The Canadian Writing Centre Association is very pleased to announce that the Call for Proposals for our 2017 conference in Toronto, Ontario is now open.

From Far and Wide: Imagining the Futures of Writing Centres

Where: OCAD University, Toronto, Ontario

When: May 25-26, 2017

Keynote: Dr. Frankie Condon, University of Waterloo

In her IWCA award-winning book, Rhetoric of Respect (2016), Tiffany Rousculp makes a call for developing a “rhetoric of respect” within writing centres that “entails recognition of multiple views, approaches, abilities, and . . . limitations” (25). In a community address in 2014, Frankie Condon similarly argues that “we will need to understand and act on the understanding that our most important stakeholders are the students we serve and the communities from which they come. . .  We will need to work with our students and their home communities to learn their needs (instead of assuming we know them already or are better qualified to determine what those needs are or should be).” Both writers make the call for writing centres and institutions to have respect for “the individual’s position and experience” (Rousculp 28) in a way that does not assume that the writing centre “knows better” than the writers who enter our doors.

As we look to the future of writing centres in Canada, we must consider how we make space for the multiple stories that writers have to tell—not with the goal of helping them erase differences or assimilate, but with the goal of respecting and valuing the multiple cultures, languages, writing practices, lived experiences, and educational histories that they carry with them.

The Canadian Writing Centres Association invites writing centre practitioners—from far and wide—to consider how we respect individual differences amid pressures to serve ever greater numbers of students on limited budgets and in sometimes challenging administrative contexts. How do we continue to diversify our programs, our tutor training, and our research? And how do we extend our rhetorics of respect outside of our centres, across our institutions, and into our larger communities?

The full call for proposals is available on the CWCA website.

Proposals must be submitted through our online submission form. Email submissions will not be accepted this year.

Any individual presenter may be included on up to two (2) proposals, but at least one of the proposals must be for a group presentation (3-5 presenters).

Questions about conference proposals can be directed to CWCA Vice-Chair, Nancy Johnson Squair: squairn@douglascollege.ca

Presenters will be notified by email concerning the status of their proposal(s) by February 10, 2017.