Writing Center Mission
The Siena Writing Center believes that writing, like life, is practice, and doing so alongside and in community with others makes the challenging parts more manageable and the exciting parts more gratifying. To support this practice, we believe everyone deserves a respectful, compassionate, and knowledgeable collaborator.
The heart of these relationships of practice is a person-centered approach through listening with curiosity and care. In this way, Writing Center staff affirm each individual’s dignity and their diverse, dynamic needs as they work toward mastering writing and other communication skills across the many communities of which they are a part.
We believe that caring conversation and engaging collaboration with a well-trained, specialized tutor allows folks to explore freely, discover their learning edge, and create time for reflection and improvisation. Therefore, Siena community members who use the Writing Center can expect to be invited to think, read, and engage critically and intentionally with their ideas and their work to better understand themselves as communicators. The Writing Center staff believes that leveraging diverse and unique experiences create opportunities for discovery and evolution in the ways we communicate with and relate to one another.
Writing Center Vision
As a long-standing support service on campus, the Writing Center aims to continue offering a wide array of options for students, faculty, administrators, and staff to develop, strengthen, and enhance their communication practices based on both historical offerings and emergent needs.
Through existing and future relationships across campus, the Writing Center will help identify current needs and work collaboratively with administration, faculty, staff, and students to create curriculum, programming, and events that position the Writing Center as an integral part of the Siena experience for all community members.
These collaborative opportunities provide avenues for the Writing Center to adapt and evolve both as a member of the Student Academic Success and Engagement (SASE) team and as a hub of scholarly inquiry and research. With continued support from the college, the Writing Center will be positioned to contribute to current practices and theories in a variety of academic disciplines through tutor-led initiatives and projects, ethnographic research, and collaborations with fellow faculty and administrators.