Central Michigan University

Mission and History

Mission

The CMU Writing Center is dedicated to supporting a culture of writing in the University community and to providing a collaborative environment that assists writers in developing writing strategies and skills across disciplines and beyond.

History

Writing Central: The Writing Center at Central Michigan University

The Central Michigan University Writing Center (CMU WC) is founded on the philosophy that writing should be at the center of a college education. The CMU Center has been in existence since 1978, when the then "Lab," under the auspices of the English Department, began providing one-on-one peer tutoring to basic writing students. In 1998, with funding from a CMU New Initiatives grant, the Center expanded its vision, its mission, and its services, offering assistance university-wide while continuing its involvement in the basic writing curriculum. The Center has grown tremendously since 1998. It now includes five sites, over 500 service hours per week, a staff of 50, and multiple services to the university community: on-site and online sessions, workshops, and faculty development (WAC-WID). Four sites are on campus: Park Library 400 is the newest and most-centrally located site; Anspach Hall 003 also houses the English Department and many of the writing and humanities classes; the Towers Writing Center is in a large dormitory complex on the southwest end of campus; the fourth site serves athletes and is located in the Indoor Athletic Complex. Our fifth location, opened in Spring 2009, offers service at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College (SCTC) through a joint agreement. The online service primarily serves students in CMU's large off-campus and online program courses.

Staffing includes paid and for-credit peer writing consultants both undergraduate and graduate, working 6 to 20 hours per week, approximately 50 staff per semester, including several graduate assistants (8 in Spring 2009, 10 in Fall 2009), a director, an associate director, and a half-time secretary. The Center is funded by its dean and the provost, with an operating budget of approximately $90,000, excluding regular staff salaries and graduate assistants. Consultant wages, which start slightly above minimum wage, vary depending on status (graduate or undergraduate student) and on the length of time (training and experience) at the Center.

Education and supervision is an important part of the Center's focus on providing quality services. All consultants take Eng 510, Writing Center Practicum, in their first semester of working at the Center, usually with a combination of for-credit and for-pay hours (e.g., Eng 510 requires 5 non-paid hours per week for working with students, plus discussion sessions, and assignments). On-going training continues during staff meetings and as needed for individual consultants throughout the year.

The Center is affiliated with a registered student organization, the Writing Circle, which functions in conjunction with Center activities. This student organization invites all university students to participate in activities that support writing and teaching writing, and it allows members to apply for student funds to support on-campus activities and conference travel.

The Center services include one-on-one consulting, online, for-credit classes, workshops, and outreach. One-on-one consulting resulted in close to 14,000 sessions in 2008-09, both on-site (face-to-face) and online. The online service is offered to students in Eng 101, first-year writing, and to students in CMU Off-Campus Programs (national and international). In addition, the Center offers two one-credit writing classes: Eng 099, Writing Workshop, is a required, one-hour companion to Eng 103, an alternate first year writing class. Eng 299, Writing Workshop II, provides help similar to that of Eng 099 to students in any other university class, and is offered in both on-site and online formats. Classroom sessions and workshops include orientations to college writing and to the Center, peer-editing, model genre critiques, research writing workshops, etc., and faculty development for writing-across-the curriculum / in-the-disciplines. The Center has also been able to do some outreach to the university and surrounding community: editing and publishing an annual basic writing student publication (Carved Marks), providing training and development support for area high schools, working with writing in K-12, offering writing sessions at Make-A-Difference Day, providing writing workshops during various summer camps and programs.

During the academic year, the Center is open over 125 hours weekly among the five sites: Sunday 5:00 p.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Thursday 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., and Friday 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. While the on-site hours are substantially reduced for summer (approximately 30 hours/week), the online service operates 24/7, 51 weeks of the year.

The Center works with writers throughout the CMU community: graduate and undergraduate students from a wide variety of courses and instructors (over 150 different courses and / or instructors in 2008/09), native and non-native English speakers, and staff and faculty who want feedback on their writing. In 2007/08, basic writing classes, which require weekly sessions, accounted for approximately a third of the sessions; two-thirds of sessions were provided to other university students and for classes throughout the university, including online sessions. Such usage patterns, which include both younger, novice and older, more expert writers, fits the Center's philosophy: that writing needs to be not only central but on-going, supported throughout university careers and beyond.