Final Project, Fall 2007

The Bosporus Project, An Overview:

bosporus bridge

Unlike a normal "research paper," this project allows you to make a real difference in the field and, maybe, in our world. For several years, Turkish and Greek academics have reached across the very real geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic barriers separating their nations. Thus the European Writing Center Association began a series of conferences. I first traveled to Turkey in 2005, and I met several faculty participating in this bridge-building.

Dr. Dilek Tokay of Bogazici University in Istanbul is the consummate bridge-builder and cosmopolitan. She loves the Bosporus as place and metaphor. In 2006 I attended the EWCA conference and compared notes with Lebanese, Greek, Turkish, and German colleagues about writing centers. After a session about the architecture of Writing Centers, I wanted to continue sharing ideas across space and cultures. One night, from the deck of a boat giving a dinner-cruise of the Bosporus, I looked at the giant bridges that connect two continents. Then the idea came to me.

Bosporus Project Home (opens in new tab or window)

Your Roles:

When you join the project, you may edit or create your own pages. Your goal will be to select a worthwhile topic that will interest an international audience of writing-center professionals (peer tutors are rare in Turkey; I do not yet know about other nations).

The topic for the project-page can take any form. Of course, the language of instruction is English at the schools where we are working. Thus ESL topics will be useful. I've continued my own work on the physical spaces we use for tutoring.

Prospectus :

Due In class, Monday Nov. 5: There will be a one-letter penalty on the final project grade for a late or incomplete prospectus.

In the prospectus, briefly discuss in at least one double-spaced page what area of writing-center work you think will be valuable to our international audience. I plan to share your prospectuses with Dr. Nuray Grove, who will guest-teach class the week I'm in Greece and Turkey. Also include an annotated bibliography of at least six possible sources for the topic, three from outside of the class readings. Each annotation should sum up, in a sentence or two, the source's focus and findings, if one exists.

Requirements for the full project:

Brevity is the soul of wit, and we often forget this lesson in academia. So the project's length is tricky to prescribe. Look at my page on redoing the current Center's appearance to guide you on what a typical project might entail.

Your audience will be professional tutors in Europe. You won't be able to teach this audience much about our theory, but perhaps you can help by making some of the heuristics we use in our center accessible in short documents. Think of how Ryan and Zimmerelli do this in The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors. I strongly encourage you, when possible, to take a few photographs of your work to make the pages more interesting. Send them to me in jpg format.

How to begin:

You will want to begin with a few Turkish University sites; you will also want to consult the following resources in print or on-line:

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