Midwest Writing Centers Association

02/11/2026

MWCA folks! We wanted to remind you of our upcoming Solidarity Session and give you a little bit of information about it:

We are excited about our upcoming online event on February 13, part of our new Solidarity Sessions slated to take place each semester. We hope you'll join our MWCA Solidarity Session: Service and Allyship for Multilingual Students this Friday from 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM as support one another in efforts to support multilingual students in our unstable and threatening social and political climate. If you haven't already registered, you can do so on our events page: https://mwca.wildapricot.org/event-6547854/Registration

We'll be joined by colleagues from College of DuPage (Illinois) and Carleton College (Minnesota) serving as respondents, offering narratives of challenges and opportunities for participants to help.

12/08/2025

We are pleased to announce our 2024-2025 Bob Marrs Award Recipient: Sarah Z. Johnson!

Please check out a bit about Sarah below and all the amazing work she does to support writing centers in our area:

Sarah Z Johnson has been Director of the Madison College Writing Center for nearly 20 years, over which time she has gathered around her an amazing team of leaders who help her run one of the most comprehensive and innovative two-year college writing centers in the nation. She has spent her career dedicated to tutor education and development, and one of her proudest achievements is how the Madison College Writing Fellows program emerged from the chaos of the pandemic shutdown. Along with Clint Gardner, she recently co-edited a special issue of Teaching English at the Two-Year College dedicated to two-year college writing centers. Sarah also currently serves as co-chair of the IWCA AI Task Force and is working to help the writing center community grapple with how genAI is impacting our everyday work as tutors and administrators. She is passionately dedicated to the mission and vision of two-year and open admission colleges in this country, and loves the ways social justice is enacted and embodied in writing centers at these institutions.

As a Bob Marrs Award recipient, Sarah has demonstrated outstanding long-term commitment to tutor leadership and research, supports tutor development, and advances writing center scholarship across the MWCA region.

Sarah was nominated by her colleagues Susanne Treiber, Max Stone, and Adrienne Olivia for her decades of leadership and unfailing support for her colleagues. Each writer shared some wonderful sentiments about Sarah I want to pass along here about her dedication to tutor education and research, and her contributions to writing center pedagogy:

Susanne writes: "I most certainly would not have become a doctoral student (at the age of 54!) studying linguistic equity and writing center tutor training without Sarah’s leadership and ‘go get it’ approach to her role as Writing Center Director."
Max writes: "Sarah has a knack to see beyond what may be in front of her, and at that time, I had no idea what I was capable of, but she did, and her mentorship changed the trajectory of my life."

Adrienne writes: "Sarah makes all under her guidance an active participant in Writing Center research in a way that allows us to understand that we are all capable of creating knowledge."

Please join the MWCA Board in a sincere congrats to Sarah and deep appreciation for the work she continues to do in our region. This award includes an honorarium of $500, and Sarah will be added to the archive of award recipients and be featured in our next newsletter. Look for more on this honor and and a more detailed profile on Sarah and her work soon.

12/06/2025

Our next online workshop is here! Please see the information below and we hope to see you there!

MWCA December Workshop: Sustainable Conversation Around Generative AI and Writing Centers

When: 12 Dec 2025 11:00 AM, CST
Where: https://url.avanan.click/v2/r01/___https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/98413710425?pwd=MqBPD17kLZdgahM6scdespqxa6V9Pq.1___.YXAzOmNyb3dkZXJjb2xsZWdlOmE6bzpiMzA2M2I0MTMxOTEzYmYzZDM1YzY1MTk0OTE0N2U2ZDo3OjQyNjQ6ZmQ3NmU4NzQ0YTIwNmZhZGJmN2Q0NzNlYjYxZTE2ZTk5ZjJjMGQ3YjFlYzBiNTAyY2IzNzk3YmZiYTdkMDlmMTp0OlQ6Tg

Sustainable Conversation Around Generative AI and Writing Centers

December 12, 11AM-12PM

Dr. Laura Hardin Marshall, Webster University; Mindy Ashby, Shawnee Community College; Dr. Deirde Egan, University of Iowa; Dr. Daniel Henke and Shellane Shettleworth, Lake Forest College

A panel of writing center administrators will share their current approaches of tackling generative AI at their institutions, whether those institutions have a “hands-off” policy (or no policy at all) to robust guidelines. They will also share a variety of resources and strategies about how to tutor with or around AI tools.

11/20/2025

The MWCA is seeking a host for the in-person 2027 MWCA Conference! If your institution may be interested in hosting, submit a proposal form by December 19th, 2025. Email [email protected] if you have questions.

Please submit at the following link:

This form collects proposals from individuals and/or organizations for hosting the MWCA Conference taking place in person in March 2027.

11/12/2025

Join us for our November Online Workshop happening this Friday:

Transitioning to Accelerated and Corequisite Composition: A Writing Center's Role

Lisa Avendano, Lincoln Land Community College; Zak Forkner, Salk Valley Community College; Elizabeth Busekrus, St. Louis Community College

November 14th, 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

Accelerated and co-requisite composition models are reshaping students' writing journey. What does that mean for writing centers? How can writing centers support ALP/Co-req students who are facing new challenges?

As more and more colleges move away from developmental composition courses and toward accelerated or co-requisite models, writing centers can provide vital support to students enrolled in those courses. This roundtable discussion will explore the struggles our ALP/co-req students are facing and the types of support writing centers can provide to help them succeed. Embedded tutoring will be highlighted as a new potential service.

Join on Zoom:
Meeting URL:
https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/98972114560?pwd=a3W42oDzl2Fz22K6krgfxPOZiQbVTO.1
Meeting ID:
989 7211 4560
Passcode:
176920

Best regards,
Midwest Writing Center Association

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10/07/2025

We hope your semesters have been going well!

If you haven't heard, we have an exciting new online fall workshop series for MWCA folks! Here is the information for our first online workshop, which is this Friday, October 10, from 11am-12pm:

MWCA October Workshop: Poetic Autoethnography

Dr. Roger Powell, Instructor, Director of the Writing Center, Crowder College

Contributing to conversations around directing SLAC writing centers and autoethnographic studies in writing centers, this session shares poetic autoethnography as a way to understand and process the emotional labor of writing center work. Dr. Powell, MWCA board member, invites participants to explore this approach through an interactive workshop.

Please join the link provided in a recent email announcement, or you can join here at the link on our website: