Writing @ Bates Mission Statement

Writing @ Bates fosters collaborations within the Bates community to empower student writers to fully participate in academic, professional, and civic communities of knowledge. We support faculty as writers and as mentors of students as writers, mindful of disciplinary and interdisciplinary ways of writing and knowing. We support students in their life-long development as writers, with respect for cognitive diversity and multilingualism. Committed to the belief that writing engages the power of our differences, we endorse it as an intellectual and cognitive endeavor as well as an embodied and multimodal practice.  We believe in the power of writing to effect change in the world and promote the use of writing, speaking, and argumentation as tools for social engagement. Writing @ Bates honors the long-standing culture of writing across the curriculum at Bates College by facilitating the teaching of writing, and the use of writing as a tool for learning.

Through consultations, workshops, and other programs, Writing at Bates seeks to:

  • Provide stewardship for the writing-attentive curriculum, ensuring that all faculty have the appropriate tools, resources, and materials to teach writing.
  • Facilitate access to research about writing pedagogies and local implementation of best practices for the teaching of writing.
  • Partner with faculty and students to engage in the hard work of writing with the awareness that diverse audiences, changing technologies, and emerging knowledge make learning to write a lifelong process.
  • Train and mentor the students who work in the Student Writing & Language Center to provide outstanding peer tutoring support, engaging them as partners in the teaching of writing.
  • Create conversations and dialogue across difference with respect for diverse ways of knowing, writing, and speaking that exist both in the academy and beyond.