supporting scholarly exchange about communication across the curriculum
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Links: View our list of links to Web sites that support Writing Fellows Programs.
Bibliography: View our bibliography on Writing Fellows Programs.
Welcome to the WAC Clearinghouse Writing Fellows Programs page. This page provides descriptions of writing fellows programs, links to resources relevant to writing fellows programs, and a bibiography of sources related to the use of writing fellows to support writing across the disciplines. We will be expanding this page and hope to make it a focal point for information about this vital part of many writing-across-the-curriculum programs.
I hope you'll help us build this page by adding a description of your writing fellows program. If you would like to suggest resources for inclusion on this page, please contact me at tzawacki@gmu.edu or (703) 993-1187. I look forward to hearing from you.
-- Terry Zawacki
Writing Fellows Programs Editor
Since its inception in 2006, the American University of Sharjah's Writing Fellows program has supported student writing in courses as diverse as art history, biology, civil engineering, chemical engineering, design, economics, education, English, history, management, and political science. For more information, please e-mail Lynne Ronesi, LRONESI@AUS.EDU
Barnard College Writing Fellows are attached to particular writing- intensive courses in a variety of departments and required to work one hour a week in the Writing Center. Compensation for a term is $700 and participants enroll in a 3-credit training course. Please contact Pamela Cobrin, the program's director, at pcobrin@barnard.edu for more information.
Boston College’s Writing Fellows Program is an opportunity for graduate students. Fellows are required to work ten hours while attending seminars each week. Pay is $10 an hour. The program’s director, Paula Mathieu, may be reached at mathiepa@bc.edu.
The Writing Fellows Program is a curriculum-based peer tutoring program, sponsored by General Education and Honors. Coordinated by Beth Hedengren, the program has developed "brief guides" for faculty and writing fellows along with a variety of assessment instruments. Tutors are paid $7.50 an hour for approximately sixty hours a semester. WFs may pay to take a 3-credit course for their fellowship. Beth has presented on the program at conferences and has compiled a list of WF programs nationally with contact information. For a copy, contact Beth at beth_hedengren@byu.edu.
Six faculty have been assigned by CUNY to the Bronx Community College WAC program. Writing Fellows are upper level doctoral students from the City University Graduate Center. They are working in several departments on campus to help realize the College’s plan for integrating writing assignments throughout the disciplines. Each of the six Writing Fellow is assigned to a specific division or department where they work with both students and faculty. The Fellows meet weekly in a joint meeting with the Writing Fellows coordinator, Dr. Gabrielle Regney; and monthly with faculty members from the various departments to discuss writing strategies.
Established in 1982, this is one of the first writing fellows programs in the nation and one of the models on which other writing fellows programs are based. The program serves from 45 to 50 courses each year, reaching roughly 3,000 undergraduates. Brown’s writing fellows also tutor basic writing as part of the Pre-College Enrichment Program, which targets at-risk high school students.View a Detailed Program Description
CSUS Writing Fellows tutor in a variety of capacities: as adjuct tutors with individual professors, tutors for clusters of classes, or as tutors for specific departments. Tutors take a semester-long tutor training course before they are eligable to be Writing Fellows. Each department that wishes to participate in the Writing Fellows program sponsors 1/2 of the tutor's hourly pay, and each tutor works 5 hours a week.
The director of Carleton College’s Writing Assistants Program and Writing Center is Kathy Evertz. Writing Assistants are experienced Writing Center tutors who take an additional full day of training for their position. Assistants dedicate three hours per week to tutoring, attend weekly meetings, and earn $9.24 an hour. Carleton publishes a hardcopy Writing Assistant Handbook. Contact Kathy at kevertz@acs.carleton.edu.
CUNY Writing Fellows are advanced doctoral candidates at the Graduate Center, in most cases already working on their dissertations. Selected via formal application and campus interviews for year-long appointments (renewable for a second year), they are then trained in WAC principles and practices at CUNY-wide professional development workshops and in weekly group meetings with the BMCC WAC Coordinators.
After successful completion of UNIV 320 (formerly WRIT 210) a three-credit course in writing and writing theory, students may work ats Writing Intensive tutors for the University Writing Program. The Program is housed in the Pennoni Honors College. Tutors are honors or non honors students with a minimum grade point of 3.0. Writing Intensive tutors earn $500.00 a term (Drexel has four terms a year). Writing Intensive tutors are attached to specific writing intensive classes and work with up to 20 students in each class. Since we are interested in building a holistic writing community, tutors keep journals, attend author events, writing workshops, and respond to submissions on our online creative writing web site for high school students (creativewritingforum.org). Since Drexel is located in Philadelphia, tutors have access to the larger community. In the spring of 2006, tutors reviewed work submitted to Philadelphia's city-wide writing workshop, the Autobiography Project, during the city's Ben Franklin Tercentenary celebration.
Writing Fellows are typically undergraduate students who have taken CAS 390: Peer Tutoring in Writing in the Disciplines, a one-credit experiential course. Once they have completed at least a semester of tutoring at the Writing Center, they may be invited to become a writing fellow. Writing Fellows are jointly sponsored by the writing center and the Center for Teaching Excellence, where they join with other teaching and research apprentices to reflect and report on their work.
Established in 1987, The Writing Program at Lafayette College is intended to help integrate the practice of writing into courses throughout the college. The program trains selected undergraduates as Writing Associates, assigning them to specific courses in the college's general curriculum and in a wide variety of disciplines. Associate earns $800 per term and attends weekly training sessions while assisting students in assigned class. Contact the program’s director, Patricia Donahue, at donahuep@lafayette.edu for more information.
Directed by Margot Soven, the program is well-known nationally even though it does not have a web presence. Margot has also written extensively in WAC publications about creating and maintaining a Writing Fellows program (see Bibliography) and is generous in sharing her materials.
Writing Fellows are part of the WAC program.
This program is directed by Karen S. Rowan, Director of the Morgan State University Writing Center. Writing Fellows work to develop literacy/writing outreach programs when they're not actively reading and responding to students' drafts. Contact Karen at karensrowan@gmail.com.
The Writing Associates Program at Swarthmore College, a small liberal arts college, is home to the writing fellows or what we call the Course WA program. Other programs include the Writing Center, the Online Writing Lab (OWL), the Writing Associate Mentor (WAM) Program, and the Thesis WA Program. For more information about our program please contact Jill Gladstein, director at jgladst1@swarthmore.edu.
UWAS, from any major, are nominated by faculty members. They provide a writing sample and written application and are interviewed. Before assignment to work in a writing intensive course, UWAs take a one-credit tutor training course, work as a writing consultant for one semester, and earn CRLA certification. Subsequent training is less formal but intensive.
The Writing Fellows program is a specialized peer-tutoring program, designed to support the upper-division Writing Proficiency (WP) graduation requirement. Skilled undergraduate writers selected to be Writing Fellows complete an instructional seminar and then work directly with faculty teaching WP courses. Fellows read first drafts of student papers and respond to writers with written comments, identifying strengths and weaknesses in their papers and suggesting areas for revision. The Writing Fellows program provides stipends and supervision for the Fellows.
At Tufts, Undergraduate Fellows are trained in a course on writing theory and pedagogy, are assigned to classes in their major, and meet with small groups of students to discuss early drafts of papers and offer suggestions for revision. Graduate Fellows run discussion sections in large lecture classes and work with students on writing as well as on the course material.
Dayton's tutors are previously trained by the University's Writing Center. Participants enroll in a 1-credit course, attend all sessions of the class to which they are assigned, and privately tutor students. Tutors earn $1250 per semester they are involved with the program. Patricia Delmar is the director.
Writing Fellows are advanced undergraduates trained to work one-on-one with student writers in writing-intensive courses, such as first-year interdisciplinary Honors colloquia and first-year Honors composition courses. The Writing Fellows Program is part of the University Honors Program.
Our mentoring program places English graduate students in English 100 classrooms to help students in first-year composition perform to the best of their abilities. Mentors help students meet their instructors' expectations and standards through such varied approaches as holding regular out-of-class conferences, coaching students in library research skills, teaching students to develop e-portfolios of their writing, introducing students to writing intensive courses that will follow English 100, and helping students become a part of our campus community in many other ways. Students, mentors, and faculty have affirmed the added value that the mentoring brings to the first-year experience, and mentors have lauded the professional experience that this work provides them in preparation for their own careers as teachers, scholars, and writers.
Writing Fellows is an undergraduate peer tutoring/writing across the curriculum initiative that began in the 1980s at Brown University and has since spread to many other colleges, small and large. The goals of the Writing Fellows Program are to improve student writing and writing processes, to promote collaborative learning, and to encourage instructors to use writing to learn in their courses. Because Iowa has no required writing courses beyond first-year Rhetoric, the Writing Fellows program extends writing instruction beyond the departments of Rhetoric and English and encourages instructors in departments across the College to consider writing instruction part of their professional responsibility. Writing Fellows are assigned to professors' courses and work with all of their students on drafts of two major course papers.
The goals of the Writing Fellows Program are to improve student writing and writing processes, to promote collaborative learning, and to encourage instructors to use writing to learn in their courses. Because Iowa has no required writing courses beyond first-year Rhetoric, the Writing Fellows program extends writing instruction beyond the departments of Rhetoric and English and encourages instructors in departments across the College to consider writing instruction part of their professional responsibility. Writing Fellows are assigned to professors' courses and work with all their students on drafts of two major course papers.
Begun in the summer of 2005, the Writing Initiative Peer Fellows Program hopes to help both students and faculty in Writing Intensive courses. Professors teaching small Writing Intensive classes without TAs can ask to work with Peer Fellows. Fellows read the papers carefully and discuss revision options and strategies in one-on-one meetings with each writer. Peer Fellows are not editors; they do not rewrite the papers or correct all the grammar or mechanical problems.Instead, while they may comment on those issues, their primary focus is on global issues of assignment criteria, organization, development, and thesis. Peer Fellows can never grade or predict grades on student work, but they can offer students suggestions based on the professor’s goals for the writing assignments. Fellows are also available on a limited basis to lead in class writing workshops, and they often make themselves available to students for optional conferences on the other writing assignments for the class.
A writing fellows program built around the university's honors program.
A well-established program housed within the WAC program. Offers detailed guidelines for writing fellows and assessment instruments for faculty, students in the course with the fellow, and the writing fellow.
The program supports both students and faculty in writing-intensive and Communications-B courses. It places undergraduates in positions of intellectual leadership, emphasizes the significance of writing skills, and applies the concept of peer mentoring to the process of writing papers. It also creates new opportunities for intellectual exchange between and among students and faculty. New Fellows receive $600 per semester working 70-90 hours during the term. A 3-credit training course is paid by tuition. Emily Hall directs the program and may be reached at ebhall@facstaff.wisc.edu.
Washington University's Writing Fellows Program is a peer mentoring program run by Cornerstone: The Center for Advanced Learning. The writing fellows are undergraduates nominated by professors, and are currently working in courses in the humanities and the sciences. Fellows work with students on 2-3 papers a semester. For more information about Washington University's Writing Fellows Program, please contact Seema Mukhi at smukhi@wustl.edu.
The Western Carolina University Writing Fellows program—the first of its kind in the UNC system—addresses undergraduate writing needs across the academic disciplines by directly supporting faculty who assign at least two papers per semester. Each Fellow works closely with 10-12 students, providing an additional level of focused support in classes where writing is important. Contact Maryann Peterson at mpeterson@email.wcu.edu for more information.
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