From Beyond the Center: Lessons on Collaboration from a Sixth-Grade Multimodal Outreach Project

Deeds Boardroom

Despite writing center studies enduring interests in the intersections among learning and collaboration (North; Brufee), the field has yet to develop robust understandings of how collaboration happens and comes to happen (particularly in liminal spaces). This presentation offers the possibilities of rethinking collaboration based upon my experiences co-leading a multimodal storytelling outreach project outreach program at Michigan State. Based on these experiences, this presentation will consider the ways in which sixth-graders engaged in collaborative making as it might pertain to writing center pedagogy and administration. I ask: what are the ways in which collaboration occurred in the space of the multimodal outreach project? Using these observations as sites of departure, I hope to reconsider what writing centers think about in terms of collaboration-- including what is collaboration (as both a practice and methodology), what is produced by such collaboration, and how to develop practices that foster collaboration as experienced by participants in the outreach program. I hope this talk and discussion can help reframe the ways in which collaboration is routinely constructed in writing center scholarship (e.g., as democratic and nonhierarchical) by acknowledging the imperfect, frustrating, and often unequal processes making occurs.