Image: Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

Writing Centre staff from the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the University of Cape Town (UCT) met on a Cape Town winter’s day on 25 June to share best practices and consider ways to enhance the support they offer to students.

As Munashe Mashabatu, a UWC writing consultant, observed, ‘Not even a powerful storm could dampen the energy of the insightful collaboration’.

The two writing centres identified that there are many similarities in the ways that each of them work. Both hold consultations with individual students or groups of students. These consultations focus on a draft of a student’s writing.

The writing centre consultant engages with the student while she or he is in the process of writing and has a discussion in which they assist the student to develop the piece of writing and coach them in academic writing practices. In addition, both centres receive requests from lecturers to run workshops for students on aspects of academic writing.

Mapula Maropola from the Directorate of Learning, Teaching and Student Success (DLTSS) at UWC. Image: Aditi Hunma

As writing centre staff, we discussed how each of our writing centres relate to other institutional structures and what impact this has on the work of the centre. We observed that the UCT Writing Centre is more integrated with other UCT learning and teaching structures, whereas the UWC Writing Centre is quite marginalised in the University. The lower take-up of the Writing Centre’s services at UWC could be related to this factor.

There was a lively discussion about the challenge that students’ widespread use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) presents for writing centres and how the two writing centres have been addressing this. Both universities are still in the process of finalising policies on AI. There are different types of uses of generative AI, including entering a prompt into ChatGPT to generate an assignment, using AI for editing a student’s writing and using AI to translate a student’s own writing into a more fluent or academic form. It is most problematic when undergraduate students use the assignment task as a prompt and ask ChatGPT to generate the whole assignment for them. This is because it circumvents the whole process of reading, thinking and ordering one’s thoughts. In this case, the student does not develop much understanding of the material and loses the opportunity of the assessment to develop their academic literacies.

Participants in the discussion noted the need to liaise with departments and lecturers about what their policies are with regards to AI, and their expectations from the Writing Centre. Students’ use of AI is relatively new and its affordances keep growing. Also, students develop innovative ways of hiding their use of AI. Writing centre consultants are at the coalface, encountering the ways in which various students from different disciplines use AI in their writing. They thus develop creative ways of engaging with students about AI in their writing, using the session as an authentic learning experience for the student.

Contrary to some opinions that AI reduces the need for writing centres, writing centres are faced with the responsibility to assist students in developing AI literacies in order to use AI appropriately and ethically while developing critical capacities.

Dr Aditi Hunma, a senior lecturer based in the Language Development Group in the Centre for Higher Education Development at UCT, emphasised the critical role of writing centres to assist students to develop their own “voice and critical thinking in the drafts that they produce alone or in collaboration with AI tools”.  UCT Writing Centre Consultant, Orrie Staschen, stressed that this is more important now than ever “with the growth in popularity of AI, along with the saturation of misinformation and fake news in the digital age”.

• The UWC Team included Dr Arona Dison, the Coordinator, Tasneem Ismail, the Administrator, Dr Phoene Oware, the Graduate Lecturing Assistant, and six of the postgraduate consultants, as well as Mapula Maropola from the Directorate of Learning, Teaching and Student Success (DLTSS). The UCT team consisted of Dr Aditi Hunma, Acting Coordinator, Kendi Osano, Administrator, Nicole Isaacs, Workshop Coordinator, as well as seven postgraduate consultants.