Writing Programs Worldwide - Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places, 2012a

O’Sullivan and Cleary
SUSTAINABILITY OF THE REGIONAL WRITING CENTRE
Another responsibility of the Writing Consultants, in addition to developing
student writing, was to assist with the development of an academic
plan for the continued development of the Writing Centre. The most important
aspect of this plan was the sustainability of the Writing Centre in
the post-SIF (Strategic Initiative Fund) period. Throughout the SIF-funded
period, the aim of the Centre was to ensure the development of initiatives
that would be valued so greatly that the institutions would not want to do
without them. However, as the SIF project neared an end in June 2009,
the possibility of further SIF funding to sustain the Shannon Consortium
Regional Writing Centre diminished as the economic climate weakened.
The focus for future funding turned toward the individual institutions for
sustainability. UL contributed matching SIF funding to sustain the Regional
Writing Centre at the university for a further year, until June 2010.
The efforts of the Centre staff in that year were to ensure that the funding
for the Writing Centre would come from core budget. Embedding Writing
Centre activity in core curricula, it was advised, was the means to ensuring
sustainability. In addition to continuing the initiatives outlined above, the
Centre was involved in the design and development of further modules to
ensure its presence in the core activities of the university; for instance, the
development of modules entitled Thesis Writing, Advanced Technical Communication
for Engineers, and Educational Guidance have been developed
in conjunction with the MA programme in English Language Teaching,
the MEng in Mechanical Aeronautical Engineering and the pre-university
Access programme respectively. It was hoped that these modules, alongside
ever-increasing intervention within disciplinary modules, would be enough
to ensure our sustainability in the university.
Efforts to ensure the sustainability of the Writing Centre have resulted in the
Centre growing quite rapidly and in many diverse directions. Such diversity ensured
the visibility of the Centre in its infancy and built goodwill amongst faculty
and staff. However, with limited resources, such diversity and rapid growth
would be difficult to maintain. Following the external evaluation of the Writing
Centre in July 2008, 1 carried out by Professor. Terry Myers Zawacki, former
Writing Center Director and currently Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum
(WAC) Program at George Mason University, it was recommended
that the scope of activities and initiatives the Centre had developed in the SIFfunded
period be narrowed in order to ensure the sustainability of the Centre
and to grow the Centre in the two areas central to its core mission, namely to
assist students with their writing, through one-on-one and group support, as a
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