Name of Center: The Writing Center Year Opened: 2005 Web Address: http://www.writingcenter.msstate.edu/ Twitter: @MSU_WC Institutional Affiliation: Mississippi State University Institutional Location: The Department of English City, State: Starkville, MS Director: Rich Raymond (Professor and Head, Department of English) Associate Director: Stacy Kastner (Assistant Professor, Department of English) Assistant Director(s): Kayleigh Few, Sava Kolev (Lecturers, Department of English) History: With a background Directing the Little Rock Writing Project, and as a firm practitioner and theorist of a hybrid literature and writing pedagogy, in 2004 Rich Raymond accepted the position as Head of the Department of English and requested support—space, furniture, computers, staff, and budget—for a Writing Center. The Writing Center at Mississippi State University started as a room in Lee Hall in 2005 (where the English Department was and is currently housed). Building off of this foundation, Rich established a tenure track hire in Rhetoric and Composition to provide leadership for the Center as well as a 3-credit split-level course that would prepare GAs and interested undergraduate students for work in the WC. Starting in 2005, graduate students from the English Department worked in the Writing Center as part of their assistantships. These graduate students also worked with Rich and Director Tennyson O’Donnell in independent study courses about writing centers, in the official course once it existed, in research projects, and along with Sarah Sneed (Director following Tennyson) as tutors in the Writing Center. As some of those graduate students transitioned into roles as composition faculty, these MSU tutor alums—Brad Campbell, Daniel White, Chelsea Henshaw—under the leadership of Sarah Sneed, began the work of initiating a “Mobile WC” movement on campus. They successfully advocated for online tutoring capabilities, leading to the purchase of the mywconline.com system that allowed us to beginning offering synchronous online tutoring in the evenings (Sunday-Thursday, 6-9). They worked with Athletic Academics to locate a space, negotiate hours, and negotiate tutor support and compensation so that tutors could meet with student athletes “where they were at,” in the Templeton Athletic Academic Center where tutoring services, spaces, and resources for student athletes are located (MondayThursday, 10-1). They received permission for tutors to set up a sign at tables in the food court of the Colvard Student Union (Monday-Thursday, 4-6). They worked with MSU Libraries to set up a space in the Instructional Media Center (Sunday-Thursday, 6-9). As well, they oversaw the relocation of the main WC hub from a room in Lee Hall to a small house that sits just off MSU’s drill field, a central gathering location for students, The House at 94 President’s Circle (MondayThursday, 10-4; Friday, 10-1). During these location changes and mobile expansions, Brad and Chelsea were transitioning into administrative roles themselves under Sarah Sneed’s and then Rich’s leadership (Brad, Interim Director; Chelsea, Assistant Director). In 2014, Sarah transitioned out of her role as the Director, preparing to move to a different location; Brad accepted a position as the Director of The Oxford Writing Center at the University of Mississippi; and Chelsea accepted a new position on MSU’s campus as a writing coordinator for Maroon & Write, the office charged with implementing MSU’s writing-focused Quality
Enhancement Plan. With such changes, Rich found himself back in the lead of the MSU WC as Director and Stacy Kastner took on the day-to-day leadership of the WC as the Associate Director with Kayleigh Few joining her as a Co-Assistant Director and Coordinator of the Templeton Athletics site in spring 2014. In 2014, we reconfigured how our mobile sites were working and where they were located. Given the difficulty writers were having when trying to locate tutors within the food court of the Student Union and noise levels, in Fall, Stacy relocated the WC in the Union to the Dawg House, a large open room traditionally used by gamers. Though students could find the WC in the Dawg House, challenges like noise persisted, so in spring 2014, the Union location was closed for tutoring and hours were expanded at the main site, The House at 94 President’s Circle. Similarly, in 2014, Stacy, Rich, and Kayleigh worked with the Dean of Libraries and the Head of Research Services to relocate the mobile WC site in the Library from the Instructional Media Services area to the Research Services area. In 2015, Stacy began collaborating with The Streetcar, MSU’s student-run creative arts journal, to sponsor open night poetry nights in the Dawg House in the Student Union every semester; hosting other creative and non-academic writing events in the Student Union (like a Valentine’s Day writing station); collaborating with English faculty at MSU’s branch campus in Meridian, MS to host face-to-face visits from the Writing Center, offering class presentations and face-toface tutoring sessions (students on this campus currently only have access to online tutoring from main campus supported by the mywconline.com system); and collaborating with The Center for America’s Veteran’s to co-sponsor and facilitate “For Those Who Serve,” an annual writing and arts awards contest for student service members that syncs with Veterans Appreciation Week in November. In fall 2015, the Writing Center remained consistent in its sites and locations, but expanded its mission beyond working one-on-one with students. Stacy and then Co-Assistant Director Kiley Forsythe began piloting embedded tutoring with a select number of classes and programs; collaborating with our Learning Center to use their lab spaces to offer workshops for undergraduates, graduates, and multilingual writers; and collaborating with MSU Libraries—the graduate librarian and research services staff—to co-design and -deliver writing and research workshops and class presentations for students and for faculty. Kiley also joined the Maroon & Write staff in spring 2015, and Sava Kolev, current Co-Assistant Director, has taken over her work collaborating with other units, like The Learning Center and our English Language Institute, to develop workshops and student outreach and support activities. In 2016, the WC hosted its first Dissertation Jump Start, working with doctoral candidates from the College of Education in collaboration with MSU Libraries, The Learning Center, and The Center for Teaching and Learning, coming full circle back to Rich’s original National Writing Project inspired “idea” of a writing center. Sponsoring department, school, or organization(s): Housed within the Department of English and funded by the College of Arts & Sciences and Maroon & Write (MSU’s Quality Enhancement Plan). The Templeton site is an exception. This site receives leadership from the Writing Center administrative team, but its staff, space, and technology are funded by the Office of the Provost through Athletic Academics. Hours and Locations: The House at 94 President’s Circle The WC in Research Services (Library) The WC in Templeton Academic Athletics The WC Online The WC in the Union
M-TH, 10-6; FRI 10-1 (online and face-to-face) SUN-TH, 6-9 (face-to-face) M-TH, 9-1 (face-to-face, all students) SUN-TH, 6-9 (face-to-face athletes only) SUN-TH, 6-9 (online) For Events and Sponsorships
The WC in the Student Union
The WC in Templeton Athletic Academics
The WC in Research Services The Writing Center at 94 President’s Circle
Guiding Philosophies and Theories: Tutorial instruction is very different from traditional classroom learning because it introduces into the educational setting a middle person, the tutor, who inhabits a world somewhere between student and teacher. Because the tutor sits below the teacher on the academic ladder, the tutor can work effectively with students in ways that teachers can not. Tutors don’t need to take attendance, make assignments, set deadlines, deliver negative comments, give tests, or issue grades. Students readily view a tutor as someone to help them surmount the hurdles others have set up for them, and as a result students respond differently to tutors than to teachers… - Harris, Muriel. “Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors.” College English 57.1 (1995): 27-42. Print. The nature of the writing center, then, is community . . . I say watch out for cubicles. Watch out for computer terminals. Watch out for all evidence of attempts to break down the gathering of minds. - Summerfield, Judith. “Writing Center: A Long View.” The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Ed: Robert. W Barnett and Jacob S. Blumner. New York: Pearson, 22-28. Print. [W]riting happens in moments that are richly equipped with tools (material and semiotic) and populated with others (past, present, and future). When seen as situated activity, writing does not stand alone as the discrete act of a writer, but emerges as a confluence of many streams of literate activity: reading, talking, observing, acting, making, thinking, and feeling as well as transcribing words on paper. - Prior, Paul. Writing/disciplinarity: A sociohistoric account of literate activity in the academy. Routledge, 2013. Print. In order to draw attention to the multimodal nature of the enterprise of text production, I am adopting the unusual practice of using the term “wrighter” rather than “writer” to refer to a maker of meanings in one or more modes—someone who “wrights” a text in the way a wheelwright “wrights” a wheel. This is in line with the use of the term “playwright” to mean a person who constructs the script for a multimodal performance—people in the theater deride the misspelling “playwrite” because it implies the construction of a verbal text and misses the implication of the multimodal character of the theater. - Ivanič, Roz. “Intertextual Practices in the Construction of Multimodal Texts in InquiryBased Learning.” Uses of Intertextuality in Classroom and Educational Research. Eds. Nora Stuart-Faris and David Bloome. Greenwich: Information Age, 2004. 279-314. Print.
Q: If you had to choose one thing teachers should do when teaching writing, what would it be? Donald: Write yourself. Invite children to do something you're already doing. If you're not doing it, Hey, the kids say, I can't wait to grow up and not have to write, like you. They know. And for the short term and the long term, you'll be doing yourself a favor by writing. All of us need it as a survival tool in a very complex world. The wonderful thing about writing is that it separates the meaningless and the trivial from what is really important. So we need it for ourselves and then we need to invite children to do what we're doing. You can't ask someone to sing a duet with you until you know the tune yourself. - Graves, Donald. "Answering Your Questions about Teaching Writing." Scholastic Teachers. Web. 16 Mar. 2016. The fact that college instructors may actually think that grammar is the one skill that makes or breaks student prose does not mean that they are right. We often correct the grammar of a disappointing essay, only to find that the prose remains unsatisfying. That's because readers demand much more than standard English from writers. We want organization, examples, an appropriate level of complexity, a sense of audience awareness. We want writers who not only know something, but who also have something to say. In fact, if writers establish their authority early and decisively, we tend to overlook the same kinds of grammar glitches that are problematic in less-effective essays. . . Those new attempts to reconfirm grammar as a measure of writing will result in students' studying grammar more and writing less. Studying grammar more is good, but writing less is not going to help students' writing performance. Nor will sending students the message that all they have to do to improve their writing is put their participles in order. - Baron, Dennis. "Teaching Grammar Doesn’t Lead to Better Writing." Chronicle of Higher Education 49.36 (2003): 20-21. Print. We must look again at our own attitudes and the images of language and of writing we project in the classrooms and in our offices as we read and mark our students' papers. Yet so often here it is Error, not communication, that is being taught. A case in point: the other day a former student came to my office extremely upset with the first long paper she had written for her present English teacher. I turned each page, looking at red marks: circled commas (misplaced); carats (word missing); every misspelled word underlined with an occasional remonstratory remark like ‘What, Miss X, you've done it again!’; and one or two ‘good points’ in the margin. I got to the end of the paper and found an oversized F with the brief comment: ‘Although this paper shows considerable thought and is well -organized, your run-ons and spelling mistakes are inexcusable.’ This teacher had doubtless thought that by emphasizing errors, he might jolt the student into doing something about them. Needless to say, the effect was the opposite. Rather than emphasizing and so encouraging her performance where it mattered-her thought and her ability to communicate it logically to her reader-he reinforced her pessimism and sense of despair. He was teaching Error, not writing. - Halsted, Isabella. “Putting Error in Its Place,” Journal of Basic Writing 1.1 (1975): 72-86. Print.
Number of consultations in the last year: Mywconline.com recorded 4,810 appointments with 2,180 unique writers in 2015, totaling 3,151.5 hours of talk about writing in 2015.
2015, Consultations Total
3151.5
2180
Fall
1181
4810
1686 2502
142 99 184
Summer
1323.5 1033
Spring 0
1000
2124
2000
Hours of Tutoring
3000
4000
Writers
5000
6000
Appointments
The writers we work with: We work with writers from every college on our campus, including undergraduates, graduates, staff, and faculty. We similarly work on a variety of assignments, including those produced for classes, pleasure, job opportunities, and scholarship applications.
Undergrad Writers, 2015
All Writers, 2015 Faculty 0%
Senior 13%
Staff 0% Other 1%
Grads 14%
Junior 13%
Undergrads 85%
Undergrads
Grads
Faculty
Staff
Other
First-Year 65%
Sophomore 9%
First-Year
Sophomore
Junior
Senior
Writing Center (Payroll) Staff: Our staff payroll functions in terms of course releases (10 hours/course release): Director (reduced load to from 2-3 to 1-1 teaching assignment) Associate Director (reduced load from 2-3 to 1-1 teaching assignment) Co-Assistant Director (reduced load from 4-4 to 2-2 teaching assignment) Co-Assistant Director (reduced load from 4-4 to 2-2 teaching assignment) Rotating: Composition Instructors and Lecturers (reduced loads from 4-4) Rotating: English Department Teaching Assistants (reduced loads from 2-2) Staff (Hourly): Our current hourly wage for all tutors is $15.00/hour. We hire alums of the Tutor Training course (undergraduate and graduate) and composition lecturers and instructors to tutor at this rate. We also hire qualified individuals from these groups as assessment assistants at a rate of $10.00/hours. Money Matters: what is the budget, how is the center funded. This is a complicated question :). Our budget, like our Center, is best described in terms of our people. Our Director and Associate Director receive course release time to provide leadership in the Center. Lecturers are funded by the Provost to work for the Department of English teaching composition and tutoring or doing administrative work in the WC—their tutoring appointments are also budgeted as course releases. Our graduate students are funded by the Department of English, 10-20 hours per week, budgeted as course releases. Our tutors working at our Templeton location are paid $15.00/hour by Academic Athletics. When needed, funds from English Department funds from distance education have been allocated to hire a tutor to work in the Center to address shortages in staffing due to increased student enrollment, and thus, increased enrollment in comp courses and less available course releases for work in the Center. Since Rich joined the Department, we have received explicit monetary support from the College of Arts & Sciences. This support has been modest, but allowed us to hold memberships in professional organizations, purchase basic supplies, and hire greeters (work study and minimum wage student workers) to help writers register and make appointments. Under Rich’s leadership as Head, the WC has always and continues to have an adequate number of staff hours to meet the needs of students and to support our growing “mobile” expansion across campus. At present, MSU is committed to a Quality Enhancement Plan that promises to increase the quality and quantity of writing on campus. Throughout the life of the QEP (five years), the Writing Center will receive additional explicit budgetary support that has been used for minor renovations, professional development, tools and technology, and sponsorships of writing events on campus. The College of Arts & Sciences has likewise recently committed to increasing its support of staff and fiscal budget in coming years. As are all Writing Centers, we are an idea in the making that is flexible and responsive to the rapidly changing technology of writing and the writers who use this medium to communicate and make meaning.
Spring 2016 Programs: Undergraduate Student Writing Series (synced with the second course in our Composition sequence) - “Researching to support your argument (with MSU Libraries)” - “Writing with research (with MSU Libraries)” - “Self-Editing for Undergraduate Writers” - “Analyzing Poetry” Multilingual Writing Series (Co-Designed with MSU’s English Language Institute) - “Self-Editing” - “Writing in the American University: A Panel Discussion with International Faculty for ESL Students and their Writing Tutors” - “Evaluating/Citing Sources” Athletic Academics Writing Series (Co-Designed by MSU Athletic Academics) - “Plagiarism and Composition at MSU: An Overview for Student Athletes” Graduate Student Writing Series - “Dissertation Jump Start for the College of Education” (with MSU Libraries, The Learning Center, and The Center for Teaching and Learning and sponsored by the College of Education) - “Self-Editing: Strategies for Producing Polished Prose” - “Writing for the Academic Job Market: Cover Letters and CVs” - “Writing for the Academic Job Market: Research Statements and Teaching Philosophies” - “Don’t Let Deadlines Pass You By!: Working with Reverse Timelines” - “Citation Management and Matrices: Practices and Tools for High Impact Literature Reviews (with MSU Libraries)” Faculty Writing Series - “Writing the NIH or NSF Biosketch” (with MSU Libraries and sponsored by the Office of Research and Economic Development) Writing Center Professional Development Meetings - “Refresher: Best Practices in Writing Center Tutoring” - “Resumes, CVs, and Cover Letters” (Facilitated by MSU Career Center) - “Helping Writers with Sentence Construction: Addressing Common Challenges” - “Research Services in the Library: Introduction and Cross-Training Session” (Facilitated by MSU Libraries) - “Sensitivity in the WC” (Facilitated by Holmes Cultural Diversity Center and Safezone Training)
Spring 206 Sponsorships and Events: “ESL Game Night”
“Write Your Love, MSU: Valentines Event in the Colvard Student Union”
“The Streetcar’s Open Mic Poetry Night: Poetry of Resistance”
“The Writing Center Visits the Meridian Campus”
“Just in Time for Finals: Meet Your Writing Center Team on the Drill Field”
*Note: Picture is from fall 2015 National Day on Writing Event, but this is what our Drill Field Events tend to look like.
2016 Mississippi Writing Center Association Conference and TutorCon (MSWCA