Editor’s note: We would like to thank Chessie Alberti, Writing Center Instructional Specialist of the Writing Center at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany (Oregon), for providing this piece. To contact the author, please email Chessie Alberti. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.

                           Chessie Alberti

In 2018, our dean tasked us with creating an emergency Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) for the Linn-Benton Community College Writing Center. I looked around at our round tables, armchairs, and plants: What would I grab in a fire? Obviously not the Comfiest Chair on Campus.

One of the principles of running a studio model writing center is the sense that furniture, material design, and a third-space location are pedagogical (Grego and Thompson). Our 842-square-foot Writing Center in rural Oregon had flirted with studio pedagogy for the last ten years, providing an affective third space for students to camp, write, and collaborate for hours at a time outside of the bounds of work, home, and the classroom. The majority of our sessions were 20-minute interactions on a drop-in basis. We also offered 30-minute appointments and asynchronous online feedback. Zoom was still a distant concept.

Back in 2018, I submitted a short list of materials for the COOP: A computer. WiFi. Pen and paper. As long as we had a trained writing assistant, a writer, and something to write with, with the right amount of chill we could run sessions on top of a cardboard box if we really needed to. The Writing Center could be an idea, not a place.

Then COVID-19 hit Oregon. On March 13th, 2020, we closed up our cozy home overnight and went completely remote. Like other educators all over the country, we researched and adapted a completely new system in a matter of days. I frantically designed a two-hour asynchronous training session for our staff, thinking this situation would be short lived.

Five months later, we still hold all of our synchronous sessions over Zoom. We use TutorTrac to schedule appointments and by using Zoom’s waiting room feature and breakout rooms, we can hold multiple sessions simultaneously in a drop-in room. We’ve also lengthened our average session time from 20 minutes to 45 minutes, to account for technology delays.

Our asynchronous support, provided through Google Suite, has doubled in popularity. We use a Laserfiche form to collect students’ materials and questions, which are then organized into a Team Drive. Assistants provide feedback within 48 hours by working on these responses during downtime. Each response takes an average of 45 minutes to craft and uses a mixture of feedback letter (for global suggestions) and contextual comments (for evidence). Not only are we no longer a physical place to hang out and work, but students and writing assistants do not even need to operate at the same point in the continuum of time.

This is not without cost. Our staff have been required to use their own computers, microphones, webcams, and internet. In addition to the inequity of asking staff to provide their own materials, we have paid the steep emotional and cognitive cost of adapting a pedagogy based in space and place to thin air. We’re all exhausted.

But we’re still here. And we’re still busy. In Spring Term 2020, our Writing Center held only 16% fewer sessions with students than we did in Spring Term 2019, which was aligned with the college’s overall drop in enrollment. The first Zoom appointment I had was with a student who told me that she had always wanted to come to the Writing Center but hadn’t been able to make the commute to Albany. How many other students like her have we missed because we were too tied to our physical environment?

Despite all of the careful thought I put into our COOP two years ago, all I ended up grabbing in the fire was a Surface Go tablet. We’re now planning for a completely remote Fall Term and thinking not only about how we can operate this way as a stop-gap through a global health crisis but about how we can do remote work well. I still mourn the physical space our Writing Center used to provide for student parents and caregivers, students without a house to live in, students with unstable home lives, students who needed our technology, and anyone else who benefitted from a collaborative, physical, social, and affective learning environment. But clearly, when we do rebound to physical services, our cozy home will need to add a Zoom room.

Work Cited

Grego, Rhonda C., and Thompson, Nancy S. Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces: the Studio Approach. Carbondale, Southern Illinois UP, 2008.