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Home » Archives » Fall 2007 (Volume 5 Issue 1) - Diversity in the Writing Center
From the Editors: Diversity in the Writing Center Fall 2007 / Columns
Praxis tackles diversity in the writing center This issue of Praxis explores diversity in the writing center. And while authors have interpreted this theme in appropriately diverse ways, each article supports two distinct but related observations: firstly, the importance of interrogating and evaluating the writing center’s response to diversity; and, secondly, the writing center’s vital role in coordinating, mediating, and sometimes remediating broader, university-wide efforts to provide equal access to education. Our Focus section begins with a challenge to writing centers to fulfill this role. Sarah Dees, Beth Godbee, and Moira Ozias urge writing center directors and staff to talk about systematic racism without slipping into distracting discussions about language difference. Andrew Rihn, in a similar vein, discusses the importance of raising questions of racial inequality during consultations, even (or, perhaps, especially) in non-diverse universities. Writing about a very diverse educational setting, Mirriam Lephalala and Cathy Pienaar examine the contribution writing centers can make to the huge task of educating large numbers of low-income students in post-Apartheid South Africa. Also in the Focus section, Emily Heady recounts the cross-cultural connections and crossed signals between tutors and South Korean students before and this past April’s tragic Virginia Tech shootings. Finally, Janet M. Lucas and Jane Hirschhorn each consider the challenges of tutoring ESL students: Lucas writes about the large number of ESL students seeking nursing degrees; and Hirschhorn considers the similar approaches that have worked in tutoring ESL and learning-disabled students. Contributors to our Columns, Consulting, and Training sections consider diversity in a variety of different ways, including, but not restricted to, the usual focus on race and ethnicity in such conversations. In our Consulting section, Sayantani Dasgupta relates her experiences as an international student working as a consultant in a Midwestern U.S. writing center, while Angela Woodard asks us to consider other examples of “non-traditional” students in the case study of an adult learner struggling with her return to the classroom and to academic writing. Rusty Carpenter furthers our understanding of what counts as diversity and how writing centers can nurture it through his discussion, in our Training section, of how the virtual space of the internet offers inclusion to place-bound students who cannot visit writing centers during regular business hours. Finally, in Columns, our research group at the University of Texas at Austin University asks how writing centers might better accommodate male consultees when research indicates that women are statistically more likely to visit the University Writing Center. Beyond our Fall 2007 theme of “Diversity in the Writing Center,” Praxis continues to provide a forum for writing center directors and consultants alike
to discuss their craft. In Training, Marjorie Chadwick describes the extradisciplinary approach to writing employed by the University of Houston, concluding that “writing is not the province of one department, but the responsibility of the entire university community.” Deidre Dowling Price, also contributing to the Training section, takes this logic a step further by developing a series of lectures and workshops that base writing lessons in popular culture, which students can more easily relate to. ‹ Featured Center: Gallaudet University Tutorial & Instructional Programs
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Genre, Diversity, and Disorder in the Writing Center ›