Community Building
Community can be difficult to come by on a commuter campus. In our mission statement, we emphasize the significance of our center as a “collaborative space.” We strive to embody this principle through events designed to encourage connections among City Tech community members around their writing.
These gatherings allow space to bond over the work it takes to nurture and grow one's ideas, to share the excitement when discussing the potential of one’s work, and to celebrate the power and joy of sharing one’s voice. Below, we provide short vignettes of the four key community events we held last year.
STUDENT WRITING SHOWCASE
December 6th, 2023
At the start of the 2023-2024 academic year, our center primarily attracted traffic from faculty referrals and returning students. In the weeks leading up to midterms, we found ourselves reaching 85% weekly utilization (mainly empty slots were no-shows) and turning more students away than ever before.
With limited resources, we sought innovative ways to reach a broader student audience, even if it meant providing shorter, less intensive support.
INTERNATIONAL MOTHER LANGUAGE DAY
February 21, 2024
The Writing Center hosted its second annual International Mother Language Day celebration, this time in partnership with the African American Studies and Humanities departments. The United Nations-designated day highlights the role that multilingual education plays in improving learning outcomes, supporting intergenerational connection, and preserving culture. This day bears particular relevance for our student body, who, at last official count, speak 70 different native languages - from Afrikaans to Nepali to Yoruba (AIRE data, 2023).
With over 80 attendees, this year’s International Mother Language Day celebration was our most well-attended event to date. During the open mic, students, faculty, and staff were invited to share their mother language with the audience. Our readings were diverse in language as well as in genre – they included poetry, memoir, nursery rhyme, short story, speech, and even a mini-language lesson, engaging the audience in call-and-response. Student response to this event was overwhelmingly positive: not only were there numerous new visits to the Center, but beginning not even a week after the event, students were already requesting information about when the next reading would be.
SHUT UP & WRITE
April 11, 2024
Public space on an urban campus can be challenging to find; working from home can also feel stressful when sharing space with family members. During the Spring ‘24 semester, we continued to work on ways to encourage students on our commuter campus to view the Writing Center as a community resource – a place where students could feel comfortable coming to work.
Coinciding with midterm week, the goal of our “Shut Up and Write” evening was to give students a quiet, inviting, and engaged place to work on their writing assignments. Writing Center tutors were present and available for any questions students had while they worked, and students were provided with tea, clementines, and other brain-food snacks.
At the end of the event, one student remarked that they wouldn’t have been able to write their thesis if they hadn’t come to the event.
CREATIVE WRITING LAUNCH & SHOWCASE
May 8, 2024
The end of the academic year brought much to celebrate, including winding down another year of hard work and the launch of the English department’s new Creative Writing minor.
Over 70 students joined us to celebrate these milestones — and, more importantly, 17 students signed up to share their powerful poetry, fiction, and nonfiction with our campus community.
Faculty speakers also shared their published writing, adding to the room’s joyful atmosphere.
The energy of the crowd was palpable, with so many students eager to read that we couldn’t fit everyone into our two-hour event.