Month: May 2020

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2020 EWCA Conference Postponed


Dear EWCA Community:

Our Board met recently to talk about whether we should cancel or postpone the conference or whether we should try to hold an online conference. After a long and serious deliberation, the EWCA Board has made the difficult decision to postpone the Conference 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.  The date of the conference is too close, and we still cannot assure that it can go forward. Also, it is difficult to have a synchronous online conference as participants and members are from all over the world.

We feel very sorry, and we are also sad. We’ve been very much looking forward to  welcoming all of you to Graz and to create a space for our community to come together, to talk, to discuss and to celebrate.

We are planning on holding the conference in Graz in 2022. We considered holding the conference in 2021, but with everything so up in the air, it is not possible to predict whether everyone concerned would be in a position to travel by summer 2021. We intend to keep the same topic as was announced for the 2020 conference, so everybody who already had an abstract accepted is welcome to join us and to deliver their presentations, workshops or roundtables in 2022, exact dates to be confirmed. Others who were unable to submit for various reasons will have the chance to answer a call for papers that will be forthcoming by the end of 2021.

How to keep in touch?

We are a community of practice, and our community is very international. I fondly remember all the beautiful conferences and meeting people from all over the world. Meeting friends and sharing our knowledge, ideas and questions.

We have not met for a long time, so we are thinking about how we can keep in touch until we meet again.

We have the listserv, and we will soon open a new the Facebook group and we have our blog https://www.ewcacircular.eu/.  These are our digital instruments for keeping in touch.

We would like to share our stories and publish the stories in our blog: https://www.ewcacircular.eu/

We would like to invite everybody to present their writing center and to tell us a bit about your writing center and the challenges you are facing during the coronavirus pandemic. Please write a text for our blog, videos and pictures are also welcome to hand in. We will publish you story on our blog.

Please write to the board if you are interested in sharing a story: board@writingcenters.eu

Finally, the postponement of the conference poses another issue that we would like to address in this announcement. As you all may know, the election of the board traditionally happens every two years at the EWCA Conference. However, because we have not met since 2016 at the conference in Łodz, our Board and our Chair have are already been in office for four years . As we are unable to hold elections for the EWCA Board and EWCA Chair until 2022, we decided to work without a Chair, working as a unit instead as an ad interim committee (Lawrence Cleary, Franziska Liebetanz and Doris Pany) and we are also thankful to have Elif Demirel and Annemieke Meijer with us.

Warm regards, Franziska Liebetanz, Doris Pany an Lawrence Cleary

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Special Edition of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship

Stories and Reflections on the Impact of Covid-19 on Writing Center Work

The editors of WLN would like to create a space to gather and record your reflections and impressions on how Covid-19 has impacted your writing centers. We recognize the devastating impact that the virus has caused to writing centers as staff fall ill, budgets are cut, positions are furloughed. We do not yet know when or how this pandemic will end or what lessons we will learn, both in the short and the long term. But we are certain that writing center professionals will want to reflect upon, learn from, and understand how we experienced this moment and its impact on our services, users, and our futures. We also know that writing centers will prevail and in some situations emerge stronger with renewed clarity of purpose or strengthened value to the campus community.  For this special issue, then, we are interested in capturing your reflections on any potential positive outcomes that have or may emerge from the impact of Covid-19 plus new solutions, approaches, and/or strategies that have worked for you.

 We are inviting short submissions of 500-750 words from directors, tutors, and even frequent writing center users. Please submit them through the WLN website: wlnjournal.org, by August 1, 2020, and choose “other” as the type of submission.

 Here are some possible prompts:

  • How has your care for tutors and writers changed since COVID 19 emerged? What long-term effects of this care do you predict will last in your writing center?
  • What new methods, processes, or tools have you adopted that you would not have if COVID 19 did not occur? How has this changed the way your writing center now operates? How does this change impact the ways you will offer tutoring in the future?
  • What is the best outcome you have experienced from COVID 19? How has this changed you, your center, your tutors?
  • How has COVID 19 changed the way you educate tutors? Will these changes be temporary or long-term pedagogical shifts?
  • How has COVID 19, or thinking in terms of infection control procedures more generally, impacted your relationship to the physical space of your writing center?
  • When your writing center returns to its physical space, what will you change, add, or revise after experiencing being online as the only way to interact with writers? For example, will you add or continue to have online accessibility?

•     What has been your experience with online technology, and what would you recommend and why?

•     What tutoring adaptations have you and your tutors made when tutoring online? Why?

  • For writing center users: how has your experience with the writing center been enhanced through online interaction? Or how has the writing center helped you through the shift to online learning as a consequence of Covid-19?
  • If you have tested or used multiple platforms, such as Zoom, GoToMeeting, Skype, FaceTime, etc., what are the various advantages and/or disadvantages?

———————–

Muriel Harris

Professor Emerita of English
• Writing Lab Director (retired)
• WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Editor-in-Chief
• harrism@purdue.edu