Tisha Turk directs the Writing, Reading, and Speaking Center at Grinnell College, where she teaches students from all years and majors in individual sessions, prepares students to work as Writing Mentors, leads the Writing Center's professional instructors, and consults with faculty across campus about how best to assign and respond to writing in their classes. Prior to joining Grinnell, she was Writing Center Director and Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Morris, Minnesota's public liberal arts college.

She is available for external review of writing centers and writing programs, especially at small liberal arts colleges, for faculty development workshops on responding to student writing, and for research development professional workshops on using lessons from writing pedagogy to improve proposal reviews.

Teaching

In the classroom and in writing center sessions, Tisha approaches writing and learning as social and collaborative processes. At Grinnell, her Teaching & Tutoring Writing course provides both an overview of composition studies debates and practical experience for students preparing to serve as Writing Mentors. She has also taught courses about academic writing, literacies, fan studies, gender & sexuality studies, narrative theory, the history of the novel in English, and The Lord of the Rings.

Research

Tisha's current research focuses on writing center work, especially peer tutor training and the experiences of professional tutors. She is contemplating, and occasionally even working on, a book about what makes writing difficult. She has also written about labor in participatory media fandom, interdisciplinarity in fan studies, and the processes of vidding and vidwatching, including the role of music in vidders' creative practices.

Advocacy

From 2009 ro 2023, Tisha worked with the Organization for Transformative Works to petition for Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions granting fan vidders and other creators of noncommercial remix videos the right to break copy protection on media files. In 2010, the OTW won the right to rip DVDs. In 2012, that exemption was expanded to include digital downloads; in 2015, it was further expanded to include Blu-Ray. The exemption was renewed in 2018 and 2021.