The Writing Centre can collaborate with you to support your students. Here are a few options for such collaboration:

• Bonus points for visiting the Writing Centre;
• Required visits to discuss a draft, notes, or an outline, or to work on prewriting tasks, such as understanding the assignment instructions, brainstorming, or creating a thesis statement. The required visit may be all that’s needed for the student to earn the points, or they may have to complete a follow-up assignment, such as a reflection about what they learned during their appointment;
• Writing labs: for this option, Writing Centre staff come to your class and circulate around the room while students work on their writing assignments; answering students’ questions; brainstorming ideas with them; or providing feedback on their drafts, notes, or outlines. The writing lab can simply be a class you designate for students to work on their writing assignments and where the Writing Centre is there to help you provide feedback to your students as they work, or we can kick off the class with a mini lecture on a writing topic of your choice before circulating around the room as students work on their papers.

If any of these options appeal to you, please email us at writing_centre@cbu.ca, and we will make a plan.

The Writing Centre offers in-class and virtual class visits, workshops, and presentations. We design these workshops and presentations collaboratively with individual faculty members based on their students’ needs. To request a class visit, presentation, or workshop for your class, please fill out this form or email writing_centre@cbu.ca with the following information:

• Course
• Type of request:

1. • Class visit (approx. 20-min. introduction to the Writing Centre)
   • Presentation (30-75 min. presentation on a topic determined in collaboration with Writing Centre)
   • Workshop (30-75 min. presentation and interactive activity determined in collaboration with the Writing Centre)

• Date and time of requested visit/presentation/workshop
• Class location
• Number of students in the class
• Writing assignments in your class related to the visit/presentation/workshop (you can type this information into the email or attach your syllabus/assignment instructions)
• Whether you will be present during the visit/presentation/workshop
• Any additional information that would be helpful to the Writing Centre in collaborating on your request

We will be in touch to confirm the details of the class visit, workshop, or presentation. Because developing workshop/presentation materials and tailoring them to specific classes and assignments is time- and labour-intensive, we may require at least two weeks from the time of request before we can deliver the workshop or presentation.

The Writing Centre is unable to accommodate required Writing Centre appointments for entire classes. In our experience, required appointments don’t always have the intended effect or motivate students to work on their writing skills. Often, students are more focused on fulfilling the requirement than learning. A workshop or presentation might be a better option.

We have found, however, that required visits can work well for students who are rewriting assignments based on their instructor’s feedback. If you would like to require a select number of students in your class to visit the Writing Centre, please email writing_centre@cbu.ca to check with us, so we can determine if we have the capacity to meet with your students and so we can learn more about the requirement (e.g., for what assignment, the goal of these meetings, the deadline for students to attend, how many students we should expect).

If you require an appointment confirmation after a required visit, the Writing Centre has developed an automated email that students receive after they’ve held an appointment. They can forward this email to you as proof/confirmation of their meeting. This replaces direct confirmation of appointments from the Writing Centre.

Because student appointment information is confidential, without students’ written permission, we cannot confirm whether a student has visited the Writing Centre nor what they discussed. However, we realize that in some situations (e.g., rewrites, bonus points), faculty may wish to receive confirmation a student has held a Writing Centre appointment. To this end, we’ve developed an automated email that students receive after they’ve held an appointment, which they can forward to a faculty member as proof/confirmation of their meeting.

Please be aware if your course includes group assignments that the Writing Centre’s policy on working with students on group assignments is that ideally all group members should attend appointments to discuss the assignment (unless a student is booking an appointment to discuss only the section of the assignment they wrote). We will only review a section of a draft if the student who wrote it is present. This is so they can answer questions about the material and learn how to improve their own writing. In other words, one group member cannot bring another group member’s writing for review or hold an appointment to discuss the entire group’s project under the role of “editor.”

You can use this single-page information sheet to promote the Writing Centre to your students.

This handout lists what we consider to be the best online resources that you can recommend to your students about the three major citation styles: APA, MLA, and Chicago. These are also the resources we use in the Writing Centre.

As writing instructors, we have spent a great deal of time thinking about ChatGPT, its abilities and inabilities, and how it may impact students’ learning and their development of writing and critical thinking skills. We do not think outsourcing aspects of the writing process to ChatGPT or other generative artificial intelligence (genAI) programs is wise for students. 

A non-exhaustive rationale: 

Most importantly, ChatGPT and other generative AI tools allow students to forgo basic steps in the writing process. Studying and practicing these basic steps make students better, more confident writers and thinkers. Steps like generating ideas, planning, and engaging in the reiterative process of writing, thinking, rethinking, and rewriting promotes critical thinking and learning, which is what university writing assignments are designed to do. When a technology completes these steps in whole or in substantial part for students, they are deprived of the cognitive growth associated with driving the process themselves. 

There are also substantial problems with the writing these tools produce, which stymies the usefulness of genAI as a co-writing tool for students. Though completely grammatically correct, AI-generated text is often vague, bland, and repetitive. Generative AI is untrustworthy as a source of information; the text it produces contains inaccuracies and lacks sources. And because novice writers are typically not well-positioned to adopt these tools critically and make meaningful revisions to computer-generated text while retaining authorship and ownership of it, we think it is a tool that robs students of more than it offers them in their learning process.  

As such, the Writing Centre will not encourage student use of ChatGPT/genAI as part of their writing process, or to help them learn to use it.  

However, many students will understandably be curious about genAI and want to experiment with it. To help orient students to what artificial intelligence is and help them think critically about it, the Writing Centre has developed a short  Moodle module (“Aritifical Intelligence & CBU Students”). The module emphasizes students’ responsibility for understanding and following faculty policies on use/non-use of generative AI in completing their academic work. You may wish to review it and assign it to your students to read. 

At the Writing Centre this term, we are prepared, as ever, to help students develop their writing skills and gain confidence in their abilities. This includes helping them recognize features of strong writing, consider the quality of the writing genAI produces, and make ethical choices that support their learning.

Fall 2023