Exploring New Heights and Opportunities: New Literacies & the Writing Center

Writing has fundamentally changed since early days of writing centers when students brought in handwritten or typewritten documents. Increasingly students are asked to create and communicate in multimodal forms. We agree with Jackie Grutsch McKinney when she says, “Though I understand the impulse as a writing center director to say, “Not one more thing! We do enough!,” to me, tutoring new media is not another thing. Writing has evolved with new composing technologies and media, and we must evolve, too, because we are in the writing business” (p. 49). The purpose of this workshop is to explore how we can work with new literacies and how engaging in this work may open new opportunities to collaborate with communities on and off campus. The presenters were both involved with establishing a multiliteracy center at a STEM high school before moving on to more traditional writing centers at 4 year universities. In conversation with the scholarship on writing centers and new literacies, the presenters will draw on their experiences to facilitate an interactive workshop. In the first half of this 60-minute workshop, participants will engage in a writing-center style session with a multimodal project. Participants will be encouraged to bring their own projects, but we will also have scenarios and projects available for use. In the last half of the workshop, we will debrief this experience and discuss how expanding our definition of writing beyond traditional alphabetic texts can create opportunities for collaboration with communities on and off campus