Scholarship

This page serves as a database for OWC-related scholarship. You can filter results by using the tags below or the search bar to the right.

Have corrections or scholarship suggestions? Contact mentoring@onlinewritingcenters.org

Translanguaging as Multimodality: Encouraging Multilingual Students’ Full Use of Linguistic Resources in Online Writing Centers (2023)

Translanguaging can be viewed as a theory, approach, or set of practices which validates multilingual expression, i.e., a full use of a multilingual person’s linguistic (and associated cultural, rhetorical, and connected knowledge) resources (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020; Cummins, 2019; Li, 2018; Li & García, 2013). In writing centers, a translanguaging approach, simply put, encourages multilingual writers to make use of knowledge from their multiple languages, or modes, whether online writing center staff speak all those languages or not. Translanguaging practices can utilize standard online writing tools in software, such as Zoom and Google Docs/MS Word Online, for meeting, drafting, and editing. Extra keyboards, dictionaries, and grammar-checkers may be needed.

A Forced Hand and a Promised Land: How the Pandemic Pushed One Writing Center to Erase Distinctions Between Student Populations (2023)

In 2019 our newly united online and onsite writing centers provided asynchronous feedback to our “adult and online” student population and appointments in our physical writing center to our traditional-aged, onsite students. The pandemic, increased online course offerings for onsite students, and my perspective coming from the online writing lab were three streams of influence that made us continue post-pandemic with a both/and/all menu of modalities that, I argue, best suits the needs of today’s students by substituting the Burkean parlor model of writing feedback for a model that is both of the moment and reflective of students’ lived reality: the family room.

Queering Through the Screen: Rhetorical Strategies to Foster Care and Confidence in Virtual Writing Center Environments (2023)

An undeniable challenge of operating in a virtual writing center environment is the level of removal, in this case the literal barrier of the computer screen, between the tutor and student. Conducting appointments either asynchronously or synchronously poses significant uncertainties for both students and tutors: students risk receiving feedback that feels impersonal, removed, or unduly harsh; while tutors risk burnout, lack of connective relationality, and feeling dissociated from the potential joys of writing center work

Embracing Interdependence in Online Writing Center Work (2021)

We see interdependence as directly related to collaboration and community, which we feel are core writing center values and central to our work as writing center administrators. We plan to share our specific contexts and identify the various layers of interdependence that we recognize in our work. This isn’t to say there may not be others–in fact, there may be more within your own context and more nuanced ways of thinking about these individual layers. But we hope that by sharing the layers of interdependence we’ve identified and giving some clear examples of how these layers play out in our day-to-day writing center work, we can help you also think about those layers in your own work.

Experimenting with Peer Mentoring: Models for Professional Development Among Staff and Administrators (2021)

In this panel, members of the OWCA’s Mentorship and Scholarship committee discuss their experiences planning, supervising, and participating in a variety of peer mentor groups. Michelle Cohen speaks to the benefits and challenges of establishing “mentorship groups” to replace weekly staff meetings within a large university writing center. Emily Gresbrink shares pointers gleaned while assisting in the implementation of a mentoring program which worked to bridge industry experience from technical and professional advisory board members with graduate students and undergraduate students. Paula Rawlins offers insights from her experience working to foster a greater sense of community among her undergraduate and graduate writing partners. Finally, Beth Nastachowski, shares information about the the OWCA’s recently revised mentoring program, which adopts the practice of peer mentorship and embraces the spirit of interdependence and collaboration by implementing peer mentor groups. Nastachowski invites questions and suggestions for how the program can best serve OWCA’s members.

Leading Towards Interconnectedness (2021)

Co-curricular support services and those who lead them have traditionally operated at the periphery of higher education institutions, structured as separate from the education mainstream (i.e., academic departments), and siloed from one another, with their critical contributions to the institution often going unnoticed. During this panel presentation, a panel of experts from 4 different universities, with Marshall and Carlock acting as moderators, will explore how recently, in reaction to the pandemic, work at the periphery has been drawn more center stage and what this might mean for those leaders at the periphery.