The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship

In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges. Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1143/thumbnail.jp

Chapter 19- I See Research Questions Everywhere : Developing Metacognitive Skills in an English-Major Research Methods Course

How many ways can sticky notes—branded as Post-it Notes and introduced in 1980 by 3M—be used by college students? According to the undergraduate who investigated this topic, 31. In the report she produced as a result of a study conducted in English 3470: Approaches to Research in English Studies, the researcher found that “many stationery products have died with advancements in technology, but the Post-it Note has thrived and continues to play a role in productivity in the workplace, continuing at the top of the supply list” (Eralie, 2019). To come to this magic number of 31, Megan conducted a case study and used tools such as a Qualtrics survey. She shared the results with the campus community through a poster during the annual Student Research Symposium (Eralie, 2019). Megan did not arrive in class thinking, “Oh, I’m going to focus on uses of sticky notes for my project”; the topic came to the forefront when I noticed that Megan had what I thought was an atypical way to store information from class lectures—on sticky notes, which could then be organized and re-organized easily, as she pointed out to me. This was an analog strategy for a digital native

Rhetoric Associates in Natural Resources: Influences on Undergraduate Education at Utah State University. Part II: Influences on Student Recipients and Faculty

Surveys of undergraduate students in the College of Natural Resources at Utah State University who were mentored by their fellow students in the Rhetoric Associates (RA) Program suggest improved writing and critical-thinking skills, students’ ability to take constructive criticism, and clarification of expectations of the course instructor. Surveys of faculty teaching courses to which RAs have been assigned indicate improved writing skills and greater focus on the content of written assignments, reduced demands on the instructor\u27s time, increased satisfaction from working with talented undergraduate mentors, and benefits associated with RAs serving as mediators

Habits of Mind: Designing Courses for Student Success

Although content knowledge remains at the heart of college teaching and learning, forward-thinking instructors recognize that we must also provide 21st-century college students with transferable skills (sometimes called portable intellectual abilities) to prepare them for their futures (Vazquez, 2020; Ritchhart, 2015; Venezia & Jaeger, 2013; Hazard, 2012). To “grow their capacity as efficacious thinkers to navigate and thrive in the face of unprecedented change” (Costa et al., 2023), students must learn and improve important study skills and academic dispositions throughout their educational careers. If we do not focus on skills-building in college courses, students will not be prepared for the challenges that await them after they leave institutions of higher education. If students are not prepared for these postsecondary education challenges, then it is fair to say that college faculty have failed them

Outreach: The Writing Center, the Campus, and the Community

Making the process-oriented writing center an integral part of the community, as well as of the campus, can be crucial to ensuring its survival. Using students as tutors gives the center free tutoring and the students hands on experience. To reach students, the director can provide campus-wide publicity and attend meetings for incoming, ESL, and nontraditional students. The center can also provide help for students from academic disciplines other than English with report and scientific writing, research papers, social science writing, theses and dissertations, letters of application, and resumes, as well as offer study sessions for professional entrance exams. The writing center and the library can work together to develop research modules for students to use in conjuntion with or in lieu of a course on research writing. The center can and should be a force for literacy on campus by conducting workshops geared to specific disciplines, visiting classes to guest lecture on improving writing skills, consulting with departments on evaluation and conferencing, developing materials such as editing guides and style sheets, reading student papers, and conducting surveys. Such projects demonstrate the value of the writing center to the administration deciding the program\u27s fate. Beyond the campus, the writing center can collaborate with high school English departments and with community groups and businesses both to generate additional revenue and to precipitate community-wide literacy

Recommended: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Move over Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is back. Actually, Gilman has been with us for a long time, just lying low until the time came when she was needed again. Although some readers may be saying Charlotte who? Gilman was a household word in the first part of this century, an early feminist whose works were not recognized as feminist writings until the 1970s. Gilman, however, would not have used the word feminist to describe herself; she was, instead, a humanist-concerned with the equality of both men and women. And this is the theme which dominates all of her writing-both fiction and nonfiction