| dc.description.abstract | Since its inception in 1994, the University of the Western Cape’s Writing Centre has been on
the margins, viewed as an add-on to central learning and teaching activities at the university
(Archer and Richards 2011, Clarence 2011). In this article, we use the constructs of place, space,
and power to explore the decentering of feedback on students’ writing from the face-to-face,
physical location of the Centre to the formative assessment space in a module. We reflect on
the Centre’s engagement with a formative online feedback intervention conducted by a lecturer
within a Bachelor of Education Honours course. Writing centre tutors participated in providing
formative feedback on nested, scaffolded tasks leading to a long essay, using the feedback
function of the Turnitin platform. The space of engagement with students moved from the faceto-face, physical writing centre location to the online space. We found that the development of
the academic writing and feedback literacies of writing tutors, students, and the lecturer were
developed through sustained and responsive online and face-to-face communities of praxis. In
this process, there was a partial decentering and recentering of the role of the Centre, enabled
by technology and the integration of the development of academic literacies within the course
curriculum. | en_US |
