Marian University Writing Center

The Marian University Writing Center is an active hub within the College of Arts and Sciences and serves the Marian University campus and greater Indianapolis community through in-person and online individual consultations, workshops, events, and collaborative instruction.

• The center’s commitment to social justice and human dignity informs our practices, and the center maintains a vibrant public presence across Indianapolis through service engagement and community-integrated tutorials. All people, regardless of university affiliation, are encouraged to utilize the center’s literacy and writing support services.

• We utilize a philosophy of asset-based thinking and view writing and literacy as actions of doing, ways of constructing and exploring personal and social identities, and means of making knowledge. We believe literacy practices—the underlying meaning-making mechanism of individual and social expression—are a universal right. We understand meaningful language practices to be found within a wide variety of codes, dialogues, and modes of expression.

• Tutorials and support services are based on sound teaching and learning principles, like dialogic inquiry and situated collaborative learning, discourse theory, funds of knowledge, socio-psycholinguist theories of acquisition, and critical pedagogies. The center's primary purpose is to provide a framework for intellectual growth and critical inquiry by using literacy practices as a means of cultivating agency, advocacy, and ownership. 

• We support and encourage the scholarship and personal growth of our student peer tutors and instructional staff. Peer tutors and instructors present their work at peer-reviewed conferences and are active participants in national conversations about writing center theory, peer tutoring, and engaged and experiential learning. Staff are also encouraged to become actively involved in community-based and collaborative learning.

• The Marian University Writing Center operates under a shared governance model. A Student Leadership Board composed of upper-level undergraduate students is central to many administrative actions and decisions, like hiring  peer tutors, campus-community outreach, culture-building, record keeping, and training.

• The Marian University Writing Center is an active member of the East Central Writing Centers Association and the International Writing Centers Association.

The Marian University Writing Center supports writers and advocates for the personal and social literacy practices of writing. We view writing as a way of knowing, a way of thinking, and a way of doing. Grounded within the Franciscan Values, the Marian University Writing Center provides a framework for intellectual growth, critical inquiry, and social imagination through the use of rhetorical investigation and collaborative learning practices.

Anti-Racism Statement

In its “Position Statement on Racism, Anti-Immigration, and Linguistic Intolerance,” the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) states its direct and unwavering opposition to “the rising tide of implicit and explicit racism” recognized by the organization’s members.

“Within our writing centers and our classrooms, we are made aware daily of the toll exacted by institutional racism on students and staff of color,” the statement continues. It demonstrates the widely dispersed and highly personal impact of this problem. Staff and faculty who work with language—but far more the people marginalized by our social and linguistic system—grapple daily with the fallout of this systemic intolerance and how to contest it.

• The Marian University Writing Center stands firmly with the IWCA and its position on anti-racism in public engagement, policy, pedagogy and practice, as well as Marian University’s statement on “radical hospitality.” We believe that the Franciscan values of peace and justice, responsible stewardship, dignity of the individual, and reconciliation require this of us, at a minimum, both for writing center employees and the community with whom we work.
• The Writing Center will continue its mission to open its doors to all who visit, free of charge or judgement. We will actively contest the many implicit and explicit manifestations of racism within our culture, political system, language, grammar, and more.

Current Student Leadership Board