In the fall of 1972, the Department of Humanities of the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan adopted a lecture-recitation format for its required course in scientific and technical communication. The recitations were conducted by graduate student teaching assistants of which I was one. Though I found my educational background, which was in electrical engineering, to be an advantage rather than a disadvantage in many ways, there were certain aspects of the department, the course, and the teaching techniques of my colleagues that I did not originally anticipate. This article presents some of these.

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WHEN I FIRST HEARD Bette Midler sing, the most prestigious place she had ever appeared was the Continental Baths on W. 74th Street. Friends only barely tolerated my rave reviews and insistent suggestions that she would become a major star. So when, during the same week last December, the Divine Miss M appeared both in sold-out performances at the Palace and on the cover of Newsweek, I merely smiled. Those community college leaders who for many years have crusaded for reform in graduate education based on the realities of life in two-year colleges must feel a similar sense of satisfaction when they read the recently published report of the Panel on Alternate Approaches to Graduate Education, Scholarship for Society.' Although the criticisms of graduate education have often been uneven, oversimplified, perhaps more hostile than constructive, teachers in community colleges have had opportunity to know sooner than most the inadequacies of their graduate training and can argue from an indisputable position of authority-their collective personal experience. It must be gratifying now to hear their arguments echoed in the words of a major document written by a blue-ribbon commission of scholars, graduate deans, and other university administrators under the auspices of the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board.2

I did my graduate work, composition was taught almost exclusively by slaves. With the exception of a few wives of important faculty and a small number of supervisory personnel, graduate teaching assistants instructed the 200odd sections of freshman composition offered each year. Southern Illinois University has thus opted for one of the two common solutions to the problem of college composition. It utilizes vaguely supervised graduate teaching assistants to instruct the staggering number of students who, each year, enroll in the freshman composition sequence. It goes almost without saying that the freshman composition sequence has virtually no repute within the English department. The Director of Composition is judged effective and the graduate teaching assistants are regarded as a good crop on the basis of the decibel level of student

IF ANY ONE DOUBTS that we are living in changing, even revolutionary, times, then I suggest that he read the latest cure for the woes of Freshman English, that most universally taught college course in the United States. As expressed by Louis Kampf, next president of the Modern Language Association, the new cure-all is a socialist revolution.1 And a socialist revolution which will compel English teachers to stop preventing the rise of lower class students by dubious grading systems. But the winds of change are not only blowing in the colleges. Fredson Bowers, speaking of graduate education at the Brown University Commencement (June 1, 1970), though not so sure as Louis Kampf about the coming revolution, conceded that Involvement with life, not isolation in the pursuit of knowledge, is the current watchword.2

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1 This article is based on a master's thesis prepared by Miss Auguste under the direction of Mr. Nalven at Queens College, where he is a part-time faculty member. 2 B. Folta, comparison study in the syntax in speech and writing of grade one students using the initial teaching alphabet and students using traditional orthography (USOE Bureau of Research Project No. 7-E-145. Lafayette, Indiana: Lafayette Public Schools. 1968). 3 Lenora Sandel, comparison between oral and written responses of first-grade children in I.T.A. and T.O. classes (USOE Project No. 7-8220. Hempstead, N.Y.: Hofstra University, 1967). 4 A. Mazurkiewicz, A comparison of I.T.A. and T.O. reading, writing, and spelling achievement when methodology is controlled, in The initial teaching alphabet and the world of English, A. J. Mazurkiewicz, ed. (New York: ITA Foundation, 1967), pp. 59-63.

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This case study examines how collaboration between a writing centre manager and an educational developer created new opportunities to advance writing pedagogy at a mid-sized Canadian university. Initially born from our university’s response to generative artificial intelligence, our effort both responds to perceived threats to the future of writing studies and attempts to preserve our work through new opportunities. Collaboration between writing centres and faculty development is under-represented in the literature, yet we have found the marginality of the third space to be a productive one from which to grow our campus’ writing community from “under the curriculum” (Hunt, 2006, p. 371). In this paper, we present three examples of collaborations between a writing centre manager and an educational developer—creating a community of practice, facilitating workshops for graduate students, and presenting to our university’s Senate. The outcomes of our reflections offer perspectives on AI and writing pedagogy, highlight the importance of cross-unit partnerships, and illustrate how third space professionals can offer critical writing-related perspectives to institutions where formal writing programs do not exist—ultimately helping make visible the often decentralized work of writing studies professionals in Canada.