Sharing the Write Stuff: Writing 255 Students Present on Writing Center Strategies
Professor Madeline Sutton and her students (left to right: Esther Park, Amylyn DePaz-DePaz, Olivia Ess, Danira Mukhamedyarova, and Linda Garziera) post-presentations. (Elizabeth Richardson/Trinity Communications)
On a sunny day in late November, Thompson Writing Program faculty, Writing Studio consultants and friends gathered in the Classroom Building as five students presented their hard work.
This was the culmination of Writing 255, Literacy Writing and Tutoring, a class that teaches composition studies, literacy studies and writing center theory. The course also focuses on training Writing Studio consultants, who work with Duke students and assist them with any and all stages of the writing process, from papers to posters to presentations.
Madeline Sutton, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Thompson Writing Program and Assistant Director of the Thompson Writing Program Writing Studio, is one of the faculty who teaches the course.
“Students who take 255 in the fall are able to apply to be writing consultants in the spring,” said Sutton. “I would hope after this course they’d feel extremely confident going into those interviews.”
Sutton said that throughout the semester, they started from a very broad picture, exploring big questions such as what is a writing center? What is writing? Together, they dug down to their own personal backgrounds and histories, exploring their own narratives with writing and reading in the context of writing center and rhetorical theory. From that shared foundation, each student built their own research project.
Students’ projects ranged in topics from collaboration between rural and urban writing centers to how writing centers can address the rise in AI use.
They had to interview and survey subjects, propose a practical application, and create a deliverable, such as a reference sheet or brochure.
“I want the class to understand how writing is connected to identity,” said Sutton, “and how when you are consulting with someone on their writing, you’re entering this conversation, and fostering their literacy development in really big ways.”
Just as she hoped, students’ experiences greatly informed their research and presentations.
Danira Mukhamedyarova, a Biology major who will graduate in the spring, presented on how writing centers can support multilingual writers.
“English is my third language,” she said, “and I learned it independently five years ago.” She shared that she wished she had had gotten this help when she started at Duke.
During her presentation, Mukhamedyarova recommended that consultants consider linguistic diversity a resource, not something to be overcome. She suggested, for example, allowing students to code-switch in their writing as well as discussing how to break hierarchical roles between consultants and writers as a staff member.
By connecting their writing with their identity, writing consultants are also able to break invisible barriers between students and instructors.
As part of the course, students conduct some practice consultations with a first-year writing class, and Mukhamedyarova got a chance to practice some of her techniques. “We have a lot of multilingual writers who don’t open up, so I tried to use my own strategies from my research. They seem to work so far.”
After the presentations concluded, students fielded questions from the audience. Even when unsure of the answers, students used these questions as fodder for discussion, furthering their and their audience’s learning.
“Each student asked a timely research question at the heart of the field of writing center studies,” said Sutton. “Duke's Writing Studio will benefit from their new perspectives and fresh ideas.”
