2010 SWCA Georgia Statewide Conference

February 12-13, 2010
Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA

Conference Co-Chairs
Beth Burmester, Ph.D., Georgia State University, SWCA President
Christine Cozzens, Ph.D., Agnes Scott College, Southern Discourse Editor

Theme
"Back to the Tutor"

The SWCA is sponsoring mini-regional conferences in 2010, each with the theme "Back to the Tutor" (see below for more info). Each mini-conference will highlight the work and research of our tutors, promote more local participation and networking, and reduce travel costs in light of our current economic environment. Questions regarding the Georgia Conference can be directed to Beth Burmester or Christine Cozzens at swca.georgia@gmail.com. We will be posting regular updates to our website, so keep coming back!

Registration via mail is now closed, but we will accept on-site registration - see sidebar below!

Conference Location: Agnes Scott College

Conference Location: Agnes Scott College
141 E. College Ave, Decatur GA 30030, www.agnesscott.edu

Friday, February 12, 2010

GOING FORWARD WITH CONFERENCE

Hello! It is snowing in metro-Atlanta, including Decatur, but roads are clear and we are moving ahead with the conference as planned. Our buffet dinner begins at 6pm, and a full-day of events on Saturday including continental breakfast and a hot lunch. Registration will be open today at 4:30pm and all morning on Saturday. Bedford St. Martins publishers are also sponsoring a book exhibit. See you soon!

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Program and handouts now available

The SWCA mini-regional program schedule is now available as an electronic pdf file.

Download the program here to view the full schedule.

Would you like to learn more about the SWCA? Download an informative handout here.

We look forward to seeing you at the conference!

(Note: concerned about the weather? Check back here Friday morning at 11:00 am for any weather-related updates.)

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Campus Map and Parking Information

Here's a link for the Agnes Scott College campus map and visitor parking information:

Campus Map & Info

We have a great program planned, so please join us for the full program, which begins Friday evening at 6 p.m. (An electronic version of the program will be available on this site beginning Wednesday evening.)

Sunday, January 17, 2010

CFP Deadline extended!

For many of us, the week of January 11, 2010 was the first week of a new term. We want to give as many of you as possible an opportunity to respond to our call for papers, so we've extended the deadline to January 25, 2010. We look forward to hearing from you!

Friday, December 11, 2009

CFP

The deadline for proposals has been extened to midnight on January 25, 2010; we encourage early submissions.

Please send proposals with the subject line "SWCA-Georgia Proposal" via email to swca.georgia@gmail.com, and attach an MS-Word file, or include proposal and contact information in the email itself.

All presenters must register for the conference. Proposals will be accepted from individuals and institutions both within—and beyond—the SWCA region. Everyone is welcome!

Group proposals especially sought; individual proposals will be grouped with others. No limit on number of presenters per proposal. All submissions will have a place on the program. We are emphasizing hands-on, interactive, live-action, multi-media, and creative ideas and formats. Presenters are encouraged to use either completed projects, existing work, or work-in-progress. Our aim is sharing resources and starting conversations and connections across institutions.

Proposal length: 100-300 words.

We are looking for the following two types of sessions: ROUNDTABLES OR POSTER SESSIONS.

---Roundtables: issues related to peer tutoring, such as, How do new technologies impact peer tutoring? What do tutors most want in a tutor training program? What is the role of time in peer tutoring? What do tutors believe the future holds for tutoring and writing centers? Or, brief research presentations with Q&A from audience (usually Roundtables have 6-8 presenters each talking 5-8 minutes; sessions will be 75 minutes).

---Poster Sessions (4 categories, individual or collaborative):

POSTER SESSION I
MOVIE/CONFERENCE POSTERS: create a poster for the SWCA State-by-State Georgia mini-regional conference based on the movie poster for the film “Back to the Future,” and our theme of “Back to the Tutor”; all posters should be brought to the conference for judging, and these posters will be featured on the conference website following the conference; Specifications: must be created on 22” by 28” poster board or printed/reproduced on paper; prizes for first through third places will be awarded by a judge’s panel; a “crowd-pleaser” award will also be presented for the poster receiving the most votes from conference participants.


POSTER SESSION II
TUTORING IN ACTION: demonstrations/role playing of tutor practices; demonstrations/role playing of tutor training: you will act out the demonstration for participants in a special session; each demonstration should be between 5-8 minutes; posters or written handout can accompany the demonstrations but are not required.


POSTER SESSION III
DOCUMENTING TUTOR WORK—tutoring session forms, tutor application forms, surveys, annual reports, budget reports, grant proposals; in short, any forms or documents that you use or have especially developed for assessment and/or to record tutoring in your center; Bring 25-30 copies of forms with you to the conference to exchange with others during this session and be prepared to talk for up to 5 minutes about how the form is used.


POSTER SESSION IV
TUTOR RESEARCH: posters related to any kind of tutor research project; individual or collaborative, at a single institution, between two or more institutions, or involving community service or connections; these may be in the planning stage, in progress, or finished.

You may submit to both poster and roundtable sessions, but please submit separate proposals to assist the conference planning committee with scheduling and creating the program.

Format for submissions:

PROPOSAL TYPE (Roundtable or Poster Session)

name
phone number
email address
institutional affiliation
all participants' names (and affiliations, if different)
proposal title
one sentence describing proposal
audio visual needs
proposal body(100-300 words)
MOVIE/CONFERENCE POSTER:
name
phone number
email address
institutional affiliation
all participants' names (and affiliations, if different)
DOCUMENTING TUTOR WORK:
name
phone number
email address
institutional affiliation
all participants’ names
names of those creating the forms or documents (if different from participants)
kind of document or form

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Welcome and Invitation to Participate

The 1985 film Back to the Future introduced us to Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Dr. Emmett (Christopher Lloyd), who helps Marty travel back in time to save the future for himself and his siblings—ultimately making his parents’ life better in the process. Significantly, Marty serves as a peer tutor to his father, guiding him to become more confident to act and think for himself. Most notably, by the end of the film, we see the tangible results of Marty’s peer tutoring: George McFly grows up to be a published science fiction writer.

It is not merely coincidence that the year the film hit theaters, 1985, falls in the middle of a decade that gave rise to a wave of writing center publications, specifically texts about peer tutoring. As Harvey Kail noted in his editor’s remarks for the Fall 2008 special issue of The Writing Center Journal (dedicated to Kenneth Bruffee and the Brooklyn Project), “Bruffee publishes in the mid-1980s a series of essays that famously theorize peer tutoring as a paradigm of social constructionist pedagogy” (3). Moreover, Kail’s assertion about the essays is proved by the example of Marty and George from the film Back to the Future, who “Together and separately, …make a compelling argument for the value of organizing students to take each other seriously as writers and readers” (3).

As the end-note speaker at the joint IWCA/NCPTW conference on November 1, 2008, Harvey Kail spoke of how far our profession has drifted away from talking about what tutors do in tutorials and what they achieve and learn from being tutors. He issued a call to explore and recognize the contributions of our tutors. Thus, SWCA saw this year as the ideal one to return our focus to our tutors’ voices and experiences, and to look ahead to how their voices create our futures.

We issue a special welcome to high school writing centers and to writing centers, tutors, and scholars who have not yet participated in SWCA. Please join us!