Blog post #9 - Lulu

For me, research in the writing center setting feels crucial in that it can serve to address questions that come up across so many disciplines. Because writing centers often see students from a wide cross-section of the University community, research has the ability to address how we serve students in a variety of fields and demographics. I'm especially interested in my WC enrollment student who may have dyslexia and the gaps that we saw during last week's class between the University's resources for learning disabilities, our students' instructors, and the Writing Center. 

 Research can help to bridge those gaps by identifying specific writing center populations and their needs and then taking this identification a step further by asking questions about how these students write, how their instructors teach, how we can best serve them, how they respond to feedback, what type of feedback "works" for which students from which backgrounds and in which contexts, (etc) and then by sharing some of these answers across disciplines, not just in academic publications but with our peers and each other. I imagine that what comes out of writing center research has the potential to change pedagogy more widely and could even impact colleges and universities on a more structural level as they think about how writing inside and outside the writing center can impact both teaching and learning.

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