Working in the Thunderdome: Coalitions and Community as Resistance

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

July 14, 2026July 14, 2026 ~ 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

Clare Bermingham: Visionary Leadership and a Culture of Care

June 4, 2026June 17, 2026 ~ 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.

May 20, 2026May 20, 2026 ~ 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.