(listen to it on audio) My%20WC%20Story.m4a

by Heather Fitzgerald

Before I started working in a writing centre, more than a decade ago now, I did not know what a writing centre was. My university back in the 90s did not have one (or if it did, I didn’t know about it), and it’s not something you come across very often outside of universities. But when I started looking into writing centres, I discovered not only a whole history stretching back to the mid-1970s (or in some accounts, even earlier!), but also a whole field of research and study. Writing Centre Studies is a thing: you can do degrees in it!

Now, a decade later, I am deeply immersed in the culture and practice of writing centres and writing centres scholarship. Every year, I attend at least one, and often several, conferences devoted to writing centre practice and research. I subscribe to three peer-reviewed journals for the writing centre field. I am now the president of the Canadian Writing Centres Association, a professional association representing hundreds of university and college writing centres across Canada. And, for the past two years, I have encouraged several of our peer tutors to give presentations at national and international conferences.

I tell you all this not to brag about my accomplishments, but to demonstrate that your work in the writing centre is connected, by a web of associations, to writing centres across Canada, North America and the world. What we do here is valuable and, in many ways, unique, but it is also connected to the work being done at most post-secondary institutions in the Western (and increasingly non-Western) world. Part of our training and professional development in the Writing Centre is to make those connections explicit—to link our conversations with the wider conversations happening in our field.

Even more excitingly, you have the opportunity, if you choose to exercise it, to make your mark on this growing field.

Last modified: Tuesday, 30 June 2020, 4:55 PM