Concurrent Sessions K – 10:00 AM to 11:15 AM (EST)
K1
Maggie Conlee, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Subverting the Writing Center Paradigm to Support First Generation Students
Is the writing center doing enough to support first-generation students? Studies have found that first-generation students do not find it as helpful as it claims to be. This presentation focuses on offering ideas that writing centers can implement to better support these students.
Laura DeLuca, Binghamton University, Historically Marginalized Yet Predominantly White Writing Centers: The Crucial Decision Between Oppressive or Liberating Tutoring Practices in 2021
This presentation explores how tutors exist in a liminal space, having a level of authority, yet still being students. This liminal space is a choice for tutors, who, perhaps unconsciously, select whether to establish authoritarian dominance or partake in democratic interaction with their clients. I will test Paulo Freire’s “banking model of education” while considering the historically ghettoized space of Writing Centers, and the demographic information of Binghamton University, which is a predominantly white institution.
Elaine MacDougall and James Wright; University of Maryland, Baltimore County, New Forms of Responsiveness: Toward Antiracism and Anti-Oppression Practices in Baltimore University Writing Centers
This presentation asks, How can writing center staff redistribute power and so “exceed” (Greenfield, 2019) traditional training frameworks, curricula, epistemologies, practices, and spaces to develop new forms of responsiveness rooted in antiracist and anti-oppression orientations to writing in the academy and beyond? We will introduce the Baltimore Writing Center Project (BWCP) and describe how the project interrogates our roles in writing center practice and (re)positions our work to radically confront linguistic racism and the reproduction of white language supremacy in our writing centers.
K2
Peter Maslan, St. Lawrence University, Experimental Writing: A Student Practice Within Standardized Academia
Misconceptions of syntax, grammar, literary techniques and craft often pervade our writing; distant teachings have left many adhering to a standardized English form that can inhibit literary evolution and creative freedom. Counter to this limitation is experimental writing which can alter public perception and acceptance of form across disciplines. In bolstering students to express themselves compositionally, part of the role lies with writing centers to encourage students’ experimental writing to subvert standardized English craft.
Tiffani Britton and Dominique White, Rider University, Creative Connections of Virtual Tutoring
As student tutors at Rider University, we have learned to adapt to the new remote environment. From previous research and our own study, it is clear that several of the tactics utilized during this pandemic have built a stronger support system for the students while overall increasing engagement and collaboration. As a result, many of these strategies can now be implemented for future use in both in-person and online tutoring.
Aaron Wilder, Marian University, From “Fixed Functionality:” Curating the Physical/Digital Space in the Post-Human Writing Center
Writing Centers’ identity is tied up in technology. Writing, after all, is a technology which every one of our practices is built upon. Yet our conception of self often fails to recognize this. I propose writing centers re-center our identities around a “post-human” model which is honest about the roles technology plays in our pedagogy and practice.
K3
Joni Hayward Marcum, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Emotional Labor and Remote Tutoring: Status Switching, Invisible Labor, & Liminality
Three forms of emotional labor discussed by Kristi Murray Costello in her 2021 article “Naming and Negotiating the Emotional Labors of Writing Center Tutoring” stand out for their prominence while tutoring online during the pandemic: status switching, invisible labor, and liminality. This presentation pursues the ways in which the lessons learned from these forms of emotional labor will impact our practice as writing center tutors moving forward.
Melody Denny and Gracelyn Gutierrez, University of Northern Colorado, Post- Pandemic Writing Centers: Transitioning Back to “Normal” with a Focus on Mindfulness and Emotional Labor
This presentation will outline our approach to handling our WC’s transition back to “normal” and the factors that complicated our return to face-to-face consulting. We will discuss emotional labor and mindfulness training, community-building initiatives, and the initial experiences of both the Director and the Consultant as well as a report on how our WC’s Consultants are responding to these trainings and focus.
Dalton Burks, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Vulnerability, Empathy, and Trauma in Writing Center Practices
This presentation will discuss the importance of practicing empathy with writers and the self in response to the vulnerability inherently embedded in writing center praxis, as well as how, by accepting vulnerability through empathy, the writing center can become a safe space for both writers and tutors.
Concurrent Sessions L – 11:20 AM to 12:35 PM (EST)
L1
Christopher Glover, Moe Gamez, Katie Patton; El Camino College; Leveraging a Crisis: How the Health of Our Writing Center Plans will Improve after COVID
Just as Nancy Maloney Grimm, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and others have called into question some of the bedrock principles of what constitutes writing tutoring in humanizing, anti-racist, and decolonized ways, we will be discussing how we turned an existential crisis for our writing center into an opportunity to reinvent ourselves and articulate a new philosophy toward the work we do.
L2
Mitch Hobza, Roni Heyman, and Quinn Houlihan; Purdue University; Subversive Literacies: Queer and Translingual Literacies in Staff Education
Our staff education course introduced undergraduate writing consultants to queer and translingual literacies’ subversive potential. Students composed their own literacy narratives to illustrate how literacies shape writers. Mitch provides theoretical context and reflects on the embodied aspects of teaching queer literacies. Roni discusses multilingual consultants’ use of translingual literacies to subvert monolingualism. Quinn explores how queer literacies and embodiment subvert normativity. Panelists will guide attendees to reflect on their literacy practices after their presentations.
L3
John Katunich, Nhi Ly, Xenia Makosky, Long Ta, and Nhu Truong; Dickinson College; Multilingual tutors: Identity Negotiation, Legitimacy, and Tutoring Practices
To gain a more complex understanding of multilingual tutors and their navigation of identities within writing center work, this project investigates how multilingual tutors, with the imbrication of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and linguistic background, legitimize themselves as tutors in writing centers, in the face of implicit or explicit biases they encounter, and how this negotiation of identity shapes tutoring practice.
Concurrent Sessions M – 1:30 PM to 2:45 PM (EST)
M1
Kia Thompson, University of Minnesota, Whose side are you on? Understanding how consultants prioritize expectations
As a writing consultant what feedback do you give to writers? How does an instructor’s expectations influence your feedback? Building on the ideas of both Thonus and Greenfield, and my previous inquiry, through interviews with writing consultants, I consider new questions. How do consultants mediate the feedback they give writers based on expectations of both the writer and the instructor? And how does a consultant’s racial identity factor into this mediation?
M2
Ryan Fallert, Betty Araya, and Katerina Fakinos; Hofstra University; The Writing Center as the Starbucks App: Working Against the Automation of the World through the Writing Center
In A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond, Daniel Susskind describes a not-too-distant future where automation will replace much of the work humans perform now. Our roundtable would consider Susskind’s work as it applies to writing centers, provide the audience with ways to problematize Susskind’s theories, and invite audience members to collectively theorize an understanding of the challenges, costs, and plans necessary for protecting human tutors in an automated world.
Concurrent Sessions N – 2:50 PM to 4:05 PM (EST)
N1
Christopher Ervin, Oregon State University, We’re Not Just “Getting through the Whole Paper”: A Facilitative Pedagogy for Asynchronous Consultations
This pedagogical workshop will lay the foundation for a facilitative pedagogy in asynchronous (written) consultations for online writing centers. Workshop attendees will be introduced to the pedagogy, collectively analyze an example written-feedback consultation, and begin to compose a written feedback consultation themselves. Workshop participants will be invited to complete their consultations after the workshop and send them to the facilitator for a round of feedback.
Concurrent Sessions O – 4:10 PM to 5:25 PM (EST)
O1
Nick Mueller, Arizona State University, The lightness of improvisation in a dark time of vulnerability
Sharing one’s writing is an act of openness and vulnerability. The quality of lightness as manifested in improvisation can lower the threshold for this act.