On April 16, I had the opportunity to attend the Pacific Northwest Writing Centers Association Conference as part of the delegation from Evergreen. I thought I’d post my notes and thoughts here, though they probably won’t mean much to very many people.

Getting There: The conference was at the University of Washington – Bothell campus, which put me about 20 minutes from home and in an area that I’m quite familiar with. The trip up was uneventful, though we left at 6:30 in the morning and ended up hydroplaning half the way there due to heavy rains.

Keynote: After the Center, Then What? Writing Centers and the New Work Order
The keynote speaker for the conference was Nancy Grimm from Michigan Technological University. In it, she discussed how writing centers prepare peer tutors for their future placement in the workforce, and talked a lot about how the modern workspace mirrors the work done in writing centers nationwide. She discussed the old order versus the new order, in reference to two different approaches to management and the distribution of knowledge. The old order was when knowledge was centered amongst a particular group of people high up in the management hierarchy. The new order, on the other hand, is modern times, when knowledge has been distributed amongst employees, and when the addition or loss of an employee can drastically affect the knowledge base that a company has. Writing centers help tutors develop the capacity for ethical thinking, as well as developing an awareness surrounding their relationships to other people. She also discusses how writing center allows the development of knowledge management skills crucial within the new order, which involves literacy and the language used within writing center work: accessing information and crossing boundaries, for instance. She closed by giving a list of five things that any writing center director should do in order to maximize ethical thinking in the workplace:

1. Review mission statements to see if they reflect the impact that the Center has campus-wide.
2. Reconsider what makes a good writing tutor within a global context; promote diversity in staff.
3. Reconsider how we think about tutor training; training is not the same as education.
4. Consider the promotion of literacy for the new work order; how will newcomers to the center improve the quality of work at the Center?
5. How does the Center engage with being at the center or at the margins of the educational process?

None of these five points are exact quotes, but what I understood them to be. This was an excellent start for the conference, as it injected everyone with a lot of energy.

Concurrent Session A: The Ripple Effect
The first session I attended was a facilitated discussion about how to create a welcoming atmosphere for writing centers that allows both the tutor and the client to be comfortable in that environment. This was quite an interesting discussion, as I got to listen to a range of different ways that writing centers have created a welcoming environment for extremely diverse populations. There were five discussion questions, which we skipped between as appropriate. Below are my notes on each question:

1. How can a writing center create a welcoming environment?
   • Get to know students, build relationships
   • Create a personal evaluation form that allows students to track progress
   • Remember the name of the student and state it
   • Advertise/get the word out/class visits
   • Bring classes to the writing center/sample roleplay
   • Treat everyone as a newcomer (including new tutors)
   • Create a "home" for tutors/social activities
   • Open house for all
2. How can we create a welcoming environment for international students?
   • Have a diverse staff
   • Tutors of same ethnicity as int’l student to help explain
   • Conversation pal program (Highline Community College)
   • Teach skills needed to succeed in American writing
   • Dialog – exploration of ideas
3. What are some positive consequences of creating a welcoming environment for consultees, consultants, and the college as a whole?
   • Teachers promote the center
   • Ripple effect – word gets around
   • Elimination of ethnic divisions
4. What are some negative consequences of creating a welcoming environment for consultees, consultants, and the college as a whole?
   • Americanized writing (non-judgmental)
   • Noise
   • Lack of confidentiality
   • Interrogated feeling

Some of this was stuff I hadn’t considered, though the majority of the attendees seemed to work in centers with a much higher percentage of international students attending than Evergreen’s.

Concurrent Session B: Crossing the Line
This was essentially an ethics workshop. It presented a series of exercises used by Highline Community College to discuss and break down barriers around the ethical considerations of being a tutor. This is something that was extremely interesting to watch, since everyone had four choices after watching a short skit demonstrating a particular ethical dilemma:

• I would/should do that
• I would/should never do that
• I might do that but…
• I don’t know what I would/should do

The range of responses when asked why people picked their positions was very enlightening to me, and I’ve begun to notice when I do some of the things discussed in this workshop. For me personally, this was very interesting, and I may end up taking it to Evergreen’s Center Director and pitching it for inclusion in one of the staff retreats.

Concurrent Session C: Communicating with Faculty: Exploring Conference Summaries
This was a presentation on research done at Seattle University surrounding the use of conference summaries in tutoring. Essentially, the Writing Center there decided that they wanted to be able to provide some sort of feedback to faculty regarding a student’s progress in a session. A form would be completed at the end of each session and, if the student consented, that form would then be sent to the faculty for whichever class that student came in for. Some interesting results here, namely that most people declined to have that information sent to faculty and that it added a considerable burden on tutors to complete and maintain the paperwork after each session. Evergreen does something like this in response forms, but they’re used for internal tutor evaluations only. After the presentation of the research, we had a short discussion session to clarify any questions we had about the research and to give suggestions on how to improve the system.

This gave me a few ideas, on the off chance that Evergreen’s Writing Center decides to do any revamping of their attendance system in the near future.

Concurrent Session D: Conflict and Compromise: The Question of Required Tutoring
This was a presentation by Evergreen’s own Bo Kinney on whether or not centers should require students to attend sessions. This isn’t one that I can easily summarize, as I don’t have any real notes for it, but suffice it to say that it added a few interesting elements to our own internal debate surrounding required tutoring.

After all the sessions, we had a post-Conference wrap-up, which allowed various groups to give their impression of the day. I found the whole thing to be very educational, though I didn’t take the opportunity to network at all, which I kind of regret — that would have been a very useful endeavor. From my understanding, though, other members of Evergreen’s delegation networked quite well, so we’ll see how those connections add in to our work as a Writing Center.