October 9, 2024 Update: You can now visit the Peer Learning Commons website at bates.edu/plc.

Bates has long provided comprehensive and innovative peer education and peer tutoring. In 2021, after some staff departures, we began an initiative to re-imagine our academic support programs and structures with a goal of improving what we do to better meet the ever changing needs of our students. As we move toward academic year 2023-24, with the Kessler Scholar Program and the Schuler Access Initiative fully in place, we know that achieving this goal is even more important. Over the last two years, we have been examining some of the best programs in the nation to determine how we can improve Bates’ already robust model of student academic support. Working with the excellent colleagues in the unit, we are excited to announce a reorganization, redesign, and expansion of our student academic support programs.

Reorganization of Student Academic Support and Student Writing Support Resources and Programs

Academic support services and programs for students are currently divided into 3 areas: the Academic Resource Commons (ARC), the Mathematics & Statistics Workshop (MSW), and the Writing and Language Center (WLC). On August 31, 2023—Arrival Day for the Class of 2027—these resources will re-open as 2 Centers: the Student Academic Support Center and the Student Writing and Language Center.

The Student Academic Support Center will combine the programming presently provided by the MSW and ARC, namely peer tutoring in math, statistics, computational studies, the quantitative social sciences, and the natural and physical sciences. The Student Writing and Language Center will expand the work of the WLC by providing writing and language support to students with a particular focus on course-attached peer support for the First-Year Seminar, support for the W2, and support for the thesis/capstone (W3). Furthermore, this reorganization enables expansion of the staff for both Centers, so that there will now be a dedicated staff member in the Student Writing and Language Center focused on translingual and multilingual education and English-language learning and a dedicated staff member in the Student Academic Support Center focused on learning skills and learning strategies development.

New Leadership

We are excited to announce new leaders of these 2 Centers. Bridget Fullerton will be the Director of Student Writing. In this role, she will lead the design of programs and resources offered by the Student Writing and Language Center. In addition, starting this coming Fall 2023, Bridget will teach a new half-credit Fall course, EXDS 201, in which all FYS Writing-Course-Attached Tutors will be enrolled and which will enable those tutors to learn about writing pedagogy and writing center theory, and therefore be better able to partner with first-year students and support FYS instructors. She will also teach a second course – in the Short Term – that will also focus on writing pedagogy, which will be available to tutors whose roles include supporting students who come to the Center to develop their writing for courses throughout the curriculum, including but not limited to the W2 and W3. Finally, Bridget will work with a new Assistant Director of Student Writing, who will focus on supporting English-language learning, linguistic diversities, and trans-lingual education. The search for this position is ongoing.

Grace Coulombe will be the Director of Student Academic Support, and in this role, she will lead the reorganization of peer tutoring in mathematics, statistics, quantitative social sciences, computational studies, and the natural and physical sciences. In addition, Grace will offer one mathematics course per year as she has in previous years and will develop a new half-credit EXDS course in tutor pedagogy that we expect to be available in the 2024-25 academic year.

We are also happy to announce that Andee Alford will take the role of Associate Director of Student Academic Support and will focus on math, statistics, and digital and computational studies support. Eric Dyer has accepted the position of Assistant Director of Student Academic Support; he will be the liaison of student academic support to the Kessler Scholars Program as well as develop learning skills and learning strategies programs and resources. A search for a second Assistant Director of Student Academic Support is ongoing, and that position will focus on supporting peer tutoring in the area of the sciences and quantitative social sciences.

We want to acknowledge the hard work that Grace, Bridget, and Andee took on in the Summer of 2021 to each take on two-year Acting positions—Grace as Acting Director of ARC, Bridget as Acting Director of the WLC and the Writing@Bates Program, and Andee as Acting Assistant Director of ARC. Without their partnership, that ongoing management of these programs as well as the visioning for this reorganization would not have been possible. Thank you to each of them for their professionalism and care for Bates students.

An Exciting Relocation

The 2 new Centers will be co-located on the Ground Level of Ladd Library, adjacent to the Office of Accessible Education and Student Support and across from the redesigned Chase Hall. We expect that this Ground Level area of Ladd will be named the Peer Learning Commons.

This relocation offers some exciting opportunities. First, it creates an accessible and organized single location for student academic support resources – Accessible Education, Student Academic Support, and Student Writing and Language Support. Second, the Peer Learning Commons has a newly-accessible exterior door that opens onto the area near Chase and Carnegie. As many Student Support Advisors will be located in the new Chase Hall, this proximity enables more partnership between these services and SSAs. Third, we believe the integration of the 2 new Centers into a single shared Peer Learning Commons—which occupies the same square footage of the current 3 Centers (ARC, MSW, and WLC)—will provide exciting new opportunities to continue and expand upon Bates’s innovative community approach to peer tutoring. Work to redesign the Ground Level into the Peer Learning Commons will take place over the Summer, and we expect that the Peer Learning Commons will open on Arrival Day, August 31, 2023.

Improved Faculty Support for Writing and Writing Pedagogy

This reorganization of student writing and student academic support has also enabled a systematic re-examination of how the Dean of the Faculty can improve resources for faculty writing and faculty writing pedagogy. While Bridget Fullerton, in her role as Director of Student Writing, will continue to partner with Steve Engel in his role as Associate Dean of Faculty, to support the First-Year Seminar (which functions as the W1) as well as to work with tutors who support writing across the curriculum, this reorganization also enables more dedicated writing pedagogy resources for faculty to be available through the Center for Inclusive Teaching and Learning. Lindsey Hamilton, Director of CITL, is currently searching for an Assistant Director, whose portfolio will include supporting faculty in their role as teachers of writing, and we expect that individual to start on or near August 1. We aim for there to be close alignment between the writing pedagogy support provided by the CITL for faculty and the student-facing work—both in the education of peer tutors and the support for faculty in developing their FYS courses—that Bridget will oversee in her new role.

Again, we are excited about the prospects of this reorganization and redesign of our student academic support and student writing support resources and programs. The services provided by this new structure should be more easily understood by students, staff, and faculty. We look forward to inviting faculty and staff into the new Peer Learning Commons to explore the new Student Academic Support Center and the new Student Writing and Language Center in the coming academic year. We are tentatively scheduling an open house of the new Commons at Ladd’s Ground Level for Friday, September 8, 2023, which is the Friday of First-Year/First-Weekend programming of the First-Year Experience.

Thank you for all the work that you do to support our students.

Malcolm Hill, Dean of the Faculty and Vice President of Academic Affairs
Steve Engel, Professor of Politics and Associate Dean of Faculty