Strategic Plan for Meijer Center for Writing & Michigan Authors
Context For Planning
The Fred Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors is an open-door student service that provides composition support to all students, staff, and faculty at Grand Valley State University.
Mission
Through peer mentorship, the Fred Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors provides a safe space for analytical dialogue, wherein writers develop strategies and skills for building awareness of and confidence in, their own writing process.
Vision
We view Grand Valley as a community of writers, all with their own writing processes, purposes, and goals. The center should enable students, faculty, and staff to achieve their writing goals as they learn to participate in our campus community as well as in larger academic, professional, and global contexts.
Value Statement
The Fred Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors is founded on the principle that writing is a social act and that a writers peers whether undergraduate, graduate, or faculty/staff can, with proper training and support, provide a writer with valuable writing assistance. Therefore, we value:
1. Process
Just as Grand Valley strives for excellence, the Writing Center values time and space for writers to practice the writing process; we believe this perspective is essential to a writers confidence and personal success in writing. We train our writing consultants, therefore, with the skills and knowledge necessary to approach writing from a process-oriented mindset so as to pass that perspective on to other writers and fellow thinkers. Through this value, The Fred Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors hopes to be an instrumental resource for our clients to become more intentional writers.
2. Dignity
The Writing Center greatly values the dignity of all who enter our space, use our services, and/or work for our center. We aim to not only respect the dignity of others, but also promote and nurture the dignity that may yet be acknowledged in an individual. By valuing dignity, we hope to maintain the integrity of writers, their peers, and their sources of expert perspective (i.e. academic citations, formatting, and audience expectations). Our writing consultants, therefore, are trained to embody the liberal education components of dialogue and collaboration, which require empathy, constructive positive feedback, and respect toward the writer and their identified needs and goals. By aligning ourselves with this desired framework, it is essential that the Writing Center stay grounded in this value of dignity, wherein we become a part of a writers process of building confidence, ability, and identity.
3. Curiosity
The Fred Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors aims to create a safe environment for the free exchange of ideas. We ground much of our consulting work not only in theory, research, and the fields best practices, but also in curiosity, inquiry, and critical thinking. We ask that our consultants learn respectful strategies for supporting writers in their quest for new knowledge. We take on the responsibility to support writers in their acquisition of descriptive, declarative, and procedural knowledge; therefore, we promote active and engaged curiosity at all levels of the writing process for consultants and authors.
4. Inclusiveness
The Writing Center aligns itself with Grand Valley in valuing all identities, perspectives, and backgrounds and aims to create a safe and inclusive environment for everyone who enters. We employ students from multiple disciplines, language backgrounds, educational experiences, and personal cultures not only for the purposes of supporting the interdisciplinary nature of writing, but also to promote and grow an inclusive and diverse community of writers, thinkers, and members.
5. Community
In the same way that we aim for inclusiveness, the Writing Center actively promotes community in all aspects of our work community in an individualized consultation, community at our locations, community online, and collaborative communities on campus. At the university level, the Writing Center functions as a intellectual contact zone, where students can discuss, challenge, and respond to feedback from trained peer consultants. By creating a space where all writers are encouraged to engage with their peers, the Writing Center champions creating communities on local and global scales. One of the essential features to building community is empathy, which includes an attention to listening, judgment free consulting styles, adaptable strategies and practices, and awareness and acknowledgement of ones personal and subjective biases. Through empathy, the Fred Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors aims to build a healthy community full of independent, active thinkers with the drive to promote the love of writing beyond our physical spaces.
6. Empowerment
The Fred Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors considers power to be an instrumental feature in ones belief of their own capacity to approach, complete, and succeed in any writing project; therefore, the Writing Center values our role in the empowerment of emerging, practiced, or expert writers. Through our pedagogically sound consulting techniques, consultants provide writers with the time and space to celebrate success, identify concerns, develop helpful strategies, and grow a personalized voice and style so as to continue the writing process beyond the walls of the Writing Center. We make it our mission to be a supportive place and service for writers, who want or need to acknowledge and grow their own agency over any writing project or future writing goal.
7. Adaptability
Through our innovative collaborative efforts and our critical awareness of our clients needs, the Writing Center hopes to pin adaptability at the forefront of our mission and of our daily work. Not only do we orient every individual consultation toward each writers own specific needs and goals, we focus on adapting our training, practices, and services to the constant evolving qualities and identities of our clients. Additionally, we aim to adapt to changing technology needs, student expectations, and evolving university goals. The Writing Center offers multiple avenues of writing support to serve the campus community, which include face-to-face consultations, online consultations, group consultations, classroom support, electronic resources, and multiple locations at our various GVSU campuses.