English writing centers at Chinese universities present a fascinating paradox. On one hand, the number of universities with writing centers and the professional interest in writing centers in China have grown steadily over the past two decades. But on the other, the number of centers is still modest and only a few centers have had a significant influence on the culture of writing on their campuses, which is surprising given the vast number of universities in China and the documented need for strengthening and expanding writing instruction in English. This international research study explores the current state of English writing centers in China in a more comprehensive way than previous literature has done. Using data from new in-depth interviews with 17 professionals involved with English writing centers at 15 Chinese universities—professors, tutors, instructors, directors, administrators, and university leaders—as well as data from publicly available websites and WeChat accounts and published literature in Chinese and in English, this study identifies important needs that English writing centers can meet in Chinese universities, offers a typology and descriptions of existing centers, and identifies challenges that writing centers face and possible paths forward, or strategic action fields, for successfully institutionalizing writing centers in China. This study not only offers practical advice to support the promising future of writing centers in China but also introduces English writing centers in China to a larger international audience and reveals powerful insights into the ways models, principles, and practices of writing centers travel and change across continents and educational cultures.

Introduction: Many technical and professional communication (TPC) students, practitioners, and instructors are not trained translators or localizers. However, translation and localization competencies are important in today's interconnected world and should be part of international TPC instruction. To meet this need, TPC instruction may incorporate exposure to translation issues into coursework and explore the growing use of technologies in the translation process. About the case: Recognizing the need to incorporate translation and localization (T&L) into a graduate seminar on “Global Technical Communication” (GTC), the course's instructor and students co-constructed a unique translation assignment that embraced the limitations created by most instructors’ and students’ lack of exposure to or experience with the translation process. Situating the case: TPC education has been criticized for focusing increasingly on TPC and writing classrooms as the object of study rather than sites where students eventually work and apply their knowledge. While study abroad programs or globally connected learning communities are ideal for teaching “real-world” T&L skills, substantial material limitations can impede their widespread adoption. Methods/approach: This experience report was co-authored by the instructor and TPC students from the 2020 and 2022 iterations of the GTC graduate seminar. We describe the translation assignment, its development, and the groups’ final submissions and reflections. Results/discussion: Students’ group and instructor reflections suggest the assignment's potential to facilitate closer engagement with real-world global TPC processes, deeper consideration of language and culture's relationship in TPC, and developing appropriate levels of confidence in working on similar projects as TPC researchers or practitioners. Conclusions: Our experience report provides proof of concept for how we might begin introducing T&L practices to TPC students in low-stakes but meaningful assignments.

Whenever students enter our Writing Center, they are overwhelmed by more than the writing process. Our student population includes individuals who experience a myriad of life circumstances, such as poverty, poor mental health, and transience, that impact their ability to perform within and without the classroom. Writing Center staff are considered campus liaisons because they provide support and connect students to resources in other departments. Throughout a writing tutor’s career, they may walk with clients across campus to the Military Student Center, The Office of Disability Services, Full Spectrum Learning Center, and Counseling Services. These clients often recognize problems, yet fear receiving assistance because of stigmas. By demonstrating that students are not alone and taking time to journey with them, tutors reinforce a collaborative mindset that reaches beyond the Writing Center’s walls. Our tutors are particularly adept at addressing students’ needs because we have experienced similar circumstances and can ultimately relate to our clients. Keywords : emotional labor; culture of care; collaboration; narrative inquiry

This article is adapted from a keynote address at the July 2022 European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) conference, sponsored by the University of Graz in Austria, whose theme focused on writing centers as spaces of empowerment. Designed for peer tutors as well as writing center faculty, this talk first celebrates some examples of writing centers empowering student writers and tutors. It then attempts to articulate what scientific spectacles allow us to see when we look deeper into these examples of empowerment: some of the big ideas, the abstract principles, the constellation of expertise and commitments that underlie our contemporary writing center work. That expertise and those commitments range from what’s familiar in our field (writing expertise, care for writers and tutors, multilingualism, dialogic interaction) to what’s less familiar (the power of interdisciplinary teams and generalists, connectivism). The talk concludes by urging writing centers to use their expertise and commitments to forge partnerships and engage in some activism—in order to empower more writers, make centers and writing more inclusive, and influence teaching and learning at their schools and universities more broadly.

Preview this article: Interchanges: Response to Shawna Shapiro, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/74/2/collegecompositionandcommunication32281-1.gif

Seeking to support graduate student writers, writing centers at research universities have developed highly successful dissertation camps over the past 15 years. Previous research from North American dissertation camps has demonstrated significant benefits from these camps, as dissertation writers developed new writing habits and increased their productivity. In this study, however, a closer look at initial and follow-up survey responses provided by participants from dissertation camps at two institutions—an Upper Midwestern university in the United States that has held camps for 11 years and an Eastern European university that held an online camp during the 2020 pandemic—suggests that focusing on the positive responses may obscure some telling tensions between dissertation camps’ benefits and limitations. Our research reveals tensions around four key parts of dissertation camp curricula—developing writing habits and schedules, sustaining a community of writers, focusing on the drafting stage, and emphasizing cross- disciplinary participation. Listening more deeply to these outlier responses sheds valuable light on the affordances and limitations of dissertation writing camps and on how the curricula of dissertation camps might be reimagined to better articulate and embrace those tensions.

Abstract Five graduate students reflect on their experiences in multiple roles to address the question, What does a good teacher do now?—during a pandemic, in a moment of reckoning with white supremacy, in the face of uncounted griefs and challenges. We contend that good teachers craft communities of care for students, colleagues, and themselves. We advance trauma, accessibility, surveillance, and labor as particular sites for that project.

Critical language awareness offers one approach to communaljusticing, an iterative and collective process that can address inequities in the disciplinary infrastructure of Writing Studies. We demonstrate justicing in the field’s pasts, policies, and publications; offer a model of communal revision; and invite readers to become agents of communal justicing.

A reading of Inferno 32, Purgatorio 31, and Paradiso 31 compares a physical and interior pilgrimage, especially in the way in which the beginning and end of an interior journey are distinguished, to illuminate the concept of love that is central to the Divine Comedy.

Salmon learn the scent of the stream into which they are born, journey for sometimes thousands of miles, and, if they survive the sojourn, return home to spawn and die, leaving traces that enrich ecological relationships. In the homing practices of the Pacific salmon, we find not only a critical portent of ecological health, but also an exemplar of olfactic memory and a model of practical wisdom that moves us toward multi-species flourishing. The homing practices of salmon are instructive for rhetoric, offering a biotrope that challenges us to engage in deep ecological change in order to honor and restore relationships with place.

This article addresses the teaching of Amy Levy's “Xantippe” (1880), a poem 279 lines long, in an upper-division survey of British literature from 1800 to the present focused on life stories. Though the poem is short enough to be read in a single sitting, it is also long enough to pose the pedagogical challenges common to teaching all long poems: asking students to read both closely and at length, to discern unifying tropes or themes across manifold details or narrative episodes, to engage in sufficient discussion commensurate with the long poem's complexity, and to discover the pleasures of the long poem (deep immersion, sweep of vistas, narrative propulsion, and more). Since Levy is not anthologized in most survey textbooks, the article also concerns teaching noncanonical poetry. The methods presented include prompts posing questions and explaining the work's poetic and cultural contexts, and student reading diaries listing what students found challenging and what they learned. The article thus incorporates real-time student responses, as well as discussion of teaching strategies.

This study examined the impact of using a multiliteracies pedagogy and the social networking site (SNS), Ning, to help 6th grade English language learners (ELLs) develop their writer identities, with the purpose of increasing the students’ confidence, sense of self, and language and literacy skills. To this end, we were interested in whether and how the development of a writer identity and an increase in social presence on the Ning would translate into face-to-face connections in the physical classroom and an induction into the academic learning community – a space in which the students may have previously felt intimidated. In doing this, we employed a qualitative case study analysis to investigate the experiences of two ELLs at an elementary school in Toronto, Canada. Our study found that incorporating multimodal tools and an SNS allowed the students to more freely express themselves; to share their work and their personalities with peers, which made the writing assignments more meaningful and engaging; and provided a platform for students to negotiate their values and beliefs. Ultimately, the increased interactions with peers online and the development of this new English-language literate identity translated into the development of students’ individual voices, a sense of ownership of English, and an increased social presence in the classroom.

This article examines an African American urban debate league in order to understand the types of literacy training youth in these leagues undergo. As the author notes, debate leagues are important sites of community literacy that are often overshadowed by the popular views of these leagues as highly competitive, predominantly white, and for the socially affluent. However, Cridland-Hughes shows that facilitators and organizers in urban debate settings often shape these leagues as sites of communal and cultural education and support. Her discussion of City Debate, one such organization enacting community literacy, illustrates the relationships built through these sites of rhetorical training and their connection to the development of black youth as critical thinkers, speakers, and citizens of tomorrow.

Undergraduate social work education in England requires the completion of the necessary academic credits for an honours degree, alongside the demonstration of the necessary standards and competencies associated with a professional award. This requires a challenging and diverse programme of study. However, the skills necessary for successful academic enquiry complement those required for effective practice. In particular, academic writing skills support effective professional communication and research skills allow for evidence-based practice. This paper describes the development of academic skills within a new undergraduate social work programme at a UK university, designed to meet the needs of a diverse and atypical student cohort. Having recognised the flaws in the early delivery of the programme, a revised curriculum has placed the development of academic research and writing skills at its core.

Describes an intermediate college writing class that uses Paulo Freire’s essay “The Banking Concept of Education” as its philosophical foundation to encourage students and teachers to engage in critical thought, critical writing, and critical action. Describes several assignments that evolved from the essay, and its implications. Shows how students experienced writing as “critical action.”

Reviews three books: August Wilson and the African American Odyssey, by Kim Pereira; When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy, by Ira Shor; A Guide to Argumentative Writing, by Byron L. Stay.

This past year saw the publication of two new books devoted specifically to the work of writing centers, and, as Jeanette Harris pointed out in these pages in 1992, book-length publications about writing centers are still rare enough that each "must bear the weight of great expectation and close scrutiny" (205). Writing Centers in Context : Twelve Case Studies , edited by Joyce A. Kinkead and Jeanette G. Harris, consists of extended descriptions of twelve different writing centers. These profiles offer clear, vivid descriptions of each program's history, purpose, philosophy, services, staffing, training, and administration. Thus the book emphasizes the big picture, the macro-level of writing centers. As its title promises, The Dynamics of the Writing Conference: Social and Cognitive Interaction^ edited by Thomas Flynn and Mary King, examines the much more intimate setting of writing center conferences, focusing on individual instruction and the interaction between a teacher and a student. As will become clear, these books are so different that they need to be considered separately in order to understand and evaluate

Wordless instructions can circumvent language barriers, both technical and international, but several cycles of testing and revising are necessary to ensure their effectiveness. These cycles are described as they occurred in developing unpacking and setup instructions for the IBM SELECTRIC® II typewriter marketed in Europe. The lessons learned are expressed in ten recommendations.

Preview this article: Round Table: Herrick's "Hock Cart" Companion Piece to "Corinna's Going A-maying", Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/27/5/collegeenglish23264-1.gif

Preview this article: The Contemporaneity of Classical Rhetoric, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/16/3/collegecompositionandcommunication21089-1.gif

Preview this article: Teaching Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation: A Short Cut, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/15/2/collegecompositionandcommunication21146-1.gif

Richard P. Benton, John P. Cutts, Ralph M. Williams, Charles Norton Coe, George E. Nichols, III, Samuel French Morse, Arthur H. Hughes, Paul Smith, Gustave W. Andrian, George Brandon Saul, Books, College English, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Jan., 1960), pp. 233-243

Preview this article: Instruction in Using the Library at the University of Vermont, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/7/4/collegecompositioncommunication22627-1.gif