MSU Student Research Celebration

   Fellow peer tutors, Kerry Byrnes and Brooke Hampton, agreed to a crazy idea I had about a month ago to present our writing center research at the MSU Student Research Celebration. Both Kerry and I had received College of Letters & Science Research Travel Grants to help fund our trip to Orlando last fall, where we had presented at the International Writing Centers Association / National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing joint conference. I was fortunate enough to receive a second grant from CLS to travel to Tampa for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. We were being funded by these MSU grants, as well as our MSU Writing Center, yet few people outside of our writing center community on campus had seen our research. For that reason, we decided to apply to a Flexible Format Session at the MSU Student Research Celebration.

   Once we were selected to present on April 9th, the three of us faced a new challenge in revisiting our research, and re-learning how to present it to a mixed audience. When we had presented this research in the fall, our audience had been comprised of individuals familiar with writing center pedagogy and practice. For our MSU audience, there would be people who hadn't visited the Writing Center before, people that didn't know what a tutoring session looked like, or what a Writing Group was defined as. This revision process was incredibly beneficial for me in reminding me of just how much I had learned in my last three semesters at the MSU Writing Center.

   If I had been attending this panel as a member of the audience a year and a half ago, I wouldn't have known any of the terminology, practices, or ideas we were now discussing. I would never have imagined the similarities between mapping and writing, or how a Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) Writing Group would influence me academically, personally, or creatively. My research on GIS Writing Groups has permeated nearly aspect of my life in some way or another. I'm thinking about geography and writing in new, weird, and exciting ways. It has influenced the way I approach photography, and the way I identify myself spatially.






 For our presentation, we discussed and questioned the relationship between new media and writing centers, and more specifically, how our MSU Writing Center is affected by these new forms of communication. Our first speaker, Kerry, reimagined peer tutoring pedagogies based on the presence of computers in a tutoring session. Brooke, our second speaker, focused on how our image as a writing center has changed through the use of Facebook, blogs, and newsletters. As the third speaker, I explored the role of new media as I have experienced it in writing groups. At the MSU Writing Center, we have developed writing groups for those in Geographic Information Sciences (GIS). Because those in GIS communicate with maps, images, and graphs as central parts of their writing, our role in facilitating discussion about, and response to, each member's writing must evolve to include an understanding beyond alphabetic text.

   Becoming a peer tutor at the Writing Center has enabled me the opportunity to question and challenge my preconceived notions on writing, and what it means to write. Being a peer tutor doesn't mean you spend all of your time tutoring. I am lucky to be a member of a writing center community that encourages and enables research and questioning in the realm of writing center work. After presenting this research for the fourth time yesterday, I am excited in the progress I made during that time period. I am also excited to get started on my next research project -- it's time for something new to question, research, discuss, and map. Here's to a wonderful past year of research, and the next year of research of work!