The Writing Center of the European-University Viadrina is celebrating its 10th anniversary!

Dear colleagues and friends of our writing center,

We cordially invite you to our anniversary celebrating the 10th birthday of the Writing Center at the European-University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany.

Happy happy

 

When: Thursday, 04 May 2017, 7 pm

What: Official ceremony with speeches, panel discussions, and evening entertainment

Where: Logensaal, Logenstraße 11, 15230 Frankfurt (Oder), Germany

When: Friday, 05 May 2017, during the day*

What: Workshop on writing center assessment with experts from the USA: Ellen Schendel und William Macauley

Where: Campus European-University Viadrina, Große Scharrnstraße 59, 15230 Frankfurt (Oder)

We are delighted that our university’s president Prof. Alexander Wöll will open the ceremonies. After the official opening we will hear speeches from Dr. Katrin Girgensohn, Director of the Center for Key Competences and Research-Oriented Learning at the Viadrina, as well as from Prof. Julie Nelson Christoph, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Writing, Learning, and Teaching at the University of Puget Sound, USA. Ceremonies will close with a panel discussion on writing with teachers from all faculties of the European-University Viadrina.

Afterwards there will be accompanying entertainment and time to celebrate together with drinks and food.

We kindly ask you to register with this online form before 20 April 2017. Thank you.

Best regards,

Franziska Liebetanz, Katrin Girgensohn & the team of the Writing Center at the European-University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder)

*Detailed information about the time will be announced soon.

Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer

Chris announced the recent publication on Facebook: “Hard copies! Thanks to all the great contributors (some not on my FB–pls. tag), fabulous co-editor Jessie Moore, and the always-supportive Mike Palmquist, Sue McCleod, and Dave Blakesley.”

Critical Transitions

You can get a look at the new addition on the WAC Clearinghouse website at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/ansonmoore/

Copying in the blurb below from the WAC Clearinghouse just to get you salivating a bit about what awaits you:

Edited by Chris M. Anson and Jessie L. Moore
Copy edited by Don Donahue. Designed by Mike Palmquist.

In Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer, Chris Anson and Jessie Moore offer an important new collection about prior learning and transfer theories that asks what writing knowledge should transfer, how we might recognize that transfer, and what the significance is—from a global perspective—of understanding knowledge transformation related to writing. The contributors examine strategies for supporting writers’ transfer at key critical transitions, including transitions from high-school to college, from first-year writing to writing in the major and in the disciplines, between self-sponsored and academic writing, and between languages. The collection concludes with an epilogue offering next steps in studying and designing for writing transfer.

About the Editors

Chris Anson is Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University. He has published fifteen books and more than 120 articles and book chapters relating to writing and has spoken widely across the U.S. and in 28 other countries.

Jessie L. Moore is Associate Drector of the Center for Engaged Learning and Associate Professor of English: Professional Writing & Rhetoric at Elon University. Her recent research examines transfer of writing knowledge and practices, multi-institutional research and collaborative inquiry, writing residencies for faculty writers, the writing lives of university students, and high-impact pedagogies.

Publication Information: Anson, Chris M., & Moore, Jessie L. (Eds.). (2016). Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer. Perspectives on Writing. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado. Available at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/ansonmoore/

Online Publication Date: June 19, 2016.
Print Publication Date: March 1, 2017.

Contact Information:
Chris M. Anson: chris_anson@ncsu.edu
Jessie L. Moore: jmoore28@elon.edu

How I Write, Ireland: Video Lesson-plans

Lawrence Cleary is a Co-Director of the Regional Writing Centre at the University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland. He is a newly-elected member of the EWCA board.

Since 2011, at the Regional Writing Centre (RWC) at the University of Limerick, Ireland, I have been interviewing prolific writers, both academic and creative, about their writing processes, how they assess their writing situations and their strategies for negotiating the process in a given situation. The RWC’s series was inspired by Hilton Obenzinger’s How I Write Series at Stanford’s Hume Writing Center. Though Stanford’s series is much better funded than my meagre attempt at the University of Limerick, the effect is nevertheless the same: to make the process of writing more visible. We can watch fishermen tie a knot on YouTube or watch how a Ferrari is manufactured on TV, but when was the last time a prolific writer’s writing process was documented on time-lapse video for all to watch?

sarabauminterview
How I Write, Ireland interview with Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

The RWC calls its series How I Write, Ireland, and as they do in Stanford, we video record and transcribe the interviews with prolific writers, posting the video and transcripts on the Regional Writing Centre’s website, accessible to everyone on Earth who has internet access and are curious about how good writers write. We also include written lesson plans that identify things the writers have said and present them as prompts for in-class or at-home free-writes and discussions, getting novice writers and teachers alike to be more conscious of what they do, what they think, what they feel and how they incorporate others into their process when they write.

For some time, it has been in my mind to extract those portions of the interview that inspired those prompts from the video and present them as self-contained ten to fifteen-minute video lesson plans. Not long ago, I received a bit of money from the t1Step programme, an Irish education programme that is promoting the use of technology for learning. That small amount was enough to motivate me to get two video lessons up and running. These videos are listed as Video Lessons on our website, and as one can see when they click on the link, the first speaks about the role of cultural capital in the making of a good writer, and the second interview focuses on the role of deadlines in the writer’s process.

 

StephenKinsellainterview
How I Write, Ireland interview with Stephen Kinsella, Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick

 

These short video lessons are true testaments to the individuality of the writing process. The videos compare two writer’s opinions about a particular issue. Revealed is that despite having diametrically opposing positions on the matter being discussed, they both end up in the same place: lauded writers with publications that go around the block and back again.

We hope that students and teachers alike will delve into our growing bank of interviews and use them to learn how good writers go about the process of writing, how they contend with obstacles to their writing goals and how they analyse the situations into which they write. It is our hope that these writers’ revelations about their own processes will offer novice writers ideas about how they might better negotiate their own process and better assess the writing situations that confront them. It is our hope that these videos and video lessons will instigate and perpetuate a conversation on writing that began long before we came along, but that the RWC, nevertheless, made a primary mission when we established our ethos ten years ago this coming April.

The Regional Writing Centre asks users that find the resource valuable to help us with our research on this resource by answering the appropriate questionnaire on our How to Participate page.  One survey is for those using the resource as a teaching tool and the other for those who use the videos as a learning tool. Any feedback or information that you can give about how you used our resource would be gratefully received as the information will assist us in future funding applications for this resource. Enjoy.

University of Cologne issues an invitation to their upcoming 10th Write-Peer-Tutor * intern Conference

The University of Cologne has issued an invitation to their upcoming 10th Write-Peer-Tutor * intern Conference to be held from September 30th to October 2nd, 2017.

“We are looking forward to welcoming you to the SPTK in Cologne this year. We want to discuss the latest developments and experiences in the area of peer consulting with you, the writing staff from all over Germany and Europe.

A call for papers was issued as well on the topic of “Roles (conflicts) in the peer-writing advice”. Abstracts must be submitted by April 30th, 2017 to: sptk-2017@uni-koeln.de.

For more information: contact us by e-mail or telephone: 0221/470 38 14 or  sptk-2017 (at) uni-koeln.de. visit: http://www.schreibzentrum.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/sptk2017.html