Fellows Contract

The goal of the Writing Fellows Program is to facilitate and support writing at Wilkes University. Participation in the program as a working Fellow is by application and requires that you work for at least a semester as a Consultant in the Writing Center and that you successfully complete Eng 298 Advanced Practicum in Writing. Once admitted, you will work as a member of a Collaborative Learning Network that is connected to and serves the entire campus community. Your work will spread across three components: interaction with your Faculty Mentor and students, and record keeping.

You will be paired with a Faculty Mentor who teaches Eng 101 or a Writing Intensive Course, and together with that instructor, you will devise a plan to best assist the writers in that course as they draft and revise writing projects throughout the semester. You can expect to attend some part of some class meetings in order to understand the nature and scope of writing assignments and/or to work with peer response groups. The specific details should be worked out with your faculty mentor, but you are not expected to act as a Teaching Assistant, nor should you expect that the majority of your time will be spent inside the classroom. You should meet with your Faculty Mentor at least once every two weeks to engage in a dialog about your collaboration.

The majority of your work with students will involve meetings that take place outside of class--individually or in small groups--and these meetings may take place in person or in cyberspace via a chat program like Instant Messenger, the Writing Fellows discussion board, or by e-mail, but no one session should last longer than 30 minutes, unless you meet with a group. Your interaction with them will encompass the duties listed below and/or any other sort of support you and your Faculty Mentor devise for the success of your collaboration.

• Small group work: responding to work-in-progress
•  Individual session: responding to work-in-progress
• Editing/proofreading sessions wherein you teach the student how to become a better editor.
•  Activities/exercises provided by your Faculty Mentor that pinpoint specific problem areas.

During the process, you must keep records of your work in the form of a Log in which you record each interaction with students, both in class and outside of it. Each entry must

• Describe the session in detail.
• Comment on the session, evaluating its value in relation to the students' progress.
• Predict the kind of assistance needed for future sessions.

You will meet with the Writing Center Director twice during the semester to discuss your work and iron out any difficulties, and at the end of the semester, you will turn in your Journal and an Exit Form for use in ongoing research designed to examine and improve the evolving Writing Fellows Program.

As a probationary Writing Fellow, you will initially be paid at Level 3, with each 30-minute client session comprising one unit. First year Writing Fellows may not log more than twelve units per week. With a semester's worth of experience, the satisfactory completion of your Log, and a good evaluation from your students, your Faculty Mentor, and the Writing Center Director, you will be eligible for an increase to the Level 4 pay rate.

While your work in the Program will be tremendously valuable to the instructor and students with whom you collaborate, there will be many benefits to you personally, monetary as well as intrinsic. To begin with, you will be compensated at an hourly rate notably higher than the majority of work-study positions on campus, and you will have the opportunity to earn increases based on experience and merit. But equally important, you will have the satisfaction of assisting other students as they struggle to become better writers, which in turn will foster improvements in your own writing. Finally, you will gain valuable work experience that closely parallels many graduate assistantships, you will become skilled at working in a collaborative learning network, and you will play an important part in fostering innovation on campus.