Editor’s note: We would like to thank Daymon Kiliman, former Writing Center Director for Senatobia Campus and Online Services at Northwest Mississippi Community College, Senatobia (Mississippi), for providing this piece. To contact the author, please email Daymon Kiliman. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.

Daymon Kiliman

Like many educators in the spring of 2020, my colleagues and I found new ways to work distantly together to meet the needs of our community college’s student writers. While we were collaborating for the entire campus, I was also focused on a small group of future writing consultants enrolled in my credited training course. Our class was scheduled to begin final projects when our campus moved online following spring break. The original final project asked students to either create a portfolio of items useful to the writing center or write a traditional research paper.

Students could have undertaken these projects in our newly online course, but neither reflected the period we had entered. What were “useful items for the writing center” going to look like when we could not anticipate changes to our campus, classes, and academic support units? And the research paper—while a fine exercise in academic work—seemed small and already siloed next to the gravity of a global pandemic. I contemplated setting aside my original plans and finding a new direction that would strengthen our classroom community at an otherwise isolating and frightening time. I drew upon an experience as an undergraduate—and an example provided by a particularly influential professor—when opening myself up to restructuring my course.

In fall 2001 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I was completing some seminars in sociology, including an engaging course on public memory led by Dr. Judith Pintar. Uncertainty and fear similarly dominated that semester following the terrorist attacks of September 11. Dr. Pintar recognized how those events intersected with the seminar’s topic, memorialization. During our first class meeting after the attacks, she proposed shifting the course’s focus. The students unanimously embraced Dr. Pintar’s proposal to explore, as she explained, “the ways in which this tragedy will be spun to shift/construct national identity” (Mitchell).

At the time, I could not have anticipated that many years later I would invoke Dr. Pintar’s demonstration of dedication, trust, and creativity as an educator.I proposed that we shift the focus of the final project in our course. I described a Google Site we could create where we collect, contextualize, and reflect on the pandemic from a writing center perspective. For example, in a section with articles about the pandemic and higher education, we could explore how these analyses explain institutional changes that will impact writing centers. Additionally, scholarly readings could be annotated with insights into how they might inform approaches in an unprecedented age of distance learning.

The students were excited but apprehensive about this new direction. I believe their excitement stemmed from working on a project that invited them to marshal their knowledge to serve a community of practice addressing a unique exigency. Many of their questions centered on how I would assess their performance on a collaborative project. I attempted to assure them that participation could take many forms, such as posting a new article, adding reflections on articles posted by others, addressing formatting and other technical issues, and proposing new sections. Now I recognize that their concerns likely arose because this collaborative project challenged their notions of authorship and individual performance in school. Despite my attempts to build trust and community in this course, I imagined them thinking most immediately, for example, “How will teacher know that I spent time working with text boxes and image placement because I value formatting and design?” And more broadly, “How does one negotiate a group of personalities and ideas focused on one project and still make thoughtful individual contributions?”

Ultimately, this project pushed me to consider how traditional forms of individual student assessment influence the scope of possibilities I entertain as a composition instructor and writing center professional. Working on this project with my students has reinvigorated my commitments to modeling the social construction of knowledge (Bruffee 14) through assignment design and to advocating for that approach in writing programs. Not only do collaborative projects prepare students for professional work, they empower students to build community in isolating times and challenge instructors to find authentic opportunities for their students to engage with communities of practice.

Works Cited

Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Peer Tutoring and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” Writing Centers: Theory and Administration, edited by Gary A. Olson, National Council of Teachers of English, 1984, pp. 3-15.

Mitchell, Melissa. “Collective Trauma: Class Turns to Real-Life Trauma to Understand How Nations Form Collective Memories.” LAS News Magazine, Summer 2002. web.archive.org/web/20180512013011/http://www.las.illinois.edu/alumni/magazine/articles/2002/trauma/.