“Dedicated Drop-ins” as a Way of Addressing Some Writing Centre Challenges

Abstract

Writing centres need to be integrated into the writing community of their host institutions, but this can be difficult: often students view them as peripheral (Bowles 2019), see them as “fix-it” shops and/or see them as places where one simply “learns to write” (Cheatle & Bullerjahn, 2015; Simpson 2010), or do not perceive a connection between their services and students’ actual, current course work (Missakian, Olson, Black & Matuchniak, 2016). In this article I discuss the practice of offering and running “dedicated drop-ins,” course- and assignment-specific drop-in sessions for writing support, as one means of addressing several of the challenges that writing centres face in terms of making themselves visible and visibly useful members of their institutional community. Our experience shows that while these “dedicated drop-ins” are not in themselves a perfect solution, they can be a useful addition to writing centres’ toolkits.