"What is so awesome about getting feedback from people outside of my field, is that they are able to gauge how well I’ve communicated something and that it is not specific to my area of research. I learned so many skills and techniques, such as how to write concisely."
"[I]ncredible support, both directly (PhD thesis), professionally (tips for success in academia), and personally (mental heath, encouragements)."
Creating accessible support
Over this past year, the WCC focused on creating services and programs that were virtual and fully accessible. In addition to considering students with disabilities up front, we also recognized that many students were working from time zones across the globe, were navigating internet connectivity issues, and were managing barriers with their physical spaces. To meet all students’ needs, the WCC developed asynchronous materials and workshops that were delivered in diverse and fully-accessible formats. As well, appointment hours were expanded into early mornings, late evenings, and weekends, and we piloted a successful asynchronous email appointment program for undergraduate students. Conditions were ever-changing, and over the year, we engaged in continuous improvement processes by reviewing, assessing, and revising materials and programs in line with accessibility guidelines. The results are high-quality resources and services for students, postdocs, and instructors that will continue to be used after we return to campus.
As course instructors transformed their courses for the virtual remote context, the WCC collaborated with them to integrate custom support for topics and assignments. We created synchronous and asynchronous workshops and we facilitated discussion sessions live and on discussion boards.
To support first-year undergraduate students who were transitioning to university during a pandemic, the WCC also launched Waterloo Ready to Write. In this program, senior undergraduate students helped orient incoming first-years to general expectations for university writing and communication tasks. Through videos and online workshops, they provided tips and resources on topics like how to read a syllabus and how to break down an assignment. The student facilitators combined their personal experiences with writing research to help first-years succeed.
Appointments for undergraduate and graduate students continued to be a WCC core service in 2020-21. In appointments, students can seek feedback from staff advisors or peer tutors, and they report that these sessions have valuable impacts on their work and their goals. The WCC’s Teaching Philosophy describes our approach to working with writers, highlighting that our relationships and conversations with students are central to helping them develop agency and transferable strategies and skills. We frequently hear from students that they need more appointment availability, and we are continuing to work to create that availability while also supporting students in other ways, such as with workshops and online resources.
The WCC peer tutor program is one way that we have expanded appointment availability and developed professional capacities in undergraduate and graduate students to coach and support writers. Our accomplished peer tutors participate in rigorous training and professional development throughout the year, as well as engage in teaching observations and reflections. As you will read in the report, in 2020-2021, some of them also began engaging in writing centre research, both presenting and publishing in scholarly venues.
"Even with everything being remote it was really easy to figure out booking of appointments and using the online appointment dashboard/ whiteboard during the meeting."
Supporting students holistically
The scale of global events coupled with their impacts on our everyday lives was a marker of 2020-21. Students, instructors, researchers, and staff at the University of Waterloo experienced the impact of the global pandemic as it interrupted home lives, studies, research, and scholarship. The COVID virus caused generalized anxiety for many, and the isolation of the year affected people’s mental health and wellness. Appointments were critical opportunities to check in with people about the impact of the pandemic on their studies and research and to connect them to other campus resources as needed. Many writers – at the undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty levels – experienced the pandemic as an interruption to their writing habits and routines, or else they were unable to pursue their research in the ways they had anticipated. In this context, WCC virtual writing cafes and groups became important support and accountability communities that helped writers continue working in connection to a local academic community.
Our Teaching Philosophy speaks to ways we integrate equity and antiracism into our pedagogy. Over the past year, as conversations about systemic racism and colonial violence have increased, students have a heightened awareness of how their identities and languages and success are impacted by ways of knowing and writing that are grounded in White western values. At the WCC, we have been intentional about making space for these conversations with students. We support Indigenous and racialized students and multilingual speakers as they navigate the impositions of White rhetorical traditions and White linguistic structures, and as they make choices and wield this knowledge in ways that upholds and values their identities, languages, and experiences. We are committed to continuing to do this work more intentionally and in partnership with other campus groups and members.
Looking back on 2020-2021, I am proud of all that the WCC has accomplished. The WCC team, from professional staff to student tutors, have been collaborative, flexible and resilient throughout one of the most challenging years any of us could have imagined. Most importantly, they have demonstrated limitless compassion for students, staff, researchers, instructors, and each other. As we face the next phase of this pandemic and review our goals for the next year, we will continue to engage with compassion and commitment. And, we invite you, our campus community partners, to join us in writing, teaching, and learning together.
Director, Writing and Communication Centre
"I asked for advice on my research proposal for the international Ontario Graduate Scholarship. This required that I write a single proposal which would be suitable for a reader in mathematics and one outside mathematics. The best part of the WCC was that they gave me the necessary advice to improve my proposal to the desired level. Since I won one of the scholarships, I must say that their advice was key in forming the final product."
Undergraduate Appointments
Between our fulltime advisors and our part-time student peer tutors, we held 1959 appointments with undergraduates this year from each of UWaterloo’s six faculties. Through both formal and informal feedback, undergraduates tell us that they find appointments with the WCC highly valuable in helping them accomplish their goals, make progress in their work, and improve their process and results when it comes to writing and communication. Some sample feedback from undergraduates includes:
“Highly knowledgeable and approachable associates. I learn something new every time. This is a seriously unique distinguishing factor offered by UW.”
“The writing centre helped me a lot with my English assignments this term. I am not a natural writer and found that the writing centre really helped me to better structure my work. I saw a huge improvement in my marks after working with the writing centre. I used both the live and email tutoring services this term.”
“The specialists I worked with, especially the ones who I saw repeatedly over the term, seemed invested in my success, and it was nice to see familiar faces.”
"The best part of working with the Writing Centre is the fact that there is always someone willing to listen to your ideas and pieces of writing. Sometimes all you need is to read your papers, essays, etc. to someone out loud to identify key areas of improvement, and that is what has helped improve my assignments."
"I found the structured format and dedicated time for writing extremely helpful. It was reassuring and motivating to have a group of people to write online with. Having the quick check in with the writing office was really encouraging as well as someone who has not accessed their services in a long time and was unfamiliar with the format online (I plan on hopefully scheduling another appointment now after this experience)."
Speak like a Scholar
In the spring of 2020, the WCC reinvented its four-day, in-person presentation skills ‘boot camp’ for doctoral students to suit a remote learning context. This shift involved re-envisioning how to facilitate group presentation practice and peer review sessions through an online platform (LEARN), and also developing new content that focused on helping students to develop skills for virtual presentations rather than in-person ones.
The WCC will begin inviting master’s students to participate in this program in 2021-2022.
"Moving forward, I think that for me, from now on, every presentation will appear as an opportunity to practice. I probably will still get nervous, but I am more confident in the tools I can utilise to minimise my anxiety."
Writing Communities
Writing communities for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty were paused in March 2020 as a result of the shift to working from home. In spring 2020, the WCC introduced three weekly Virtual Writing Cafés on LEARN, which are open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty, to take the place of the twice weekly in-person Graduate Writing Cafés and once weekly Faculty Writing Café. Working and writing from home can be challenging, and many writers have found the structure, community, and accountability that these sessions offer to be invaluable to their motivation and progress this past year. We have seen an 86% increase in participation compared to in-person writing cafés from the previous year.
In addition to these sessions hosted by WCC staff, we have also seen significant growth in the #WaterlooWrites writing groups this year: decentralized, volunteer-hosted writing groups that are often discipline specific. In 2020-21, there was a 454% increase in writing group participation compared to 2019-2020, which was due to the group of dedicated volunteers who hosted seven different writing groups, and the logistical ease of hosting these sessions virtually instead of in person.
#WaterlooWrites Writing Groups for 2020-2021:
- Chemical Engineering Graduate Students Association
- Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology
- Optometry
- Psychology
- Students of the Water Institute, Graduate Section
- Writing Online Waterloo
Staff at the WCC have shared their insights from coordinating these writing groups with members of the Canadian Writing Centres Association. As a return to in-person writing cafés and writing groups becomes possible, we hope to retain some of the benefits of these online programs: the ability to share digital resources and flexibility in choosing where to write from.
"The writing groups have been a great way to remain motivated and stay connected with other grad students and faculty during the pandemic."
Rock Your Thesis
This program, which was designed to complement DBC with workshops about the structural and technical choices involved in writing a thesis, moved from a full-day workshop to three half-day workshops in 2019-2020. This change was intended to enable students to use their time efficiently by attending only the workshops that are relevant to them, with each workshop targeting a specific stage of the thesis process. In 2020-2021, Rock Your Thesis was one of the few graduate programs or workshops that the WCC chose to continue offering as a live webinar event rather than asynchronously. This live format was well received at the beginning of the pandemic, but interest waned as the winter of 2020 wore on, and people’s enthusiasm for participating in on-screen events waned. Although “Rock Your Thesis” saw a 16% growth in participation this year, 75% of survey respondents indicated that they had watched the recordings of these three workshops rather than participated in real time. In 2021-2022, “Rock Your Thesis” will be moving to an asynchronous, online module format that students can access at any time and return to at different stages of the thesis-writing process.
Campus Partner Support
The WCC continued to collaborate with campus partners such as Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs and the Centre for Career Action to support events for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. This support included facilitating a workshop and drop-in coaching for participants in GSPA’s GRADflix competition; facilitating workshops for incoming students as part of GRADready – GSPA’s virtual orientation program; facilitating workshops for current students as part of the GRADventure Professional Skills Conference; and developing several new workshops (diversity statements, research statements, public scholarship) in collaboration with the Centre for Career Action as part of their Pursuing and Managing your Academic Career conference. WCC staff also developed several custom workshops for research institutes as part of our Course Integrated Support program. And we supported University of Waterloo staff through the transition to working from home by developing a video and resource package about tools and strategies for working productively for Organizational and Human Development.
"It was thanks to the online writing groups that I could have a sense of normality and routine during the pandemic."
Instagram Live Q&As
During Spring 2020, at the initiative of one of our undergraduate peer tutors, we began holding live sessions on Instagram to answer students’ questions about their writing and communication assignments. These were facilitated by an undergraduate peer tutor once/week in the evenings throughout the spring, fall, and winter terms. While many people briefly viewed the live Q&As (93 participants over 19 sessions), very few asked questions. For that reason, we decided not to carry on with this program going forward and continue to find new ways to reach students virtually.
Peer Tutor programming
Our undergraduate and graduate peer tutors from a variety of faculties support students with any kind of communication assignment at any stage of the writing process. Students tell us in feedback surveys that they appreciate meeting with a peer who understands the challenges of being a student and can provide suggestions and ideas from that perspective. As one student said: “I was able to meet with older students and go over assignments! It was extremely helpful and prepared me for my papers.”
To provide effective tutoring, we’ve found that ongoing professional development (PD) for peer tutors is essential. Our interactive PD sessions are mainly facilitated by the Manager of Undergraduate and Peer Tutor Programs, but tutors are also encouraged to facilitate PD sessions based on their own research or interests. This year we facilitated active PD sessions on:
- Antiracism in tutoring
- Boundary-setting in appointments (facilitated by an undergraduate peer tutor)
- Decolonizing communication (facilitated by a graduate peer tutor)
- Reflection on our tutoring through recorded sessions
- Strategies for tutoring online
- Tutoring students on presentations and visual communication modes (facilitated by the WCC’s Multimodal and Public Scholarship Program Developer)
- Working with multilingual students
We encourage and support peer tutors to research, publish, and present in the field of writing studies. This year, two tutors (one undergraduate, one graduate) presented at two academic conferences with our Manager of Undergraduate and Peer Tutor Programs. One tutor published a well-read article about Confronting Oppressive Language in Our Tutoring Practice on the Canadian Writing Centres Association/Association de centres de rédactologie academic blog, and another is conducting an REB-approved research project with the WCC.
"I hadn't used the WCC much before Waterloo went primarily virtual, but I'm enjoying and benefiting from these resources more now so thank you for offering these services!"
Evening Appointments
While we were operating virtually, our team of four to ten peer tutors provided evening appointments through our WCOnline system in lieu of in-person drop-in appointments at Dana Porter and Davis Centre libraries. These evening times, including Sunday evenings, have been popular and effective for meeting our students’ needs, whether because students are in time zones outside of Eastern or because they are working on assignments in the evening. Tutors conducted 744 appointments with undergraduate and graduate students in 2020 – 2021. Feedback tells us that students find their peer tutors to be “thorough,” “knowledgeable,” “supportive,” and able to give “great advice.” One student said that the tutors made them “feel safe in discussing [their] work, which delved into personal experiences.” They added, “I greatly appreciate their time, insight and ability to create a safe space.”
Email Tutoring for Undergrads
In Winter 2021, we launched a pilot program to give undergraduates the option of receiving feedback over email. Our peer tutors conducted 53 email tutoring sessions in that first term. The pilot was initiated by an undergraduate peer tutor who wanted to conduct research into this tutoring approach. Our REB-approved study showed that some students find email tutoring more accessible than virtual appointments either for logistical reasons like time zones and deadlines, or for personality or mental health reasons. Students reported that email tutoring helped them improve their assignments in addition to teaching them strategies they could transfer to other communication assignments. Many requested that we continue the program, and we plan to do so.
Arts First Writing Hub
This year we transformed our Arts First peer tutoring program, which is funded by the Arts Undergraduate Office, to meet the needs of Arts 130 and 140 instructors and students. With plans for the fall term in flux, we created a series of six short videos that echoed the cohort-building connections that are such a central part of the Arts First peer tutor program. In the videos, four experienced peer tutors offered students personal, friendly, and frank advice on the theme, “what I wish I’d known,” targeting key experiences over the term, including the first week of classes, the first assignment, and midterms. Many instructors included these videos in their Arts First courses, and students told us they found them informative and helpful.
In addition to the videos, we were happy to continue with a virtual embedded peer tutor program available to all Arts First courses. In Fall 2020, we renamed the program the “Arts First Writing Hub” and moved it to WCOnline during the noon hour each weekday. We regularly sent promotional materials to instructors to share with students. These changes resulted in only 13 sessions with tutors.
To better meet Arts First students’ needs and promote the program, we moved the Writing Hub to Microsoft Teams in Winter 2021. There, tutors posted writing tips for their peers in addition to holding drop-in and scheduled tutoring sessions. We also held an information session for instructors near the start of the term and created promotions to make it easy for Arts First instructors to invite their students to make use of the program. These changes resulted in 120 students engaging with our five Arts First peer tutors in the form of 169 sessions, including 158 one-to-one tutoring sessions, 10 emailed feedback sessions, and one group-work session.
We also received feedback from instructors and students that the peer tutor program was useful. Instructors praised the program for these reasons:
“Just knowing it existed as an optional resource for students = big relief. Just one less thing to worry about knowing it was so well run and organized. And knowing someone is there to help students with writing details not necessarily covered in course content.”
“Knowing that students have another trustworthy person to talk to about assignments and working through micro-level issues.”
“Clear communication and content from coordinators that minimized the need for us to develop content to direct students to the Writing Hub were very helpful.”
Feedback from students indicates that they found the peer tutor welcoming, encouraging, and knowledgeable. They also said peer tutors asked good questions and made good suggestions. Specific comments from students included:
“I truly enjoyed my experience with the Arts First peer tutoring. I wholeheartedly believe that this program helped me improve my writing.”
“I didn’t access my peer tutor for specific assignment help, but for how to give peer feedback and how to be cognizant of racial differences in experiences related to the assignments. She was tremendously helpful and insightful, even though this wasn’t the typical request for help.”
“Thank you for providing this service. My peer tutor was amazing and I learned a tonne from her.”
Athletics
We continue our partnership with the department of Athletics and Recreation to provide student athletes with direct access to trained writing and communication peer tutors. Student athletes are referred to writing and communication tutors by their academic coach, and they meet with tutors at any stage of the writing process to get motivation, guidance, and support with their assignments in any discipline. Tutors and athletes especially appreciate the sustained relationship they can develop with each other over the term. This year, WCC tutors held 89 sessions with 57 different student athletes.
“…adapt[ing] to the online environment with the most gusto and success, the transition felt very well done.”
“Easy access and connection under pandemic conditions. Amazing people to work with. Great feedback, relevant, extremely helpful.”
Impacts on Course-Integrated Support (CIS) due to Covid-19
For the course-integrated support (CIS) program, our goal was to continue to support instructors who were shifting to the virtual context both asynchronously and synchronously. Adapting what we were creating and learning in workshop development, we met instructors’ and students’ needs by developing relevant and engaging workshops that had the flexibility to meet instructors’ and students’ needs in three modes of delivery:
- Asynchronous (PowerPoint video and Articulate 360)
- Synchronous (MS Teams, WebEx, Bongo Classroom, Mentimeter)
- Blended (Asynchronous with a synchronous follow-up)
Communicating with instructors and sharing potential options for helping them support their students was a challenge over the last year. We amended our intake form for the virtual context and announced that support was available in our newsletters, on social media, and on the Daily Bulletin. We also partnered with other academic support units, including SSO, Academic Integrity, and Accessibility to establish a LEARN site, “Instructor Resources for Student Success.” This site contained a number of workshops that could be embedded in courses and instructions for uploading them to LEARN course sites. Individual WCC workshops available on this site were downloaded between two and six times, which was comparable with other units’ workshops.
Despite our best efforts to continue to support instructors with course-integrated support, requests from instructors for workshops declined during the virtual delivery of courses over the pandemic. Between 2019/2020 and 2020/2021, we observed a -73% difference in sessions and a -46% difference in users. However, it’s important to note that we regularly directed instructors to the asynchronous versions available on LEARN, both on the “Instructors’ Resources” site and the “WCC Workshops” site, and the use and re-use of these workshops are not fully trackable.
Throughout the pandemic, the WCC was aware of the anxieties and stresses that students were experiencing, and we worked to ensure that the CIS program was sensitive to the emotional landscape students were coping with. Over the fall and winter terms, the shift to virtual teaching resulted in decreased engagement in the WCC's synchronous virtual workshops as a result of “Zoom Fatigue” and other pressures of virtual learning. We noted that more instructors were asking for asynchronous resources each term, and we regularly recommended asynchronous workshops or flipped workshops that combine asynchronous learning with synchronous question, practice, and feedback sessions.
Arts First Workshops
In Spring 2020, we received funding from the Arts Undergraduate Office to build online programming for Arts 130 and 140 courses in the fall term. In just six weeks, our team of two graduate fellows, with support from fulltime staff and a co-op Senior Online Learning Associate, created eight asynchronous workshops using Articulate software. We created these workshops to help students develop drafting, revising, and presenting strategies that they could apply to their coursework, while encouraging them to reflect on how they composed their communication tasks. These workshops represented the most frequently requested in-person workshops that were facilitated in Arts First classrooms in 2019 and 2020, including “Your Ideal Writing Process,” “Integrating Sources into Your Writing,“ “Writing with Quantitative Data,” and “Designing Effective Presentations.” We were unable to track usage, but informal feedback tells us that most of the almost 90 Arts First courses in 2020-2021 used one or more of these workshops.
We received feedback from both instructors and students that they found the workshops helpful and of excellent quality. Instructors commented that they found the workshops useful because students “had something to directly reference that wasn't a slideshow, recorded lecture, or formal reading,” and they praised the workshops’ “detail” and “clarity.” One instructor commented that they found the workshops so useful that they “would like to continue using all of them even if we return to in-person in the fall.” Another wrote:
"These workshops are phenomenal! They are allowing me to introduce these topics/practices to my students in a professional and easy way. I've dropped them into my course and have required the students to complete them—these modules are integrated right into weekly class plans. Thanks for making this so much easier!"
Demographics and Feedback
The WCC supports undergraduate and graduate courses across all six faculties at the University of Waterloo. In the 2020/2021 academic year, half of the workshops were delivered to courses in the Faculty of Science , and a quarter were delivered to courses in the Faculty of Health. Courses in the Faculties of Environment and Arts comprised 13% and 12% respectively. Please note, however, that Arts First courses are not included in the Faculty of Arts total.
Feedback on course-integrated support was collected from the instructors who used the workshops and from students who participated in them as part of their classes. Instructors who requested workshops reported a 100% satisfaction rate. A small set of responses from students (n= 18) who participated in workshops gave a satisfaction score of 78%. Participants in our regular asynchronous workshops, which are available to the whole University community, reported an 85% satisfaction rate
Looking ahead
Although the pandemic affected the number of workshops that were delivered in-person at the beginning of the 2020/2021 academic year, it provided the WCC with a unique opportunity to accomplish a key goal in our strategic plan, that is, to create an accessible online learning environment that parallels and extends the services of the Writing and Communication Centre.
Our goal is to continue to nurture existing relationships and expand our reach by building new relationships with research institutes and student groups. Additionally, there are opportunities to grow by targeting second-, third-, and fourth-year undergraduate courses, as well as graduate courses from the other five faculties.
Given the current climate and the unpredictability of a pandemic, our online services will continue to grow, and with this growth, we look forward to professional development surrounding online learning, online facilitation, user experience, teaching software, and campus collaborations.