A site can do important business right on its own campus. For example, TCs from many sites have participated in summer assessment gatherings that give them a chance to learn and put into practice the NWP's Analytical Writing Continuum tools. Using this new knowledge, the Central Texas Writing Project has become an important service provider to its host college at Texas State in San Marcos. The site has just entered into a 2-year contract with the college for providing assessment services related to freshman entrance application essays. Watch for a post from Lori Assaf with more of the story behind this progress. And add your own thinking about ways to do business on campus as a comment in this forum discussion.
Responses
Thanks for posting this Mike. It will be great to hear the details from Lori too. This is something other sites might want to pursue.
Lori will also be sharing this work and more at the NWP Annual Meeting in a session she and Janet Swenson from the Red Cedar Writing Project at Michigan State are facilitating, Sustainability: Your Site as Essential University Resource, 1:15am - 3:00am Palmer House, 7th Floor, Dearborn 2. Look for materials from that workshop here in Connect!
Thanks Mike for posting this prompt about ways to build relationships and ways to "do business" with our universities. Central Texas Writing Project is housed at Texas State University-San Marcos. We have had exceptional support from our Chair and our Dean and feel fortunate enough to have had opportunities to serve new teachers and experienced teachers in our community. Because of the recent change in funding, our leadership team started out the year by brainstorming ways we could gain more visibility and provide more service to our university and local districts. We have several initiatives but one that has proven both lucritive and important to our site's visibility is our relationship with the Office of Teacher Preparation. We were hired last year and just signed a two year contract to assess in-coming essays from students applying to the College of Education. With a team of committed TCs, we are using the Analytical Writing Contiuum to provide valuable assessment and evaluations of college students' writing. Like most relationships, our partnership with the Office of Teacher Preparation came about because of our diligent reaching out and communicating with the directors in these programs as well as our understanding of our college's needs and hopes to improve the program. We also had to showcase our strengths and draw connections between what we do and what our college needed. Another way we are building stronger relationships and visibility with our university is by exploring ways we can support our student veterans on campus. Because of our location (close to two large military bases), many recent veterans register for classes at our university. Our Veteran Affairs office provides logistical support but not much on academic writing and reading for the college classroom. We are hoping to fill this important need by providing one or two day institutes (lead by our TCs) on ways to negotiate college reading and writing. These are just two examples of ways we are building relationships and "doing business" with our university. What are other sites doing? I would love to hear from others who have discovered ways to build interdependent relationships with their host universities and how you have negotiated your site's visibility.
Also, hope you can join us during our session at NWP (see Joye's post above) to learn from others and explore your site's possibilities!
Thanks!
Lori