A partnership that began with a visiting scholar’s year in IUP’s Jones White Writing Center has helped build a new writing center in Turkey.
Dana Lynn Driscoll, professor of writing and founding director of IUP’s Center for Scholarly Communication, traveled to Istanbul, Turkey, in September with IUP alumnus Omar Yacoub (PhD ’23, Composition and Applied Linguistics). They were there to help launch the new writing center at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University (IZU). Driscoll and Yacoub each gave an invited keynote address, trained IZU’s writing center tutors in writing center theory and pedagogy, and met with IZU administrators and students. The visit was part of IZU’s Writing Center Workshop: “Evaluating Project-Based Practices and Writing Guides.”
Omar Yacoub (West Virginia University, IUP PhD ’23); Osman Özdemir (IZU associate professor and visiting scholar at IUP, 2022–23; and Dana Driscoll, professor of Writing, IUP)
The visit grew out of a partnership that began at IUP. Osman Özdemir, an associate professor at IZU, spent 2022–23 at IUP as a visiting scholar hosted by the Department of English. During his two semesters at IUP, he worked in the Jones White Writing Center, where he learned tutoring and writing center operations firsthand. He also co-authored research with Driscoll on how writing center tutoring affects international students learning English.
After he returned to Turkey, Özdemir received a grant from TÜBİTAK, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye, to establish a writing center at IZU. The grant came through TÜBİTAK’s 3005 program for innovative research in the social sciences and humanities. Özdemir then invited Driscoll and Yacoub to help launch the center.
Yacoub earned his PhD in composition and applied linguistics at IUP in 2023 and served as the assistant director of the Jones White Writing Center. He is now an assistant professor at West Virginia University, where he leads the Eberly Writing Studio (writing center).
Driscoll’s keynote was titled “What Is Expertise, and Can AI Provide It? The Case for Writing Centers in the Age of AI.” It drew on a century of research on expertise and on her longitudinal study of writing development. She argued that real mastery develops through sustained struggle, expert feedback, and time. When generative AI can produce expert-looking text in minutes, students risk handing off the difficult learning moments that build expertise. Writing centers, she said, give students the one-on-one, human support they need to keep learning and to learn to use AI well.
Yacoub’s keynote was titled “Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines in the Age of GenAI: The Evolving Role of Writing Centers in Supporting Learning and Communication.” He drew on his work at WVU to show how writing centers serve writers across fields, from chemistry and nursing to computer science and engineering. His central point was that a center that belongs to the whole university can keep learning visible at a time when a polished text is no longer proof of learning.
Both talks were delivered with Turkish translation. In the afternoon, IZU faculty held roundtable sessions to evaluate the university’s new writing guides.
University officials from IZU University with Dana Driscoll and Omar Yacoub
On the second day, Driscoll and Yacoub led hands-on training for the center’s tutors. In Driscoll’s workshop, “Writing Center Tutoring: Building Rapport and Relationships with Writers,” tutors looked at the difference between acting as a tutor and acting as a collaborator. They explored collaboration with hands-on activities, worked through realistic scenarios, and practiced opening and closing sessions and asking productive questions.
Yacoub’s workshop, “STEM/Medical Writing Tutoring,” prepared tutors to work with technical and scientific writers without being experts in the content. Tutors learned a Purpose–Map–Test–Return method for reading unfamiliar papers as an “intelligent outside reader.” They also practiced responding to figures and specialized terms and learned to recognize when a question should go to a disciplinary expert.
IZU Writing Center Tutors, Driscoll, Özdemir, and Yacoub
Driscoll said, “Watching a colleague who learned writing center work at IUP go on to build a center in his own country, and sharing that moment with one of our own graduates who also runs his writing center, is exactly what we hope for from our programs.
“IZU now joins a worldwide community of writing centers, and IUP is proud to have been part of its beginning,” Driscoll said.
Driscoll has consulted on new writing centers around the world, including at North South University in Bangladesh and VSB–Technical University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic. Her book Becoming an Expert Writer: A Holistic Guide to Writing for Publication was published in 2026.