Writing Center Leaders at Mississippi College Attend Nashville Conference

Daniel White, Nathanial Stickman, Hannah Fields and Lingshan Song are the MC Writing Center educators attending a conference in Nashville in February.

Four Mississippi College educators will travel to a Nashville conference to discuss international student learning on the Clinton campus and other topics.

The group will attend the 2015 Southeastern Writing Centers Association conference February 19-21.

English instructor Daniel White, Writing Center Assistant Director Lingshan Song and recent MC graduate Hannah Field, an undergraduate tutor, will discuss their collaborative international student learning project.

It’s designed to assist learning initiatives at Mississippi College which hosts more than 400 international students, a new university record. They represent two-dozen nations, with the largest numbers coming from China, Saudi Arabia and India.

At the Tennessee conference, Nathan Stickman, a graduate tutor at the Writing Center and adjunct instructor, will discuss the online tutoring plan he developed to strengthen the center.

Established in 1981, the Southeastern Writing Centers Association is designed to enhance the work of the group’s professionals in the region. It spans eight Southern states plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Mississippi College’s Writing Center at the Leland Speed Library remains quite a busy place for students and tutors year-round.

The MC Writing Center reported a total of 1,591 visits by students last fall. That’s a new record, and represents a 28 percent jump over the Fall 2013 semester numbers. Students returned to the Writing Center four times on average. Nearly 100 sessions were conducted online, new reports show.

The semester before Lingshan Song arrived as a tutor in 2008, the MC Writing Center reported 500 visits.

“We’re growing,” Song said. “The MC Writing Center is becoming one of the largest in the state.”

Students seeking academic help are not just staying for a few minutes and leaving. New reports show that 878 of the scheduled visits by Mississippi College students last fall each lasted for 60 minutes.

In addition to the Nashville meetings at Lipscomb University, the four MC educators recently made similar presentations at the Mississippi Writing Centers Association Conference in Oxford.

“This is all part of our initiative in the Writing Center to promote undergraduate and faculty-student research projects,” says Writing Center Director Steve Price, an English professor on the Clinton campus. “There are good things going on at the MC Writing Center.”

For more information on the MC Writing Center, contact Lingshan Song at 601-925-3268.