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.
5 comments:
Hi everyone--I'm also at the SLCC Community Writing Center. I split my time between teaching in the English department and being the assistant director at the CWC. I mainly manage our writing coaching and workshop programs. In both programs, we do a lot of outreach with our city and county library systems. I look forward to collaborating with all of you.
And I'm Carol Severino, WC director at the U of Iowa, where I've been a Rhetoric prof. since 1990. Our community writing center in the Iowa City Public Library is new. We're only in our second year and we operate only one afternoon a week for two hours. Last year we had two tutors there and this year only one because of funding cuts to our entire staff. Among the types of writers who come to the CWC are teenagers with course projects, local poets, fiction, and non-fiction writers, senior citizens writing letters to the editor, and speakers of English as a second language practicing for the TOEFL essay. We average about 3 writers per session. We'd like to expand, but the community demand is not huge and our funding for all our services (twice a week tutoring, appointment tutoring including at satellites, email tutoring, chat tutoring is limited.
Hi Folks--
Sorry it took me a few days to say hey! We're at the end of the quarter here at the University of Denver. I'm the WC director of a new writing center; we both arrived last year. Prior to coming to DU, I was an assistant director at the Undergraduate Writing Center at UT Austin, where I started a community writing center in a public library/community center in a lower-income neighborhood. It was a pilot project--two consultants, two nights/week. At DU we are getting a similar pilot project started. We're applying for some grant funding to support two faculty working with two different community partners over the summer and we'll take it from there. One community partner works primarily with homeless adults, the other with GLBT teenagers. So we're in the investigative stages now, but will have data in hand by August.
Hi, everyone. Please accept my apologies for being slow to post as well. :( I’m the WC director at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Our community involvement is mostly via what we’ve called the Community Narrative Project (CNP). In short, the CNP is an oral history project done in collaboration with the 49/63 Neighborhood Coalition (the neighborhood association for the area that UMKC’s main campus is located in), Western Historical Manuscripts Collection (a library on campus), and U professors from the English Department and the School of Education. In the beginning, we partnered with UMKC’s service learning office, but when our contacts in that office left UMKC, that relationship dissipated. Usually, the CNP works with one course a semester, and students work in teams of two and interview long-time residents. Most of the interview questions are created by the students and relate to their class’s content, but all CNP interviews include several whole-life questions so that each interviewee’s file contains a biography segment. Some of the interest areas of the CNP are redlining, blockbusting, education in the neighborhood, changes in the neighborhood, experiences related to living in an organized neighborhood, and reasons why residents moved to and out of the neighborhood. In addition to aligning with U goals related to “being an essential community partner,” we describe our participation in the CNP as an effort to engage with multiliteracies and a WAC program designed to facilitate different relationships with faculty and students. Other community projects the WC has been involved in include a tutoring program at a local high school, tutoring for community (youth and adults), and co-sponsoring readings/meet the author type events that are open/advertised to the community. Currently, we are looking into ways to reinvigorate/expand WC sponsored writing groups—which may become a “community outreach” project of sorts.
Hello. Here at the writing center of Central Washington University, I am researching the intersections of writing-center work and service-learning. We do lots of campus outreach and offer readings and such that are open to the community, but true community outreach is still just on the agenda. We are talking about doing something collaboratively with the Latino Studies advisory board, which includes community leaders. I teach writing through service-learning and find it so powerful that when I became a writing center director, I wanted to bring the two together. I could offer some theoretical links that I've found so far, and a survey of tutors in five Washington state universities. We asked them what they knew about service-learning, whether they did or could consider their jobs to be that, and what complications the label might invite. Some of their responses were quite telling. They sure "told" me that what tutors do, day in and day out, is a fabulous model for service-learning. I am eager to learn from you all.
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