For Instructors

Yes, please do! If you’d like to hang around longer than a few minutes, please reach out ahead of time, so we can formally welcome your students.

You’re welcome to require appointments for your students. However, to ensure we have enough available staff/hours to accommodate entire classes, we ask that you let us know if you plan to require more than one meeting per student. It’s also helpful if you share any relevant documents (e.g., assignment sheets, applicable course policies) with our director, so she can train consultants on supporting your assignment specifically.

After every required appointment, you should receive an e-mail from the Writing Studio account with appointment information (student name, date, length of meeting) and a short summary. If you need this confirmation but have not received it, just e-mail us directly and we’ll share our records.

We have very limited availability for classroom workshops, but you’re welcome to reach out directly to our director with your request.

If you attended a workshop sponsored by our office prior to 2025 and would like access to materials from that workshop, reach out and we can send you a link to our workshop archive.

No. If you know you’ll be unable to teach your course meetings, you’ll want to arrange coverage with your department colleagues. You can also reach out to the Dean of Faculty Development’s office to facilitate coverage.

We do not hire or place course-embedded consultants or TAs. However, if you know there’s a Writing Studio consultant with specific experience with your discipline, writing course, and/or assignments, feel free to recommend that consultant to your students. (We are also happy to recommend specific consultants to your students depending on student/course need.)

It’s important for our consultants’ professional development that they work with different types of assignments and classes, so we do not limit their availability to one instructor, class, or department.

Possibly! Reach out to our director to discuss your vision.

Not in any official capacity. The Writing Studio is not here to identify AI-generated papers. We’re also not here to inform instructors of AI use or penalize (or be part of penalties for) students who choose to use AI as part of their writing processes. We exist as a judgment- and evaluation-free space for writers to deepen their writing practices and build their confidence. By making the work of writing more visible, we hope students will come to see writing as a useful, approachable technology for their intellectual, emotional, and communal growth. For more information on our stance on generative AI, please read our general FAQ.

There are different ways to encourage a student to visit us:

The first is to verbally encourage or require them to visit. You might walk them over to our space or e-mail them with a link to our main page or consultation scheduling site.

You can also submit a Writing Studio referral through Navigate, the college’s advising appointment platform. All referrals go to our director’s inbox. Upon receiving the referral, she will contact the student directly to schedule a meeting. Once our director meets with each referred student once, she closes the referral with a brief note about the meeting.

After the initial intake meeting, the Writing Studio director will determine next steps for the student. Some students do incredibly well working regularly with their peers in the Studio and others may benefit from continued one-on-one meetings with the Writing Studio director or other professional staff.

Yes! Although the bulk of our sessions center on writerly practices, reading and writing are “interanimating” (as one of our favorite literacy scholars puts it). For that reason, we are happy to spend some time working with Studio visitors on developing different annotation or note-taking practices and approaches to reading. Because we have likely not read all the texts folks are being assigned and we’re not course-specific tutors, we can’t explain course readings or quiz students as part of our consultations. However, we can offer suggestions about different approaches to reading, including setting reading goals, incorporating reflective or application check-ins, scheduling reading sprints, etc.

Yes. Our director regularly meets with faculty and professional staff to discuss their writing projects. You can make an appointment by e-mailing her here.

Yes, that’s a great use of our expertise. Let us know if there’s a specific disciplinary perspective or type of feedback you’re looking for and we’ll help arrange a meeting with a suitable consultant.

This happens sometimes. Writing Studio consultants are students, not professors, which means they’re not content experts and (like all human beings) sometimes they get things wrong. Each consultation is an opportunity for our consultants to try out different frameworks and strategies. They’re also actively developing their own pedagogical and philosophical perspectives as part of their work. Thank you for helping their learning by supporting the Studio despite occasional missteps.

Feel free to contact our director directly with a generous summary of the error/interaction, and she’ll incorporate any corrections or alternative perspectives into training for all the consultants.

We depend on faculty nominations and recommendations to hire our incredible student staff. If you have a student who you think would excel as a Writing Studio consultant, please let us know. You can e-mail our director directly with the student’s name and/or share Writing Studio’s consultant application with the student. We’re always happy to answer prospective consultants’ questions about the work

Yes, but we have limited hours. During these periods, the Writing Studio is primarily staffed by our director, who, like most other Berea faculty and staff members, takes vacation and attends to her professional development during the summer months.