Call for Proposals
As writing centers, we are increasingly called upon to demonstrate our effectiveness and catalog our contributions to the communities we serve. While our institutions vary widely, we share a common need to investigate our theory and practice and to convey our knowledge in measurable, convincing ways. Some may heed the call of a dean to justify their existence in tight budgetary times, some may feel the push of compiling a tenure review portfolio, some may seek the history of a policy or practice within an institution or within the field, and some may feel challenged to explore a long-standing bit of tutoring or writing theory or practice. Some may simply want to look more closely at a routine or assumption within a particular writing center or within the writing center community. Whatever the spur, we invite you to gather evidence around some aspect of writing center work that is of interest to you and to share your findings with your fellow members of SWCA in Chapel Hill next February.
While the word “research” connotes much in the academy, we use it here as an umbrella term that encompasses all kinds of efforts to explore, glean, investigate, and demonstrate what we know or want to learn about writers, writing, tutors, tutoring, administration, and administering. As writing center theorists and practitioners, we experience the felt-sense of success daily with individual students and can often cite yards of anecdotal evidence that suggests our effectiveness. However, it’s in our interest, and the interest of writing centers everywhere, to take the next step and make the nature and process of our success more plain to others.
We encourage you to submit proposals on any aspects of writing center work and to think creatively about what kinds of problems you’d like to solve, knowledge you’d like to gain, theories you’d like to investigate, and practices you’d like to test or measure. Your proposal may outline a formal systematic research project or a smaller, local, informal investigation. If you’d like to learn more about research methods and tools, we’ve gathered some tips here to start you thinking and planning and exploring. You may find resources and collaborators on your own campuses as well. Before you begin, you may want to consider the size and shape your proposal may take. You can review the session formats here to begin to envision the ways in which you may report your research activity when conference time comes.
We invite you to brainstorm and develop a project around questions you’d like answered within your writing center or that seem unexplored or undocumented in current writing center literature. As you read wcenter, talk with each other in staff meetings, or reflect on an article in WLN, the Writing Center Journal, or Southern Discourse, we encourage you to take action and develop a plan to gather evidence about what’s really happening in your center or beyond. Let’s research!