From an unsettled, ambivalent middle between discourses of generative AI integration and refusal, we offer a critical-ethical stance for AI-engaged writing assignments. We apply a critical thinking framework to these assignments, assert critical AI literacy as a kind of critical thinking, and discuss how critical thinking and critical AI literacy can facilitate ethical discernment about generative AI use. This unsettled, critical-ethical stance positions scholars in our field to support context-sensitive pedagogical responses to generative AI across first-year writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing centers, and beyond.

In gaming, cheat codes change how players engage a system by inviting exploration and reducing the fear of failure. Drawing on writing center pedagogy, this article proposes a similar framework for navigating generative AI in writing instruction and positions play as a method for developing critical AI literacy. Writing centers have long served as spaces where students engage collaboratively with new technologies and construct meaning through dialogue. This article extends that tradition by positioning writing center pedagogy as a framework for helping students examine AI’s ethical implications through treating it as a rhetorical situation to be unpacked, which demands principled, human-centered engagement rooted in values such as collaborative exploration. By weaving together writing center praxis and game-informed pedagogy, this article contributes to ongoing conversations in writing studies about how to integrate AI in ways that support critical thinking and ethical reflection. It demonstrates how playful, classroom-tested activities can animate discussions of bias and representation while helping students build rhetorical discernment through experience. Ultimately, the article argues that ethical literacy must be practiced through relational, iterative work. As writing classrooms become one of the few remaining spaces where students encounter generative AI with support and critical context, writing instructors have a vital opportunity to help students learn to write with, against, and around powerful technologies.

In our peer writing tutor/consultant alumni research project, participants indicate that writing center work is primarily focused on negotiating relationships. We identify two primary orientations participants had to negotiating relationships: “removing roadblocks” and “building bridges.” We discuss the potential for the bridge-building orientation to promote an inclusive culture of writing across campus.

I propose spatial affordances as a tool for assessing pedagogical writing spaces such as writing centers. I outline a heuristic I used to evaluate the opportunities and limitations of two spaces and emphasize its adaptability to other learning spaces. Spatial affordances are useful because they underscore how place/space/location structures and facilitates writing practice.

This paper tells the story of theedubba, the Mesopotamian scribal school. First, theedubba’s pedagogy demonstrates that the first formalized center for teaching writing was more akin to the modern writing center than to the composition classroom. Second, unlike many modern writing centers, theedubbawas multilingual. It is easy to look at the past and congratulate ourselves on how much better we’ve made the future, but theedubbahas something to teach us beyond the fact that it preceded the composition classroom. A circle has no beginning, and both the writing center and the writing classroom are part of one circle—equally important to the students they serve.

In this article, we argue for a coalitional orientation for writing programs and centers to advance language justice and make good on the promises delineated over fifty years ago in the Conference of College Composition and Communication’s publication of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Specifically, we argue that writing centers are ripe sites of teaching and learning—not merely auxiliary support for the composition classroom. Indeed, as we demonstrate, many writing centers actively push for language justice by, for example, publishing language diversity/inclusion statements and championing concrete, pedagogically just practices. Accordingly, we urge the discipline of composition and writing centers to work together as coalitional partners to advance language justice across the discipline and, ultimately, beyond.

Utilizing Sara Ahmed’s work on “brick walls,” this article discusses a qualitative study of stories shared by twenty-five women writing center directors and the possible insights gleaned if we choose to “notice through feminism,” (Ahmed) and advocate for change across writing studies.

This article reports on one university’s experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed “MonsterComp,” including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures, the main motivation behind this experiment was to enhance teacher training and support while still retaining the workshop environment and low student-to-instructor ratio of traditional composition sections. The course involves multiple stakeholders, including the WPA and graduate student program coordinators, graduate student instructors, and course-based coaches from our university's writing center. Assessment of student work, observations of the course, and surveys administered to stakeholders indicate that the course was successful in terms of teacher training and preserving student learning outcomes.

Reviewed are: Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in American Lives John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca S. Nowacek, and Bryan Trabold, eds. Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography Eli Goldblatt PHD (Po H# on Dope) to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life Elaine Richardson Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp

Reviewed are: From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 David Fleming Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post–Civil Rights Era Steve Lamos Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave Pegeen Reichert Powell Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe

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Institutional ethnography seeks to uncover how things happen—how institutional discourse compels and shapes practice(s) and how norms of practice speak to, for, and overindividuals. The Faculty and Staff Standpoints project is shaped by this methodology, as it explores writing center staff and faculty relationships to their work.

Reviewed are: The Idea of a Writing Laboratory, Neal Lerner Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL, Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegal, and Linda Harklau, editors The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations, Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort

Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls “the democratic paradox” and insists is the essence of a “well-functioning democracy” that supports pluralistic goals. The following article argues that a similar logic shapes writing center work and, therefore, any attempt to promote change must likewise embrace the democratic paradox as it manifests itself in the writing center: “the writing center paradox.”

I examine my involvement with writing centers as an example of how we can look at the choices we’ve made within our areas of expertise to see why they attract us. In my case, the flexible, collaborative, individualized, non-evaluative, experimental, non-hierarchical, student-centered nature of writing centers is an excellent fit. An earlier version of this article was delivered as the Exemplar’s Address at the Fifty-first Annual CCCC in April 2000.

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Elizabeth H. Boquet, "Our Little Secret": A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-Open Admissions, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 50, No. 3, A Usable Past: CCC at 50: Part 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 463-482

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Contents: C. Murphy, J. Law, Introduction: Landmark Essays on Writing Centers (1994). Part I:Historical Perspectives. R.H. Moore, The Writing Clinic and the Writing Laboratory (1950). L. Kelly, One-on-One, Iowa City Style: Fifty Years of Individualized Instruction in Writing (1980). M. Harris, What's Up and What's In: Trends and Traditions in Writing Centers (1990). P. Carino, What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Our Metaphors: A Cultural Critique of Clinic, Lab and Center (1992). G. Olson, E. Ashton-Jones, Writing Center Directors: The Search for Professional Status (1984). J. Simpson, What Lies Ahead for Writing Centers: Position Statement on Professional Concerns (1985). J. Summerfield, Writing Centers: A Long View (1988). Part II:Theoretical Foundations. S.M. North, The Idea of a Writing Center (1984). K.A. Bruffee, Peer Tutoring and the Conversation of Mankind (1984). L. Ede, Writing as a Social Process: A Theoretical Foundation for Writing Centers? (1989). A. Lunsford, Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center (1991). C. Murphy, Writing Centers in Context: Responding to Current Educational Theory (1991). A.M. Gillam, Writing Center Ecology: A Bakhtinian Perspective (1991). M. Cooper, Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers (1994). Part III:Writing Center Praxis. J. Simpson, S. Braye, B. Boquet, War, Peace, and Writing Center Administration. D. Healy, A Defense of Dualism: The Writing Center and the Classroom (1993). R. Wallace, The Writing Center's Role in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program: Theory and Practice (1989). R. Leahy, Writing Centers and Writing-for-Learning (1989). H. Kail, J. Trimbur, The Politics of Peer Tutoring (1987). A. DiPardo, Whispers of Coming and Going: Lessons From Fannie (1992). M. Woolbright, The Politics of Tutoring: Feminism Within the Patriarchy (1992).

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Muriel Harris, Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Oct., 1992), pp. 369-383

Richards on Rhetoric, Ann E. Berthoff W. Ross Winterowd Balancing Acts: Essays on the Teaching of Writing in Honor of William F. Irmscher , Virginia A. Chappell, Mary Louise Buley-Meissner, and Chris Anderson Sam Watson A Sense of Audience in Written Communication, Gesa Kirsch and Duane H. Roen Chris M. Anson Beyond Communication: Reading Comprehension and Criticism, Deanne Bogdan and Stanley B. Straw Sandra Stotsky The Writing Center: New Directions, Ray Wallace and Jeanne Simpson Muriel Harris Writer’s Craft, Teacher’s Art: Teaching What We Know, Mimi Schwartz Wendy Bishop Teaching Advanced Composition: Why and How, Katherine H. Adams and John L. Adams Richard Jenseth Textbooks in Focus: Creative Writing: Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy, Joseph M. Moxley Released into Language,Wendy Bishop Writing Poems, Robert Wallace What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter The College Handbook of Creative Writing, Robert DeMaria Chuck Guilford Textbooks in Focus: Technical WritingTechnical Writing: A Reader-Centered Approach, Paul V. Anderson Designing Technical Reports: Writing for Audiencesin Organizations, J. C. Mathes and Dwight W. StevensonTechnical Writing and Professional Communication, Leslie A. Olsen and Thomas N. Huckin Technical Writing: A Practical Approach, William S. Pfeiffer Technical Writing: Principles,Strategies, and Readings, Diana C.Reep Design of Business Communications: The Process and the Product, Elizabeth Tebeaux Carolyn R. Miller

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