Rewriting the Rules: Writing Center Tutors, Ethics, and AI in Student Writing
📄 Read the full article in Contemporary Educational Technology In the fall of 2022, peer tutors at the American University of Sharjah Writing Center began raising a new set of questions: “Can I help a student revise something if ChatGPT wrote it?” “What if the student doesn’t say they used AI, but I suspect they did?” “What do I do when a student asks me to ‘humanize’ their AI-generated draft?” As generative AI tools quietly became part of many students’ writing processes, tutors found themselves navigating a space filled with uncertainty, contradictions, and ethical gray areas. Faculty policies were inconsistent, students used AI in different ways (and sometimes didn’t say so), and tutors were left to negotiate these situations in real time. As director of the Writing Center, I wanted to support and guide the tutors. I drew on my own teaching practice at first but soon saw the need for guidance grounded in writing center pedagogy. At the time, though, there was virtually no scholarship on how peer tutors should respond to AI-generated writing. To address this gap, we began by listening. We conducted a qualitative study with our tutoring team: a focus group discussion, followed by a staff meeting using a shared Google doc as a collaborative writing space where tutors described current challenges, answered scenario-based questions about concealed or “humanized” AI writing, and co-authored
Visibility, network, and capacity: Creating an open access journal for writing studies in the MENA region
By: Halle M. Neiderman, Sarah Elcheikhali, Dorota Fleszar, Marwa Mehio, and Amy Zenger As writing researchers, writing program administrators, and instructors of academic writing, we are keenly aware that our reach and potential are significantly handicapped (if not devastated) when we do not have a community we can turn to for support and to think through shared challenges. The goal of MENA Writing Studies Journal is to extend that support, and to produce and disseminate scholarship that addresses our needs because it is by us and for us. Often, when we are working for curricular or programmatic change, we encounter scholarship from the West which is not directly applicable to our students and resources, or we encounter EFL and language content that is not fully applicable to a composition discipline and outcomes. MENA Writing Studies Journal is working to provide a much-needed catalyst for scholarship and community building across writing studies in our region. From initial conceptualization to final publication, the first volume of the journal took 14 months to emerge. The editorial team benefited from the close and longstanding relationships among its members, who have known each other in different capacities over the years as fellow students, instructors, and researchers in the region. The team met weekly to establish procedures, draft a mission and a call for submissions, design a cover—in short,
Three Cs of a Writing Center: Creativity, Collaboration, and Competence
By: Svetlana Suchkova My way to academic writing in English started with the letter “C” – challenge. When I was an early-career researcher, I got a rejection for my first publication in English. It helped me realize that writing conventions in English differ much from those in my mother tongue, Russian. The failure encouraged me to explore the area of academic writing in English and influenced my further career. I have published several textbooks on academic writing, and now I am directing a faculty–focused writing center at one of the leading Russian universities, Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Moscow. The Academic Writing Center (AWC) was established in 2011 as the university administration’s response to top-down governmental initiatives of internationalization of higher education. The Russian Academic Excellence project called for university administrative policies to increase the number of publications and make Russian universities more competitive globally. Russian universities were encouraged to attract international students and faculty, and to publish their research in international peer-reviewed journals. This meant getting a higher position in global university rating systems, where ranking largely depends on research output and the number of publications. Therefore, the center became a great asset in the process of assisting academics to write in English. Working in the area of English for research and publication purposes (ERPP), the center provides a specific type of support that focuses on high-stakes
Institutional Accountability and Writing
Like others in the writing center field, this blog’s editorial team are volunteers who balance their time between serving the writing center community and pursuing their own scholarly development. We use writing as a means to showcase that development but also as a site of inquiry about our field. At a recent editorial meeting, we found ourselves asking: To what extent does institutional accountability shift attention from writing as a process to writing as a product? We hope this reflection will inspire you to reflect and reconsider accountability as a writer, writing center consultant and director, and a scholar.
Rewind & Reset: Accountability in the Writing Center: Graduate Writing Consultants’ Perspectives
In this month's Rewind and Reset, I want to share with you Assistant Editor, Dr. Weijia Li's article on accountability and the writer.
Tutors as Promoters of Writing in a Brazilian University
At LLAC, we tutors not only volunteer to help students reflect on their texts and their role in their discourse communities, we also try to contribute to fostering a culture of academic writing as a social practice at our university. Note: this piece is available in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
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Tutor’s Perspectives
Over time, I learned that, as tutors, our role is not to perfect every paper or provide the ‘right’ answers. Rather, it’s to foster the tutee’s ability to think independently and develop their voice. By framing my advice in a way that gave them the freedom to interpret and apply it as they saw fit, I empowered them to take ownership of their learning process.
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