The IWCA is currently holding an election for three open positions: Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer.
These terms begin at NCTE in Fall 2015 and are two-year terms. The VP is a six-year commitment: VP becomes president in Fall 2017 and then past president in Fall 2019.
Duties of each office are described in both the IWCA constitution and in the bylaws (http://writingcenters.org/about/iwca-constitution/ ).
The election will begin on Monday, August 17, and ballots must by cast by midnight Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, August 31, 2015. Votes will be cast electronically and anonymously. Only current IWCA members are permitted to cast votes.
The candidate statements are listed below (and will also be posted on the ballot). Please choose one candidate for each office.
Ballots can be accessed at http://iwcamembers.org .
Candidates for Treasurer
Karen Johnson, Associate Professor and Director of the Writing Studio, Shippensburg University, PA, directs writing and oral communication tutoring, teaches writing and first-year experience courses, and supervises writing fellow programs. Her current professional activities include serving as the Mid-Atlantic Writing Association (MAWCA) Treasurer and Scholarship Co-chair. She has served on the MAWCA Executive Board for four years in the roles of an At-Large Representative, Ex-Officio Member, and as Treasurer. A strong supporter of writing center scholarship and professional development, Karen chaired the 2012 MAWCA Conference at Shippensburg University. Karen attended the 2010 IWCA Summer Institute and has presented at IWCA, IWCA Collaboratives, NCPTW, CCCC, PADE, NTCE, WPA, and the Assessment Institute. Additional service activities include serving as an article reviewer for The Writing Lab Newsletter and Double Helix as well as supporting MAWCA conferences as a proposal reviewer, program scheduler, conference planner, and new conference chair mentor. She maintains memberships in the NCTE, MAWCA, and IWCA. Her publications include three book chapters in edited collections and articles in the Academic Exchange Quarterly, The Learning Assistance Review, and The Research Exchange. At Shippensburg University, she has received the Teaching Innovations in Scholarship and Pedagogy Award and the Faculty of the Month Award.
Karen has supported the regional writing center community’s scholarship and professional development through her service activities. In her role as MAWCA Treasurer, she has responsibly remitted payments, maintained records and spreadsheets, reimbursed individuals for expenses, and helped manage financial transactions for conferences and retreats. If elected as IWCA Treasurer, she would use her past experience in managing financial records, budget development, and spreadsheets to maintain sound record keeping and reporting practices to ensure accuracy and transparency. Her ability to attend to details, complete tasks in a timely manner, maintain accurate record keeping, and ask questions would be an asset for the IWCA Treasurer position. As IWCA treasurer, she would ethically manage members’ funds to ensure a fiscally healthy organization, enabling future IWCA members to pursue scholarship and professional development opportunities.
Candidates for Secretary
Alanna Bitzel, Academic Counselor and Coordinator—Writing Program, Intercollegiate Athletics at University of Texas, Austin is the current secretary of IWCA. In her first term, she looked inward at Board workings and cohesion and outward at how the Board connects with our membership at large. With this dual focus, Alanna expanded the IWCA Secretary role, envisioning it as an integral point of contact and liaison for the Board and IWCA.
Internally, Alanna prioritized consistent and ongoing communication, creating a much-needed infrastructure for sharing information and recordkeeping. She also emphasized the need for a quality experience for Board members. For example, she created new Board member orientation, an information and training session designed to: (1) help incoming Board members transition to their new roles and responsibilities and (2) connect them with projects that utilize their areas of expertise and interest. Additionally, she developed the regional representative forum, a meeting series for regional representatives to aid in brainstorming and networking across regional affiliates of the IWCA.
New to the Board herself, Alanna also recognized the importance of Board transparency and member involvement. To that end, she created and chairs the Outreach Committee, the focus of which is to develop ways for IWCA to connect with our members. This fall, the committee is spearheading a first-time attendee session at the annual conference. It has also enhanced IWCA’s social media presence, including greater use of Twitter and the creation of a new IWCA blog, offering members more ways to participate with our organization.
Given the needs of such a large organization, Alanna’s first-term experience highlighted to her the time involved in learning how to be effective and efficient as Secretary. She feels that she has hit stride in that regard. She is pursuing a second term to build on the momentum and accomplishments of her first term. She wants to use her institutional memory and knowledge to support new, incoming IWCA leadership and serve the needs of our growing and increasingly varied membership through innovative systems. Her goals for a second term include: (1) creating a best practices manual for maintaining an accurate and timely Board archive; (2) developing a cohesive, strategic communications plan that streamlines and tightens communication and reflects the increasingly technological nature of the writing center community; and (3) expand outreach and social media initiatives to bring in fresh perspectives and renewed energy.
Alanna has been an active member of the writing center community since 2003. She currently coordinates a writing program for student-athletes. Her graduate work centered on management and leadership in the writing center context, and her areas of research interest include: student-athletes and the writing center; new spaces and places for writing centers; learning commons/centers; tutor training and professional development models; and writing center administration. In addition to her involvement with the Board, Alanna is a regular participant and presenter at IWCA and regional conferences, and she co-hosted the annual SCWCA conference in 2015. Alanna is Editor of the new SCWCA Newsletter, and she serves as a reviewer for several writing center journals
Sherry Wynn Perdue is director of the Oakland University Writing Center. She completed graduate studies in American Studies at Michigan State University and attended the School of Criticism and Theory, then located at Dartmouth College. She has actively participated in curriculum development and peer mentoring in addition to teaching composition within the Writing and Rhetoric Department since 1996. In 2009, Sherry affirmed her commitment to the lively art (and science) of writing at OU by taking the helm of the writing center, where she spends most of her consulting hours collaborating with faculty on their scholarly publications and with graduate students on their theses and dissertations. Most recently, she has returned to the other side of the desk by entering a PhD program in Educational Leadership. When she is not teaching or working one-on-one with clients, she is collecting data, developing training curriculum, mentoring one of the center’s writing consultants, or presenting at conferences.
Sherry’s publications on evidence-based research in writing centers, the unique needs of dissertation writers, information literacy, and undergraduate research have appeared in The Writing Center Journal, Education Libraries, the Journal of Academic Librarianship, and Perspectives in Undergraduate Research and Mentoring. In addition to composing her own scholarly texts, she serves as co-editor of The Peer Review, book review editor of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. She is currently the East Central Writing Centers Association representative on the IWCA board.
She has reaped many personal and professional benefits from her affiliation with the organization, and finds herself well-positioned to play a more active role within our community.
Since entering the field of writing center studies ten years ago, she has worked as a writing center advocate, first as an assistant director, then as a director, and now as a board member of the IWCA, East Central Writing Centers Association, and the Michigan Writing Centers Association. In these roles, she strives to increase the visibility of WC work by collaborating with other professionals, by demonstrating the efficacy of our practices, and by sponsoring the next generation of practitioners.
As an outgrowth of her own writing center leadership and membership within our professional organizations, she has placed WC research at the center of her scholarship and helped to launch a much-needed new venue for writing center publication. She would like to ensure that others find the scaffolding they need to make their own unique contributions within our community. If she is entrusted with the role of secretary, she will work with the rest of the executive board to ensure timely communication, to extend support for our members, and to expand the services we offer writers.
Lauri Dietz is the director of the University Center for Writing-based Learning at De Paul University. Last year she was elected to one of the Representative At-Large positions. She has appreciated the opportunities the Representative At-Large has afforded her to contribute to the overall mission and goals of the IWCA and would welcome an opportunity to give even more through the position of IWCA Secretary.
As a Representative At-Large, her specific contributions this year have been connected to her participation on the Conferences and Institutes committee. She chose the Conferences and Institutes committee for two main reasons. One, she started her Representative At-Large position by attending NCTE to help Vice President, Shareen Grogan staff the IWCA table in the Exhibition Hall. Because NCTE is primarily targeted at K-12 teachers, it gave her a great opportunity to talk with and learn from people already in the high school writing center world as well as teachers interested in bringing peer tutoring to their high schools. The experience reinforced how important conferences are for bringing together writing center practitioners with diverse experiences and backgrounds, and she knew she wanted to do her part to help facilitate those opportunities. Secondly, she enjoys the process of planning and organizing conferences. She has co-hosted NCPTW 2012, MWCA 2013, plus a handful of local events in the Chicagoland area. Currently, she is am serving as the Travel Grants and President’s Future Leaders Scholarship committee chair for the 2015 IWCA conference in Pittsburgh. In that position, she has worked closely with the IWCA executive leadership, created the online application process, advertised the grants and scholarships, fielded questions from possible applicants, and assembled a team of readers to select winners. She believes the organizational and communication skills she has refined through these experiences will make her a good candidate for IWCA secretary.
One of the qualities of an effective secretary is someone who provides the support to help make successful collaborations possible. The IWCA has many working parts, and the secretary plays a key role in facilitating communication among the IWCA elected officers as well as with and among IWCA members. Whether by organizing regular IWCA meetings, orienting new members, sending out important updates, or checking in with the various teams to see what support or gentle nudges they might need, the IWCA secretary helps to make sure that we all feel part of a connected community. The secretary helps ensure that decisions, practices, and processes are appropriately transparent so that opacity and needless bureaucracy do not become impediments for participation.
She believes she is ready to take on this challenge because of her current experiences with the Conferences & Institutes and with directing her own center, The University Center for Writing-based Learning (UCWbL). The UCWbL employs about 90 tutors and staff members who work across two separate campuses in Chicago. With a large staff divided geographically, she has worked to find and implement various online communication and collaboration solutions, such as Trello, Google Docs, DropBox, and Slack, to keep us productive and connected. She would welcome the challenge to build from the IWCA’s current methods of collaboration and communication as needed to enhance all our opportunities to efficiently and effectively achieve the goals and mission of the IWCA.
One of the main reasons she has found her home in the world of writing centers is because she shares the community’s deep and radical commitment to collaboration. The position of IWCA secretary is appealing precisely because it seems to be a position tasked with supporting collaborations wherever and however they may happen. Therefore, she runs for the position of IWCA secretary so that she can do whatever she can to support the IWCA’s value of collaboration.
Candidates for Vice President
Jackie Grutsch McKinney is a Professor of English at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She has worked in writing centers since 1997 and has been engaged with writing center scholarship since her first IWCA conference presentation (still NWCA at that point) in 1999 in Bloomington, Indiana.
Since this time, Jackie has published numerous articles and chapters on writing center issues in places like the Writing Center Journal, Writing Lab Newsletter, Praxis, and WPA. Additionally, she has presented at dozens of conferences, won an IWCA research grant in 2008, and had her first book, Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, published which won the IWCA Outstanding Book Award in 2014. She will be giving the keynote address at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing in November and looks forward to her second book, Strategies for Writing Center Research, coming out this fall. Her scholarship argues for expanded visions of writing center mission, texts, research, technologies, and labor.
She served as a board member, webmaster, and then as vice president/president/past president of the East Central Writing Center Association, between 2009-2013. She has worked with the IWCA Board previously as a regional representative, as the chair of the article award committee, and as a member of the works-in-progress committee. She attended the IWCA Summer Institute as a participant in 2008 and as a leader in 2014. She is also on the review board of Writing Center Journal, Writing Lab Newsletter, Praxis, and Southern Discourse in the Center.
She has directed the writing center at Ball State from 2003-2011 and returned to this position in 2015, after a brief stint as writing program director. As writing center director, she launched online and multimodal tutoring, secured funding for student conference travel, technology, student pay increases, and a newly remodeled center. At Ball State, she has also developed and taught an undergraduate course on peer tutoring and graduate course on writing center theory, pedagogy, and administration. She has worked closely with student projects over the years, serving on over twenty dissertation committees (chairing eight of these), eight MA thesis committees (directing four), and undergraduate honors theses. She has recently completed a proposal for a community writing center, which she hopes to see come to fruition in the near future.
She believes this is in the right time in her career to serve at the international level and hopes her extensive experience with writing center research, leadership, and administration could be an asset to the organization. She believes IWCA needs to continue to help its members advocate for writing centers at the local level as the board advocates for writing center visibility within the field of writing studies, the k-12 system, higher education, the for-profit sector, and within communities.
Russell Carpenter is the director of the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity and Program Director of the Minor in Applied Creative Thinking at Eastern Kentucky University where he is also Associate Professor of English.
IWCA is critical for the growth and future of writing centers. As a leader, Russell (Rusty) would be committed to the productive development of the organization, the sustainability of critical initiatives such as the now-annual conference, the cultivation of outreach and scholarly networks across regional and affiliate organizations, and continued development of the relationship between regional and affiliate organizations and IWCA. In addition, he is interested in developing technological infrastructures to implement new ways of networking and sharing resources with the writing center community.
He is a long-time member of the Southeastern Writing Center Association (SWCA) and has served in a variety of roles in this growing organization, including Vice President (2012-2014) and most recently President (2014-2016). He chaired the 2012 conference held at EKU, one of the most successful in the organization’s history. Current membership in the organization has climbed to nearly 300.
He is serving as Program Chair for the 2015 IWCA conference in Pittsburgh. In this process, he worked collaboratively with an international team of over 50 reviewers representing the regional and affiliate organizations of IWCA. He has collaborated with the IWCA Conferences and Institutes committee, Executive Board, and current organization leadership to ensure an exciting program that is representative of the excellent research and activity taking place in writing centers. He has also served in a number of leadership and committee roles in IWCA. He has reviewed proposals for the IWCA Collaborative (IWCA@CCCC) and IWCA conference. Additionally, he has served as a member of the grant awards committee and Conferences and Institutes committee for the past two years. He was a leader for the 2013 IWCA Summer Institute in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Additionally, he co-chaired the 2014 IWCA SI held in Lexington, KY, with Dr. Kevin Dvorak, and the 2015 IWCA SI held in East Lansing, MI, with Dr. Trixie Smith. These opportunities also served as valuable learning experiences for future leadership in the organization.
He also maintains an active research and publication agenda. As a scholar, he has co-authored or co-edited six books, including The Routledge Reader on Writing Centers and New Media with Dr. Sohui Lee. He has also edited or co-edited three special issues of peer-reviewed academic journals and is currently co-editing back-to-back special issues of the Journal of Faculty Development (spring 2016 and summer 2016) and a special issue of Computers and Composition: An International Journal (September 2016), with numerous peer-reviewed articles and chapters in print and many others under review or in progress.
He regularly mentors undergraduate and graduate students, including co-authorship of peer-reviewed articles and chapters, while cultivating future writing center scholars and leaders. He involves students in nearly every aspect of his research and scholarly service and would continue cultivating new leaders through his work as Vice President.