LLC Students Elaine MacDougall and James Wright, both from Cohort 22, have just been awarded the 2020 Jodi Crandall Fellowship for Research in Language, Literacy, and Culture.

They proposed an interdisciplinary collaborative project for peer writing consultant training to address global and local contexts for learning, encourage peer writing consultants to critically reflect on their positions and identities in light of linguistic and cultural difference; consider multiple ways of knowing as professional writers-in-training; question their own and others’ assumptions about difference; and negotiate and problem-solve collaboratively across professions and identities.

Their project will include voices of writing center administrators and up to 20 peer writing consultants from various universities and high schools across the Baltimore area through the already established Baltimore Metro Writing Centers Association. Through this collaboration, they plan to develop a year-long, research-based training series for critically exploring these questions at the secondary, undergraduate, and graduate levels through critical reflective practice based in scholarship that encourages peer writing consultants “to engage reflectively [in writing], mapping what they understand” and “to explicate tacit knowledge” embedded in such wide-ranging “intersections of self, experience, and the world.” (Yancey, 2016)

Congratulations, James and Elaine!