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This weekend, the writing center went to JMU for the MAWCA
conference, and it was so much fun! We got to ride the bus down with a bunch of
schools from our area and when we got there the weather was just perfect. JMU
has such a beautiful campus, and it was nice and warm. Shortly after we got
there, I went to a presentation on accommodating tutees with disabilities and
got to talk and share ideas with a group of tutors from West Springfield. It
was interesting to see how some writing centers are so similar to ours! A lot
are pretty different, though. On Saturday, for example, we went to Katie
Kowalski and Sydney Dolan’s presentation on tutor collaboration(which ROCKED)
and talked to some collegeage tutors. Their writing center has a lot of
differences from ours (like the fact that they get paid), so that was cool to hear
about. Many of the presentations at the conference were geared more toward
college writing centers, but I think we could easily adjust some ideas to fit
at our school. One of the panels I went to was explaining a program at UConn
where the university teams up with middle and high schools around them to create
writing centers. I thought it was a really unique idea, and it might be
interesting to try to do something similar with our school. Maybe we could work
with the writing center at George Mason!
Sydney Hamrick and I actually presented at the
conference, too. We did a workshop about working with ESOL students, and we had
about 14 people show up from all different writing centers. It went really well
everyone was engaged in the discussions and seemed to learn a lot from our
session! We were both really nervous beforehand, but afterwards we were so
happy. That was probably one of my favorite parts of the trip, because a lot of
people told us they were really impressed and that we did a great job. I wish
there had been more sessions, because I think there’s even more I could have
learned, but it really was an enjoyable and interesting trip! (Also, one of the
best moments was when Metaxia put an entire ball of butter in her mouth at
lunch. Yum!!!!)
Mrs. Hughes, Sydney, and I after our presentation!
