Editor’s note: I was excited when Kelly Wilson of the Texas A&M University in Qatar agreed to share more with us about the Middle East – North Africa Writing Centers Alliance. Read about their valuable work below!
2014 MENAWCA Conference
MENAWCA (Middle East – North Africa Writing Centers Alliance) was founded in 2007 to foster communication among existing writing centers in the region and to promote the work/practice/pedagogy of WCs in hopes that other institutions would be interested in starting them. Currently, our board has nine members.
I serve as President. My term began in May 2015 when the president at the time learned that she would be leaving the region. The expat world can be quite transient and some of us come and go without much notice. But, I was happy to take the role on as I love writing center work and I see it as an opportunity not only to serve the field, but to learn and develop new skills. My term will end in March 2017.
I have worked at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) for 5 years, both as a writing consultant and now as the Program Coordinator of Tutorial Services in our Academic Success Center. I oversee the training and supervision of tutors for writing as well as some math and sciene courses. TAMUQ is an engineering college – we offer bachelor’s degrees in mechanical, electrical and computing, petroleum and chemical engineering. We also offer an MEng or MS in chemical engineering.
The remainder of the members on the MENAWCA Executive Board are as follows:
- Vice President: Maimoonah Al Khalil (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)
- Past President: Molly McHarg (Washington DC)
- Secretary: Elizabeth Whitehouse (Al Ain, UAE)
- Treasurer/IWCA Representative: Sherry Ward (Doha, Qatar)
- Public Relations Officer: Paula Habre (Beirut, Lebanon)
- Conference Co-Chairs: Ryan McDonald and Susan Finlay (Muscat, Oman)
- Webmaster: Amy Zenger (Beirut, Lebanon)
- Member at Large: Jodi Lefort (Muscat, Oman)
Our board consists of professionals working as writing center administrators, writing faculty, and in general education and we have a fair amount of representation across the region. Our membership currently stands at around 150 members with another 400+ subscribing to our mailing list. Members are those who have attended the previous conference and/or have paid membership dues via conference registration. Our conferences are held biennially and usually in November, however, this year we had a unique opportunity to collaborate with a large annual conference (Oman ELT) which is held in April. So, we’re working on a shorter timeline, but we hope we will have the same amount of attendance, if not more, in Muscat. The idea of collaboration and working across disciplines is not new to MENAWCA or its members. We hold our general meeting and elections at the TESOL Arabia conference that happens each year in Dubai. We also have a fall and spring newsletter that we put out via our mailing list and our website, www.menawca.org.
Generally speaking, MENAWCA has been a conference-only IWCA affiliate, but our current board is interested in pursuing other opportunities/endeavors to promote the organization and WCs in other ways. We are looking at re-vamping our website to include more resources and a possible repository of MENA region scholarship. We would love to have enough funds/revenue from our conferences to have travel grants (e.g, MENAWCA conference, IWCA conference or IWCA SI) and research grants for our members. We would also like to look into the possibility of promoting micro affiliates as this model would likely work well in our region, considering the sheer square mileage it covers. Of course, these are things that we will begin to look more closely at after the current frenzy of conference planning and the actual conference.
Our conference information will be updated more each week, but our CFP has been announced and you can find it here. If you would like more information about the conference or more specific information about the board members, myself, or MENAWCA, please let me know. I’m certainly open to a Skype call or something like that. Any promotion or support we can receive from the blog would go a long way toward helping us not only get the word out about our conference, but also to let the people following you know that we are here and that writing centers are alive and well on this side of the world. It may also help those in our region who may not be as familiar with us or – dare I say I it? – even know about us, have more information and access to the alliance. Any questions about MENAWCA can be directed to me, of course, but I would also like to put out our board email account, which is menawcaboard@gmail.com.
Our twitter feed is brand new; we decided to start it at the suggestion of one of our board members, Maimoonah Al Khalil. Please feel free to follow us there and ask us anything!
https://twitter.com/MENAWCA_org/status/667718982485413889
https://twitter.com/MENAWCA_org/status/665871375249358848
https://twitter.com/MENAWCA_org/status/661068761483632640
Questions for Kelly Wilson and the rest of MENAWCA? Comment below!
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