by Katie Rose Criscuolo
Online Content Editor
In response to school-wide budget cuts, the Center for Writing and the Center for Speaking are becoming one entity in which all tutors will be trained comprehensively in order to give support to students with all forms of projects including writing, presentations, portfolios, and digital communication. In addition to this change, the staff will now compose of mostly students who qualify for work-study.
Christine Cozzens, professor of English, department chair, and director of the Center for Writing and Speaking, believes that the merging of the centers will be a positive change overall.
?It will be kind of like one-stop shopping. A student can come for help on a project and know they can receive support for the presentation or essay. We decided to do this for a lot of reasons, one of them financial, but also students who go out in the world need to be multimodal communicators, and we need to find ways to support that,? said Cozzens.
It used to be that tutors were hired for either writing or speaking. Now each tutor must be trained to help students in both areas, which means more attention must be brought to training.
?We are hiring people to help us with training and to make sure we are really learning in a very up to date way,? said Cozzens.
Leah Kuenzi ?14 has been a writing center tutor for three years.
?When I first heard that the writing center and the speaking center would be combined, my immediate thought was: ?I don?t know enough about public speaking to feel confident assisting other students. I am a writer; that?s what I know how to do.?
?However, after having some time to let everything sink in, I think it is wise to combine our resources so that we can serve the campus community to the best of our ability. There are certain foundations of writing and speaking that are the same, and our Fall training seminar will focus on making all tutors feel as confident as possible in both areas,? said Kuenzi.
It seems that the downside of the budget cuts is that it will be very challenging and costly to hire students who do not qualify for work study. The operating budget ? the money which is provided by the school ? formerly paid for all salaries; but now it only pays for the salary of work-study students. In order to hire students who do not qualify for work study, Cozzens must tap into the designated funds, which come from endowments.
?The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the most devastating change for us is that we only can hire students on work-study. While there are many strong tutors who are on work-study, we want to be able to hire the best options from all applicants. We also have four or five people already on staff who expect to work next year but don?t have work-study? the first use of my funds will be to pay them,? said Cozzens.
At an annual usage rate of over 70% and with 6,344 appointments completed last year (Agnes Scott had a student population of less than 900), the Center for Writing and Speaking is one of the most popular resources on campus. Despite the budget cuts, Cozzens is striving to keep the center modern and helpful for students.
?We?ve been handed lemons but we will make lemonade. It is exciting and challenging, but in the end it will do good for the college,? said Cozzens.
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