Staff at the Kansas University Writing Center spent some time visiting with a guest last week who hoped to soak in some information on the operation so she could operate a similar center at a university in Iraq.

Elizabeth Sansom, who teaches at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani in the Kurdish northern region of the country, came to KU at the invitation of her friend, Martha Jerrim, who is the assistant director of the KU Writing Center.

The two met while teaching English at Istanbul Bilgi University, where English was supposed to be spoken, but classes often slid by in Turkish, Jerrim said.

Sansom said that, despite the “American” name, the United States has nothing to do with the university, which is privately operated. The “American” name is common in Iraq and is a nod to the American style of education, which the university (and many like it in the region) seeks to emulate, Sansom said.

Courses are conducted in English, she said, and are taught in a manner similar to that in the U.S. The university offers degrees in business, information technology and engineering — an area of great need in Iraq, she said. An environmental science degree is also in the works, she said.

While at KU, Sansom, who has never operated a writing center before, said she picked up a great deal of information, including tips on training tutors, staffing levels and what kinds of hours of operation work best.

“In writing centers, our goal is to make better writers,” Jerrim said. “We do that by creating conversation between writers.”

KU’s tutors don’t proofread papers and send them back to students, though many students might rather they did, Jerrim said. The free service for students on the fourth floor of Anschutz Library instead has a tutor read a paper and then give feedback. A tutor might, for example, explain what subject-verb disagreement errors are, give an example and encourage students to fix the errors they find.

The challenge in Iraq becomes even greater because the tutors usually don’t speak English as their first language either, Sansom said, but added that the cooperative process usually helps everyone.

“Writers always need to bounce things off of somebody,” Jerrim said.