Re: Writing Center and WAC

[Muriel Harris <harrism@omni.cc.purdue.edu>]

I'll be following this strand on writing centers and WAC with great
interest as our Writing Lab is part of our English Dept., in a
university with no WAC program. Therefore, I'm the one who fields
calls from faculty around the university who want some support for
writing they'd want to assign, and I have yet to get any clear sense
from our administration as to whether this is an appropriate use of
our resources. Sure, we gladly work with students writing in any
field, and I help (when asked) with faculty who are interested in
coordinating their assignments with the Writing Lab (as that's a great
way to help them write effective assignments). But I do wonder how
many of us do this sort of informal WAC work where there is no WAC
program. 

For those of you who do help with writing in various
disciplines in this informal way, do you publicize that help? 
In a large, decentralized university, we don't do mass mailings to
gadzillions of faculty and TAs who teach the gadzillions of courses
(can't stretch our budget THAT far). But I would like to make contact
with interested faculty in some way. Workshops through our Center for
Instructional Services don't get a heavy turnout for any of their
scheduled events, so I'm not sure what to do, and I'm even less sure
whether I should be looking for additional ways to stretch our tight
resources. Yet it seems appropriate to all of us in the Lab to be a
campus service and to help the students outside of our large writing
program who manage to find us. If this sounds familiar to you, what do
you do? How do you publicly reach out across the campus? What kinds of
feedback from administrators do you get, if any?

-- 
Mickey Harris
harrism@omni.cc.purdue.edu