Taking Long Night Online: Envisioning Your Long Night
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Every month this Summer and Fall 2020, Axis brings you an installment in a six-part series on two writing centers’ experiences on two different campuses with two different demographics and their experiences as they took their Long Night Against Procrastination programs online. We hope this series can help further conversations about our work as writing center professionals during and beyond the global pandemic.
See the first entry in this series here.
June: Envisioning Your Long Night
The creation of any event begins with a vision. Goals and outcomes reflect the vision of the event. However, even the most foolproof, water-tight plans need to have wiggle room for error and revision. Here, we outline how our campuses recreated our respective visions of LNAP for an online venue and if each actually played out how we saw them in our minds’ eye.
Southwestern University | Dr. Jennifer Marciniak
Context
The original vision for Southwestern’s LNAP face-to-face festivities was based on collaboration between the Academic Success, the library, and the Debby Ellis Writing Center. Following a “learning commons'' model, LNAP was specifically couched in providing assistance for writing, research, and academic tutoring in one space. Starting several months in advance, collaborators from each area met on a bi-weekly basis to discuss what the event should accomplish. Between meetings, collaborators would gather feedback from their student workers (peer mentors, academic coaches, tutors, writing consultants) regarding how they visualized the event. This feedback heavily influenced the vision and programming, and would also do so with the move towards an online event.
Switching Gears
Taking LNAP online required collaborators to take a step back and reevaluate the vision. Would the event work in an online space? It also took getting buy-in from the student tutors, consultants, and academic coaches. Could they envision this event online? If now, why not? With the face-to-face event, the vision was consistently providing a festive and celebratory space for writing and studying to be completed among friends and classmates. However, in an online world, the real challenge was not only buy-in, but how to recreate the same culture of the face-to-face event that was so successful in the past.
Gathering Data
Each collaborator surveyed their student workers on the practicality of a virtual event. In particular, collaborators wanted to know what value the event would have to the student body. In the end, the response from writing center consultants was mixed, with some being all for the event, some on the fence, and some against the idea. Those who wanted to participate in the event or were on the fence were curious and/or skeptical about student buy-in because they could not, at that point, visualize how it would work online. We brought in a student worker to the collaborator meetings who communicated to us that the real value of the event was not in the raffle prizes or academic assistance. The actual prize was socializing with friends and classmates you haven’t seen in a while. Considering this information, we decided the best route for the online LNAP was to create as many opportunities for accountability, writing and studying assistance, and socialization as possible. Our purpose was to cover as many bases as possible.
SU’s vision of a virtual Long Night included break-out rooms for a large variety of programming. Room numbers at the top were clickable and included detailed schedule information about each room. This online schedule was created in Canva by Southwestern writing center consultant Aydan Urias.
The Vision in Practice
Considering the outcome of the event, we learned that constant communication between directors (collaborators) and our students is vital to the vision. While we, the collaborators thought we were actively listening, we needed to do more of it. For example, the collaborators wanted to maintain the soul of the face-to-face event -- accountability for completing academic projects. But that was not what the students needed.They needed something much simpler. In hindsight, we did not see the disconnect until the event began and attendees expressed the desire for a shift in programming to include a virtual study room in addition to the active sessions. Once this room was created, it was heavily utilized. Much more so than the active sessions. Ultimately, compared to our face-to-face events, the online version was more of a break from social distancing and a check-in with their friends. Understanding this shift in vision was important because it correlated to an indirect but significant institutional goal: retention.
Nevada State College | Dr. Rachel Herzl-Betz
I’ll be sharing my section this month with Hannah Guenthoer and Brittany Cox, our fearless undergrad leaders for our online LNAP.
Context
The Nevada State Writing Center divides internal work by teams, made up entirely of our undergraduate peer tutors. Typically, the Events team leaders plan for the LNAP vision, before bringing on the rest of the specialists to bring that vision to life. That work usually includes picking a theme for the day and planning our visual branding. For example, we already had a theme and a t-shirt design ready to go, before March 16th, when our semester budget (and all in-person plans) evaporated. Then, it was time to start over from scratch.
Specialists work in the Nevada State Writing Center. From left in foreground: Sandy Vasquez, Kayla Arceo, Hannah Guenthoer, Brittany Cox; in background: Eduardo Mabilog
Now for Something Completely Different
The Events Team leaders decided to focus on the core of LNAP’s appeal, namely giving students a space to get work done, while being with their friends. In the five years since it began, our live LNAP had taken on a life of its own, with, and a long list of collaborators and events. This time, we just wanted to provide a sense of community togetherness and a level of calm.
Gathering Data
Our priorities arose, in part, from a synchronous and asynchronous conversation with our undergraduate specialists asking what they would most want from an online event. We gathered a big pile of ideas and then worked as a team to figure out what was feasible in the time frame. That student focus was important, because it kept us from overcomplicating when students really wanted a virtual space to chill out.
The Vision in Practice
Because of that feedback from the team, we decided to center our event on two elements: 1) a livestream space with lofi music and, 2) a page on our LMS website to use as a launching pad or “virtual brochure”. From there, participants could find resources and info on how to have sessions with librarians and writing specialists, but we kept the framework as simple and goal-oriented as possible. In retrospect, that clarity enabled all of the aspects that worked best about our first foray into online event planning. Every time we were tempted to overcomplicate, we could go back to the core goals of the event. For example, we considered adding optional workshops, but dropped them when they seemed to distract from that shared space for community and productivity.
The image above shows printed LNAP programs. The image below shows the top of the Canvas page that functioned as the program for the Spring 2020 event.
Creating Your Vision
Southwestern and Nevada State developed distinct visions for their respective events, but both were guided by local priorities. Sometimes we weren’t clear on our own priorities until we’d already begun (or completed) the planning process. As you think forward to your own Long Night, how will you determine the top priorities for your specific context? Consider using the following questions as the foundation for an all-team conversation:
Who makes up the audience for your online Long Night Against Procrastination?
What do you think your audience values most about your in-person events?
What evidence can you use to assess the validity of those priorities?
What could those priorities look like in an online setting?
What could you cut to let those priorities be the star?
Author Bios
Dr. Jennifer Marciniak is the Director of the Debby Ellis Writing Center at Southwestern University. She earned her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Louisville and began her writing center career at Berea College. She is from South Texas, and her research interests focus on oil and gas worker literacy practices. She was a first generation college student, and has personal and professional interests in working-class studies.
Dr. Rachel Herzl-Betz is the Writing Center Assistant Director and English Instructor at Nevada State College. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and began her writing center career at Carleton College. She’s originally from northern Wisconsin, and her research focuses on the intersections between disability, writing center studies, and educational access.
Hannah Guenthoer is a first-generation, undergrad tutor studying Criminal Justice with a minor in counseling at Nevada State College. She has been working at the Writing Center since 2018 and has been on the Events team ever since. Hannah’s research focuses on identity, queer bodies within writing center spaces, and training regarding microagressions based on one’s identity.
Brittany Cox is an undergraduate student as well as a peer tutor within the Writing Center at Nevada State College. She is currently working on completing her Bachelor's in Criminal Justice with minors in both Psychology and Counseling. She was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, and has been employed by the NSC Writing Center for just over a year now! Her interests are in queer studies, anti-racist work, and social justice issues.