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2011 Call for Proposals

NEWCA 2011: The Writing Center as Community Garden

Southern New Hampshire University, Hooksett, NHSaturday, March 12th, 8:30 am to 5:00 pm and Sunday, March 13th, 8:30 am to 11:00 am

Proposals due by December 1, 2010

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Harry Denny, St. Johns University, NYC

Harry Denny is an Assistant Professor of English at St. Johns University in New York City. Throughits Institute for Writing Studies, he directs writing centers on its Queens and Staten Island campuses

and does research on composition and writing center studies, cultural studies and social justice. He

authored the recent book,Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring

,and has published essays on identity, activism, and the politics of representation and public policy.Denny is active in writing center community organizing and leadership in New York City, the

Northeast Writing Centers Association, and the International Writing Centers Association. He iscurrently at work on projects that focus on research methods for writing centers as well as critical

explorations of space and the negotiation of professional identities in the field.

Conference Theme: The Writing Center as Community Garden

The community garden is an apt metaphor for our writing centers. According to the Knox ParksFoundations, Community gardens are a return to the common or the central place in a city or town

where people could graze livestock or plant vegetables. [C]ommunity gardens are neighborhood lotsthat are used by the area residents for growing vegetables, flowers and/or fruits. They beautify and

enhance a neighborhood, provide food and are a vehicle for fostering community self-reliance and theopportunity to meet and connect with neighbors.

Like a community garden, much of the work done in the writing center involves similar shared acts of

preparing, planting, cultivating and harvesting. Writing centers and community gardens are sites wherediverse groups of people devoted to a common cause work together. They create life, through physical

effort, education, sharing, volunteerism, and continuous efforts to improve their own processes andproducts. The theme of this years conference, The Writing Center as Community Garden, provides us

with new ways to look at our work through this metaphor and framework.

We enthusiastically call for tutors, administrators and students of writing centers to explore the

metaphor of the community garden and its connection to writing centers, including the seeds we plant;the growth we nurture; the pests we control; the benefits we reap; and the transformations we see. We

invite proposals for workshops, roundtable discussions and panel presentations that investigatequestions such as:

PREPARING AND PLANTING

In what ways are our writing centers hybrids of other species, other spaces?

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How are the rights and responsibilities of the community members negotiated and upheld? What are our strategies for planting seeds of knowledge in our centers? What are the most

important seeds to plant in writing center users?

Who pays for the resources needed to effectively run and grow our centers? What resources areplentiful or scarce?

Is there an ideal size for our centers? What problems may arise if we grow beyond our existingborders? How do we respond to demands to shrink or grow our borders?

How does the relative size of our plots and the communities we serve affect our operations anddecisions? How is it valuable for a small writing center to listen to and learn from a big one,and vice versa?

GROWING AND CULTIVATING

What types of growth are we hoping to nurture or weed out? What practices work best inencouraging or discouraging growth?

What tools and technologies are most beneficial to our gardens? What fertilization is necessary for growth? What is in our compost heap? How do we embrace the local in our centers? What are our local resources, and how do we put

them to good use? Who are the workers in our community gardens? How can we flatten hierarchies, so that

everyone contributes to and benefits from the gardens that are our writing centers?

Are our attempts at grafting on to other university structures successful? What areas of our writing center garden need the most cultivation? How do we do so, given the

limited resources of the community garden?

CONTENDING WITH PESTS,WEATHER, AND OTHER CONDITIONS

How do we claim and negotiate our plots, our physical spaces? Must we defend our plots?What politics come into play in doing so?

What outside forces impact our writing center gardens? Who are the interlopers and pests?Which of these forces are essential to our success? Which species help us to pollinate and

cross-pollinate, sometimes in ways mysterious, fleeting and unseen?

Are fences and boundaries necessary in our writing center gardens? If so, how do we deal withsuspicion, longing, neediness of those peeking through our fences?

What are the weather conditions like in our centers? What conditions are necessary for thegrowth of our work?

How responsive are we, or must we be, to changing conditions and forecasts? How flexiblecan or should a writing center model be?

How do we get the sun to shine on us all the time? And keep out the weeds? And block theshade? And always have enough water to grow?

HARVESTING

How do our centers change from season to season? What is our definition of a successful harvest? Quantity or quality? In what ways does writing center work feed a larger community? What are some strategies that could be recommended to other writing center gardeners? How

can we pay it forward when we benefit from the recommendations and successes of othercenters?

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Is a for-profit writing center somehow different from a not-for-profit center? Does thecommunity garden metaphor no longer apply if profits are involved in our work? Can writing

centers follow an agribusiness model, or should they always be family farms?

Proposal Guidelines

We continue to reach out to community college and high school writing centers in order to includemore voices and perspectives in our ongoing discussion. We also highly encourage tutors and first-

time presenters to send in proposals. We welcome presentations of original scholarship and research informats that foster active dialogue with conference participants.

Historically, successful presentations are dynamic exchanges between audience members comprised of

peer tutors, graduate students and other writing center professionals and faculty. And, as a result offeedback from recent conferences, we continue to particularly encourage proposals for the facilitation

of roundtable discussions. Your proposed workshop, roundtable or panel should actively involve theaudience.

Please prepare a 250- to 500-word proposal and a 75-word abstractfor a 20-minute individualpresentation or a 75-minute interactive workshop, roundtable, or panel.

Please include the following information in your proposal:

Proposers name, position (i.e., tutor, director, etc), institution, institutional or home address,telephone number, and email address

Presenters names with title and contact information, as above Title of presentation, a one-page description of presentation, and a 75-word abstract for

inclusion in the conference program

Type of session (i.e., individual presentation, panel presentation, roundtable discussion,workshop presentation)

Specific audiovisual and technical requests (NOTE: Presenters should plan to bring their ownlaptop computers)

Plans for encouraging interaction and involving the audience in the presentation (this may beincluded in the one-page presentation description)

Proposals will be evaluated on the basis ofrelevance to the conference theme and application to abroad audience of writing center tutors and administrators. Submissions will also be reviewed on the

basis oforiginality(novel perspectives, approaches, and methods), interactivity (audience participationvs. oral delivery of an essay), and clarity.

Proposal Submission

Submit your proposal by December 1, 2010, electronically to the chair of the NEWCA Proposal

Reading Committee, Kathryn Nielsen-Dube, at NielsenDubeK@Merrimack.edu. You may submit yourproposal as an MS Word attachment or included in the body of the email. For more information about

submitting proposals, please contact Kathryn Nielsen-Dube via the above email address or call her at

978.837.3551.

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For More Information

For other questions related to the conference, email the NEWCA chair, Kerry Rourke, atkrourke@babson.edu or call her at 781-239-5704.

For more information about the conference, registration, or scholarship opportunities, including the

2011 NEWACC meeting held at the conference, visit the NEWCA website athttp://www.northeastwca.org.

For more information about the NEWCA organization, events and online discussions, visit our blog at

http://newca.wordpress.com/

We hope to see you at NEWCA 2011!