Time and Publication

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Time and Publication

As we prepare to publish another issue of Praxis this week, we're thinking about time. As editors, we think about time in terms of deadlines, publication schedules, author time-to-publication, and upcoming projects, all of which are fairly discrete, tidy units. Someone has to do something by a certain moment, or in a series of certain moments, and as editors our job is to be that someone or to assist that someone, and to hold the timeclock. It's a little like a race, and just like at the end of a race, we're a little tired, a little sweaty, and a little proud right now.

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Sentence by Sentence, Bird by Bird: Composition Pedagogy by Anne Lamott

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Sentence by Sentence, Bird by Bird: Composition Pedagogy by Anne Lamott

Today marks the exact middle of the month immortalized as the cruelest by T.S. Eliot—at least within the world(s) of Anglophone letters. While UT-Austin’s undergraduate population may disagree with everything else Eliot wrote, the ever-increasing hustle and bustle of the UWC (University Writing Center) suggests they’d likely agree with “The Waste Land’s” opening line. 

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Praxis: Statement after the Ferguson Grand Jury Verdict

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Praxis: Statement after the Ferguson Grand Jury Verdict

This week, as the national conversation about systemic racial violence continues, we think about what it means for our institution and for our work.

At his 2005 keynote address at the IWCA/NCPTW conference, Victor Villanueva earned a standing ovation for his call for increased attention to race in the writing center. Within weeks, as Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan report in Writing Centers and the New Racism, the conversation was reduced to silence. 

Racism, write Greenfield and Rowan, is shaped by silence. As Villanueva remarked, "if we no longer speak of 'racism,' racism gets ignored." There are many appropriate responses to the events in Ferguson and Staten Island, but silence, we think, is not one of them.

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IWCA 2014, “Wonderful World of Writing Centers,” Redux

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IWCA 2014, “Wonderful World of Writing Centers,” Redux

Building off Mary’s metaphor, I can say that my time at the International Writing Center Association conference brought me in contact with different, equally fascinating writing center kingdoms.

One was the kingdom of writing center outreach to underserved high schools. In a session entitled “It’s a Small World: Creating Collaborative Communities,” Denise Stephenson spoke about the challenges involved in setting up effective collaborations across institutions. High schools have different structures than colleges, different professional jargon, different pressures on teachers (think mandated testing), and different points of entry. This last difference was particularly challenging for Denise, who found herself directed to talk to administrators instead of teachers about the kind of support her consultants could provide. The message got lost along the communication chain, and her first tutors found themselves underutilized—a situation she has since corrected by insisting on meeting with the teachers well before the start of the academic year.

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