Sweetland Peer Tutors Present at 2010 IWCA/NCPTW Conference

“Safe Harbors or Open Seas? Navigating Currents in Writing Center Work” was the theme for the combined meeting of the International Writing Centers Association and National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing held in Baltimore, Maryland over November 4-6, 2010. Both the safe harbor and the open sea attracted 1000 people from the U.S. and beyond, among whom were eight peer tutors from the Sweetland Center for Writing.

Four tutors, Autumn Chapoff, Kristen Bialik, Colleen Cirocco and Stefanie Gibson created a panel to address whether tutoring centers provide enough multi-disciplinary tutoring. Titled “The Peer Tutoring Center: A Dock for All Disciplines,” their panel consisted of a multimedia component and an interactive discussion. Presenting on her own, Meghan Zingales talked about Michigan’s Online Writing Lab, both its traditional OWL and its new syncOWL. She asked the audience to consider whether the goal of reaching many students through the use of online media overpowers the goal of effectively helping each individual student. Shauna Russell participated in a Scholar-to-Scholar session, using her studies in linguistics to provide “A Critical Approach to the Lower/Higher Order Concern Framework for Non-Native English Writers.” Sarah Friedman and Brad Estes teamed up with Sweetland faculty members Matthew Kelley and George Cooper to address issues of directive and non-directive tutoring. Their session, focused on tutor training and pedagogy, was titled “Currents in Writing Center Pedagogy: Undertow from the Principle of Non-Directive Tutoring.” Last but not least, Sweetland Associate Director, Naomi Silver, collaborated with a cohort of Big Ten writing center directors to address “Issues Facing Writing Centers at Large Research Universities.” These eleven conference participants returned to Ann Arbor tired but exhilarated from three days of interaction with writing center colleagues from around the world.

IWCA/NCPTW Conference Photos