Clarifying the value of writing center partnerships with libraries and learning centers: Models and lessons learned

This panel will explore collaboration and partnerships between writing centers and librarians, faculty and learning centers.

• The AUS Library and the Writing Center: Partnering for student success (Christine Furno)

  As librarians continually strive to connect students to the expanding world of resources, reaching them at their ‘point of need’ encompasses a host of challenges. To further understand these challenges and to better integrate ourselves as academic partners, IL librarians at the American University of Sharjah partnered with the Writing Center to examine student writing appointments through a transcription analysis study.

  Notwithstanding faculty support coupled with campus promotional efforts, previous library outreach initiatives proved underwhelming within the academic writing department. Yet, a physical relocation to pilot reference services in the Writing Center deemed to be one step closer to meeting students at their ‘point of need’. The subsequent study examined students’ writing experiences and revealed the challenges encountered as they support their writing assignments with appropriate research resources.

  Results of the study highlighted specific research-related contexts and fostered recommendations to improve current IL program initiatives, to supplement tutor training, and to enhance research help awareness. Collaborators can now share a narrative and implement an action plan with campus stakeholders in order to reinforce connections across academic support units, such as the Writing Center and the library. This presentation will highlight the findings, challenges, and recommendations from this collaborative initiative.

• Collaboration is not the easy way out but… it does pay off: Reinventing the writing center at ACT (Stella Asderi & Nicola Kondoyiannis-Zannis)

  The Writing center at ACT was run previously, by the English Department. However last year a major change occurred as the writing center came under the aegis of the Bissell Library. The need for reinvention and organizational restructuring was of immense and immediate importance, so as to outreach the whole academic structure. It was decided that collaboration across all academic departments and key organizational structures was an integral part of the process. This presentation sets out to recount the process, with all its pros and cons, of establishing the new service provided by the Bissel Library.

• Writing centers and learning centers: A match made in (pedagogical) heaven (Gregory Katsas)

  Lately, more and more writing centers are merging with academic skills centers. The debate of the effects of these mergers is strong. On one hand, the traditional writing center may feel threatened that their primary purpose is diluted in a more general setting. On the other hand, academic skills centers address the whole learning process which, among other things, covers writing. This presentation aims to address this debate as the discussion will focus on three dimensions of this debate:

  1. Identity. Do writing centers and learning centers have distinct identities?
  2. Mission. In what way are the missions of writing centers different than the missions of learning centers?
  3. Operation. What operational concerns and resources need to be addressed?

  At Deree College we have created such an “all-encompassing” Learning Center five years ago. It is called S.A.S.S. (Student Academic Support Services) and its learning facilitators are entirely students. Its practices will be used to help guide the discussion.