing Centre

~ CWCA/ACCR

Vol. 6 No. 5 (Spring 2025)

Christin Wright-Taylor

Manager, Writing Services, Wilfrid Laurier University

Vice-President, CWCA/ACCR

Today, the Ephesian agora doesn’t look like much—just an open field with slabs of exposed stone lining the grass. A row of headless columns tacks down the remains of an ancient mosaiced walkway, varied marble tiles wink back colour and light. Beyond those, stoas arch over shaded stalls where merchants sold their goods. To the left, the open market shakes out into a cluster of Junipers, and then the scrubby, rolling Turkish hills. For all its unassuming rocks and grass and marble, there is something striking about the simplicity of the ancient agora. Continue reading “Proximate Chaos: An Agora Model of the Writing Centre” →

Announcement | Paid Opportunity – Assistant Conference Chair

~ CWCA/ACCR

Access a PDF version of this Position Description

Job Title: Assistant Conference Chair

Location: Remote

Position Type: Part-time, Contract

Term: February 10 – June 30, 2025

Compensation: $3,000

About Us: The Canadian Writing Centre Association/association canadienne des centres de rédaction (CWCA/ACCR) is dedicated to supporting writing centres across Canada through professional development, networking, and advocacy. As the Vice President of the CWCA/ACCR, we are seeking a motivated and organized individual to join the CWCA/ACCR board as the Assistant Conference Chair. The position runs from January – June 30, 2025. This role is crucial in ensuring the success of our annual conference, which brings together writing centre professionals from across the country.

Job Summary: The Assistant Conference Chair will work closely with the Conference Chair and the CWCA/ACCR Vice President to plan, organize, and execute the annual conference. The hired applicant is expected to become a member of CWCA/ACCR.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Assist in the development and implementation of the conference agenda and schedule.
  • Facilitate the blind review process by communicating in a timely manner with reviewers, distributing the review materials, and coordinating the responses/decisions.
  • Coordinate with speakers, presenters, and panelists to ensure timely submission of materials and adherence to deadlines.
  • Manage conference registration, including processing registrations, sending confirmations, and handling inquiries.
  • Assist in the creation and distribution of promotional materials and communications related to the conference.
  • Support the Conference Chair in managing the conference budget and tracking expenses.
  • Organize and participate in regular planning meetings with the Conference Chair.
  • Provide synchronous support during the conference, including registration desk management and troubleshooting any issues that arise.
  • Collect and analyze feedback from conference attendees to inform future planning.

Qualifications:

  • Canadian residency and current work permit.
  • Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field (e.g., Communications, Event Management, Education) or equivalent experience.
  • Previous experience in event planning or conference coordination is highly desirable.
  • Strong organizational and time management skills.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  • Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
  • Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite and familiarity with event management software.
  • CWCA/ACCR is committed to putting on an inclusive, antiracist, accessible, decolonial, and liberatory conference. Experience with these approaches is an asset for the role, as are insights from lived experiences of the realities of exclusion, racism, inaccessibility, colonialism, and systematic injustice.

How to Apply: Interested candidates are invited to submit their resume and a cover letter outlining their qualifications and experience to chtaylor@wlu.ca. Please include “Assistant Conference Chair Application” in the subject line.

Application Deadline: February 1, 2025

Contact Information: Dr. Christin Wright-Taylor, Vice President, CWCA, chtaylor@wlu.ca

We look forward to receiving your application and thank all applicants for their interest. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted

Trump’s travel ban, Baltimore, and the 2025 IWCA Collaborative@CCCC

~ CWCA/ACCR

No. 4, Vol. 6 Winter 2025

Brian Hotson, Editor, CWCR/RCCR

In 2016, at the beginning of the first Trump presidency, reaction to the possibilities of what might lay ahead produced a significant number of pronouncements and warnings. The French paper, Les Echos, for example, wrote of Trump in November 2016: “Racist, populist, male chauvinist, arrogant and unpredictable. We do not know what is most terrifying in the personality of Donald Trump.” We now know that he is a rapist and convicted felon. As I’ve written here before, Trump displays all the markers of a neo-fascist. His latest threats include challenges to the sovereignty of Canada (Tasker, 2024, December 11), as well as not ruling out military invasion of both Greenland (Shamim, 2025, January 9) and Panama (Role, 2024, December 25). Continue reading “Trump’s travel ban, Baltimore, and the 2025 IWCA Collaborative@CCCC” →

Already Whole: rethinking your so-called ‘parts’ (announcement and repost)

~ CWCA/ACCR

Vol. 6 No. 3 (Fall 2024)

CWCR/RCCR is pleased to announce the publication of Clare Goulet’s volume of poetry, Graphis scripa / writing lichen (available from Gaspereau Press, 2024).

Clare Goulet is writing centre coordinator and adjunct professor in the Department of English at Mount St. Vincent University, teaching editing, composition, and intro creative writing

Below is a post Clare wrote for CWCR/RCCR in 2023. This melodic and inspiring piece–part poem, part lichen biography, part autobiography–is worth reading and rereading. So, on this occasion, here it is again.

Congratulations to Clare.

– Editor, CWCR/RCCR

Vol. 5, No. 6 (Fall 2023)

Clare Goulet has published creative nonfiction, poetry, and reviews as well as essays on metaphor and polyphony. Adjunct prof and writing centre coordinator at Mount St. Vincent University, she co-edited with Mark Dickinson Lyric Ecology on the work of Jan Zwicky. Her book, Graphis scripta: writing lichen, will be published by Gaspereau Press in spring 2024.

1.
1975. Late summer in the woods behind the backyard, lost, first freedom, almost five, lying across a warm rough slab of granite, heat soaking into my belly where the cotton t-shirt has pushed up, scratched by brown prickly things—rock tripe, though I didn’t know the name, genus Umbilicaria—the world something sensuous, even reading which came too early, my head already filled with poems. The sun is hot. I mumble made-up lines, sleepy, peeling brittle bits to see the thick white cord connecting each to its substrate, holding rock, lichen, child in place. It will be forty years before these come together and I feel this whole again. Continue reading “Already Whole: rethinking your so-called ‘parts’ (announcement and repost)” →

Call for Proposals | WLN – The Future of Writing Centers

cover of Graphis scripa / writing lichen header, showing a printing of lichen on a green-grey background.
~ CWCA/ACCR

WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship (WLN) is calling for contributions to an edited collection, The Future of Writing Centers, to be published on WAC Clearinghouse’s Digital Edited Collections (DEC).

DEC is an open-access publication forum focused on topics relevant to the field of writing center studies. These multimodal texts, which are rich with graphics, links to sources, videos, and teaching resources, extend learning beyond printed texts. In addition to its enhanced ability to engage and educate readers, this digital scholarship is accessible to international audiences and easily shareable through digital links.

Theme:

The theme of this WLN DEC volume, the future of writing centers, was the theme of the very successful 2024 European Writing Centers Association Conference. Though Franziska Liebetanz (Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)), in a special English-language edition of Journal für Schreibwissenschaft, is leading on the topic as it pertains to writing centers in Europe, this call asks for chapter proposals that reflect on how those wider contextual exigencies and affordances of neoliberal policies in higher education have led writing center administrators and practitioners everywhere—North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia—to question or re-think their writing center’s identity, the identity of the field as a whole, and the direction their writing center is, or writing centers in general are, taking or should be taking. How has your writing center responded to these difficulties and possibilities? How have these neoliberal techniques changed who we are, how we see ourselves, what we do and how we do it? What is the way forward? We are particularly interested in chapter proposals that examine the author’s own writing center or writing centers more broadly through the lens of globalization, emerging technologies, or pedagogical innovations. Impact on centers resulting from other techniques of neoliberalism will be entertained, but our focus will be on these three areas of impact.

Nuts and bolts:

  • For this DEC, we seek 500-word proposals for book chapters with an explanation on how you plan to integrate multimodal elements into your manuscript. Multimodal elements should not simply be add-ons but essential complements to the author’s ideas and argument.
  • Chapters should be between 4,000-6,000 words.

Schedule:

  • Proposal due date: January 10, 2025
  • Invitation to submit chapters by March 3, 2025
  • Submit chapter drafts by: July 19, 2025

Please, see the full call here.

We look forward to reading your proposals.

Lawrence Cleary,
Director Regional Writing Centre
University of Limerick,

Support for anxious writers: The six stages of an undergraduate online writing retreat

~ CWCA/ACCR

Vol. 6, No. 2 Fall 2024

Sarah King, Writing Support Coordinator, Centre for Teaching and Learning, University of Toronto Scarborough

When I was an undergraduate, I found academic writing assignments highly stressful. Books would pile up on my residence room floor, as I researched but put off writing until the very last minute, ultimately pulling all-nighters and submitting half-baked ideas. I think that’s why I’m sympathetic to anxious students and perhaps why, in the dark, middle days of the pandemic, I devised a way to make the graduate writing group techniques of freewriting, goal-setting, and timed writing useful for undergraduates. I called these “writing retreats,” students greeted them with enthusiasm, and our writing centre is still offering them regularly. Continue reading “Support for anxious writers: The six stages of an undergraduate online writing retreat” →

Fooling the detector: Using Grammarly’s AI Detector

~ CWCA/ACCR

Vol. 6, No. 3 Fall 2024

Brian Hotson, Editor, CWCA/RCCR

As I’ve written before here, writing support tools can be both helpful and harmful, just and unjust (See, Friends don’t let friends Studiosity (without reading the fine print) and Academic writing has completely changed: Turnitin forges ahead). Grammarly, a $13 billion USD company (2021), launched an AI detection tool in 2024, which comes bundled in with a Grammarly Premium subscription. Many universities and colleges offer Grammarly Premium without charge and promote the tool to students, faculty, and administrators. AI tools embedded into these writing support tools have changed the formulation of how these tools function. But, do they work as advertised? Continue reading “Fooling the detector: Using Grammarly’s AI Detector” →

International-ish Writing Centers Association

~ CWCA/ACCR

Vol. 6, No. 1 Fall 2024

Brian Hotson, CWCR/RCCR Editor
Stevie Bell, CWCR/RCCR Associate Editor

Note: This post does not reflect the position of the CWCA/ACCR.

Last week, the IWCA announced their 2024 grants and awards winners. Once again—and year over year—the International Writing Centers Association awards go to those in the Global North, specifically Americans, save two: the non-US awardees are Editors, Karin Wetschanow, Erika Unterpertinger, Eva Kuntschner, Birgit Huemer, of the collection, Neue Perspektiven auf Schreibberatung, awarded Outstanding Book; and Gillian Saunders, University of Victoria, awarded a Dissertation Grant. Of all the IWCA Outstanding Book award winners since 1999, with the exception of this year, all awards have gone to American authors, written in American English, and published in the US (Heinemann/Boynton-Cook is a US subsidiary of Heinemann UK). Of those listed as recipients of the Dissertation Grant, this is only the second year that the grant has gone to a non-US graduate student. Only once has the grant gone to a graduate student from the Global South.

There are many examples of non-US writing centre practitioners and scholars deserving recognition. The new Centro de Escritura y Argumentación, part of the Red Mexicana de Centros de Escritura, continues the building of the writing centre community in Mexico. Examples of publications include the edited collection, Centros y Programas de Escritura en América Latina: Opciones Teóricas y Pedagógicas para la Enseñanza de la Escritura Disciplinar (2023), edited by Estela Inés Moyano and Margarita Vidal Liza;  Reimagining Writing Centres Practices: A South African Perspective (2023), edited by Avasha Rambiritch and Laura Drennan; Multilingual Contributions to Writing Research: Toward an Equal Academic Exchange (2023), edited by Natalia Ávila Reyes; Negotiating the Intersections of Writing and Writing Instruction (2023), edited by Magnus Gustafsson and Andreas Eriksson; and Inclusive Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning Practices in Higher Education in India (2024), edited by Kanika Singh of Ashoka University’s Centre for Writing and Communication. Recognizing work published or to be published is laudatory and important. Taking a global approach to this task should be the work of an international organization. Continue reading “International-ish Writing Centers Association” →

Tutor Event | SCWCA’s Tutor Talks September Session: Mission: Possible – Semester Goals Edition

~ CWCA/ACCR

This is an open event for all tutors and consultants from the Tutor Talks Executive Committee of the South Central Writing Centers Association. – Editor

Dear Writing Center Tutors and Consultants,

Join us on September 27th at 12 p.m. CT for the first Tutor Talks session of this academic year: Mission: Possible—Semester Goals Edition. In this session, both new and experienced consultants will have the opportunity to share and discuss their writing consultant goals for this semester. Continue reading “Tutor Event | SCWCA’s Tutor Talks September Session: Mission: Possible – Semester Goals Edition” →

Call for Papers | RLCPE’s Andamiajes in collaboration with SKRIB

~ CWCA/ACCR
CALL FOR PAPERS
Andamiajes, 5.2 / SKRIB 2.1
In the Latin American region, thirty years have already passed since the foundation of the UNESCO Chair for the Improvement of the Quality and Equity of Education in Latin America based on Reading and Writing, and more than two decades since the first writing center was created and the first research papers on writing studies were published. In addition, in 2024, the Latin American Network of Writing Centers and Programs (RLCPE) celebrates 10 years of building connections for joint practice among Latin American colleagues. In this decade, the practice we have shared has shown signs of growth, transformation, reconstruction and continuous innovation in the hands of writing specialists who develop academic literacies in a wide diversity of educational realities.

Continue reading “Call for Papers | RLCPE’s Andamiajes in collaboration with SKRIB” →

Announcement | NCTE Position Statement on Supporting Teachers and Students in Discussing Complex Topics

~ CWCA/ACCR

While the audience of this statement is for those in the US, it has usefulness in Canadian and international contexts, at the very least to understand the current political situation in the US. As is apparent from news reports and others outlets, the US political situation is in upheaval, with the outcome of the US national election in November in doubt. The ramification of an authoritarian Republican presidency will be dire for marginalized communities, immigrants, and people of colour, the knock-on effect of which will be wide-ranging. As a community, we need to stand against the rise of authoritarianism at all levels.

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is the parent organization of the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA). Here is the statement as a PDF.

   – Editor

September 12, 2024
Continue reading “Announcement | NCTE Position Statement on Supporting Teachers and Students in Discussing Complex Topics” →

Announcement | The AI-Enabled Educator virtual PD conference

~ CWCA/ACCR

The AI-Enabled Educator virtual PD conference

October 16, 2024
9 am – 5:20 pm PST
Zoom

Laila Shaheen, Simon Fraser University

I am writing to share an announcement of a virtual Professional Development Conference focused on Generative AI: The AI-Enabled Educator. The event is on October 16, 2024, and a discounted registration rate of $180 CAD is available for the first 50 registrants, until the end of August.

This event is being coordinated by a current Simon Fraser University graduate student, who also presented at the CWCA/ACCR conference this year. 🙂

Please share widely with your networks and at your institutions as this learning event promises to be insightful and rewarding.

Full announcement and registration link follow:

On October 16th 2024 we are launching the inaugural, Canada-wide virtual Generative AI professional development conference for educators in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. This event is made possible through collaboration with educators and experts from across Canadian institutions and sponsorship from the Simon Fraser University Library.

We’ve put a lot of thought into making this event truly valuable for educators in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences because they’re often the least served when it comes to AI literacy. This conference is all about empowering them with the knowledge and tools they need to navigate the increasingly AI-engaged academic environment.

The goal of this event are to: 

  • Help post-secondary educators get over their fears and apprehensions regarding engaging with AI.
  • Provide the space for cross-institutional learning and strategy sharing.
  • Empower instructors to have knowledgeable conversations about AI with their students.
  • Encourage educators to engage with the AI EdTech leaders who are developing the tools their students are using.

I would appreciate it if you could share this event with your network. I think your audience would benefit from what we’ve planned, as they’re exactly who we had in mind when designing this event.

If you’d like to learn more or discuss how this event aligns with your goals, feel free to schedule a 15-minute call with me. We’re also open to suggestions for specific topics you’d like to see covered during the conference.

To encourage early registration, we are offering our first 50 registrants a discounted rate of $180 until the end of August 2024.

If you are interested in being a sponsor and enjoying group discount rates, let me know and I will share more information.

AI literacy is becoming more important than ever for educators, and I hope you’ll join me in spreading the word about this much-needed event.

Thank you so much for your support!

Laila

For more information, contact: info@highredai.com

 

Creating a Translingual Writing Bank for Laurier Students and Faculty

~ CWCA/ACCR

Vol. 5, No. 10 (Summer 2024)

Christin Wright-Taylor, Manager, Writing Services, Wilfrid Laurier University

Elizabeth Clarke, Learning Consultant, Transition and Learning Services, Wilfrid Laurier University

During the keynote for CWCA/ACCR’s 2022 conference, Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young (Dr. Vay) put out a call to Canadian writing centres to create a statement on translingual academic writing for students and faculty in their institutions. He also suggested creating a bank of translingual academic writing (TAW) to showcase the stylistic and rhetorical power of such writing, examples to light the way for students as well as faculty wanting to integrate diverse linguistic identities into academic writing.

Two years later, Laurier Writing Services has answered the call. We’ve created both a TAW statement and bank for our body of undergraduate and graduate students  published on an public-facing website. Whether or not our statement and bank are specifically what Dr. Vay had in mind, it is our attempt to achieve his vision: a clarion call for institutions to allow translingual academic writing in coursework and a guide for students on what translingual academic  writing could look like in their work.

The journey to this point reveals the kind of labour entailed in this work as well as the systemic and generic constraints placed on producing an artifact of this kind.

This article narrates the process by which we wrote the statement, gathered the TAW texts, and then adapted our content to fit the norms and conventions of “web writing” for a public-facing landing page.

The journey to this point reveals the kind of labour entailed in this work as well as the systemic and generic constraints placed on producing an artifact of this kind. Included in this article is the original TAW statement and sample bank created for the website, along with a link to the actual web page which is drastically revised to meet the conventions of web-writing and Laurier’s external communication norms.

The Audience and The Purpose
Since Laurier Writing Services is housed under Student Affairs, our statement and bank, first and foremost, needed to target students. As such, the statement would be housed on Writing Services’ website and positioned as a resource for student writing.

However, we know that faculty also access our student-facing resources to help support student writing. For example, faculty embed our online resources for syllabi assignments. They also access our student website to gain information on how to direct students to book appointments and attend workshops. For this reason, a secondary audience for our TAW bank was faculty. Within the institutional political structure, Writing Services’ focus is toward students. At the same time, the TAW statement and bank can provide faculty with fresh ideas for how they design and assess their writing assignments.

The primary purposes of the TAW statement and bank are to:

  • Inform students that Writing Services not only believes in their linguistic and cultural identity but will help them integrate that identity into their writing in tangible ways.
  • Direct students to book a writing appointment with Writing Services to receive guidance on how to integrate their linguistic identity into their academic writing.
  • Show students examples of translingual academic writing to inspire their own writing.

The Process
The process of composing and curating the translingual academic writing bank began with Christin, the manager of Writing Services. She reached across the university for collaborators, inviting insight and input from campus partners who support the Indigenous student body, the Black and Racialized student body, and the faculty.

Key partners in the collaboration of this work were Zeeta Lazore Cayuga, Indigenous Academic Student Success, who provided feedback on how students in her program might receive and interpret the translingual statement and bank; Alesha Moffat, Educational Developer and Instructor in Faculty of Education, who generously contributed her collection of translingual academic writing samples to the bank; Linn Huemiller, Web Content Specialist, who helped us fit our content to web writing conventions and who also helped us understand the user trends for our webpage; Elizabeth Clarke, Academic Equity Programs, who provided feedback on how students in her program might receive and interpret the translingual statement and bank.

Elizabeth’s contribution was so substantial that she agreed to become a co-writer for the project.

The Starting Artifact
Here is the original TAW statement and bank written by Christin and Elizabeth.

Your Language. Your Writing. Your Voice.

Prepared by Christin Wright-Taylor and Elizabeth Clarke

 

“I speak three languages, write in

Two, dream in one.”

~ Kamala Das, from “An Introduction”

Writing Services believes students have a right to use their own language and voice in academic writing. The staff are committed to developing writing strategies that not only consider the conventions of academic writing but also challenge and dismantle systemic barriers that students may face.

Nearly 50 years ago, the Conference on College Composition and Communication released a statement called, “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” (CCCC, 1974). This statement says students have the right to “Dig And Be Dug,” as Langston Hughes’s (2024) puts it. In other words, students have the right to bring their culture and language to academic writing and for that writing to be understood.

Writing Services acknowledges that academic writing has historically been Eurocentric, classed, and gendered, and that this has shut out students with diverse backgrounds.  As Geneva Smitherman (1995) writes, “the Unhip among researchers, scholars, and intellectuals … [argued] that even though the [language] difference of those oppressed by race, class, or gender were cognitively equal to those of the mainstream, they were socially unequal” (p. 21). In other words, racialized English has been stereotyped as “ghetto.” International English is called, “broken.” And working-class English has been branded, “unintelligent.” But these various forms of language and dialects are just as intelligent and capable as mainstream language, and many scholars have shown us the way:

Suresh Canagarajah (2015) says that “rather than developing mastery in a single ‘target language,’ students should strive for competences in a repertoire of codes and discourses” (p. 284). Paul Kei Matsuda (2006) says that “all [writing] teachers need to reimagine the [writing] classroom as the multilingual space that it is” (649). And Ilona Leki and Joan Carson (1997) say that “experiencing a deep interaction between language, personal interests, needs, and backgrounds” is important for students in terms of linguistic and intellectual growth (p. 64).

This may sound lovely, but institutions and faculty may not know about Smitherman, Canagarajah, Matsuda, Leki and the many bright ideas about language diversity in academic writing. As a result, institutions are behind in including diverse languages and voices, which hinders student expression and intellectual growth (Horner & Trimbur, 2022; Matsuda, 2006; Shor, 1997).

What should students do then? First, read the excerpts of writing below that demonstrate all the different ways other scholars and writers have brought their culture and language into academic writing. Second, book an appointment with Writing Services to learn how you can balance meeting the expectations of your writing assignment with integrating your language and culture into your academic voice.

*Special thanks to Alesha Moffat, Teaching, Excellence, and Innovation for contributing key samples of translingual writing.

References
Canagarajah, S. (2015). The Place of World Englishes in Composition. In S. Perryman-Clark, D. E. Kirkland, A. Jackson, & G. Smitherman (Eds.), Students’ right to their own language: A critical sourcebook (pp. 284–285). Bedford / St Martin’s.

CCCC. (1974). Committee on CCC Language: Background Statement. College Composition and Communication, 25(3), 1–18.

Horner, B., & Trimbur, J. (2022). English Only and U.S. College Composition. CCC, 53(4), 594–630.

Hughes, L. (2024). Motto. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/150987/motto

Leki, I., & Carson, J. (1997). “Completely Different Worlds”: EAP and the Writing Experiences of ESL Students in University Courses. TESOL Quarterly, 31(1), 39. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587974

Matsuda, P. K. (2006). The myth of linguistic homogeneity in U.S. college composition. College English, 68(6), 637–651.

Shor, I. (1997). Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality. Journal of Basic Writing, 16(1), 91–104.

Smitherman, G. (1995). “Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Retrospective. The English Journal, 84(1), 21–27.

The Final Artifact
Here is the final product: a web page created as an external facing artifact for students and faculty. Translingual Writing: Your Language. Your Writing. Your Voice | Students – Wilfrid Laurier University (wlu.ca)

The Translation
As you can see, there is quite a difference in style and format from the original statement to the web page. Though we spent hours laboring over the original statement, and were quite pleased with its stylistic savvy, Linn, our web designer, shared that the statement read too much like an “essay” and didn’t support optimal SEO algorithms. She also helped us understand the rhetorical context of the web page, which needed to function as a “wayfinding” tool, something that students can reference for where and how to access our resources. Finally, Linn helped us frame the content to best fit the way that students interact with the website: by Googling key search terms, then skimming the web page for the information they want.

To that end, we added two sections to the web page as practical support for students: “Book an Appointment” and “Talk to Your Instructor.” The booking section directs students to book an appointment with our writing consultants to help them negotiate using their own language and culture in their academic voice. The “Talk to Your Instructor” section offers students a template e-mail they can use to broach a conversation with their professor about possibly taking a translingual approach to their assignment.

Finally, copyright and accessibility considerations informed the design of the TAW bank. We had initially imagined the bank to be interactive with the  writing samples appearing as tiles students could click on and navigate out to  writing samples. However, in order to make the samples accessible and to avoid infringing on the original texts’ copyrights , we chose to offer the writing samples as links to publication pages where students can read the translingual pieces in full.

Reflecting on the Process
After completing the translingual statement and bank, here are Christin and Elizabeth’s reflections on the process:

Make it a priority to collaborate on your translingual banks! Draw on partnerships across the institution to contribute to the content and to inform the process.

From Christin
Make it a priority to collaborate on your translingual banks! Draw on partnerships across the institution to contribute to the content and to inform the process. It was vital to get Elizabeth, Zeeta, Alesha, and Linn’s input on the translingual academic writing bank. Their voices and perspectives contributed something significant to the process and ultimately made the translingual statement and bank better than it would have been otherwise.

Also, creating this statement and bank was a series of compromises: formatting it as a landing page sacrificed stylistic choices, as well as authorship (i.e. our names aren’t on the statement anymore). The landing page format also minimized the research and scholarship behind the statement and bank. On the other hand, by placing the statement and bank on the student-facing webpage, we gained accessibility to the students, relevance to their searches, and a visibility that wouldn’t otherwise be possible through internal institutional platforms.

From Elizabeth
As a learning consultant who is a part of Academic Equity Programs and working within a predominantly white institution (PWI), it’s important to me to collaborate with other staff, faculty and community partners to support the enrichment of the work being done for students (the collective).

Christin reached out to me and asked if I could provide feedback on a one-page statement about supporting and empowering diverse students to write using their unique linguistic identity and how the statement read for me as a Black woman working within a university setting. I initially read the statement from several perspectives as a Black woman working within a university, working with different individuals and groups, and recognizing it would read differently to different people. I collaborated with another colleague, Shevaungh Thomas, Racialized Counsellor, and asked how it read for her. There, we discussed the intent, meaning and initial thoughts of the article and provided feedback for more clarity.

While sharing the feedback with Christin, the process turned into a collaborative piece of work, allowing us to bounce ideas and thoughts off one another to try to speak to different readers and invite them into the writing process. It was a neat collaboration for me, as I don’t necessarily always see myself as a writer, but further highlighted the importance of creating space for collaboration and diversity in writing centres in Canada, echoing Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young.

Will It Work?
It is uncertain if the TAW statement and bank in this format will achieve Dr. Vay’s vision and our purpose. Will the students find this web page? Will it help them start conversations with their faculty and direct them to our resources? All of this is untested yet. However, another advantage to choosing to house this resource on a public-facing website, is that we will have access to analytics that can show us how many internal and external users access the site, how long users stay on the site, and how far down they scroll through the site. Our team will review these analytics periodically to see how and when users are engaging the translingual academic writing bank. In the end, this bank — in this format — may be a shot in the dark, but at least it’s a shot.

Writing centre industrial complex

~ CWCA/ACCR

Vol. 5, No. 9 (Summer 2024)

Brian Hotson, Editor, CWCR/RCCR

Neo-colonialism, and the US leadership of it, do not evoke the same sense of horror as the old colonialism and the oppressor nations of Europe used to evoke in the general imagination and in political practice. In some quarters the USA is not even seen as an imperialist power.

— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom

This May, the French government sent a force of 3,000 police and military personnel to New Caledonia (Lukiv, 2024), an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean and a territory of France, to put down a protest by the Indigenous Kanak people. Their protests are for voting to be representative of the people of their islands; France recently changed the rules of who can vote, allowing “more recent arrivals to vote in provincial elections” (Macron heading to New Caledonia…, 2024, May 21). In a Guardian article, a member of the Indigenous Kanak people of the island chain, said, “I don’t know why our fate is being discussed by people who don’t even live here.” The official language of the islands is French, even though the peoples of New Caledonia speak “28 indigenous languages” (Bissoonauth & Parish, 2017, p. 39), and New Caledonia 17,000 kilometres from France. Continue reading “Writing centre industrial complex” →