The Southeastern Writing Center Association announces “SWCA State-by-State.” Instead of hosting a single conference this year, we will be sponsoring mini-conferences by mini-regionals. The theme connecting all of them together is “Back to the Future, Back to the Tutor.” Each mini-conference (Friday-Saturday) will highlight the work and research of our tutors. In light of our current economic environment, this format will reduce travel costs as well as promote more local participation and networking.

We picked our theme for this year based on professional conversations we heard at the IWCA Conference in Las Vegas, as well as a sense that the time is right to spotlight tutors and tutoring. The 1985 film “Back to the Future,” came to mind. Six years ago, this classic film, which won 13 awards and was nominated for an additional 23, was released on DVD with a new retrospective documentary about its making, gaining it new audiences and media attention. In the film, Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox), a high school senior, time-travels back to 1955 to his parents’ senior year to save the future for himself and his siblings, and in the end makes his parents’ lives better too. Significantly, Marty serves as a peer tutor to his father, guiding him to become more confident to act and think for himself. Most notably by the film’s end, we see the tangible results of Marty’s
peer tutoring: George grows up to be a published writer of science fiction novels.

It is not mere coincidence that the year the film hit theaters fell in the middle of a decade that gave rise to a wave of writing center publications, specifically on texts about peer tutoring. As Harvey Kail notes in his editor’s remarks for the Fall 2008 special issue of The Writing Center Journal, dedicated to Kenneth Bruffee and the Brooklyn Project, “Bruffee publishes in the mid-1980s a series of essays that famously theorize peer tutoring as a paradigm of social constructionist pedagogy” (3). Moreover, Kail’s assertion about the essays is proved by the example of Marty and George from 1985’s Back to the Future: “Together and separately,they make a compelling argument for the value of organizing students to take each other seriously as writers and readers” (3). As the end-note speaker at the joint IWCA/NCPTW conference in October 2008, Harvey Kail spoke of how far our profession has drifted from talking about what tutors do in tutorials and what they achieve and learn from being tutors. He issued a call to explore and recognize the contributions of our tutors. So SWCA saw this year as the ideal one to return our focus to our tutors’ voices and experiences,and to look ahead to how their voices create our futures.

We will also use this grass-roots format to reach out to new institutions and those who have not been active recently, and to reach existing and new writing centers in high schools, to grow membership and networking across SWCA. Each State-by-State event will take place in February, the month of our usual annual conference, and we will use our website to share conference highlights from each mini-conference.

Registration fees will be: $50 for faculty or staff who are active members of SWCA ($75 for nonmembers) and $30 for student members ($50 for nonmembers). A nonmember attending the conference will become an individual or student member of SWCA with their registration fee. Nonmembers wishing to register and become Level I Institutional members may do so for $90. All registration fees will be payable to SWCA.

The Executive Board is coordinating the State-by-State events, and questions can be directed to Beth Burmester (bethburm@inbox.com) and Kevin Dvorak (kdvorak@gmail.com). We will regularly post conference updates to our SWCA website, particularly specific dates and locations, and individual CFPs, over the next two months. We have sites and organizers for Georgia, Mississippi-Alabama, and Florida. We are still seeking sites and organizers for the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee-Kentucky. Travel with us to the future and back, and hear what our tutors have to tell us.