Angela Myers '21 and Julia Kocsis '21 will present their Writing Center-related research at the Southeastern Writing Centers Association.
Meeting with Writing Center clients online during Fall 2020, Writing Center consultants Angela Myers ’21 and Julia Kocsis ’21 both observed the need for new approaches to help students write and learn through these challenging times.
Myers, a lead Writing Center consultant and professional writing and rhetoric major, identified a need for additional resources for multilingual writers. Kocsis, a Writing Center consultant, strategic communications major and dance minor, noticed a lack of self-esteem and confidence in writing among the students she worked with.
The Writing Center currently provides both online and in-person consulting, which means our appointments are accessible but, like with teaching online, require new strategies and approaches.
Myers and Kocsis both chose to develop independent research projects on these topics, and both will present their findings at the Southeastern Writing Centers Association, held online February 11-13.
This year, the theme of the conference is “Trauma and Transformation: Writing Centers in an Era of Change.” Angela’s poster presentation, “Adapting Writing Center Work with Multilingual Learners for the COVID Era,” focuses on evidence-based strategies for helping multilingual writers feel more comfortable in the online space.
“Acknowledging and Addressing the Observed Decline in Clients’ Self-Esteem in the Writing Center During the COVID-19 Pandemic” is the title of Kocsis’s “Ignite” presentation (Ignite Presentations are prerecorded, last five minutes and include 15 slides.
In her presentation, she proposes the importance of addressing self-esteem in writing center sessions and also offers strategies for working with students to improve their self-esteem.
In addition to submitting their poster and Ignite presentation, both Angela and Julia also participated in live Q&A.
