Intro: Warren Merkel

Hi everyone,

My name is Warren Merkel and I just finished my PhD in foreign language and ESL education here at Iowa, and am now serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Interim Director of the Writing Resource in the College of Education. In the former role, I'll be teaching two courses: Approaches to Teaching Writing, and ELLs in the K-12 Classroom. In the latter, I'll be tutoring graduate students (mostly ELLs) both face-to-face and online in the College of Ed. and making sure the Writing Resource stays on track (and ideally improves).

Going back a bit in time, I received my BA in German from Miami University and my MA in TESOL from the School for International Training in Vermont. My research interests focus largely on second language writing, particularly intercultural rhetoric, dialogic interactions, and plagiarism (one of the focal points of my dissertation). I also write creatively in my free time, and have had a few fiction and creative non-fiction pieces published.

When I'm not busy with work, I have two young daughters who can push me over the edge into exhaustion. But they're absolutely lovely, so exhaustion works just fine.

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Q: How important do you think it is for writing center staff to pursue writing center research? Why? What sorts of research could we propose for IWCC? I feel it's important for writing center staff to pursue research because research can be beneficial for tutors (and sometimes students). It has the potential to help tutors understand new pedagogical approaches and strategies, and develop ways to improve a writing center, to name a few. One of the challenges in conducting this research, particularly for those who are fairly new to writing centers, is to come to understand what areas of research are relevant. On the one hand, this can be accomplished by comparing the scholarship on writing centers with one's own tutoring experiences. On the other hand, tutors may want to come to their own understanding first of how a writing center functions (or doesn't function), and then search for those issues in the scholarship to see if they've been addressed. In either scenario, I...
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