Institute at a Glance

Arrive on Sunday July 25 (or earlier) for Writing Centers 101 workshop: 3:00-5:00 pm

Reception & Welcome dinner: 6:00- 9:00

Monday, July 26: Breakfast included; morning plenary sessions; lunch included; afternoon sessions; end by 4:30

Tuesday, July 27: Breakfast included; morning plenary sessions; lunch included; afternoon sessions; end by 4:30

Wednesday, July 28: Breakfast included; morning plenary sessions; lunch included; afternoon sessions; end by 4:30

Thursday, July 29: Breakfast included; morning plenary sessions; lunch included; afternoon sessions; end by 4:30

Friday, July 30: Sessions until noon followed by a closing luncheon (events are over by 1:30 pm)

Travel

You will need to travel to Lone Wolf, Oklahoma – See the website for a preview: http://www.quartzmountainresort.com/

Special room rate: $89 per night—call and ask for IWCA discount

There are regional airports (Wichita Falls, TX, Lawton, OK)

Travel from Dallas/Ft. Worth airport or Oklahoma City airport will take time; budget a rental car and a couple of hours driving each way.

Topics

*       writing center philosophies, missions, theories, and literature
*       leadership in an academic culture
*       diversity and writing centers
*       tutoring pedagogy and tutor education
*       planning, growing, developing, and re-imagining a writing center
*       writing center assessment
*       research and publishing
*       writing center politics and administration
*       technology and writing centers
*       working with multilingual writers
*       facilities and space
*       WAC/WID and writing fellows programs
*       writing center support for graduate-level writers
*       community writing centers
*       funding, budgeting, fundraising, endowments

Registration

The registration fee of $800 will include all Institute meetings, supplies, and most meals.  Full and partial scholarships will be available to defray the registration fee. Participation will be limited to the first 55 paid registrants.

As of May 3, 2010, there are still seats available

Registration URL: http://writingcenter.ou.edu/si2010/

SI Leaders

Michele Eodice

Michele Eodice is the Executive Director of Learning, Teaching, & Writing, a new unit at the University of Oklahoma that includes a teaching center, the Expository Writing Program, the writing center, and writing across campus initiatives. Dr. Eodice has published in several areas, including collaboration, co-authoring, academic integrity and plagiarism, and writing center theory and practice. With her co-authors, she has published two books, (First Person)2: A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy (2001) and The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice (2007). Currently her work at OU includes studies of general education, assessment, retention, and learning communities.

Roberta Kjesrud

Roberta Kjesrud Returning to college after ten years as a dropout, I fell down the rabbit hole 22 years ago when I began my writing center adventures as an undergrad peer tutor at Western Washington University. I never left. I was fortunate to find at the neighboring University of British Columbia a graduate program allowing me to site my research in writing centers and to work concurrently in a number of staff roles before becoming a director twelve years ago. I served as the founding president of the PNWCA, and I’m now serving as President of the IWCA. I enjoy researching the role of dissent in collaboration, negotiating power differentials, assessment, and playing to learn. True to my blue collar roots, I also value working with my hands in pursuits such as gardening, creating found art from junk, and wielding power tools (ar ar). I wish I were more athletic, smarter, and better looking; instead, I compete in the occasional poker tournament (hey, ESPN considers it a sport), play cutthroat word games (call me Boggle Queen), and tease my stunningly attractive guinea pig, Spritz.

Dawn Mendoza

Dawn Mendoza directs the writing center at Dean College and also heads up a fledgling Writing Across the Curriculum program. Dean is a private, 80% two-year college in the outskirts of Boston that also offers two BA degrees: Dance, and Arts and Entertainment Management. Dawn wrote her PhD thesis on Cuban American Literature at Tufts University, all the while falling in true and everlasting love with the writing teaching and tutoring work she did to make ends meet. She directed the writing center at Simmons College in Boston for 5 years , initiating a new WAC program there, and then moved on to her current work at Dean. She teaches classes in composition, developmental writing and literature. When not working, Dawn works puzzles and finger paints with her husband and two young boys (3 and 6), writes poetry (an approaching 40th birthday somehow unleashed cosmic creativity that had lain dormant since high school), and dreams of the days her sons will be teenagers and EVERYONE in her house can sleep in past 7am on a Saturday.

Ben Rafoth

Ben Rafoth directs the Writing Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pa. He has been in the Center for 22 years. Ben teaches undergraduate courses in writing and editing and graduate courses in composition and TESOL. Ben received IWCA’s Book of the Year Award (with Shanti Bruce) for ESL Writers and NCPTW’s Ron Maxwell Award for Distinguished Leadership. He edited A Tutor’s Guide, 2nd edition and served on the executive board of the IWCA. He chaired the first joint conference of IWCA and NCPTW in 2003 and was a Summer Institute leader in 2005.

Karen Rowan

Karen Rowan caught the writing center bug as an undergraduate working in the Academic Skills Center at Guilford College, where she started first as a deskworker and later as a peer tutor. From there, she has worked as a tutor, assistant director, and/or director at SUNY-Albany, Skidmore College, Trinity University (Washington, DC), Morgan State University, and now California State University-San Bernardino. Karen’s role as a graduate student assistant director sparked an interest such positions, and she collaborated with several other graduate student assistant directors to develop the IWCA Position Statement on Graduate Student Writing Center Administrators and pursue research on professional development for graduate student administrators. Her work at a historical women’s college, a historically Black university, and a Hispanic-serving institution has fueled her more recent research projects on writing centers in minority-serving institutions and on race and racism in writing center theory and practice. In addition to all this writing centeredness, she and her partner travel internationally whenever they can; recent trips to Viet Nam and to Chiapas and Oaxaca, Mexico, and explore the beaches, mountains, deserts, and cities of Southern California. Karen has also recently caught the triathlon bug, so she also spends a fair amount of time swimming, biking, and running.

Lori Salem

Lori Salem has been the director of the Writing Center at Temple University since 1999. In this time, the Center morphed from a small stuck-in-the-basement operation, to a large window-rich Center with three full-time staff, forty graduate and undergraduate tutors, and a stable budget. In 2005, the Writing Center became the home for Temple’s upper-division writing-intensive course program, a major change in mission that brought with it many new responsibilities and exciting opportunities for working on curriculum and faculty development.

Lori did her masters & doctorate in dance history, and taught dance at SUNY-Fredonia before coming to Temple. She wrote her dissertation about Orientalist dances in turn-of-the-century American theater, a fun, but, as it turns out, not a sustained passion. It was her experiences as a graduate tutor that convinced her to change course toward writing center studies. Her work has been presented at CCCC, IWCA, WPA, MAWCA and the Sydney conference on the New Rhetoric. She serves as the book reviews editor for Composition Forum, and she was the co-chair and local host for the 2009 Summer Institute. She is the vice-president of the Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association.

Lori is the mother of twin “tween” girls, Leila and Hana. She’s a bit of a foodie, and a total wino. She reads graphic novels, a lot of fiction, and she avoids Facebook like the plague. Until recently, she hardly cared at all about shoes, but that changed with the launch of zappos.com.

Nathalie Singh-Corcoran

Nathalie Singh-Corcoran is the director of the West Virginia University, Writing Center. She was first drawn to writing centers when she was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona. At the center, she found a nurturing community of writers, and she was persuaded to stay. She is grateful to her many mentors for nudging her in the direction of writing center administration and finds herself doing the same kind of nudging with her own writing center tutors.

Nathalie is a praxis-oriented scholar whose research areas include contingent faculty issues, writing program and writing center administration, and curriculum development. She is currently the Vice President of the IWCA. She has served as the chair of IWCA Research Awards Committee and as co-chair of the IWCA Writing Centers Collaborative @ CCCC.

She is also an IWCA Summer Institute alum. She attended in 2006, after completing her first year as director at WVU. She gained invaluable insight that helped her make her center more visible on campus. She also made some very good friends and is looking forward to learning more and making new friends in Summer 2010.

Contact Information

If you have questions about scholarships (or anything else related to the SI), please contact the SI co-directors.

Michele Eodice (co-chair and local host):
Email: meodice@ou.edu
Phone: 405-325-2937
Skype:  michele.eodice

Lori Salem (co-chair):
Email: lori.salem@temple.edu
Phone: 215-204-0709
Skype: lori.salem