Back in January, with an MLA Convention high, I started thinking about what a panel about graduate student writing support would look like. Through my work as a Graduate Writing Specialist, I realized that many graduate students needed help with their writing but couldn’t find that support. As a PhD candidate who finished her dissertation long distance, this issue hit close to home. I received a good response on Twitter and Facebook, and shortly after we had a panel!

This past Friday we found out our panel Back Up Your Work: Conceptualizing Writing Support for Graduate Students has been approved! I am thrilled that the first panel I have organized has been accepted, but I couldn’t have done it without the hard work of my fellow panelists: Annemarie Perez, Abigail Scheg, Lee Ann Glowzenski, and Tara Betts.

I have posted below the panel description:

Many PhDs in the humanities are familiar with the trope of the brilliant scholar who works alone, hiding in an office with no other responsibility other than to write day after day. However, for some scholars in training, this trope does more harm than good by setting up an impractical standard against which they measure their busy, 21st Century lives. Many graduate students struggle with the stereotype of the solo researcher that is prevalent in graduate humanities education. By extension, we are passed down the notion that we ought to work alone, and that we are “at risk” or “needy” if we don’t.

This dichotomy of needy/successful is dangerous, especially when we consider that writing is integral to the success of graduate students—especially doctoral students—but they receive little to no instruction on how to enter their discourse communities. Moreover, advisors are often the only source of writing support students have, but many advisors do not have the time or the expertise to provide thorough feedback on a student’s text. Writing support for graduate students can come in different shapes, but they all contest the idea of writing as a solitary endeavor. For the panelists, extra curricular writing support shows that writing is oftentimes collaborative and social.

The panelists will present different methods and examples of writing support for graduate students and discuss how these case studies can translate to other institutions. This panel will take the shape of a roundtable, in order to facilitate a conversation about how to better support graduate writers at every step of their careers as students. If the MLA encourages multiple careers paths for graduate students and emboldens them to speak up in public fora about the value of the humanities, writing is an important component of this vision. Writing support can help students reassess their relationship with their fields of knowledge and develop confidence in their abilities as humanists and as scholars. With this in mind, this panel brings together panelists who can contribute to the conversation from different angles; our panelists’ experiences range from program assistants, new graduate students, returning students, and writing center staff.

Questions this panel will address include:

• Where do the problems graduate students face when writing come from?

• Who is responsible for providing writing support for graduate students?

• How can we build an environment where students feel comfortable asking for help with their writing?

• Does graduate education reform in the humanities allow for collaborative creation of knowledge?

• Where is the line between support and collaboration?

• How much assistance or what type of help constitutes “collaboration”?

Our panelists come from different backgrounds in the humanities, and will address different ways of supporting graduate student writers.

Liana SIlva-Ford (formerly from the KU Writing Center) will talk about the idea of the writing center as a safe space where students can ask the questions about writing (not necessarily about the content) that many faculty members assume their students already know. She will also address how writing centers and faculty members can work together to help students succeed in their graduate careers.

Annemarie Pérez (Loyola Marymount University) will talk about her work at the USC’s Doctoral Support Center in the School of Education, particularly the weekend writing retreats. These weekend writing events helped many students (who were frequently working full time and who found themselves lagging when compared to their cohort’s progress) complete their dissertations. Also, she will discuss how working with writing advisors who help create writing groups supports doctoral students of color who frequently report feeling isolated.

Abigail Scheg (Elizabeth City State University) will focus on the current standards for “appropriate writerly behavior” regarding the dissertation writing process: how doctoral students should work alone and deal with the challenges of isolation versus the notion of collaborative work in general. She will also look into the fine line between helping, collaboration, and co-writing—which makes some doctoral programs uneasy or not as willing to provide support to their doctoral students in dissertation mode.

Tara Betts (Binghamton University) will approach the topic of this panel from the point of view of a published creative writer who has returned to school for a Ph.D., and who is tackling the challenge of balancing more complex, critical writing while still generating creative work. Moreover, she will discuss the differences in academic writing that lend themselves to critical, alienating jargon that departs from imparting a true understanding of concepts to a broader reading public.

Lee Ann Glowzenski (Duquesne University) will talk about the experience of face-to-face writing support versus online writing groups/support networks (like Twitter hashtags, for instance). There’s a certain degree of vulnerability when working within a cohort that disappears in virtual space, which raises the question of to what degree students or staff are willing to outsource support networks/writing groups.