Call for Papers
The Future of Writing Centers
Ollscoil Luimnigh, Luimneach, Éire (University of Limerick, Ireland), June 11-14, 2024
The deadline for the submission for abstracts has been extended to February 19, 2024, 17:00 pm Irish Standard Time
Instructions for registration and information about travel and accommodation can be found here.
Direct questions about the conference to EWCALimerick2024@ul.ie.
The European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) is pleased to announce the 2024 EWCA Conference to be held on June 11th – 14th, 2024, at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Concurring with the 40th anniversary of Stephen North’s “idea of a writing center” (1984), the upcoming EWCA conference invites participants to take stock of regional and transnational directions in writing center research or practice and reimagine their futures. How have local practices or narratives impacted regional ‘Ideas’ of a writing center? And what might the future of writing centers look like in your center, region, or transnationally? We would like to invite EWCA members, affiliates and writing/writing center scholars world-wide to contribute to this year’s theme with research- and practice-based presentations, workshops, roundtables, performances, multimedia gallery submissions, and pecha kuchas. In addition to opportunities to network and exchange ideas informally, EWCA2024 will open spaces, time slots and other possibilities to meet within special interest groups.
The Living Bridge spanning the River Shannon connects the University of Limerick south campus in County Limerick with the north campus in County Clare.
Almost fifteen years have passed since Tracy Santa (2009), co-founder of the EWCA, reflected on his experience as a writing center administrator at the American University of Bulgaria, Blagoevgrad, as he struggled to reconcile the advice of US tutor training manuals with the local institutional and cultural contexts in Europe. A year earlier, Elizabeth Boquet and Neal Lerner (2008) examined the outsized influence of Stephen North’s (1984) “The Idea of a Writing Center,” which no longer aligned with writing center research and practice. Five years later, Jackie Grutch McKinney (2013) extended this debate, criticizing the “writing center grand narrative,” namely that writing centers are “cozy homes,” “iconoclastic,” and places that tutor “all students” (pp. 3-4), asking us to examine who these “ideas” of a writing center include and what practices or reimaginings they exclude. Recent studies of first-generation students, speakers of English as another language, and working-class students, for example, show that common writing center practices do not necessarily serve all students equally well (e.g., Bond, 2019; Denny, Nordlof & Salem, 2018; Eckstein, 2019; Salazar 2021; Salem 2016).
What assumptions or narratives are embedded in everyday practices, including the ones your writing center holds dear?
This conference invites participants to re-assess existing narratives that impact on writing center policies and practices and envisage new ideas of what writing centers could become in the future.
Possible questions to explore include but are not limited to the following:
Looking Back to Look Forward
Writing Center Futures
These are only some possible questions. Other questions appropriate to the theme are encouraged.
Deadline for submissions extended to February 19, 2024, 17:00 IST
Submissions for the conference now being accepted here.
Submission Details:
Your abstract should correspond to the following criteria:
Important Dates: The final deadline for the submission of abstracts is January 29, 2024. You will be informed about the acceptance of your contribution by late February.
Submissions Types:
Categories: You’ll be asked to mark at least one of the following categories if your proposal is accepted.
Works Cited
Bond, C. (2019). “I Need Help on Many Things Please”: A Case Study Analysis of First-Generation College Students’ Use of the Writing Center. The Writing Center Journal, 37(2), 161–194.
Boquet, E. H., & Lerner, N. (2008). After" The idea of a writing center". College English, 71(2), 170-189.
Denny, H., Nordlof, J., & Salem, L. (2018). “Tell me exactly what it was that I was doing that was so bad”: Understanding the Needs and Expectations of Working-Class Students in Writing Centers. The Writing Center Journal, 37(1), 67–100.
Donahue, T. (2008). Cautionary tales: Ideals and realities in Twenty-First-Century higher education. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 8(3), 537-553.
Donahue, C. (2016) The ‘Trans’ in Transnational-Translingual: Rhetorical and Linguistic Flexibility as New Norms. Composition studies. 44 (1), 147–150.
Eckstein, G. (2019). Directiveness in the Center: L1, L2, and Generation 1.5 Expectations and Experiences. The Writing Center Journal, 37(2), 61–92.
Salazar, J. J. (2021). The Meaningful and Significant Impact of Writing Center Visits on College Writing Performance. The Writing Center Journal, 39(1/2), 55–96.
Salem, L. (2016). Decisions...Decisions: Who Chooses to Use the Writing Center? The Writing Center Journal, 35(2), 147–171.
Santa, T. (2009). Writing center tutor training: What is transferable across academic cultures. Zeitschrift Schreiben, 22(7), 1-6.
The European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) is organizing the European Writing Centers Week (EWCW) for the first time.
European Writing Centers Week is an excellent opportunity for the writing center professionals to connect virtually and celebrate writing centers’ important roles in academic contexts.
Follow the QR Code in the Schedule below and find links to each event. Participation is free!
Writing Centers as Spaces of Empowerment
University of Graz (Austria), July 6-9, 2022
Writing Center Work and Empowerment
Higher education is widely perceived as a promise of empowerment: It is assumed that access to new fields of knowledge and new social and cultural practices will empower students in higher education to successfully acculturate into and participate in their chosen discipline-specific communities of practice. In higher education institutes without dedicated writing programs, ensuring that promise of empowerment often falls to Writing Centers and various other kinds of student development centers.
Writing centers have to ask themselves what kind of center they want to be: Do they want to interface in live or virtual spaces? Do they want to uncritically teach established formal conventions or invite students to explore the social and political motivations behind those forms? Do they wish to pursue a deficit model? Or do they want to promote a more critical analysis of situated, disciplinary writing practices in third-level education? An Academic Literacies approach requires that writing centers address how teachers and student writers are positioned by the inherently hierarchical social relationships that motivate, even dictate literacy practices in any given disciplinary or institutional context.
In an effort to answer the questions presented in the previous paragraph, we want to keep the following question as our focus at the EWCA Conference 2022:
What can Writing Centers do to make the academic promise of empowerment come true?
In 2020, we already received numerous and inspiring contributions which will encourage interesting discussions during the EWCA 2022 conference.
For information about the Call for Papers, Submission, Registration, the Programme, Travel, Hotel and Covid 19 information and the election of a new EWCA Board, please see the Conference host's website.
Thank you for your patience over the past six years. We look forward to being together again this summer.
Warmest regards from the current EWCA Board,
Franziska Liebetanz, Doris Pany and Lawrence Cleary
Hosted online by the writing center of the University of Graz (Austria), the theme of the European Writing Centers Association 2022 Conference was ‘Writing Centers as Spaces of Empowerment’, as pointed out by conference host Doris Pany (Graz) in the conference Call for Papers, “Higher education is widely perceived as a promise of empowerment”. Certainly, the romance of writing center work is that we foster competency, and thereby participation, in not only academic discourse but in the wider conversations unique to the democratic process that have consequences for how we govern ourselves, are governed by others and the extent to which we have access to those that govern. We strive to help those who come to us to become better writers, and in an academic context, that means more informed, critical thinkers, in short, good scientists: honest, trust-worthy, fair/balanced and respectful, leading by example, responsibly sustaining standards necessary to the maintenance of the integrity of one’s self as a citizen and a scholar and to the maintenance of the integrity of those institutions of which we regard ourselves as members.
The consensus was that the conference was a great success, probably exceeding everyone’s expectations given that events conspired in the eleventh hour to force what had been a long-anticipated live conference to become what may have understandably been perceived by many as another dreaded online conference. Endless thanks go to Doris’s Conference Organizing Committee: Lisa Wurzinger, Franziska Gürtl and Lukas Georg Hartleb, as well as those less visible but none-the-less diligent Sigrid Schneck and Katharina Deman. The conference ran so flawlessly, it was easy to forget that it was totally online. It was a wonderful experience. The idea of utilizing an online networking app at the end of the day was just icing on what was already a rich, satisfyingly flavourful cake.
The flawlessness of the delivery only made the quality of the content more apparent. For three days, 3 keynote presentations, 38 presentations, 5 workshops, 6 roundtables, 3 networking sessions and a number of Pecha Kuchas and posters addressed the empowerment of students, tutors, subject specialists, writing center directors, writing centers themselves and even the empowerment realized by retired writing center directors. All these sessions were attended and carried by 165 international participants including 48 students. The many approaches and strategies for the achievement of empowerment presented in these various forms of engagement are testament to the accuracy of Brad Hughes’ categorical breakdown, in his keynote presentation, of the writing center expertise and commitment on which writing centers are built. Approaches and strategies for empowerment included academic literacies approaches, other linguistic approaches, genre analysis, social strategies such as writers’ groups and retreats, collaborative writing, contrastive language strategies, translingual approaches, “small-teaching” and “working alliance” approaches and the use of actor-network theory and “writing as liberation”. Equally impressive and edifying were the number of marginalized groups treated: international students, other language learners, at-risk students, first-year/transitioning students, multilingual students and neuro-diverse students. Empowerment through the engagement with the emotional labor of writing, an often-neglected area, was addressed as was tutor-led writing centers, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Peer Assisted Learning programs as agents for empowerment of both subject specialists and students. Finally, the issue of sustaining pedagogical integrity, particularly in the face of the corporatization of higher education, and Brad Hughes’ talk on “connectivism” spoke to the empowerment of writing centers themselves. Beside this variety of perspectives on empowerment, the conference also engaged with the very future of the EWCA itself. In the general assembly the EWCA members discussed their goals for the upcoming years and elected a new Executive Board for the period 2022-2024.
It is our hope that as we move away from our experience of the EWCA 2022 Conference toward the next biennial conference in 2024, those who heard Brad’s presentation will reflect on his ethical stance on writing centers, that they should be pedagogical workshops, continually experimenting, challenging unexamined assumptions, adapting to new contexts for writing and for teaching writing, engaging in plenty of “epistemic trespassing”.
Thank you all, members and non-members alike, for your patience, participation, comraderie and encouragment.
Best wishes from the EWCA 2020 Organizing Committee at schreibzentrum.uni-graz.at
Doris Pany, Leiterin des Schreibzentrums
Lucas Hartleb, Mitarbeiter des Schreibzentrums
Franziska Gürtl, Mitarbeiter des Schreibzentrums
Lisa Wurzinger, Teamassistenz, treffpunkt sprachen - Zentrum für Sprache, Plurilingualismus und Fachdidaktik
UNIVERSITÄT GRAZ, Österreich
EWCA Conference 2022 – A Post-Conference Round Up
July 6th to July 8th, 2022
Where Writing Center People Come Together
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