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15th Annual Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference CFP Fall 2007 / News & Announcements
Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference at Boise State University, April 11-12, 2008
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For centuries people have explored the world, striking out in search of new lands and adventures. Often, their journeys were difficult, full of rugged terrain that challenged and sometimes rerouted the travelers. In the midst of such terrain, though, the explorers occasionally found a place where they could rest and relax, a special place that offered them shelter from the wilderness: an oasis. Such resting places occasionally became more and more populated, offering not only a respite from travels but also a home for those ready to settle down. Boise itself is such an oasis, a town named for its forest-lined river, winding between scrub desert and parched foothills, a place of comfort in an otherwise arid landscape. It is here that we invite you to come and discuss The Writing Center as Oasis. For the 15th Annual Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference, we at the Boise State Writing Center ask you to think about writing centers as oases, as possible points of respite in the otherwise difficult terrain of the academy. Yet we also encourage you to complicate and question that portrayal–when might we wish to refuse the image of a writing center as oasis? Some questions to prompt your thinking: Finding (or creating) an oasis. If we view the writing center as an oasis, then what does it take to discover this place? What sort of travels do writers and consultants undertake in order to find us? When we define the center as oasis, what assumptions do we make about the ideas of place and comfort? Can we assume the same expectations for each traveler? Maintaining and growing an oasis. Once discovered, what must we do in order to keep a writing center oasis healthy? Do we, and how do we, cultivate relationships outside the oasis, with our departments, our schools, and other writing communities? Must we bring in more settlers to keep the oasis strong? How do we help new consultants become accustomed to the oasis setting? Our sessions with writers are explorations in their own right–do we have smaller moments of discovery within those sessions? What have they taught us? Escaping from the oasis. When might the idea of a writing center as an oasis prove problematic? We’ve seen times that the writing center has been used as a punishment or a requirement. We’ve also seen times where writers come in scared, desperate, and skittish. Is a writing center ever the desert, an antioasis? Do we create certain (unfair) expectations of our work if we label ourselves an oasis?
These, of course, are but suggestions to help you begin your own travels towards a proposal, and towards Boise. We invite proposals from anyone associated with a writing center, and presentations can take on a variety of forms. Deadline: February 3rd, 2008 ‹ Fall 2007 (Volume 5 Issue 1) - Diversity in the Writing Center
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