In today’s interview, Dana McLachlin, Coordinator of the Writing Center at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh, discusses the focus of AUW and how the writing center meets student needs.
Hi Dana! Can you tell us about the mission of Asian University for Women (AUW) and the student population?
AUW is a unique institution in many ways: we’re a liberal arts college for women in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and our students come from over 15 countries across Asia, including Afghanistan, Vietnam, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Syria. AUW’s mission is to graduate service-oriented leaders who will collaborate across cultural, ethnic, and religious divisions to address social and political problems. Our liberal arts curriculum thus requires courses in Social Analysis and Ethical Reasoning to cultivate critical thinking and civic and political responsibility; our residential program and extracurricular activities also promote friendship and cooperation among students. Our mission is also to expand access to higher education for women, thus the majority of our students are the first women from their families to attend higher education, and most receive full scholarships to study.
How did you get involved with the AUW writing center? What was your experience with writing center work before AUW?
I originally worked as a writing tutor at the University of Richmond, in Richmond, Virginia in the United States. At UR, most of my writing tutoring was classroom-specific rather than in a center. I worked with a specific professor for first-year writing seminars, and gave written feedback in addition to meeting with students.
When researching postgraduate opportunities, I found out about AUW online, and jumped at the chance to live in Bangladesh and work at a women’s university. While I enjoyed writing tutoring at Richmond, I began to really love writing center work at AUW, largely because of our unique student body and context. Working with many students in different classes is also a unique challenge compared to being a class-specific tutor, where you may know the assignment and content well.
What does a typical day look like at the AUW Writing Center?
As with almost any office in Bangladesh, a typical day at the writing center involves many cups of tea and lots of conversation! We’re open 10:30-6:00 weekdays as well as Saturday afternoons (the second day of the weekend in Bangladesh). We normally start the day relatively quiet, but by the afternoon we’re busy with tutors and students coming in and out, and lots of chatting by the front desk. We’re really lucky to have a group of dedicated work-study students, who serve as peer tutors and administrative assistants. They are the lifeblood of the center and keep everything running smoothly, welcoming people as they walk in and creating a friendly atmosphere. We also have a group of staff (in the past AUW fellows and WorldTeach Volunteers) who do the bulk of our tutoring; they also run workshops and IELTS/GRE courses for students preparing for graduate school.
Within AUW, our writing center serves as an interesting contact zone, partially because of our student body and context within Bangladesh. Many students come to AUW completely unfamiliar with certain writing conventions demanded of them for undergraduate study, and many also come from backgrounds of rote learning and memorization. The writing center is thus a place where students grapple with the new language of academic writing while developing their own ideas. Questions of language and power, which I read about theoretically as an undergraduate, are of daily, practical concern here. When I sit down with a student, we focus on their paper, but our discussion is never just the paper; we are also tackling the larger questions of what is good writing, and who gets to decide. We thus help students adjust to the audience, purpose, and context of formal (Western) academic writing, but we also try to create a space that celebrates communication and expression of diverse kinds. Diversity is an overused and almost meaningless word, but the diverse student body at AUW, with such a range of academic and linguistic backgrounds, makes writing center work consistently engaging and challenging here. We are constantly learning from students and adjusting our practice to make the writing center a more accessible and inclusive space for all.
What are your major programs and initiatives at the writing center? Are you starting any new initiatives this academic year?
In addition to one-on-one tutoring, we offer a monthly workshop series and IELTS/GRE preparation courses. We also have a “weeklies” program, for students to sign up for a dedicated half hour or hour with a tutor on a weekly basis. For motivated students who are committed to improving their writing, the weeklies program is great; weekly appointments allow the student and tutor to determine and work towards long-term goals. Tutors are able to carefully monitor student progress and cater sessions to match specific student needs and learning styles. We’re also hoping to start online tutoring sessions for alumni this year, primarily to help students with cover letters and writing samples for graduate school.
This upcoming year our student body is changing slightly, as AUW has added a Pathways for Promise program, which recruits talented students from garment factories in Bangladesh. Compared to our other programs, Pathways is English-intensive, and designed to prepare students without any or with a limited English background for an undergraduate degree completed in English. Our major goal in the writing center is to maintain some of our core philosophies of student-centered tutoring while accommodating a wider range of English ability in our student body. Launched in January, Pathways is still a new program and the writing center is excited to see how we can integrate with the program and expand our offerings to suit Pathways student needs.
Outside of this transition, we’re also playing with programming that celebrates the linguistic diversity of our students. All of our students are multilingual, and most speak several languages, including their family’s language, a national language, and English. I’ve spoken to students who grew up speaking Pashto at home, studied Persian, Urdu, and Arabic at school, and now attend an English-medium university. Others speak Nepali at home and lived in Assamese and Hindi speaking communities before coming to AUW. While we are an English-medium language school, I hope the writing center can be a place to celebrate these overlapping translations and mediations, even if just in small ways. For example, we hang a word of the day and poem of the week on our bulletin board, and we’re trying to incorporate words and poems from other languages our students speak. We’re also trying to embrace multilingual tutoring if needed; if a student is struggling to grasp something in English, having it explained in a language more familiar to them may aid overall learning. Hopefully these things can disrupt—even in small ways—the dominance of English within AUW and South Asia. While it is undoubtedly good that AUW students gain access to opportunity through English-medium education, I hope the writing center can jolt some of the power relations that privilege English communication.
A fascinating report. There’s a lot of tension between English and other languages, and your center seems to be handling it well.