University Writing Center

At Rhode Island College (RIC), Becky Caouette, Director of Writing, and Claudine Griggs, Writing Center Director, are invested in helping students become better writers. That’s our job, and our privilege. While we share this goal, we each work under markedly different institutional scaffolding. Perhaps nowhere was this difference more apparent than in our former writing placement testing process for RIC’s First Year Writing (FYW) courses, where all of the work was done by the writing center. In what follows, we talk about how the uneven work distribution provided the exigency to change our placement process, and how we turned to Directed Self-Placement (DSP) as a possible solution on two fronts: providing better placement procedures for our students and creating more egalitarian (and collaborative) working conditions between the writing center and the FYW Program.