Keene State College's fact book for 2022–23 notes that 40 percent of the student body at my institution in 2020 identified as the first generation in their family to attend college, yet it's rare that a student discloses this identity in the context of our Center for Research and Writing. It's likely that, in my day-to-day work as the assistant director of the center, I work with first-generation college students every day, but because we don't ask students to disclose this demographic information on our appointment intake form, I rarely know for certain. On the one hand, the invisibility of this identity is surprising: in our writing center we learn a lot about students—they disclose all sorts of things to tutors in their sessions, from the mundane (how much they like or dislike an assignment or their major) to the personal (their work history, hometown, mental health challenges, or linguistic identity). And yet, students’ first-generation status often remains unknown. Such status does not physically or linguistically “mark” a student in the same way as many other identity markers (e.g., race, gender, or socioeconomic status)—first-gen students can, at least sometimes, decide who knows their status. On the other hand, the fact that students don't regularly disclose this information to me, in particular, is probably no surprise at all.As a continuing-gen student myself (my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all graduated from college before I set foot on my undergraduate campus), I know that I speak and act in ways that mark me as an institutional insider and thus potentially, and very unfortunately, as someone who might unfairly judge first-gen students. (When I asked a few of our undergraduate peer tutors whether students ever disclosed their first-gen status during sessions, they reported that it did happen occasionally, most commonly after a good deal of rapport building or when the student was writing a personal narrative.) Beyond the barriers that my identities and positionality might present, however, I also wonder whether the writing center is a fraught space for disclosing a first-gen identity. Because writing centers are often—wrongly—conceived as sites of remediation, a first-generation student struggling with imposter syndrome might worry that accessing our services is an admission that they “don't belong” in our academic community. (Not true!) However, since we don't currently collect this kind of demographic information from students who use our center's services, I can't say for certain that first-gen students are avoiding (or using) our services.This not knowing about our work with first-gen students, along with the intention to design services that are welcoming and supportive to this group, prompted me to read Beyond Fitting In. As a relative newcomer to the first-gen conversation, I wasn't fully ready for the sustained interrogation of term/identity first-generation that persists across the collection. (Silly me: I thought because it is a widely recognized identity category that it was also easy to define.) While the collection is divided into three sections, with only the first dedicated to unpacking the meaning of first-generation, almost every essay it contains addresses the problem of definition. One strength of this collection, then, is that it offers an opportunity to witness scholars actively grappling with meaning while also showing, as Anne Ruggles Gere asserts in her intro/preface, that “first-gen students are a real group” (ix). First-gen student, faculty, and administrative voices resonate throughout the collection, which features qualitative research on the lived experiences and perspectives of members of this group, as well as reflections from the contributors themselves, many of whom claim a first-gen identity.Because the collection resists a unified definition of the term, my conceptualization of first-gen accordioned as I read—expanding, contracting, and expanding again. For example, Christine Alfano, Megan Formato, Jennifer Johnson, and Ashley Newby's essay, “Research-Writing Pedagogy,” shares definitions of first-gen generated by students at Stanford who self-identified this way. Although one of these students had family who attended college, she viewed herself as first-gen because she was the first in her family to enroll at an elite institution: “First-gen is no longer just a first in your family to go to college but more first to reach a new height of educational level” (256). While students can certainly be empowered by fitting this label to their personal experiences, other essays, including Beth Towle's “Finding First-Generation Students through an Intersectional Approach to Institutional and Programmatic Data,” make clear that overly broad institutionally imposed definitions may harm the most vulnerable students by “eras[ing] their unique cultural backgrounds” and making them “even less visible by institutional structures” (101).Towle self-identified as a “poor” undergraduate student but shared the institutionally imposed first-generation label with students of middle-class backgrounds, causing her to feel unseen. In turn, Towle argues, labels like “working-class, low-income, and lower socioeconomic status can serve us better than first-generation when we are talking about specific student needs and cultural experiences” (111). In the case of the Stanford student, the first-gen label seems to have helped her recognize and even embrace her particular cultural circumstances and positionality within her institution. In Towle's case, the first-gen label exacerbated feelings of otherness.While authors in the first section of this collection, “Defining First- Generation Students,” interrogate “first-gen” as an identity category, the second and third sections address questions of literacy education for first-generation students, beginning with a consideration of pedagogies at traditional sites of literacy instruction in part 2 (i.e., the first-year writing classroom, the writing center) and concluding, in part 3, with a series of essays exploring where and how literacy instruction is happening across campus—including within Bridge programs, STEM-intensive programs, and co-curricular and work activities.Part 2, “First-Generation Students in the First Year and Beyond,” includes Shurli Makmillen's essay “First Generation Students at a Historically Black University Talk about ‘Proper English,’ ” which interrogates literacy norms at a historically Black university through the voices of students whose parents immigrated to the United States. One reflects, “You know how recently there have been so many incidents where people or the police are getting mad at people for speaking a different language in public. So that resonates within me because it's almost as if that could happen to me, very easily. Or that could happen to my mom or my dad. It resonates very personally” (201). This example, among many in the collection, impressed upon me that literacy education can be a site of advocacy and empowerment for first-gen students, while at the same time literacies can mark and unfairly disadvantage these students both within and outside the classroom.One thing I appreciate about this collection is that it does not just name the curriculum as a site of advocacy but often provides illustrative examples of how that work might unfold within a classroom. My favorite example of this kind is offered in part 1, in Jenny Rice's “Integrated Regionalism and First-Generation Students: A Place-Conscious Heuristic.” This essay is a tightly woven and sometimes lyrical advocation for and illustration of the generative potential of teaching place-based literacies, focused on regional pedagogies of “teachers in the mountains” of Appalachia. These pedagogies emerge from a specific place, time, and culture, drawing together literacies of home and literacies of school.In part 3, “Writing Contexts for First-Generation Students, Teachers, and Administrators,” Courtney Adams Wooten and Jacob Babb explore how self-identified first-gen writing program administrators (WPAs) see their work as influenced by their identity and educational histories. This essay gently challenges the notion that advocacy efforts are best made at the system level, as many of the WPA participants reflected that they more often pursued “individual rather than programmatic interventions when working with first-generation students perhaps because it is in these interactions that they feel a real difference can be made” (311). It's heartening to read that one-to-one mentorship, of the kind that happens in writing centers every day, can meaningfully impact first-gen students. However, Adams Wooten and Babb's essay also underscores the challenge that WPAs like me have “in wielding their limited programmatic power to make significant changes” (312). And, for this reason, I would argue that this collection might be especially useful reading for those in administrative roles with the power to make curricular decisions or to influence institutional policy; the challenges that face first-gen students are both individual and systemic.Indeed, one of the collection's unifying themes is a call for systemic change and what the collection's editor, Kelly Ritter, calls “concrete, collective action” (2; see, more specifically, essays by Moreland on dual enrollment programs, Towle on institutional and programmatic data, and DeGenaro and MacDonald on institutional messaging). Elaine P. Maimon's afterword focuses mainly on reshaping PhD programs but makes this broader call to action: “New majority students often listen to demeaning and unhelpful internal voices that tell them they are not fit for college because they are too old, too poor, or too different. We must shift the emphasis from what's wrong with students to what's not right with our institutions” (318).Finally, upon closing the book, I found myself lingering over the definitional questions raised within its pages. As many of the essays demonstrate, first-gen status can be empowering when it is defined and claimed by individual students. As William DeGenaro and Michael T. MacDonald argue, “Ultimately, agency and transformation come not from being a first-gen student but rather from claiming an identity as one—there is power in naming oneself” (24). At the same time, institutions have used “first-gen” as a data point and often as a means of counting students served and tracking risk; as Christina Saidy notes in her essay on paired retention and first-year writing courses, “Often, the scholarship and university edicts regarding at-risk students, especially first-gen students, focus on the deficits of these students and the challenges they face in entering higher education. These deficits are tied to measurable data—test scores, high school grades, socioeconomic status, first-gen status—and are measured by attrition rates” (146). It's tempting to ask, after reading Beyond Fitting In, if we can we have one (self-identification) without the other (institutional identification and tracking).Answers to this question may be beyond my pay grade. There are many, many reasons to classify and count students, including those of equity and inclusion. And, in fact, before I started writing this review, I consulted our institutional statistics and noted, with real shock, that between 2012 and 2021 our institution retained less than 60 percent of first-gen students through their fourth year. Those numbers are abysmal and obviously demand a response—and the essays in this collection offer paths forward, ways to support first-gen students and demonstrate their belonging, for institutions willing to invest in this group.What does this discussion mean for my writing center space? I want first-gen students to know they are welcome, that they belong, but I don't want them to take our efforts at inclusion as a prejudgment of their abilities. Come to the writing center, first-gen students! We know you're out there and likely struggling! However, I am not convinced, after reading this collection, that this work should begin with tracking or data collection. Working to track first-gen students’ engagement with our center would require that we settle on a definition that very likely wouldn't accurately or adequately capture the experiences of these students. Instead, I want to continue to work to make our space one that validates the experiences and literacies of all the students who step through our door, to lift up and celebrate the accomplishments of first-gen students—and tutors—as a way to demonstrate their belonging in our space. These efforts necessitate the kind of one-on-one work, as described by Adams Wooten and Babb's WPA participants, that is the heart of writing center practice. And for me personally, it means continuing to do listening work that can fuel change, the kind of listening Christie Toth describes in her contribution to the collection, which requires paying special attention to “perspectives that challenge my assumptions about what we are building together” (174).

AbstractThis article examines the value undergraduate research adds to writing centers in their role as anchor institutions within English and across college and university campuses. It focuses on a pilot project conducted by a team of mentored peer tutors who researched the accessibility of writing at Marquette University. Their successes and failures show how, beyond research findings, undergraduate research experience can be consequential for practitioners and their communities.

Heather Brook Adams is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Greensboro. Her research investigates discourses of gender, reproduction, and shame as well as decolonial/intersectional methodologies. Adams's work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, and Women's Studies in Communication. Her monograph, Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction, is forthcoming from University of South Carolina Press. Adams has been granted funds for implementing undergraduate research while teaching at the University of Alaska, Anchorage as well as at UNC Greensboro. Currently she teaches courses on contemporary rhetoric, rhetorics of health and medicine, and advocacy and argumentation.Brian Cooper Ballentine is senior vice president for strategy and senior adviser to the president at Rutgers University. His research focuses on humanistic notions of value within the context of the modern universities, student debt, and the pressures of economic valuation and market forces. He has served as chief of staff to the president at Rutgers, as the director of the university's office for undergraduate research, and as research director at a global consulting firm. He holds a PhD in comparative literature, with a focus on classical reception in the English Renaissance, from Brown University.Laura L. Behling is provost at University of Puget Sound. She edited the Resource Handbook for Academic Deans (2014) and Reading, Writing, and Research: Undergraduate Students as Scholars in Literary Studies (2010). Publications in literary studies include Gross Anatomies: Fictions of the Physical in American Literature (2008); Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (2005); and The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (2001). She taught at Palacky University, Czech Republic, as a Fulbright scholar and served as a Fulbright specialist at the American University of Bulgaria.Hassan Belhiah is associate professor of English and linguistics at Mohammed V University in Rabat. Previously, he held the positions of chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mohammed V University, associate professor of English and education studies at Alhosn University in Abu Dhabi, assistant professor at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, and lecturer/teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His publications have appeared in Classroom Discourse, Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Language Policy, and Applied Linguistics. He has coedited a book entitled English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education (2020).Andrea Bresee is a recent graduate of Utah State University with a degree in English teaching and a composite in writing. While at Utah State University, Andrea served as an undergraduate teaching fellow for three upper-level English classes, as well as an undergraduate researcher for three separate studies. She was named the English Department Undergraduate Researcher of the Year in 2019 and has presented at three undergraduate research symposiums and conferences. Andrea now teaches seventh-grade English at Space Center Intermediate School in League City, Texas.Kendra Calhoun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines the intersections of language, race, and power in face-to-face and social-media contexts. Her dissertation analyzes diversity discourse in US higher education and its effects on graduate students of color. She served as a research mentor and instructor to undergraduate students in the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program, and she recently published on Black-centered introductory linguistics curriculum in Language.Anne Charity Hudley's research and publications address the relationship between English language variation and K–16 educational practices and policies. She is the coauthor of three books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017), Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools (2011), and We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom (2013). She is the author or coauthor of over thirty additional articles and book chapters. She has worked with K–12 educators at both public and independent schools throughout the country. Charity Hudley is a member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).Dominic DelliCarpini is the Naylor Endowed professor of writing studies and dean of the Center for Community Engagement at York College of Pennsylvania, where he also served thirteen years as writing program administrator and five years as chief academic officer. He founded and administers the annual Naylor Workshop on Undergraduate Research and is coeditor of the Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020) as well as other articles on this topic. DelliCarpini served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, secretary of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and as a member of the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Mariah Dozé is a 2020 graduate of Emory University, where she received a BA in African American studies and sociology. While at Emory, she served as a research assistant studying racial disparities in capital punishment and a writing tutor, among many other positions. Dozé’s research exploring the intersection between rhetorical studies and social justice was awarded publication in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Young Scholars in Writing. For this accomplishment, she was recognized as an Emory Undergraduate Research Program featured researcher. She is now a Georgetown Law 1L and intends to specialize in human rights law.Cecily A. Duffie is a PhD student in English literature at Howard University. She graduated cum laude from the University of Florida with a BA in African American studies with a concentration in journalism. Her master's thesis was on cycles of postmodernism in the work of contemporary Black women writers, particularly Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison. She has been selected as an UC/HBCU Initiative scholar, NeMLA panelist, and Howard University Research Week panelist and presenter. She has also been published by the Miami Herald. She writes Tudor-era historical fiction and southern Black gothic fiction.Jeremy Edwards is a PhD candidate in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines higher-education practices and policies that impact college access and student development. His dissertation explores the relationships between Black students and the UC system in thinking about levels of support and advocacy for Black students on recruitment, retention, and postgraduation career plans. He was a co-instructor for the UCSB Engaging Humanities Initiative, was a 2019 graduate fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and served as a coordinator and mentor of the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program.Jenn Fishman, associate professor of English and codirector of the Ott Memorial Writing Center at Marquette University, is a widely published, award-winning scholar and teacher whose current work addresses community writing and listening, longitudinal writing research, and undergraduate research in writing studies. She has edited special issues of CCC Online, Peitho, and Community Literacy Journal, as well as The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020), and contributed national professional leadership through various roles, including inaugural cochair of the CCCC Committee on Undergraduate Research and president of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.Lauren Fitzgerald is professor of English and director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center at Yeshiva University where she recently chaired the Yeshiva College English Department. With Melissa Ianetta, she edited Writing Center Journal (2008–13) and its first undergraduate research issue (2012) and wrote The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research (2015). She has also published on writing center undergraduate research in Writing Center Journal (2014) and the edited collection How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research with Undergraduates (2014).Hannah Franz is the Program Associate for Graduate Advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Her scholarship focuses on equity and inclusion in high-impact practices, such as undergraduate research and writing-intensive courses. She is coauthor of The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017) and has published in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Collie Fulford is professor of English at North Carolina Central University. Her recent work on writing program development, writing across the curriculum, and the scholarship of teaching and learning has appeared in Pedagogy, Composition Studies, Across the Disciplines, and Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education.John S. Garrison is professor of English at Grinnell College, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. He is coeditor of three essay collections: Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (2015), Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature (2020), and Making Milton (forthcoming). His books include Shakespeare at Peace (2018), Shakespeare and the Afterlife (2019), and Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare (2020).Ian Golding is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash. He is the editor of Queen City Review, an international journal of undergraduate research. His research addresses student agency, archival practices, and visual media.Kay Halasek is professor of English and director of the Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. Halasek's research spans a range of topics within rhetoric and writing studies: feminist historiography, teaching writing at scale, collaborative learning, writing program administration, portfolio assessment, and basic writing. She is the author of A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies (1999), which received the CCCC Outstanding Book award. As director of the Drake Institute, she leads enterprise initiatives in instructional support for faculty and graduate students and research on and policy development related to teaching and learning.Abigail Harrison graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) in 2020. Her area of focus is English with minors in rhetoric and public advocacy and communication studies. While at UNCG, she participated in hands-on undergraduate research highlighting rhetoric in both historical and contemporary media. Her scholarship on rhetorical theory within university media centers can be found in the Communication Center Journal.Rachel Herzl-Betz (she/her) is the Writing Center Director and assistant professor of English at Nevada State College. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began her writing center career at Carleton College. Her research focuses on intersections between disability, writing center studies, and educational access. Most recently, she has pursued projects centered on equity in Writing Center recruitment and the impact of “access negotiation moments” for disabled writing instructors. In 2017, her first novel, Hold (2016), received the Tofte/Wright Children's Literature Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.Katherine Hovland is an undergraduate student at Marquette University, double-majoring in writing-intensive English and data science. She was a member of a research team in the Ott Memorial Writing Center that studied the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Kristine Johnson is associate professor of English at Calvin University, where she directs the university rhetoric program and teaches courses in linguistics, composition pedagogy, and first-year writing. Her work has been published in College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Rhetoric Review, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education. An associate editor of Pedagogy since 2019, her research interests include writing program administration, teacher preparation, and undergraduate research.Rachael Scarborough King is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018) and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (2020). She is also principal investigator for the Ballitore Project, a project combining archival research and digital analysis at UCSB Library's Special Research Collections.Joyce Kinkead is Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University. In 2012, she was named a Fellow of the Council on Undergraduate Research. As associate vice president for research, overseeing undergraduate research, she instituted University Undergraduate Research Fellows, the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research, and Research on Capitol Hill. Dr. Kinkead is a scholar of writing studies and undergraduate research; her titles on undergraduate research include the following: Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods Undergraduate Research Offices and Programs (2016), Advancing Undergraduate Research: Marketing, Communications, and Fundraising (2010), Undergraduate Research in English Studies (2010), and Valuing and Supporting Undergraduate Research (2003).Danielle Knox is a Black creative writer who graduated from Howard University with a bachelor's degree in English. A prospective graduate student, her research interests include gender and sexuality across the African diaspora while noting the ways Black queer communities define and express themselves outside of a white Western context. She also desires to help challenge systemic inequalities, promote funding for public libraries, and support all forms of Black literature and art.Addison Koneval (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University. Her work in rhetoric, literacy, and composition primarily focuses on culturally sustaining pedagogies. Most recently, she has been working with grammar education in first-year writing settings.Susan Lang (she/her) is director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing and professor of English at The Ohio State University. Lang has extensive experience in teaching online and hybrid courses in technical communication at both undergraduate and graduate levels. She and colleagues at Texas Tech also developed Raider Writer, program-management software for large writing programs. Her research examines aspects of writing program administration, writing analytics, and technical communication. Her work has been published in College English, College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, and Technical Communication, among others. She is the recipient of the 2016 Kenneth Bruffee Award for Best Article in Writing Program Administration and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Writing Analytics.Bishop Lawton is a PhD student in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include Pan-African Intellectual History, the history of precolonial African civilizations, and twentiethth-century Black movements. In further pursuit of his interests, in June 2020, Bishop became a writer for blackpast.org, the largest online encyclopedia of African American history.Ali Leonhard is an undergraduate at Marquette University, double-majoring in forensic science and philosophy. She was a part of the Ott Memorial Writing Center's research team that looked at the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Hayden McConnell is an Elon University alumna. She graduated with a major in professional writing and rhetoric as part of the English Honor Society. Her research addresses the lack of video content that addresses the topic of rhetoric in an engaging manner while also using successful rhetorical strategies. Her work has many intentions, but the overarching goal is to begin providing more visually stimulating content that discusses rhetoric and its many branches for both new and current members of the field.John Henry Merritt is a senior English major and Mellon Mays fellow at Howard University. His research interests include African American fiction, postmodernism, literary theory, and the digital humanities. Currently, he is interested in using Twitter data to develop reader-response based analyses of blockbuster movies. His senior thesis examines the function of the underground as a setting throughout African American fiction. In his free time he likes to write code and study languages. After graduation, he hopes to pursue a PhD in English literature and get a puppy.deandre miles-hercules (they/them), MA, is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are originally from Prince George's County, Maryland, and obtained a BA in linguistics with minors in anthropology and African American studies from Emory University. Their research focuses on language as a nexus for the performance of race, gender, and sexuality in the domains of sociality and power, specifically as it pertains to Black, femme, queer, and trans communities. deandre currently holds a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.Jessie L. Moore is director of the Center for Engaged Learning and professor of professional writing and rhetoric in the Department of English at Elon University. She is the coeditor of three books, including Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (2018). Her recent research examines transfer of writing knowledge and practices, multi-institutional research and collaborative inquiry, the writing lives of university students, and high-impact pedagogies. She served as Secretary of the CCCC, founded the CCCC Undergraduate Researcher Poster Session, and currently cochairs the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Jamaal Muwwakkil (he/him), MA, is a PhD candidate in the department of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jamaal is originally from Compton, California, and transferred from Los Angeles City College to University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BA in linguistics. Jamaal's research focuses on political discourse, African American language and culture, and linguistic practices in educational and university contexts.Angela Myers is a professional writing and rhetoric alumna of Elon University. She was an honors fellow and a Lumen scholar, a two-year, competitive grant award earned by only fifteen Elon students each year. Her research addresses the rhetorical strategies of sexual violence prevention courses for undergraduate students.Sunaina Randhawa is a Marquette University alumna. She graduated in 2020 with a BA in English literature and minors in writing-intensive English, anthropology, and digital media. Along with a team of researchers from Marquette's Ott Memorial Writing Center, she worked in conjunction with the Office of Disability Services at Marquette. With their help, she and her team determined both the ways in which they could make writing more and the ways in which the writing center could help that Michael associate professor of English at the University of North as codirector of first-year composition and senior faculty fellow with Center for and He The Writing of (2018) and coedited Perspectives on and Writing He is currently and with undergraduate students that are on curriculum and is a of 2020 graduate of Grinnell College, with a major in English. He is a Undergraduate a research project on of by contemporary of the of the of the he has presented at and participated in a research at the University of in He to pursue a PhD in has a PhD in literary and studies from Mellon University, where she teaches courses on literature, and gender studies. Her current research explores can writing in the humanities. Her work on literature examines the ways in which and discourse the of gender as a modern of has a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Texas University. She Emory University as director of the Writing She has also been associate professor at College, associate professor and chair of English and language at University, and associate professor and chair of communication studies at King University. Her research in the intersections between literature and rhetoric as well as in teaching and She is a book on the in the She also coedited the Journal of the on Perspectives on Learning for is an undergraduate student in and in English and at Nevada State College. As an undergraduate writing and his work and code is professor of English and dean of the College of Arts at University. He taught undergraduate writing and graduate in the Rhetoric and Composition His scholarship focuses on writing program and the teaching of writing.

In this book, published in the CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series, Mara Holt provides a historical overview of collaborative pedagogy in US writing classrooms. In fact, Holt argues that collaborative writing pedagogy reflects and is shaped by its historical context. The book defines collaborative learning broadly, as “a pedagogy that organizes students to work together in groups” (1). Although she focuses on collaborative writing, Holt casts a wide net to capture writing classroom practices that she sees as applications of John Dewey's philosophy of American pragmatism. Holt argues that the American pragmatism espoused by Dewey is enacted in many collaborative writing practices, allowing those pedagogies to transform classrooms into training grounds for participatory democracy.Holt, who is professor and director of composition at Ohio University, intentionally operates both as a historian and as a writing studies scholar. The book has roots in Holt's (1988) history-based dissertation, “Collaborative Learning from 1911–1986,” submitted over thirty years ago, and in what the composition theorist James Berlin (1987) calls the significance of history in writing studies. Holt identifies a social-constructivist perspective in Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism that aligns with her argument that collaborative learning practices are shaped by their temporal context. Pragmatism, Holt says, offers general principles to ground education: 1) a focus on praxis; 2) knowledge creation as social, and collaboration as potentially “authoritative” (6); 3) the importance of critical thinking; and 4) the classroom as a place to model democracy and prepare students to participate in it. While Holt admits that Dewey probably never used the term collaborative (12), she implies that his principles are enacted in the most democratic collaborative learning practices.After a chapter of introduction, the chapters of Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice each provide case studies of collaborative learning in US writing classrooms at a transformational moment in US political or pedagogical history. In the introduction, Holt asserts her underlying thesis that a historical overview of collaborative writing pedagogy is needed to help new generations of writing teachers understand that they are part of a tradition of using collaborative writing in the classroom for democratic pedagogical purposes. Holt also argues that a historical perspective is necessary for educators to fully understand and assess collaborative writing practices. Chapters 2 and 3 outline collaborative learning in writing classrooms during the Progressive Era and the Cold War; chapter 4 considers the impacts of the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. Chapters 5 through 7 consider moments of pedagogical shift—feminist theory, the creation of writing centers, and computer-mediated collaboration. The book concludes with a chapter in which Holt reflects on the future of collaborative learning as it intersects with three current movements: globalization, posthumanism, and Black Lives Matter.In some ways, Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice is a contemporary complement to Anne Ruggles Gere's (1987) Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Writing at a time when social-constructivism was coming into its own, Gere outlines a theory to explain how writing groups, the collaborative writing pedagogy that she focuses on, are evidence of writing as a socially constructed activity. Holt's book, on the other hand, takes as accepted theory that writing is socially constructed and links that social interaction to Dewey's pragmatism. As a result, Gere and Holt share the notion that collaborative writing is affected by historical context. Like Gere, Holt includes historical background for the pedagogies she discusses, but Gere begins her history in the colonial era, starting at an earlier moment in US history than Holt, who extends the time line of collaborative writing into the twenty-first century.In addition to being a thesis-based history book, Holt's Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice is part memoir. Holt weaves over forty years of personal experience as a writing studies scholar into her narrative. In the preface, Holt notes that her “first formal interaction with collaborative learning was at Kenneth Bruffee's Brooklyn College Institute in Peer Tutor Training and Collaborative Learning in 1980” (ix). Through her affiliation with the Brooklyn Institute she met Peter Elbow, Stanley Fish, Carol Stanger, John Trimbur, Harvey Kail, and Peter Hawkes. She read texts by Lev Vygotsky, Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, John Dewey, and Paulo Freire. Her experiences at the Bruffee institute led Holt to pursue a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where she met James Berlin, who was a visiting professor from the University of Cincinnati. Holt's dissertation director was Lester Faigley. Holt also acknowledges Victor Villanueva as a major influence. The array of scholars that Holt was taught by, wrote with, and thought with shows the depth of her connection to the foundation of the field. Her connection and experience in the field lends credibility both to her authority to survey the history of collaborative learning within the field and to select case studies not just with an eye to proving her point, but because they were some of the most important developments of collaborative learning in the field at that moment.Sometimes, however, these personal details can distract from her argument; they add names and dates to case studies already crowded with such information. Some personal details may also distance Holt from readers when she recalls memories in a way that requires insider knowledge. For example, she references the iteration of the “CUNY Graduate School on 42nd Street,” which she attended as the “pre-Giuliani pornographic version,” which assumes knowledge of both the pre- and post-Giuliani versions of the building (5). The text also includes other unnecessary details. For example, Holt notes that 1930s progressivism affected how first-year writing programs were administered; that's interesting history about first-year writing, but it says little about collaborative learning.Overall, Holt effectively argues that collaborative learning in writing classrooms was shaped by its historical context. For example, during the labor movements and nascent socialism of the 1930s, pedagogies emerged that were based on collective, student-centered practices. Likewise, during the rise of Nazism and Fascism in World War II, when international collectivist movements were viewed as oppressive, the use of collaborative pedagogies declined. In addition, Holt demonstrates that collaborative writing practices decades apart can mimic each other, proving her point that a historical knowledge of collaborative writing might prevent reinvention. For example, under the “Oregon Plan” of the 1950s, students critiqued each other's writing before revising it to be turned in to the teacher. These examples of peer critique foreshadowed Bruffee's peer revision of the 1970s, but Holt presents no causal link between the two pedagogies. In fact, Holt stresses that, while collaborative learning practices of one era may seem similar to those of another, their purposes will vary because their proponents are responding to different historical contexts and may be rejecting rather than amplifying democratic values. In the case above, Holt says that the Oregon Plan arose in a 1950s context in which students interacted with each other's texts suspiciously, whereas in Bruffee's context, students were encouraged to depend on classmates for educational gain.In chapter 6, Holt argues that writing centers, mostly through peer tutoring programs, have been key to the development of collaborative writing pedagogy. She also outlines current historical situations to which writing centers have responded in recent decades, including increasing numbers of underprepared and international students, and the shift from alpha text to multimodal composition. In focusing on the internationalization of writing centers, Holt also notes that American English is no longer the assumed standard in US writing centers and that institutions around the world have created writing centers of their own.In chapter 6 Holt traces the advent of computer-mediated collaboration in writing pedagogy by outlining how writing centers responded to the introduction of computers. In chapter 7 she extends her analysis of computer-mediated collaboration into the twenty-first century by acknowledging that much collaborative learning in writing classrooms is now mediated by technology. The tech-mediated case studies Holt considers in chapter 7 are the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment at the University of Texas in the 1980s and the more recent use of wikis in writing instruction. While Holt asserts that such tech-mediated pedagogies are “solidly connected to Deweyan/Bruffeean theory and practice” (109), her analysis overlooks the ideology of the infrastructure that supports tech-mediated collaboration—the technology itself. As a result, it may be that an updated version of a Deweyan/Bruffeean framework is needed to analyze collaborative learning in an increasingly tech-mediated classroom. As Holt persuasively shows, collaborative pedagogies in writing classrooms often embody democratic ideals, so a framework based on egalitarian principles is appropriate for their analysis, but perhaps that framework needs to have the capacity to analyze the infrastructure mediating the collaboration as well as the collaboration itself. Such a theoretical framework might be technofeminism, a framework concerned with issues of equity and access, but which also accounts for the ideology of the technology (Bates, Macarthy, and Warren-Riley 2018).Some readers may balk at the notion of examining collaborative writing pedagogies through any sort of theoretical framework at all. Indeed, educators from many ideological persuasions have used collaborative writing to help students improve their writing and thinking. Rather, what Holt implies is that collaborative writing almost by definition embodies elements of Dewey's democratic goals for education and that to practice collaborative writing is to enact Deweyism. Holt makes a strong case that collaborative writing pedagogies reflect the full context of their historical moment, and that many of them reflect Dewey's ideas of social reform; however, her survey also demonstrates that in an age of technology-mediated classrooms, a framework that incorporates the perspectives of colleagues who study technology through a lens of equity may be a way to productively analyze collaborative writing pedagogies in the future.

While resilience often defines writing center survival strategies, resistance offers a familiar stance in relation to dominant classroom and institutional practices. However, both resilience and resistance are indexed to a perceived “normal,” and violations of normativity have consequences not always imagined in individual tutoring sessions or theoretical discussions.

Though enrollment of learning-disability (LD) students is on the rise in higher education, instructors are often underprepared to effectively support them. The composition pedagogy community needs more discussion of strategies to help LD students in the writing classroom. Scholarship on writing tutoring suggests that one such strategy is to exhibit active and intentional empathy. Tutoring pedagogy has long advocated approaching students with compassion through strategies such as empathic listening and interrogative, coparticipatory dialogue. To best serve all of our students, particularly those with learning disabilities or attention deficit disorders or who are on the autism spectrum, composition instructors should look to tutoring pedagogy’s model of a nonhierarchical, interrogatory, listening-based approach to working with students. These strategies begin with empathy for our students.

In this article, an English education professor, a university writing center administrator, and a recent graduate of an undergraduate English education program discuss the role peer tutoring might play in enhancing the education of preservice teachers of writing. The authors argue that by providing additional, authentic field experiences which reflect constructivist, student-centered philosophies often adhered to in English education programs, university peer tutoring can provide undergraduate students with authentic experience in learning collaboratively, developing rapport with students, and conducting student-centered, one-to-one writing conferences.