Conversations between Writing Centers in Latin America & the United States

Glenn Hutchinson, Associate Professor, English / Center for Excellence in Writing 

The field of writing studies has an important opportunity to increase conversations between researchers and practitioners in Latin America and the United States. For example, the collection Conocer la Escritura: Investigación Más Allá de las Frontera | Knowing Writing: Writing Research Across Borders features important scholarship from Latin America and the U. S. about teaching writing. However, more conversations are needed, particularly between writing centers in different countries. Although international organizations connect some groups from around the world, scholarship about writing centers continues to focus on local contexts, either in the United States or in Latin American countries. The goal of this project is a bilingual volume of articles from writing center directors and tutors from Latin America and the U.S. to work toward further internationalizing the field of writing centers.

Undergraduate Research Fellow Responsibilities

The undergraduate research fellow will assist with the organization of the Virtual Writing Workshop Initiative between FIU and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. These workshops will explore different aspects of writing from a multilingual perspective. One possible workshop could be on “writing the personal statement” or another topic of interest to both campuses.  The student researcher will interview tutors at FIU (and perhaps Javeriana in Bogotá) about their experiences collaborating on these virtual workshops open to both campuses. In other words, what did tutors learn from this international collaboration about writing? In addition, the fellow will research scholarship about decoloniality and literacy, the topic of a proposed theme for a special issue of the Writing Center Journal.  Some scholarship is written in Spanish, so an ability to read in Spanish would be a great asset if the student researcher assisted with this task, but it is not a requirement.  The goal will be to create an annotated bibliography of sources from scholars in Latin America and the U.S. about decoloniality and literacy, particularly those articles with a writing center focus.  The purpose of this scholarship is to raise questions and challenge the effects of coloniality on language and the teaching of writing.

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