by Rebecca Hurshman, Staff Writer
Walking into Asbury University’s Center for Academic Excellence (CAE) feels a little like walking into the future. The warm tan hues and solid pine chairs of the rest of Kinlaw Library are replaced by bright purple carpet and angular grey furniture. But the changes to the CAE over the past year have been more than cosmetic.
According to Asbury’s website, the CAE encompasses four free services designed to foster academic excellence: course tutoring, academic coaching, writing consulting and academic accessibility services. Each of these branches of the CAE was impacted by a significant donation from an Asbury alumnus last year. After the remodel took place over the summer of 2017, the space now includes two individual testing rooms, furniture designed for collaborative learning and more technology than ever.
“A nicer space with more technology… allows us to help even more people,” explained Pamela Downing, the Academic Accessibility Services coordinator. She said that new additions like a rapid scanner for scanning textbooks and reading software to aid students with low vision or dyslexia help students in the program become “more independent learners” and increase productivity of the program staff. The new testing center is also equipped with noise-canceling headphones and white noise machines to provide a quiet testing environment.
For writing consultants, the increase in space was a distinct benefit. “Our sessions can be…a little bit more private than they were,” said senior Faith Neece, a writing consultant. “[Before] students would get nervous if they were sitting near other people. [Now] if a student likes a certain area better… we can always accommodate what they prefer.”
Junior Leah Bowshier, who works as a writing consultant, course tutor and academic coach, added that the new space allows the CAE to offer more services concurrently: “We can run multiple appointments and even multiple different types of tutoring services all at once…which was something we would never have been able to do in the old space.” Both Spanish group tutoring and walk-in “write nights” happen every Monday and Thursday night.
According to CAE Director Corrie Merricks, the donation allowed her to develop better training for her student workers and support their independent projects. “We have space that makes that easier — we can sit in a circle and work on things together,” she said. One of these projects was the revision of Asbury’s remedial ENG 100 course, on which the writing consultant staff collaborated.
Merricks and three consultants—Neece, Bowshier and senior Sarah Browning—traveled to the Southeastern Writing Center Association annual conference in Richmond, Va., to present their ENG 100 course and process to other tutors, writing center directors and graduate students. In addition to presenting, Neece said, “It’ll be a good opportunity for us to learn from other centers.”
Merricks summed up the emotional and physical impact of the donation and renovation with one observation: “When they walk by, people feel like they want to come in and see what’s going on in here, and that’s exciting.”
Photos by Rebecca Hurshman