From the Lead Editor: It’s 2025, and our blog team has grown! We’re welcoming four new Regional Editors: Abigail Villagrán Mora (Universidad Popular Autonoma del Estado de Puebla), Allen Ho (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Brenda Wambua (Daystar University) and Inas Mahfouz (University of Kuwait). They’ve previously contributed to our blog through articles on how they adapt and transform writing center theory in their geographical and academic contexts. We asked each editor to share what brought them to writing center work. We hope you enjoy getting to know them!

Spanish version:

¡Estamos en 2025, y nuestro equipo del blog ha crecido! Damos la bienvenida a cuatro nuevos editores regionales: Abigail Villagrán Mora (Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla), Allen Ho (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Brenda Wambua (Daystar University) e Inas Mahfouz (University of Kuwait). Ellos ya han contribuido anteriormente a nuestro blog con artículos sobre cómo adaptan y transforman la teoría de los centros de escritura en sus contextos geográficos y académicos. Pedimos a cada uno que nos compartiera qué les llevó a trabajar en centros de escritura. Esperamos que disfruten conociéndolos.

Abigail Villagrán Mora (Regional Editor, Latin America)

English version:

I was introduced to writing centers in 2009 when Maria Todorova offered me the opportunity to start one at UPAEP University, in Puebla, México. She was the writing program director and had proposed the center as a support strategy to complement first-year writing courses. 

Back then, I was finishing a Master’s in Mexican literature and never thought that this field would be my calling or that writing centers could be so relevant to foster a learning culture around writing.

After several years of spearheading the writing center, I decided to pursue a PhD program focused on composition. I was lucky to meet Dr. Ben Rafoth at IWCA’s Summer Institute in 2013; he encouraged me to apply to the Composition and Applied Linguistics program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. There, I had the honor of studying with him, along with Dr. Dana L. Driscoll, and other great professors. They introduced me to research and good practices related to composition and writing center work.

Back in Mexico, I have collaborated with a group of writing professionals to initiate and consolidate the Mexican Writing Centers Network. This has become a lively community of peers interested in learning and creating opportunities for the writing center movement to grow in our country. Recently, I had the privilege of becoming president of the Latin American Network of Writing Centers and Programs, a much larger international community, established in 2014. 

Through these collaborations I have learned about the diversity of approaches and pedagogies throughout this region. Writing centers are definitely trending with a large array of unique characteristics: supporting academic communication in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and some Indigenous languages; with or without a budget; with peer or professional tutors; with or without a connection to a writing program; offering a variety of additional support services led by professionals in different fields. 

Every year, more and more writing centers emerge in all kinds of higher education institutions and even more writing professionals become involved in creating, learning, and sharing knowledge about their experiences and practice. As regional editor for Latin America, it is my hope to curate thought-provoking pieces that highlight trajectories, experiences, reflections, and lessons learned on some of the work and ideas that are shaping the role of writing centers in our region. It is an exciting time for writing centers in Latin America!

Spanish version:

Escuché sobre los centros de escritura por primera vez en 2009 cuando María Todorova me ofreció la oportunidad de iniciar uno en la Universidad UPAEP, en Puebla, México. Ella era entonces la directora del programa de escritura y había propuesto el centro como una estrategia de apoyo que complementaría los cursos de escritura del primer año. En ese entonces, yo estaba terminando una maestría en literatura mexicana y nunca imaginé que este campo se convertiría en mi vocación o que los centros de escritura podían ser tan relevantes para fomentar una cultura de aprendizaje en torno a la escritura.

Tras varios años encabezando el centro de escritura, decidí cursar un programa de doctorado enfocado en escritura. Tuve la suerte de conocer al Dr. Ben Rafoth en el Instituto de Verano de la IWCA en 2013 y me animó a enviar una solicitud para el programa de Composición y Lingüística Aplicada de la Universidad de Indiana en Pennsylvania. Allí tuve el honor de estudiar con él y con la Dra. Dana L. Driscoll junto con otros grandes profesores. Ellos me introdujeron en la investigación y en las buenas prácticas relacionadas con la escritura y con los centros de escritura.

En México, he colaborado con un grupo de profesionales de escritura para iniciar y consolidar la Red Mexicana de Centros de Escritura. Ahora se ha convertido en una animada comunidad de pares interesados en aprender y crear oportunidades para que el movimiento de los centros de escritura crezca en nuestro país. Recientemente, tuve el privilegio de presidir la Red Latinoamericana de Centros y Programas de Escritura, una comunidad internacional mucho más grande, establecida en 2014. A través de estas colaboraciones he aprendido sobre la diversidad de enfoques y pedagogías a lo largo de nuestra región. Los centros de escritura son definitivamente una tendencia con una gran variedad de características únicas: apoyando la comunicación académica en español, portugués, inglés y en algunas lenguas indígenas; con o sin presupuesto; con tutores pares o profesionales; con o sin conexión a un programa de escritura; ofreciendo una variedad de servicios de apoyo adicionales y liderados por profesionales en diferentes campos. 

Cada año surgen más y más centros de escritura en todo tipo de instituciones de educación superior y aún más profesionales de la escritura se involucran en la creación, el aprendizaje y el intercambio de conocimientos sobre sus experiencias y prácticas. Como editora regional para América Latina, es mi esperanza ofrecer una curaduría a artículos que inviten a la reflexión y que destaquen trayectorias, experiencias, reflexiones y lecciones aprendidas sobre algunos de los trabajos e ideas que están dando forma al papel de los centros de escritura en nuestra región. ¡Es un momento emocionante para los centros de escritura en América Latina!

Allen Ho (Regional Editor, South East Asia)

Hello, everyone. I’m the Associate Director cum Senior Lecturer of the English Language Teaching Unit (ELTU) of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). I’ve been serving at the ELTU for nearly 20 years since the summer of 2005. 

In these two decades, I’ve been involved in a variety of pedagogical initiatives, such as designing courses (e.g., a research writing course for upper-year Arts and Social Science students), coordinating courses (e.g., a professional communication course for upper-year Arts students), coordinating a Student Activities Project (from 2012 to 2019 – which is now transformed to a Social English Meet-up Club), as well as serving as a Co-supervisor in two funded projects, namely the English Across the Curriculum (EAC) Project and the Peer Tutoring Scheme (PTS).

One of the key experiences that has stimulated me to enter the tertiary-level English language education sector is my one-year experience working as a Teaching Assistant in the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Project of the Department of English at CUHK right before my role at the ELTU. I served on that capacity immediately after my completion of an MPhil program in Applied English Linguistics, through which I gained valuable insights into how English teachers could collaborate professionally with content teachers from different fields in enhancing students’ general English proficiency and disciplinary literacy. 

I was therefore very excited when being invited to be one of the Co-supervisors of the EAC Project in 2016 by the Chief Supervisor (who is the current Director of the ELTU), allowing me to put my “WAC blood” into practice. At the moment, in the EAC Project, I am overseeing nearly 10 collaborations with content teachers from the Faculty of Arts (Department of Anthropology and Department of Cultural and Religious Studies) and Faculty of Education (Department of Sports Science and Physical Education and the Early Childhood Education Program).

In my local context, one issue that my Unit encounters is students’ lack of motivation to learn the English language. One possible reason is CUHK’s adoption of the bilingual policy, implying that both English and Chinese are official languages. Unless specified, students are free to choose their preferred language to complete assignments. While this policy is a unique feature of our university (in a sense that CUHK is the only higher education institution in Hong Kong implementing such a policy), it has posed great challenges to English language teaching and learning. 

Since most students are locals whose first language is Chinese, when there is a choice between Chinese and English for assignment completion, it is likely for many of them to opt for Chinese, a language that they feel more confident in and comfortable with. In this regard, certain students do not see a strong need to use English in their university study, adversely affecting their motivation to learn and make improvements in this language. Facing this thorny situation, our Unit has made much effort in enhancing students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

Brenda Wambua (Regional Editor, Sub-Saharan Africa)

It took me about three years of reading, deep searching, curiosity, fascination, passion and learning to find my space as a Writing Centre Coordinator. I joined the Writing and Speech Centre (WSC) in Daystar University through a responsibility tasked on me by the Head of Department within one year of joining the university as a faculty member.  

At the time, I did not have any knowledge of the operations and activities of a writing centre. The WSC had operated for about 12 years and the faculty who had founded it and run it for those years had returned to her home country. I received some orientation from the colleague who had taken over after the founder had left.

However, I still had to find a way to get started. I spent long hours in the WSC (a small room sandwiched between classrooms and offices) searching for any material that could shed some light on writing centre practices. Thankfully, the previous coordinator had left behind some stacks of printed material which were relevant to my pursuit. I quickly dug into them and the more I read the more fascinating I found the information about writing centres.

I was particularly enthused by significant works on writing centre scholarship like North (1984), Harris (1995) and Brufee (1984), which opened my eyes to the writing centre philosophy “to produce better writers, not better writing.” That was quite intriguing to me because throughout my career of teaching writing, my focus had been on the writing not the writer.  Fortunately, there were about three peer tutors in the centre at the time, so I also took time to listen to them. In addition to listening, I observed them as they conducted tutorial sessions, and I was captivated by their keen interest on improving the writing skills of the student writers.

My focus shifted from better writing to better writers as I gleaned further to understand my place as a writing centre coordinator and the role of the peer tutor. Unfortunately, to most teachers of writing in my context, the focus is still on the writing, not the writer. 

I got to understand terms like tutor training, a tutorial session, keeping records, tutor talk, questioning, feedback, collaboration among others. I keenly studied the tutor training curriculum and the requirements of peer tutoring. I began training tutors and the dynamics of tutoring as they break down the writing process step by step and afterwards, I would listen to them as they shared their tutoring experiences. I would be thrilled to receive feedback from my colleagues that students who visited the writing centre seemed to have a better understanding of the writing process and were more confident as writers and willing to write more. 

In my search for more knowledge on writing centre scholarship, I realised there was no local literature on writing centres and that the concept was still unknown in most universities in Kenya. That was about 10 years ago and besides Daystar University, only one other university had a writing centre and so I got quite interested in understanding the context of writing centres in Kenya.  

However, over time two more universities have established writing centres and a few others are interested in getting started. This number is still quite low considering that there are 69 chartered universities in Kenya, both public and private. I look forward to a time when every university in Kenya will have a functional writing centre. My quest continues, and I hope my dissertation will trigger sufficient curiosity in writing centre scholarship in universities Kenya and in the East Africa region, at large.

Inas Mahfouz (Middle East North Africa)

I am a corpus linguist by training and both my MA and PhD focused on the analysis of corpora; my PhD dissertation analyzed how micro and macro textual cues can be used to disambiguate polysemous verbs. 

Working with large corpora made me fascinated with the concept of ‘choice’. I realized that a text is basically a number of choices woven to create some meanings. My current research projects include: (1) meta-discourse markers in academic writing: a cross-cultural study which I started during her fellowship at the Writing center at Dartmouth College in Summer 2017 and (2) the Arab Learner English Corpus (ALEC): a corpus of Freshman writing hosted by the Learner Corpus Association. 

I am also an associate professor of language and linguistics at the American University of Kuwait. I am also chair of the English Department where I teach a variety of language courses and academic writing. When I joined the AUK in 2010, I noticed how visiting the writing center can help my students write better papers. This made me start looking deeper into the role that writing centers can play in supporting multilingual writers. I made it a common practice to hold workshops there or mandate visiting the writing center at least once while they are working on a major task.

I am specifically interested in multilingualism at the centers and the different languages that are used during the sessions. Working in an environment where English is the chosen medium of instruction although it is not the language our students speak at home has made multilingualism an aspect of my students’ life. Teaching second language writing and examining learners corpora have made me realize multilingual writers bring diverse cultural backgrounds to their writing classes which shape how they adopt and apply the guidelines of academic writing.