Alison Caviness Gibson
A Writing Center for the Flourishing of All Wheaton Students
Alison Gibson, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer of English, Director of the Writing Center and First-Year Writing
In the CACE seminar this May, we were each invited to consider how we can promote the flourishing of men and women within our "spheres of influence" at Wheaton College. What steps can we take to foster mutuality and Biblical hospitality in these spaces?
As Director of the Wheaton College Writing Center, I train my student staff in best practices for peer writing consultations, which are rooted in collaboration. When a student comes to the Writing Center for help with a paper, our student writing consultants do not annihilate the paper with red ink in order to"correct errors." While our consultants can give directive feedback (e.g., explaining how to use a semicolon correctly), most of the feedback they provide is nondirective: for example, they ask questions to ignite the writers' ideation, teach writers to draw concept maps to organize their thoughts, and listen as the writers talk through their arguments aloud. The consultant must respect the writer's authority and voice as a writer, enabling the writer to make his or her own choices. We often say that the goal is not to correct the paper; it is to equip the writer. That means that the consultant's role is not to assert authority over the paper but to listen and provide meaningful direction to the writer in his or her writing process.
Writing Center pedagogy draws from academic research in writing studies, psychology, education, and linguistics, and it is rooted in decades of research conducted in individual writing centers across the globe. At Wheaton, I pair this research on collaborative writing pedagogy with Biblical hospitality when I train the Writing Center staff. The students learn that Biblical hospitality– friendship for the guest–is grounded in the imago Dei: we seek to truly know and love one another as fellow image-bearers of Christ. In the context of the Writing Center, this means that the consultants and the student writers are learning from one another, engaging in mutual growth and respect as they work together on a piece of writing.
Thanks to the many generous donations to the Faithfully Forward campaign, the Writing Center will occupy a much larger, more prominent space in the renovated Wheaton College library, which is scheduled to open in 2028. With expanded programming that includes writing workshops and writing mentorships, the Writing Center will become the campus hub for writing consultations and writing events. Our vision is that the Writing Center will foster a culture of writing on campus, in which all Wheaton students grow in their calling to be storytellers who use their words to proclaim the Gospel and serve Christ's kingdom.
The CACE seminar provided me with the space and tools to imagine how to make our already flourishing Writing Center even more hospitable for all Wheaton students. We should thoughtfully design the new Writing Center space so that its furniture, lighting, sounds (and even smells!) are safe and supportive for all students, including men and women, international students, and students with disabilities. The staff should have more training on the theology of art and creativity, understanding how God created men and women in His image to be creators.
The Center should offer writing workshops on genres that might be particularly challenging for certain student populations, such as presentations, reflections, and rėsumės. To promote a culture of faithful writing on our campus, the Writing Center could sponsor faculty book talks and readings, host performances of original worship songs, and partner with the Preaching Lab to help students to write sermons. At larger universities, writing centers also support faculty with their writing; Wheaton's Writing Center could do this in simple ways by facilitating faculty writing groups and offering workshops on how to write grant and book proposals. We could even help faculty to design better writing assignments and rubrics in the age of artificial intelligence.
In a world where it's easy to dehumanize anyone who disagrees with your political point of view, where you can lambast someone online whom you've never met, and where you can form a "relationship" with a chatbot rather than a human being, the Writing Center is radically different. It is a space where students practice embodied Biblical hospitality, face to face, word by word.