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. 1978).  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 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 initiative also brings speakers from the public sphere into writing classrooms to talk about writing outside academe. 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.

Integrating writing into classrooms across the curriculum and supporting writing outside of the classroom through peer tutoring and public scholarship are important to Penn State's mission of improving "the lives of the people of Pennsylvania, the nation, and the world through integrated, high-quality programs in teaching . . . . informed by scholarship and research."

 

June 2008