CEW Mission Statement

The Center for Excellence in Writing promotes a writing-intensive philosophy of student-centered teaching and collaborative learning through three integrated programs: the Writing Across the Curriculum Program (established for faculty in 1997), the Graduate Writing Center (established for graduate students in 1999), and the Undergraduate Writing Center (established for undergraduate students ca. 1973).  The primary mission is to advocate writing as a way of thinking and learning so that faculty use writing to improve the way they teach and students use writing to improve the way they learn.  This leads to a closely linked secondary mission of writing improvement across the curriculum.  Collaborative learning among peers is the preferred vehicle for achieving this mission.

The CEW has recently added a fourth program: the Public Writing Initiative (previously called the Leonhard Center Technical Writing Initiative). This project, enacted through collaboration with the Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy, engages writing teachers, students, and peer tutors in classrooms that work on commissioned assignments from outside the university. The CEW aims to integrate this public scholarship initiative with the Center's other three programs in order to address issues of civic engagement through community literacy by means of collaborative learning among peers.

 

April 2006