C&I Ph.D. students present research on creating an Urban High School Writing Center

On Friday, November 7th, Stephanie Rollag and Erin Stutelberg, Ph.D. students in Critical Literacy and English Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, presented at this fall’s Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing research colloquium. The title of their talk was Understanding the Collaborative Construction of an Urban High School Writing Center: Sustainability, Interdisciplinarity, and Connected Learning.

With mentorship from their advisor, Dr. Cynthia Lewis, Steph and Erin have been working collaboratively with school staff and administration to develop, coordinate, and research a local urban high school writing center. They were awarded an ISW grant in the Spring of 2014 to support their research, and the funds have allowed them to: work over the summer on visioning and development of the writing center with school staff, create processes in place to get the writing center up and running, train DirecTrack to Teaching students to serve as writing center tutors, and begin working with high school students on their writing in the center.

Steph and Erin approach their research as critical ethnographers, studying power, space, discourse, and writing pedagogies in a racially and linguistically diverse city school.