feedback on second draft

I've read Tif's revised draft once, twice now, and I don't see anything to change! This proposal covers all our bases, as far as I can tell, and it's tightly written. I move to send it on!

Thanks for your hard work on this, especially at a busy time of year,

Melissa

Second Draft of Workshop Description

Hi everyone,

This draft isn't horrible, so it's probably a good place to get some real specific feedback about what you'd like to see changed. Thanks for taking the time to do this in these frantic weeks at the end of the semester. Also, any titles are also highly welcome.

Hope you have a good break!
Tiffany

"Title of Writing Center Outreach Workshop"

Writing centers are uniquely poised in higher education to provide flexible literacy and community-building opportunities to the neighborhoods and cities in which they reside. In fact, this workshop posits that higher education institutions—in particular, those that are publicly funded--have an obligation to be a “good neighbor” and make available alternative learning environments for people in the community. As the need for writing skills and abilities transcends traditional educational programs, writing center should be the first to explore how to be a “good neighbor.”

In this half-day workshop, participants will be introduced to writing centers that have reached out into their surrounding communities in multiple ways—some that have just started the process, others that have been in partnership for nearly a decade. Facilitators from universities and community colleges across the country will share their stories of challenging institutional assumptions of writing center work and the process of building mutually-beneficial partnerships with people and organizations outside of college/university boundaries.

Participants will be provided with an overview of established and newly-developing theories and research that ground such writing center outreach. We will examine strategies for assessing community and institutional assets/needs, community partnership ethics, negotiating institutional politics, generating opportunities for tutors to create innovative partnerships, and research possibilities.

After an initial orientation and discussion session, participants will break into small groups to analyze community and institutional assets in order to brainstorm potential community partnerships and institutional support for such outreach. Participants will then move through round table discussions focusing on different approaches to working within the community: service learning, community partnerships and community writing centers.

At the end of the workshop, participants will have a plan to begin exploring community outreach possibilities and/or strategies to interrogate and refine current outreach efforts. Participants will also have the option to join a writing center outreach network that will emerge from this workshop.

Why I Do Community Work

Hi Everyone, (If you haven't read the two posts below about the workshop abstract, please do that before reading this one. Otherwise, it will make no sense).

I've been thinking a lot about this question for the past 24 hours and had an epiphany when I woke up this morning. Well, rather than an epiphany, I finally remembered why I have been doing this work for the past decade. (It's sad that doing the actual work starts to cloud the reasons for it.) What follows is not very qualified or restrained, and not appropriate for academic discourse, but I'm hoping we're in a more brainstorming-focused level now.

Pure and simple, I think that institutions of higher education have an obligation to the communities they reside in to provide flexible opportunties for self-directed learning. And, I believe that writing centers are uniquely positioned to provide these opportunities.

I came to this realization at the University of Southern Califronia--a wealthy private university in the 'ghetto'--when I worked for a program that provided edcuational support to students in two surrounding junior high schools. USC felt obliged to be a good neighbor to their community. And, they're a private university, not receiving taxpayer funding.

My notion of higher ed having an obligation to the larger community, is only strengthened when talking about publicly-supported institutions. The national average for Bachelor's Degree attainment is 27%. Yet, 100% of the people are providing support to their colleges and universities. I'm not saying that the other 73% do not benefit from the traditional education that higher ed provides to members of the community--they do in the many ways that education provides an infrastructure for community growth and services.

However, a public institution is a part of the community and, therefore, should be flexible, to a reasonable extent, in providing options for ALL community members to improve their knowledge and skills.

Now, why writing centers? I see writing centers as one of the most flexible and innovative 'institutions' within the larger higher education system, and thus, they can respond to community educational needs with dynamic responses. Also, equally important, writing is a skill, knowlege, need, etc. that all (or nearly all) people encounter. Not everyone needs to know how to code the human genome, or fix air conditioners or understand the physiology of a flower. These are academic and vocational pursuits that universities and colleges house within their traditional programs.

But, the need for writing abilities transcends traditional programs.

So, does the obligation of the university/college fall on the Writing Center's shoulders? To me, yes and no. I think that the writing center is uniquely poised to provide opportunities to the community, but finanically, it is the university/college that should be held responsible. It is their obligation and the writing center can be a vehicle for it to occur.

Financial support for such work will always be a miniscule amount of the institution's budget, but the payoff in terms of public appreciation and institutional image is huge. The CWC's budget accounts for only 0.14% of SLCC's E & G (state appropriated) budget, only a bit more than a tenth of one percent. But, we reap huge rewards for the college as they can point to our work as truly dedicated to the community that we belong to.

Now, I don't know how to turn this into a 'hook' for our abstract, but does it give any of you ideas?

Thanks for listening,
Tif

Abstract Draft

OK, raise your hand if you think that Tiffany's being too hard on herself about that abstract. (ME!!) It's a terrific start! The first go-at-it is always hardest, as we all know, and I think the main pieces we need are here.

Right now my only "bigger" suggestion is that we make the first sentence or two more exciting. The typical writing center is pulled in multiple directions, lured by so many possibilities for "reaching out" right on their own campuses. Why would a center want to think about reaching out to the community -- what are the potential payoffs? I am not suggesting that we can answer that question in this abstract, let alone in the first couple sentences. But maybe we can liven things up so a reader thinks, Wow, I can do that! I want to do that!

Having made that suggestion, I'll now say that I myself can't think of the exact words to achieve that kind of opening. Not at the moment anyhow. What do others think?

Melissa

PS: Great job starting us off, Tif -- truly! I think the main thing the rest of the abstract needs is a little polishing.

Very Poor Draft of Abstract

Hi everyone,

My brain is feeling the doldrums of the end of the semester and is frozen by the first snowfall of the winter. So, I would like to abdicate all responsibility for the draft below, but we need to start with something...so there it is.

Please comment at will and be ruthless.

Thanks,
Tif

______________________

In this half-day workshop, participants will be introduced to writing centers that have reached out into their surrounding communities in multiple ways. Facilitators from universities and community colleges across the country will share their stories of challenging institutional assumptions of writing center work and the challenging process of building mutually-beneficial partnerships with people and organizations outside of the college/university boundaries.
Participants will get to see inside the different stages of developing community partnerships, from centers just starting, to those who have been in partnership for nearly a decade.

Participants will be provided with an overview of established and newly-developing theories and research that ground such writing center outreach. We will examine strategies for assessing community assets and needs, community partnership ethics, negotiating institutional politics, generating opportunities for tutors to create innovative partnerships, research possibilities, and so on.

After an initial orientation and discussion session, participants will break into small groups to conduct a community assessment in order to explore where potential partnerships may lie. Then, participants will assess their own institutional asset assessment in order to determine strategies for developing support for the outreach.

Participants will then move through different round table discussions focusing on different approaches to working within the community: service learning, community partnerships, community writing centers.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have a draft of an action plan?

Ick.

Introduction from Jennifer Curtis

Hi everyone,

I did not introduce myself before so let me do that now. After raising a family and helping in two family businesses, I returned to school ten years ago to learn how to write. I haven't stopped going since then. I am currently enrolled in Indiana University of Pennsylvania's Ph.D. Composition & TESOL program. I've worked in three different writing centers as an ug peer tutor, a graduate assistant, and an adjunct faculty tutor. I greatly enjoyed working with people from the local community and deeply believe in sharing our specialized knowledge with the community. I began teaching various English and composition courses as a fulltime adjunct at San Jacinto College in Houston in 2000 and moved to Pennsylvania last year. I am doing an independent study on community outreach and writing centers and hope to base my dissertation on this topic. I am not tutoring in a writing center at this point.

Tiffany, your list sounded engaging, and I agree with Melissa we need theoretical grounding. I am not sure what is involved with adding a community component to a writing center, but we could do whatever is needed to equip people for that.

Looking forward to working with you all,

Jennifer

from Melissa Tedrowe

Hi everyone! I never wrote to introduce myself, so let me do that now. I'm the associate director of the UW-Madison Writing Center, and I coordinate our Community Writing Assistance program. I've presented on community writing programs (with wonderful colleagues like Tiffany) at several conferences and I co-wrote an article that appeared in last spring's issue of the Community Literacy Journal. I have a deep and abiding interest in this work, and am very much looking forward to sharing ideas with all of you and our participants next fall.

To Tiffany's list of what we might cover in our pre-conference workshop, I would add some kind of intellectual / theoretical grounding -- not that we're going to deliver a lecture (eegads) but that we might offer participants a bibliography, suggestions for further reading. They might be surprised to know, as I was initially, that there's a body of scholarship starting to emerge -- and there's ample opportunity to contribute to it!

I'll post more thoughts as they occur to me. Tif, thanks for starting this!

Cheers,

Melissa

Ideas for Outreach Workshop

Hi everyone,

Now that we've introduced ourselves to each other, maybe we can do a little brainstorming about what we want our pre-conference workshop to do/be/etc?

We've got a 1/2 day--so 3 or 4 hours (I'm not sure which.). I'm imagining that people who attend this workshop want to connect with other folks who are doing/have attempted this type of outreach work, want to learn about from their experiences, and then want to leave with some structure/plans/strategies for how they might get started/continue this work back in their hometowns.

Here are some ideas that I have; they are purposefully general because I don't want to take over:

• We need to tell our own stories of community outreach.
• We should collectively share the challenges that we've had.
• We should complicate the notion of 'community outreach', focusing on ethics of partnerships and mutually-beneficial relationships.
• We need to break up into small working groups so everyone gets individual attention on their own interests.
• We could break up into 'type' of outreach: writing centers, service learning, partnerships, etc.
• We should end up establishing a network for folks to share their stories and ideas after the workshop (like a 'mini-WCenter' listserv).

Can you each please put in your two cents' worth about what you think would be valuable for participants (and for us) in this workshop? Then, I'll try to compile and put forth an abstract for your review.

Thanks very much!
Tif

Introductions

Hi everyone,

Welcome! I'm so excited to be working with each of you on this workshop and am really looking forward to our collaboration over the next year.

To get started, I was hoping we could introduce ourselves to each other and provide a short overview of our community outreach efforts. I can then compile that information for the IWCA 2008 planning committee.

After we do this, I'll do another post suggesting possible plans for our workshop and ask for everyone's response. That will lead to our abstract that we need to send to them.

Hopefully we can do this over the next three weeks or so, as IWCA would like us to get that info to them fairly soon.

Thanks for your willingness to participate. I think this is going to be great.

Tiffany

My introduction:
I've taught at Salt Lake Community College for the past 14 years in the English department. In 2001, SLCC opened the SLCC Community Writing Center located in a downtown Salt Lake City neighborhood. Now located on the plaza of the SLC Main Library, the Community Writing Center supports, motivates and educates people of all abilities and educational backgrounds who want to use writing for practical needs, civic engagement and personal expression. In addition to an open space available for writing, we provide opportunities to enhance writing abilities through such programs as Writing Coaching, Writing Worskhops, Writing Partners and the DiverseCity Writing Series. I've directed the center since its inception.