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BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | January 24, 2008

Convened to discuss topics such as diversity issues in writing programs and the training of tutors, the Small Liberal Arts College Writing Program Administrators, a group of the directors of the writing programs of 58 liberal arts colleges, held a conference at Swarthmore over winter break to compare writing programs.

The conference was held from Jan. 11-13, and 36 of the 58 colleges in SLAC-WPA were represented, according to Jill Gladstein, the writing program director at Swarthmore and the primary organizer of the conference. “We invited writing directors to come and talk about the best practices and the current challenges in helping students at this type of institution develop their writing,” Gladstein said.

This conference marked the first time that the SLAC-WPA has convened. Gladstein, along with Lisa Lebduska and Dara Regaignon, the writing directors for Wheaton College and Pomona College, respectively, conceived the idea. Gladstein, Lebduska and Regaignon attended a national conference for writing program administrators in July where they recognized the need for a more focused discussion on writing instruction, according to Regaignon. Since Gladstein was heavily involved in the project’s early stages, she offered to host the first conference.

“It was an opportunity to showcase Swarthmore and to get our name out,” Gladstein said.

Lebduska emphasized the importance of bringing together schools of similar sizes and backgrounds that, unlike larger schools, do not have graduate programs to help teach writing. These smaller schools, therefore, do not have many of the advantages that come with graduate programs, like available teaching assistants or separate writing departments. “A lot of the programs we have are housed in English departments, instead of separate ones,” Lebduska said. “This sets up a different dynamic. It’s a helpful dynamic, but it means that the larger institutions cannot provide role models.”

The conference was organized into three main sessions, each addressing a different issue essential to liberal arts writing programs. One of these sessions focused on faculty development through several panel discussions that emphasized the need for writing programs to work with faculty across different departments.

“This is especially important at schools like Swarthmore, which doesn’t have a first year composition course, but instead has writing intensive courses that go across the disciplines,” Gladstein said.

“Jill [Gladstein] had a chance to speak about her biology project, which was very well received at the conference,” WA program intern Mary De Boer said. “She followed students throughout a biology class and tried to figure out how students grew as writers and what techniques Writing Associates were using that were effective.”

The other sessions included discussions on how to assess students’ writing and how issues of diversity affect writing programs.

“It is always a concern of writing programs to make sure that you have a representative group of people working as writing tutors and that you are reaching the whole student body,” De Boer said.

This is a topic that has been discussed recently in Swarthmore’s writing program. As part of their training class, a group of Writing Associates investigated diversity issues in the writing program.

“We compared people’s perceptions of the WA program to reality,” Ariane Vartanian ‘10, a WA who worked on the project, said. “We wanted to see what the campus thought the program was made up of.” In order to do this, they first examined the diversity of the WAs in terms of race, gender and social class, and then compared these results to those of the entire campus. They also administered interviews of students within the writing program and students outside of it to compare the perception of the program to the reality. Their results showed that opinions of the program varied, but for the most part were accurate in recognizing the majority of WAs to be Caucasian and female. "It’s good to talk about it and what we want for the program," Vartanian said.

The conference showed that each school approached the teaching of writing a little differently, according to Gladstein.

“We are probably one of the more comprehensive programs in that there is a course WA piece as well as the writing center, the mentor program and service programs,” Gladstein said.

Gladstein did, however, hear several good program ideas from other schools at the conference. One of them was a speaking associates program.

“We are very much in the beginning stages, but we are thinking about how our model for writing could be used for speaking as well,” Gladstein said. Although the program is not specifically modeled after any one school, the idea for speaking associates has been circling among writing programs at other colleges. This program would focus on helping students with oral presentations or leading class discussions, according to Gladstein. She hopes that the program will be piloted into a class soon to see if it could succeed at Swarthmore.

Gladstein and Lebduska say that they are now sharing what they have learned and are seeing which programs could be used at their respective schools. Both have had high hopes for the future of SLAC-WPA and for another meeting next year.

“I hope we can build up momentum and start thinking about joint research or grants to look at how liberal arts students learn to write,” Lebduska said.

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