Do you know that the International Writing Center Association (IWCA), formerly founded as the National (U.S.) Writing Center Association in 1982, became IWCA in 1998 when the affiliated European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) was established? Here is a sneak peak to our conversation with Lawrence Cleary, Elif Demirel, and Franziska Liebetanz, EWCA board members about writing center work in their respective contexts. We hope you’ll enjoy it! Make sure to check out a recent feature piece on the 2023 EWCA Summer Institute.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Lawrence Cleary: the European Writing Center Association we definitely are taking critical approaches to U.S. exports of theories and practices, and at the end of the day, you know, um, we have to do what’s working here.

[00:00:12] Esther Namubiru: Welcome to Slow Agency. This podcast offers a space for Writing Center and Writing Studies people to slow down, think, dialogue, and reflect on issues affecting their professional lives. I’m Esther Namubiru.

[00:00:26] Weijia Li: I’m Weijia Li.

[00:00:27] Anna Habib: And I’m Anna Habib. We are honored to steward this podcast. To learn more about Slow Agency, visit Connecting Writing Centers Across Borders, a blog of WLN, a Journal of Writing Center Scholarship.

[00:00:40] Weijia Li: Listeners, if you’re in the Writing Center community, you probably know about the International Writing Center Association, or IWCA. Now, EWCA, or the European Writing Center Association, is affiliated with IWCA. And joining us today are board members of EWCA, Lawrence Cleary, Elif Demirel, and Franziska Liebetanz.

[00:01:04] Esther Namubiru: Elif. Tell us about your role in EWCA and how you came to join that association

[00:01:10] Elif Demirel: Okay, so I met EWCA community first when I attended the EWCA conference in Paris at American University of Paris in 2010. I was very much impressed by the presentations and workshops there. It was a very lively atmosphere. And in 2014, I joined elections for board membership, and I entered the board of the EWCA executive board. And since then, I have been trying to do my best to contribute to the work of the EWCA.

[00:01:43] Esther Namubiru: Franziska, what’s your role in EWCA?

[00:01:46] Franziska Liebetanz: Um, currently I’m the vice chair, so I have been the chair for, from 2016 till 2022. And before, um, my role was, to take care about everything about writing and peer tutoring. And I went to the board meetings of the International Writing Association.

[00:02:08] Esther Namubiru: It’s so good that you’ve mentioned IWCA because Lawrence, um, I was actually just about to ask your role on the EWCA, but also what’s the difference between IWCA and EWCA.

[00:02:21] Lawrence Cleary: One of my motivations for joining the IWCA was challenging the international nature of the International Writing Center Association. When I went to my first summer institute in 2007, there were a handful of us from Europe and much of the conversation was so U.S.-specific that you almost felt like somebody was speaking another language that you couldn’t understand in front of you and not involving you in the conversation,

[00:02:47] and I just wanted to give back to the European Writing Center Association. I served under, um, Franziska and then, I asked around how people felt about me taking the chair this, this round for four years. And so I guess they were all for it.

[00:03:01] and I will say, Elif has been on. And like an activities secretary, she works with Sona, who’s in, um, Yerevan and together they put together some activities. They’ve also worked on the website. There’s a lot of work to be done, but, um. You know, there’s five of us, is that right?There’s five of us, so I think we need about twenty of us.

[00:03:21] Franziska Liebetanz: We are five of us and I think we are from five different countries and that’s so exciting because we are so many different backgrounds on the same time English is not the mother tongue of all of us. So we have to listen much more. It’s, it’s not so easy to communicate really fast. And at the same time because, um, you are has so many different countries and each country has their different systems, we can’t have structures which goes all over Europe.

[00:03:49] We can’t have a bank account. We don’t have a budget. No fee for members. We have a really big community. We have, um, members, I think, about 300 from all over the world. Somehow they are really interested at the European Writing Center Association. But we had like really six really tough years only having three people on board working constantly. There was, you know, COVID and, the board was really reduced because the structure is not so, developed like at the International Writing Center Association.

[00:04:22] And, um, and I’m so happy that we made it, Lawrence, because I think it’s so great that we’re here now, and I, I have the feeling the last, Um, months, so many more things came up. , it’s so great that we didn’t give up.

[00:04:35] Anna Habib: What is the vision , For EWCA and what are some of the conversations you’re having about local differences as it relates to writing center theory and practice? Maybe we’ll start with Lawrence and then Elif .

[00:05:05] Lawrence Cleary: A vision for the EWCA is becoming comfortable with our difference, what might work in Ireland may not work in Germany, may not work in Turkey or Armenia or in Bulgaria or in Greece, France, wherever, and so I think sharing what they’ve learned from practice is something that I think that, will be the spirit of the EWCA moving forward.

[00:05:27] Elif Demirel: I agree a lot with what Lawrence said about sharing. When I look at Muriel Harris’s established tradition of writing centers. These are the issues she also mentions–collaborative approach to learning to, highlight the importance of writing, for the university community. I saw a tradition of interdisciplinarity in the United States. All of the university students, regardless of their majors, were required to take writing classes, so that was one idea still it’s not realized in Turkey. This, should be one goal for my country. And in the heart of the EWCA, there’s being human oriented. We are all volunteering here because we like each other’s energy. We have become good friends along the way. There’s friendship, collaboration, and a common goal.

[00:06:23] Franziska Liebetanz: Also what connects us as a European rating center association is, there are a lot of writing centers who are not sure if they are going to survive or not. We have a lot of writing center people who has no budget to travel, for example.

[00:06:38] And when I mean no budget, I really mean no budget. So I think we all have in common still that we have to work a lot and struggle a lot to institutionalize our writing centers.

[00:06:50] And I also think a lot about how can we make our work visible for the international community.

[00:06:56] Elif Demirel: Franziska mentioned budget, so budget is also a big problem in Turkey. 75 percent of the writing centers were located in private universities because they have more budget.

[00:07:08] And only big public universities like Middle East Technical University have writing centers. And most of the people working at the writing centers have the same difficulties explaining to the other faculty what they are doing, that they are not only a remedial workshop, but they have a more global look to improving writing abilities in general. So the communication, between the writing center colleagues and the colleagues at other departments. is difficult to establish.

[00:07:38] That communication is very important in order to make the Writing Center work understood, seen, and more useful for, for the interdisciplinary work. And, the writing centers have a 20-year history in Turkey. But they are not operating all in the same way. They are not, uh, very active. Some of them are just, uh, very small. Uh, some universities have more

[00:08:07] resources and more things going on. But they have some common goals. I, uh, organized a conference last year and Lawrence kindly gave a preliminary talk there. My aim at that conference was to bring together, uh, people at writing centers in Turkey and introduce them to each other.

[00:08:28] And uh, I think when people listen to each other, um, they understood that they have the same problems, they have the same challenges. And they have lots of things in common. I think we should come more together, and EWCA has this mission as well. We also, uh, create a platform where people can come together and communicate with each other and maybe find solutions together.

[00:08:55] So that’s something we have to continue doing.

[00:08:59] Anna Habib: Franziska, um, do you want to speak to adaptation of the North American model.

[00:09:24] Of course, it did pioneer the field of Writing Center Studies. Um, but in what ways are you all seeing innovation happening or, challenges to the North American model

[00:09:35] Franziska Liebetanz: I can speak for Germany, I think, mostly the U. S. model of teaching, writing, and tutoring writing, we somehow, try to understand and to conduct it to our German university system. But I know in Germany, we have a lot of great books, research about writing. We have a lot of practical guides, handbooks about teaching, writing, and tutoring. We also have a huge theoretical part about writing process, knowledge about consulting, knowledge about, how it is to write in the second language, about diversity and so on that’s really German. And the difference is the setting. We have to convince the academics here and we can’t convince it with things we have in the U. S. We have to somehow adapt it.

[00:10:17] Lawrence Cleary: A lot of writing centers in Europe, they’re recognizing that there is this grand narrative, of Writing Center, but some of the practices are not really doable here. For instance, I had an email from somebody here in Ireland about how they should name the staff facing side of their writing center. She wanted to name it WAC (writing across the curriculum), but she didn’t think it was pure WAC. And, I said, the WAC police are like 3, 000 miles from here. Who cares if it, there’s a spirit of WAC.

[00:10:49] We had to make a case here even in Ireland for peer tutors. we’re setting up a situation where everybody learns, including the tutors. peer tutors are not there to know stuff. They’re there to learn stuff. And, and that’s what their job is. we definitely are taking critical approaches to U.S. exports of theories and practices, and partly just because of local context, at the end of the day, you know, um, we have to do what’s working here.

[00:11:39] Weijia Li: I am curious about the term translanguaging, um, because it really came up when we spoke with our colleagues from Middle Eastern and North African region. Um, so has translanguaging come up in writing center related conversations for you?

[00:11:55] And if so, uh, what does that mean for you?

[00:11:59] Franziska Liebetanz: I kind of had to look up the, the word, and please correct me. Translanguage means, um, means that like different languages are speaking, spoken in the writing center and that we teach like in multiple, um, languages, right?

[00:12:14] Anna Habib: Yeah. It’s funny that you say that. Yes. We were saying we might need to define the term, right? Because it’s different in different contexts.

[00:12:20] Franziska Liebetanz: And when I, when I think about my writing center, of course, like the main language is, is German, but we also have English, so we, we, we mostly teach in German and English. But at writing consultation, for example, we have Turkish, we have Polish, uh, Russian, Ukrainian, so a lot of different languages.

[00:12:39] Lawrence Cleary: And I’m on the edge of the city of Limerick. I’m in County Clare. There, there are people who have multiple languages, and if you look at our writing center, um, staff, our tutors are, I think probably more than half of them do not come from Ireland.

[00:12:55] To me, translanguaging, uh, would be, um, the permission to actually, um, use all of the resources that are available to oneself in order to make meaning, making a lot of room for play.

[00:13:13] I don’t think that translanguaging has really taken off in Ireland.

[00:13:17] Most of what we’re focused on is sustainability, tutor training, finding ways of embedding ourselves. And I think we’re challenged by local contexts where possibly inductive approaches to learning are not as welcomed, as more deductive approaches, directive learning versus indirective learning, that kind of thing.

[00:13:40] Elif Demirel: so I was at a conference in Nevsehir, Cappadocia. many, uh, conference presentations were focused on translanguaging. One thing which seemed cool to me was translanguaging helping to express the whole self. Uh, but in Turkey, people are getting interested in it and doing research about it. So at the writing center atmosphere in Turkey, we don’t have very much diversity.

[00:14:07] But in countries like the United States and Ireland and Germany, where there are many different students from different backgrounds, I think translanguaging could work to help students express their needs, problems or their feelings.

[00:14:22] Uh, so I think that could connect the writing center in that way.

[00:14:26] Anna Habib: Translanguaging as helping to express the whole self. I’m glad, I’m so glad you brought that to the surface. It’s a really a beautiful concept in so many ways.

[00:14:36] Lawrence Cleary: when a student comes to university, um, and learns how to write papers at university, it is like… learning a new language.

[00:14:43] Franziska Liebetanz: And that’s one thing I wrote down that language practice and theory is so fluid and incomplete and so alive and not correct and somehow we have to deal with it.

[00:14:53] And if we talk about international writing center work or a European writing center work or about diversity, I think it’s so, so important just, to be thankful to have so many not correct things and fluid things because you can, find new spaces and new ideas and you can connect and put everything together.

[00:15:15] Esther Namubiru: You’ve been listening to a conversation with the European writing center association board members. During our conversation. Elif Lawrence, and Franzika shared with us some resources, which you can find on WLNconnect.org.