Changing Spaces

Changing Spaces
Author: Arlene Archer
Publisher: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2011-07-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1920338594

Changing Spaces makes a forceful and credible case for the role of writing centres in engaging with students, staff and institutional structures in understanding issues of access from a social perspective ... This is a specialist book for those working in writing centres and for academics of all disciplines. It is based on research and provides an important set of theoretical arguments, developed through reflection on writing centre practices, about student writing and the work of the university. Professor Sioux McKenna Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University How do we select and train tutors? How do we work with faculty? How do we combat the image that we are remedial, a ?fix-it? shop? How do we prove our worth? How do we show that we improve retention? ... Changing Spaces demonstrates the flexibility of writing centers and the unique roles they play in South Africa. Writing centers everywhere represent institutional responses to the learning needs of their students, and they do so because writing centers adapt easily to different contexts and situations. They meet students where they are, as a group and individually. Professor Leigh Ryan Writing Center Director, University of Maryland, USA

Writing Centres in Higher Education

Writing Centres in Higher Education
Author: Laura Dison
Publisher: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2017-01-01
Genre: Academic writing
ISBN: 1928357547

Writing Centres in South Africa, and globally, are now well established academic support centres within many universities. Historically tasked with supporting students as they grapple with the demands of academic writing, many centres are now moving beyond their own walls to work with academic tutors, lecturers and departments to rethink the ways in which knowledge is transformed into different kinds of disciplinary writing. This move raises pertinent questions for writing centre directors, tutors/consultants, and for the universities that house them: how does a centre, tasked with supporting more general academic literacy development through writing pedagogies, initiate students into a range of particularised discourse communities? How do writing centre staff and disciplinary lecturers negotiate their shared, and separate, concerns for student learning through collaborative writing development projects? How do writing centres work with assignments and forms of literacy that challenge them to reconfigure their own pedagogical practices and expand their conceptions of writing support? How do writing centres maintain their core focus as they move flexibly beyond their own spaces to understand the nature of disciplinary writing? This collection of essays reflects on the ways in which writing centres in South Africa are working in and across disciplines. Institutional constraints and challenges that arise from these collaborations are addressed and opportunities for transforming teaching and learning spaces are explored. The chapters speak to the global move in higher education to reconsider how knowledge is made, who makes it, and how support and development opportunities for students and lecturers should be created and sustained across the disciplines. This volume contributes to the body of knowledge in the growing field of the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education in South Africa. It builds on the work of the first collection of such essays: Changing Spaces: Writing Centres and Access to Higher Education (Eds. A. Archer and R. Richards, 2011, SUN PReSS) to understand why working within the disciplines is so critical for writing development in a South Africanÿcontext.

Writing Centers at the Center of Change

Writing Centers at the Center of Change
Author: Joe Essid
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2019-09-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 042975714X

Writing Centers at the Center of Change looks at how eleven centers, internationally, adapted to change at their institutions, during a decade when their very success has become a valued commodity in a larger struggle for resources on many campuses. Bringing together both US and international perspectives, this volume offers solutions for adapting to change in the world of writing centers, ranging from the logistical to the pedagogical, and even to the existential. Each author discusses the origins, appropriate responses, and partners to seek when change comes from within a school or outside it. Chapters document new programs being formed under changing circumstances, and suggest ways to navigate professional or pedagogical changes that may undermine the hard work of more than four decades of writing-center professionals. The book’s audience includes writing center and learning-commons administrators, university librarians, deans, department chairs affiliated with writing centers. It will also be useful for graduate students in composition, rhetoric, and academic writing.

Around the Texts of Writing Center Work

Around the Texts of Writing Center Work
Author: R. Mark Hall
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2017-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1607325810

Around the Texts of Writing Center Work reveals the conceptual frameworks found in and created by ordinary writing center documents. The values and beliefs underlying course syllabi, policy statements, website copy and comments, assessment plans, promotional flyers, and annual reports critically inform writing center practices, including the vital undertaking of tutor education. In each chapter, author R. Mark Hall focuses on a particular document. He examines its origins, its use by writing center instructors and tutors, and its engagement with enduring disciplinary challenges in the field of composition, such as tutoring and program assessment. He then analyzes each document in the contexts of the conceptual framework at the heart of its creation and everyday application: activity theory, communities of practice, discourse analysis, reflective practice, and inquiry-based learning. Around the Texts of Writing Center Work approaches the analysis of writing center documents with an inquiry stance—a call for curiosity and skepticism toward existing and proposed conceptual frameworks—in the hope that the theoretically conscious evaluation and revision of commonplace documents will lead to greater efficacy and more abundant research by writing center administrators and students.

Everyday Writing Center

Everyday Writing Center
Author: Anne Ellen Geller
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2007-04-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1457174715

In a landmark collaboration, five co-authors develop a theme of ordinary disruptions ("the everyday") as a source of provocative learning moments that can liberate both student writers and writing center staff. At the same time, the authors parlay Etienne Wenger's concept of "community of practice" into an ethos of a dynamic, learner-centered pedagogy that is especially well-suited to the peculiar teaching situation of the writing center. They push themselves and their field toward deeper, more significant research, more self-conscious teaching.

Writing Programs Worldwide

Writing Programs Worldwide
Author: Chris Thaiss
Publisher: Parlor Press LLC
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2012-07-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 160235345X

WRITING PROGRAMS WORLDWIDE offers an important global perspective to the growing research literature in the shaping of writing programs. The authors of its program profiles show how innovators at a diverse range of universities on six continents have dealt creatively over many years with day-to-day and long-range issues affecting how students across disciplines and languages grow as communicators and learners.

Center Will Hold

Center Will Hold
Author: Michael Pemberton
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2003-12-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 087421484X

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.

Writing Centres in Higher Education

Writing Centres in Higher Education
Author: Sherran Clarence
Publisher: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2017-10-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1928357555

This collection of essays reflects on the ways in which writing centres in South Africa are working in and across disciplines. Institutional constraints and challenges that arise from these collaborations are addressed and opportunities for transforming teaching and learning spaces are explored. The chapters speak to the global move in higher education to reconsider how knowledge is made, who makes it, and how support and development opportunities for students and lecturers should be created and sustained across the disciplines. This volume contributes to the body of knowledge in the growing field of the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education in South Africa. It builds on the work of the first collection of such essays: Changing Spaces: Writing Centres and Access to Higher Education (Eds. A Archer and R Richards, 2011, SUN PReSS) to understand why working within the disciplines is so critical for writing development in a South African context.

Writing in the Disciplines

Writing in the Disciplines
Author: Mary Deane
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2011-08-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1350306320

Writing in the Disciplines (WiD) is a growing field in which discipline-based academics, writing developers, and learning technologists collaborate to help students succeed as subject specialists. This book places WiD in its theoretical and cultural contexts and reports on initiatives taking place at a range of UK higher education institutions. Also includes surveys of current developments and scholarship in the US, Australia, Europe and elsewhere, making it of interest to both a UK and an international audience.

Writing Centers in the Higher Education Landscape of the Arabian Gulf

Writing Centers in the Higher Education Landscape of the Arabian Gulf
Author: Osman Z. Barnawi
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-08-10
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9783319856407

This book addresses issues surrounding writing centers in the Arabian Gulf region. Including a foreword by Professor Ken Hyland, it brings together a number of thought-provoking chapters on the history, concept, and ground realities coupled with critical comparative discussions of writing centres in the region. The book begins by offering critical historical accounts of writing centers in the Gulf countries, before moving onto empirical research and reports on pedagogical practices that vividly capture the on-the-ground realities faced and experienced by different actors. These accounts serve to highlight how the writing centers vary between countries, as well as how they differ from the more well-known writing centers in the US and the UK. Finally, the book explores what sort of commonalities and differences the current trend of writing centres is producing within and between the six countries of the Arabian Gulf. This book will be highly relevant to those involved with writing centres along with directors, policymakers, researchers and teacher educators in the fields of Education and Sociology, particularly those with an interest in the Arabian Gulf area.