5:30-6pm, Session G: Roundtables

Roundtable: Translators, Colonizers, Co-Conspirators: The Conflicting Roles of Writing Centre Professionals in Creating Safe Spaces for Student Voices
Erin Stewart Eves (Trent University); Susan Thompson (Trent University)

Writing centres invite students into alternative spaces where instructors help students decode confusing and often intimidating language. In this roundtable participants will explore ways in which academic discourse alienates students and places them in unsafe spaces, tensions we experience as ‘translators’ of scholarly language, and practices we can employ to create safe spaces where students can bring their own experiences and epistemologies as they encounter the coded language of academia.

Roundtable: Creating a Safe Space in Others’ Classrooms: Virtual Assignment-Specific Writing Appointments
Jonathan Vroom (University of Toronto), Michael Kaler (University of Toronto Mississauga)

Writing centres struggle to make students aware of us, our services, and our relevance and the pandemic has made this more challenging. In this discussion, we will describe how we partnered with course instructors across campus to offer assignment-specific writing appointments, integrated into each course’s online shell. While helping students understand and respond to course requirements, we also raised the profile of the writing centre for many who might not have been aware of us.

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