Fernanda Queirós Campbell is a postdoctoral research assistant in the Health Sciences Institute of the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil; Katia Nunes Sá is an associate professor and coordinator of the Scientific Communication Center at the Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health, Brazil; Abrahão Fontes Baptista is an associate professor at the Center for Mathematics, Computation, and Cognition at the Federal University of ABC, Brazil; Gigi Taylor is the Senior English Language Specialist in the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

At the 2015 IWCA Conference, we presented “Creating a Writing Center in Brazil: Revolutionizing the Unknown” (p. 25) in an ignite session. This blog post summarizes the evolution of the project and the exciting results our effort to establish a writing center in Salvador-Bahia, Brazil.

When Fernanda Queirós was pursuing a PhD in Maternal & Child Health from UNC Chapel Hill, she was an avid user of writing center resources, including individual tutoring, English language support programs, and dissertation boot camp. Throughout her time there, she worked closely with Gigi Taylor, the Writing Center’s Senior English Language Specialist. Upon returning to Brazil in a postdoctoral position, Fernanda realized that many of the students who expected to graduate in three months were behind on writing their theses. When she described her experience at UNC, her lead professor, Abrahão Baptista, asked if she would be willing to develop similar writing support for graduate students at Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA).

Fernanda had plenty of experience as a writing center user but had no training as a teacher of writing. Nonetheless, she accepted the challenge and committed to starting a group in two weeks because she was convinced that even limited support would be better than nothing. Abrahão enlisted Prof. Kátia Sá of the Escola Bahiana de Medicina e Saúde Pública (EBMSP) and the Catholic University of Salvador (UCSal). While Abrahão and Kátia shared a deep interest in writing, neither of them knew anything about writing centers and could offer no specific help.

Unable to find information online about writing centers in Brazil, Fernanda reached out to Gigi at the UNC Writing Center. They had a long skype conversation about things to consider, how to set student expectations, how get them accustomed to writing center pedagogy, and about the wealth of resources available through the IWCA.

After consulting with Gigi, Fernanda started a “writing center” in Brazil in November 2014. Her first activity for students with a looming thesis deadline was a “writing boot camp” with the same design as the UNC dissertation boot camp—five consecutive days of structured writing time. Based on the success of this activity, Fernanda was asked to expand this academic writing support to Abrahão’s lab team. Abrahão’s lab became the writing center. Each week, the space was dedicated to focused writing and to tutorial activities.

Tutorial activities for this team at UFBA included 50-minute individual need-based tutoring sessions and group activities. The individual sessions focused on helping the students review or plan their scientific writing, with feedback and reference to resources like the UNC Writing Center handouts on academic writing. Groups sessions were spent in three ways. At times, the group discussed strategies for more successful academic writing, such as time management, establishing SMART goals, reverse outlines, etc. At other times, students would give feedback on one another’s writing in pairs, and finally, they would review and discuss one student’s draft as a whole group.

A few months after Fernanda started with the lab group, Kátia began to offer an academic writing course at her medical school, EBMSP. The writing group activities were adapted to fit the model of a weekly class meeting. Participants in both academic writing groups were very excited about the program.

Fernanda and Katia collected some initial data to capture participant’s perceptions about the groups. Among 30 graduate students at the two institutions that participated in the writing activities between November 2015 and June 2016, 16 answered the assessment survey. They were asked to evaluate the activities using a 10-point Likert scale. The activities included lectures, focused writing, peer review, individual tutoring, and group discussions. Approximately 90% of respondents rated all activities at 7 or higher. They were also asked to assess the writing program as bad-fair-average-good-excellent. A total of 75% of the participants rated the programs as excellent and the remaining 25% rated them as good. Finally, among the ten participants that already had a thesis or dissertation defense date scheduled, 70% rated their confidence level on being able to succeed as 7 or higher.

Motivated by these results and the great impact an academic writing center can have,  Kátia proposed the creation of a writing center in the two universities where she teaches. Although it took two years, the project was approved at UCSal in November 2016. This university now has a dedicated space for a writing center, which held its first activities in May 2017. A professor from the department of Portuguese & Foreign Languages, Liliane Jesus, was invited to direct the Scientific Writing Center of UCSal, working with a graduate student who will receive a stipend. Additionally, Katia has organized a series of scientific writing workshops for both students and professors at UCSal and at the Federal Institute of Maranhão in a neighboring state.

Their writing program is at the very early stage of development and is a pioneering initiative in Northeast Brazil. Fernanda, Kátia, and Abrahão recognized that graduate students at their institutions (UFBA, EBMSP & UCSal) are intimidated by writing and lack adequate training and support in this area. Academic programs in Bahia, Brazil, do not emphasize writing until students face large writing projects (thesis, dissertations), which means that they lack the skills needed to be successful in such large writing projects. The Brazilian Ministry of Education has a program to assess the quality of graduate programs, in part through assessing the quality of articles published by graduate students and researchers at each institution. Graduate programs from universities in the state of Bahia currently rank very poorly in comparison to those in other Brazilian states. Fernanda, Kátia, and Abrahão believe that providing academic writing support will have a significant impact on the quality of the writing of the students.

Fernanda and Kátia, great writers in Portuguese, are committed to obtaining adequate training and meeting professionals in the writing center community. As funding allows, they plan to continue to collaborate with Gigi and the UNC Writing Center, learning as much as possible about writing center pedagogy through that collaboration and from other professional resources in the field. They look forward to adapting the model for the Brazilian university context, implementing tutoring programs, and evaluating outcomes. Undaunted by the challenges, they are ready to move forward and write a new chapter in the history of writing centers. They hope to have more great news in a near future!