Guiding Principles & FAQ

Our goal is to support TRU students to become better, more confident writers. We collaborate with students, tutors, faculty, community, and writing centre professionals to encourage the development of writing skills and inquiry.

To achieve this, we:

• offer feedback on writing of all types and levels, with an awareness of unequal power relationships in academic spaces, and an emphasis on empathy and humility,
• provide resources and writing tips in various formats and through social media facilitate tutor training designed for both face-to-face and online appointments and guide tutors to reflect on their practice,
• encourage continual learning by providing training and skills enhancement for all tutors collaborate with faculty to support writers by mentoring and tutoring students to suit individual needs,
• work within TRU to support students and guide them to other supports as is deemed fit,
• inform practice with current scholarship,
• contribute to writing centre pedagogy and research, and
• maintain an active role in the local, regional, national and international professional communities of writing centre practice.

BCWCA Statement of Commitment to Antiracism

The British Columbia chapter of the Canadian Writing Centres Association commits ourselves to working from an antiracist lens. The Association will support individual Writing and Learning Centres, and the people who work within them, as they take up the ongoing challenge to re-learn and re-imagine. We acknowledge that this work will be different across the centres that make up our Association because we, as individuals and institutions, have differing experiences of racism and of applying antiracist practices in our professions.

We have been called out of the complacency of the status quo by violence enacted against Black and Indigenous Peoples. We think of George Floyd, Chantel Moore, Breonna Taylor, Abdirahman Abdi, Anthony Aust, and Joyce Echaquan: people in Canada and the USA who have had their lives taken from them because racism continues to structure our societies. We know that there are many others - some whose names we know and some whose names we don’t know - who continue to suffer and die as a consequence of racism. We recognize that this violence does not happen in a vacuum: racist views, both overt and implicit, conscious and unconscious, are commonly expressed by Canadians, and our society continues to be built through structures that are racist in their foundations.

We acknowledge our own role in maintaining those structures. Language is a key site of power, and Writing and Learning Centres participate in defining how language is used, what language is acceptable, and who can access languages of power. We commit to ongoing antiracist education to allow us to recognize our positionality and power and to actively take up practices that support racial equity and justice. We further commit to the following specific actions:

• Creating opportunities to learn from our communities about their experiences of injustice, especially as these pertain to the intersections of race and academic expectations.
• Engaging with faculty on issues, such as assignment design, academic integrity policies, and writing assessments, where inequity frequently lurks in the guise of standards.
• Ensuring that antiracist and decolonizing practices are actively incorporated into tutor training to intervene in the often unconsciously racist language myths that can be perpetuated through tutoring.
• Actively recruiting IBPOC staff and tutors by enacting best practices for recruiting, hiring, and retention.
• Critically evaluating our resources in an ongoing way to ensure antiracist, decolonial, and Indigenized approaches and content.

In November 2021, we will provide an update to our wider community as to the successes and challenges we have experienced in taking up these initiatives.

Signed -

Julia Lane, Writing Services Coordinator, Simon Fraser University Jenna Goddard, Writing Centre Coordinator, Thompson Rivers University Amanda Brobbel, Senior Manager of Writing and Language Learning Services, UBC-Okanagan Holly Salmon, Learning Centre Coordinator and Instructor, Douglas College Chrisa Hotchkiss, Academic Success Centre Coordinator, Camosun College Nancy Johnson Squair, Learning Centre faculty and English instructor, Douglas College Cecil Klassen, Learning Centre Faculty, Douglas College Learning Centre Heather Fitzgerald, Writing Centre Coordinator, Emily Carr University of Art and Design Nancy Ami, Centre for Academic Communication Manager, University of Victoria John Hill, Writing Centre Coordinator, Vancouver Island University Greg Holditch, Writing Centre Coordinator (Summer), Langara College Caitlin Hartnett, Learning Commons Coordinator, North Island College Emily Keery, Writing Centre Coordinator, Trinity Western University Nyarai Tawengwa, Academic Support Services Assistant, Fairleigh Dickinson University-Vancouver

If you wish to be added as a signatory, please contact Julia Lane at jhlane@sfu.ca.

Preamble

In recent years, members of the Canadian Writing Centres Association / Association canadienne des centres de rédaction (CWCA/ACCR) have noted an increase in the activity of producers of corporate, automated, online tutoring tools (CAOTTs) attempting to position themselves within higher education institutions in Canada. Many of these companies articulate such outcomes as improved writing skills, student retention, and student experience. The CWCA/ACCR shares and supports these goals, but we find that they can be far better achieved by institutional writing and learning centres within their local contexts.

Position of CWCA/ACCR

It is the position of the CWCA/ACCR that any attempt to replace local, human writing tutoring and support with CAOTTs is a fundamental error. Further, any use of these tools as a supplement to writing services should be considered only with the support of and in consultation with writing centre professionals within the institution, informed by the literature of writing centre studies. It is the position of the CWCA/ACCR that CAOTTs are not helpful or useful as a replacement for institution-based writing tutoring or instruction, whether online or in-person. CAOTTs are, in fact, a detriment to effective academic support for students, faculty, and their institutions, and CWCA/ACCR sees the use of CAOTTs as a form of social injustice.

Read More

• Yes! We provide in-person appointments on the TRU Kamloops campus in Old Main room 1411, and also support through video call (synchronous) and email (asynchronous) appointments. You can review our Appointment Guide for more information on how these appointment types work.
• Open Learning students can explore Services for Open Learning students for more information on how we support you in your courses.

• Maybe, but we can’t guarantee a tutor will be available. We are an appointment-based service. If our tutors are in a session or otherwise booked up with appointments, they won’t be able to answer your questions.
• If there is an available tutor on duty, or if another student is 10 minutes late for their booked appointment, you can have a drop-in appointment.

• Appointments are marked as “no-show” when a student is 10 minutes late for an in-person or video call (synchronous) appointment or doesn’t upload a draft to their email (asynchronous) appointment before the appointment start time.
• When a student does not attend an appointment, their WCOnline account is automatically deactivated, and future appointments will be cancelled. To have an account reactivated, students can contact the Writing Centre support staff: email writing_ctr@tru.ca, call 250-852-7673, or visit the Writing Centre (Old Main room 1411). Please note that repeated no-show appointments may result in an extended account deactivation period.

• Our tutors will do their best to answer questions you have about academic writing but are unable to provide discipline- or course-specific tutoring. That said, depending on their studies or program, the tutors are familiar with different disciplines and have different specialties, which you can view on the Meet the Tutors page. Their disciplines and specialties are also listed in the pop-up window when you book an appointment.

• Students can book two appointments per day, up to four per week (Monday to Saturday). If you’d like a 60-minute session with a tutor, you can book two appointments back-to-back, if two are available.

• No, the tutors are not available to review student work outside of their shifts.
• If you are looking to hire a private tutor, you can contact the Writing Centre at writing_ctr@tru.ca with your name, contact information, and the course, subject, or discipline you would like to be tutored in. We can pass along your information to any tutors or peer academic coaches that offer paid private tutoring services.
• Note: The Writing Centre is not responsible for any interactions between tutors and students in a private tutoring situation.

• The Writing Centre offers online appointments on weekday evenings and Saturdays up to 9 pm. We also sometimes offer in-person appointments in satellite locations around the Kamloops campus. Check out WCOnline to see when and how you can meet with a tutor.

• We can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to book an appointment with a Writing Centre tutor if we are fully booked, but here are some ways you might be able to have a session with one:
• Join the Waitlist on WCOnline. Click on the “Waiting List” link on the right side of the screen for each day you want an appointment. If there is a cancellation, you (and everyone else on the waiting list) will receive an email notification. The first student to log in and book the appointment will get it.
• Hang out at the Writing Centre “on Standby”. Students are welcome to use the Writing Centre as a study space and, if another student finishes an appointment early or is late to their appointment, a tutor may be able to help you.

• Bring your assignment instructions or rubric, some questions or ideas about the assignment, your draft (if you have one), and your critical thinking cap. Check out our “Preparing for an Appointment” section in our Appointment Guide for more information

• Yes! If you will receive a shared mark for a group project, tutors can meet with all the members of your group at the same time. If you book an email (asynchronous) appointment for a group project, tutors assume that all members of your group will read the feedback.

• In most cases, no. Unless you have written authorization from your instructor that the Writing Centre can help you with a take-home exam, the tutor will not be able to give you feedback due to academic integrity policies.