Emily Carr University of Art + Design Writing Centre Jacqueline Turner, Writing Specialist Sara Osenton, Learning Specialist Emily Carr University of Art + Design Vancouver, BC
The deep fatigue of the pandemic has definitely set in, but this year we’ve focused on our tutors and building their capacity to thrive in changing conditions. We started the year with tutor-led meetings, providing a structure and then letting them learn and practice how to lead. To kick off 2022, we started meetings with a variety of activities such as Jamboard drawing on virtual money envelopes for lunar new year, or sharing our own creative practices from painting, book making, design, and graphic novel creation to sewing and knitting. We talked about how all these practices made us think differently about the moment of writing and how empathy and enthusiasm were key traits for tutor success. This week, we’ll start off our meeting figuring out how our collective skills might help us survive a zombie apocalypse. Too real~
While the ongoing limitations brought on by COVID restrictions meant the cancellation of our yearly, open-house Valentine’s event for the second time now, we found ways to connect with students by pivoting “Love, the Writing Centre” to a Valentine’s swag-bag giveaway. A hundred students signed in to WCOnline to reserve their kit and pick up time. The kits included writing-themed items designed by our tutors, who took these ideas from conception through the design process: notepads of Venn diagrams and writing checklists designed by one of our talented (and Instagram famous) tutors; a real postage stamp designed by tutors in the Letter Writing Collective, tucked into a tiny envelope; Writing Centre pencils and bookmarks; and, of course, candy. A few select kits even included a “golden ticket” redeemable for additional prizes to amp up the excitement.
We’ve also had tutors lead out and collaborate on workshops in proposal writing featuring “obnoxious unicorns” (who ask “Why?” and “How?” many times); to moving beyond cliché in artist statement workshops; to MLA sessions; and thesis queries. We’ve had tutors visiting virtual classes and sharing their enthusiasm for writing in Zoom rooms across the curriculum. Tutors have hosted online Study Hall Sessions for students to hang out and work on assignments and hosted a letter-writing collective where they set up a pen-pal system and wrote letters to trees in Australia. Wordsmiths, our long running tutor-led creative writing club, continues to have strong uptake. In this sense, the culture of writing is still strong in our university community.
In essence, we’ve begun to see that the work tutors do beyond one-on-one appointments to build community and a love of writing is even more important in COVID times. Seeking and maintaining connections in the shifting landscape of Writing Centre practice seems like the most significant thing we can do these days. We’re lucky to have such a dynamic and thoughtful group of tutors to carry it all out.
Early in the pandemic, Kate Elliott, a Graduate Writing Facilitator with the SFU Student Learning Commons, wrote Maintaining Social Cohesion in a Time of Social Distancing, a blog post which she generously allowed me to contribute to. The post was about the opportunities that this moment of seeming isolation presents to get creative about supporting connectivity through virtual means.
Here I am over a year later reflecting once again on Kate’s incredible ability to focus on connectivity in the time of social/physical distancing within a week of everything shutting down the first time. We have been told to maintain distance from one another to keep each other safe, but that doesn’t mean that we can safely forego the social. It is clear that Kate’s emphasis on the ongoing need for social connection remains central. Throughout this past year, writing centres have been challenged to re-consider and re-imagine our roles in our wider institutions and to get creative with opportunities to support human connection—remotely—while we all experience ongoing crisis. Continue reading “There will be no switch flipping in my future: A look at post-COVID writing centres”→
This three-part series looks at how the pandemic affected both graduate student writers and graduate student writing support.We speak to Jill McMillan, a Learning Specialist at the University of Saskatchewan, and Nadine Fladd, a Writing and Multimodal Communication Specialist at the University of Waterloo.
Part I: In the Thick of It
Here, in part one, we learn about Jill’s and Nadine’s roles and work, and how the pandemic has supported intercampus collaboration and better use of resources to benefit the overall student experience.
Liv: Thank you, Nadine and Jill, for speaking with me about your experiences this year.
Could you tell me a bit about who you are and what you do at your institutions?
Nadine: Sure. I am one of several Writing and Multimodal Communication Specialists at the Writing and Communication Centre at UWaterloo. My role, in particular, focuses on supporting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty, so a lot of the work that I do focuses on developing programs for graduate students, such as Dissertation Boot Camp, a program called Rock Your Thesis that is designed to help students start their dissertation or thesis writing process on the right foot, and orchestrating and coordinating writing groups and writing communities. In between these activities, I also do a handful of appointments with grad students, postdocs, and faculty each week.
Nadine Fladd, Writing and Multimodal Communication Specialist, University of Waterloo
Jill: I’m a Learning Specialist, and I work with Student Learning Services. And yes, there’s a lot of overlap in terms of Nadine’s and my dossiers; there is a focus on programming—facilitating workshops, designing new workshops, trying to think of new initiatives that are going to have value for our graduate student population. I’ve also been hosting virtual writing groups and offer one-to-one appointments, though the majority of the one-to-one support comes from our amazing writing help centre. I also offer a course for international grad students. But otherwise, the focus is on designing new programs, creating new initiatives, trying to connect to other campus partners, and thinking of how we can pool resources, which I think is especially important these days as we just try and figure out how we can offer support without replicating services.
Liv: Have either of you have you found that moving online has helped to reduce that duplication and increase communication between communication units?
Nadine: Maybe, but I feel like every university does have that compartmentalizing of units.
Liv: Has that lessened during the pandemic, stayed the same, or intensified?
Nadine: I think that the Writing and Communication Centre had pretty strong collaborative relationships with campus partners before the pandemic, and that has been a blessing. What I’ve seen is more communication between those campus partners and each other than I’ve seen in the past. So, for example, our Student Success Office has traditionally hosted an orientation for graduate students and during the pandemic the Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs office helped design and took the lead on building an infrastructure for an online orientation program and has since handed that program over to the Student Success Office. So there’s collaboration there that didn’t exist before that I think has been really useful.
Liv: That’s positive. Jill, what have you noticed?
Jill: It’s certainly helped me as someone who is relatively new to campus to make some of those connections a bit more easily. Of course, you still encounter some of these instances where there is duplication popping up, but then you reach out and make that connection. And so, it’s possible that that duplication will eventually turn into a collaboration at a future point. So, I think that in some ways I do recognize that there have been some strange benefits to how everything has happened over the last year in terms of the shift to remote teaching and learning. I think it really has forced people to think, “oh, how do we make use of the limited resources that are currently available to maximize the student experience?”
Jill McMillan, Learning Specialist, University of Saskatchewan
Nadine: We have an incentive system. So, students have a digital coffee card that they can fill out every time they attend a writing session. And when you’ve attended 12 writing sessions, you earn a mug that has a #WaterlooWrites logo on it. We see a lot of repeat members in our writing community, and people get to know each other and talk to each other during the breaks and help each other. We see a lot of regulars in those communities for sure.
Liv: Interesting. Now, in terms of your own work, how have you kept up professionally or what’s really helped to you in your job?
Nadine: I’m lucky because unlike a lot of writing centres, I have a team I work with of full-time permanent staff who do the same work I do. I’ve learnt a lot from other members on the team as we navigated this together. A lot of my professional development this past year has been technological. One of my colleagues, Elise Vist, our digital guru on the team, has taught me how to do things like build online asynchronous workshops through Rise 360, and so now we can build these really slick looking modules full of videos and interactive elements. And that’s not something that I ever would have even considered trying to attempt a year and a half ago. It wasn’t on my radar.
So, in some ways, the pandemic has been a push to expand my range of teaching tools. And in a lot of ways, at the beginning of the pandemic, we were focused on trying to recreate what exists in our in-person programming in an online format. And I think that worked for a while. But what students have needed after a year in isolation and after a year of video calls has changed. I think my approach to teaching has really gotten back to the very basics of starting with what is the goal, what is the objective and building from there rather than trying to transfer an in-person equivalent to an online environment.
Jill: We have an academic integrity tutorial now and we’re currently just beginning to work on some new writing modules. So, you know, it’s been good to learn all about Panopto, WebEx and other online platforms.
In part two, posted next week, Jill and Nadine share their thoughts on accessibility, especially around international student writing support.
Vol 2, No. 3 (Spring 2021) Brian Hotson, Co-Editor, CWCR/RCCR
At the beginning of the lockdown across Canada and the move to online support, we asked our colleagues to provide a snapshot of their centres. These posts from March 2020 (here, here, here, and here) are historical markers and records of an unprecedented time in higher education in Canada. One year on, we’ve asked again for a March snapshot–how have tour centres changed, what have you learned, and where are we going. Here are the responses.
hundred students signed in to WCOnline to reserve their kit and pick up time. The kits included writing-themed items designed by our tutors, who took these ideas from conception through the design process: notepads of Venn diagrams and writing checklists designed by one of our talented (and Instagram famous) tutors; a real postage stamp designed by tutors in the Letter Writing Collective, tucked into a tiny envelope; Writing Centre pencils and bookmarks; and, of course, candy. A few select kits even included a “golden ticket” redeemable for additional prizes to amp up the excitement.
