I interviewed four current writing center tutors who self- identified as antiracist to answer the questions of: How do self-identified antiracist writing tutors at a university writing center define and practice antiracism? What factors limit these practices? After collection, I analyzed the data in three rounds, once inductively, and twice deductively, using a critical whiteness conceptual framework. Tutors suggested education on linguistic justice and code-switching, centering student voice, and disrupting power dynamics as key orientations in their self-identified antiracist practice. However, it was also found that tutors employed a White Educational Discourse throughout the interviews, often avoiding words and letting others off the hook, limiting the effectiveness of these orientations. Further, it was found that tutors often located antiracist practices in areas of the writing center ecosystem that were outside of their control, such as the purpose of the writing center. This study does not seek to criticize writing center tutors, but rather to provide insight into the effectiveness, opportunities, and limitations of antiracist praxis at writing centers. To conclude, I offer questions implicated in this study and directions for further research.

What do tutors think they teach in a given writing center session? What do the writers they work with claim they learned? This IRB-approved study looks at responses from 74 pairs of surveys completed by tutors and writers about what they taught and learned in particular writing center tutorials. Drawing on the distinctions variation theory makes between intended and lived objects of learning, this study analyzes the general response trends evident across these surveys by coordinating tutors’ and writers’ separate perceptions. The results suggest that writers identify learning as having taken place much more frequently and across a wider range of writing-related topics than tutors claim to have taught. While short-answer responses reveal occasional overlap between writer’s perceived learning and tutor’s intended teaching, the marked discrepancy between the two suggests that a teaching/learning causality does not accurately represent much of the instructive effort and outcome occurring through writing center tutorials. Knowing that writers claim to be learning even when the tutors they meet with don’t think they are teaching informs how tutors can perceive their effectiveness and how writing centers  can position themselves as alternative educational spaces.

Motivation interconnects with many aspects of a student’s higher education journey; a student’s goals, self-efficacy, interests, and prior experiences affect their level of motivation and engagement in a writing center session. This primer discusses the multidimensional nature of motivation and its relation to identity. Through an exploration of the literature, the author designed a heuristic called the Writing Motivational Assessment Pathway (MAP). This tool focuses on understanding students’ motivations, engaging students more in their writing process, and encouraging their development as writers. The five components of the Writing MAP—identity, beliefs, perceptions, context, and interactions—work toward understanding a student’s motivational profile and pairing strategies that connect with each student. This article discusses how to identify students’ motivational habits through the Writing MAP to help students establish effective writing habits and foster self-regulation. This heuristic continues to be refined at the community college level.

We write about a cultural rhetorics approach to writing center assessment at two different institutions where we think about assessment as everyday practice that enables us to tell multiple stories about our centers. We share how we create assessment committees within the center and collaboratively develop and revise assessment approaches and instruments, particularly with consultant input. Then, we discuss the various communities that inform and benefit from our assessments, including consultants, a broad range of writing center stakeholders, and writing center administrators. Assessment as everyday practice means that we are better informed and prepared when these constituents ask questions, make requests, or operate from (false) assumptions. We hope this view of assessment leads readers to build relationships with the individuals in their centers and universities in order to create assessments that matter in particular times and spaces as well as assessments that morph and change as the readers’ cultural communities change.

This article draws on data from 12 interviews with peer writing tutor alumni to demonstrate how their writing center training and experiences prepared them to work toward good (i.e., social justice or peace or rhetorical civility) in their post-graduation contexts. Recent scholarship in both writing center studies and writing studies calls for a redoubling of social justice efforts in our field (see Duffy, 2019 and Greenfield, 2020). This article asks how the field will recognize or know success in such efforts. Data from

Writing center tutors strive to facilitate participation from student writers, particularly student writers who are not native speakers of the conference language. This study investigated one way that tutors might better understand student writers’ intent to contribute a substantial turn at talk and thus better understand when they might make way for student writers’ active participation. This study examined four minimal responses (MRs)— mmhm , uhhuh , yeah , and ok —at the beginning of student writers’ turns at talk. It differentiated between MRs that were free standing, constituting the entire turn and suggesting passive recipiency, and MRs that were not free standing, suggesting speakership incipiency. Importantly, the study differentiated between the MRs of native English speakers (NESs) and non-native English speakers (NNES). NNESs used free-standing mmhm far more than NESs, suggesting that the NNESs may have extended the use of mmhm to a greater array of discourse contexts. NNESs used free-standing yeah far more frequently than they did non-free-standing yeah , suggesting that yeah would not have been a reliable signal for tutors that NNESs would extend their turns at talk. This study also found that both NESs and NNESs used ok to signal not only consideration of but also agreement with tutors’ evaluations or acceptance of tutors’ advice about lower-order concerns. Understanding how MRs vary from passive recipiency to speakership incipiency might help tutors better understand student writers’ intent to contribute a substantial turn and thus indicate when tutors might wait for student writers’ participation.

A large number of U.S. university writing centers (WCs) hire undergraduates as peer tutors, and many of them are menstruators. Menstruators have received strong cultural messages, including that menstruation should be concealed. Menstruating tutors’ damaged self-recognition received from the world around them can lead to internalized self-identification and further impact their perceptions of their knowledge and consultations with student writers every day in WCs. The acceptance and accessibility of menstrual products in WCs would help boost work ethic among menstruating tutors and break down the taboo about menstruation. To explore what impact such acceptance and accessibility exert on menstruating tutors, we conducted a mixed methods case study on menstruating tutors’ perceptions about themselves, their professionalism and work ethic, as well as their experiences, with and without having free access to menstrual products at their WC. We collected data via a set of pre and post surveys and individual interviews of 15 participants at the WC. The quantitative data from pre and post surveys did not reveal statistical significance, while the qualitative data helped explain why there was no statistical significance. Nevertheless, integration of all the data from this pioneering project has contributed rich findings to the existing WC scholarship about space and access, mindfulness, and social justice at large. The findings have practical applications to day-to-day WC practice.

This article discusses our work examining asynchronous eTutoring comments and how we determined whether tutor comments on papers submitted to our writing center were effective. Drawing from the fields of writing center theory, education, and rhetoric and composition, we define effectiveness as a combination of revision and improvement factors (Faigley and Witte; Stay; Bowden). Data collected consisted of initial and subsequent drafts of student papers submitted for eTutoring sessions, including the comments a tutor made on each paper. We categorized the comments and corresponding revisions to answer the following questions: which types of comments result in the greatest number of revision changes? And, do those comments, according to our definition, align with the types of comments we find to be the most effective? We found that frequency and effectiveness were not the only factors in determining a comment’s importance. We emphasize the necessity of instruction and scaffolding in tutor comments to potentially increase their effectiveness and student understanding.

While writing center scholarship has occasionally engaged the role of objects in the writing center, generally through conversations about play, consultant education models remain, with a few important exceptions, heavily focused on the verbal interactions between writer and consultant. This article argues that the relationships between materials and bodies in writing centers are essential to writing center practice, and that consultant/tutor education can help writing centers more intentionally engage these practices. The article introduces a study and consultant education framework that reframes consultant orientations by considering objects as “props,” as things consultants and writers intra-act with to create multimodal possibility and access in consultations. Situated in conversation with conversations surrounding play, embodiment, access, and space in the writing center, this article outlines the findings from this study and education framework and analyzes those findings in conversation with Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway . This analysis explores the intra-actions and reorientations that emerge when consultants work with props and writers and considers how props education and practices have shaped, and might continue to shape, the writing center. Presenting props as integral elements of consultation phenomena that help determine what is and is not possible for us to measure or do in a consultation space, this study suggests consultants can co-construct differently embodied and multimodal approaches, creating opportunities for access and encouraging new orientations, turnings, and possibilities.

Across college and university campuses, librarians and writing center workers are increasingly finding the trajectories of their academic units intersecting, both physically and institutionally. While both library and writing center scholarship have investigated this trend, research has primarily focused on specific collaborative efforts or theoretical bases for forming partnerships; the issue of centers being physically housed in libraries and the implications of sharing space have been largely unexplored. The researchers present the results of a survey of more than 100 center directors whose centers are located in libraries, moving beyond the common focus on collaborative undertakings by asking participants about theoretical, pedagogical, and practical concerns that stem from centers physically relocating to libraries. Specifically, the researchers focus on participants’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges of centers being physically located in libraries and reflect on the greater implications of this trend for the writing center field, particularly how physical space and institutional location can impact the pedagogies of the writing center.

This research contributes to our knowledge about second-language writers and their writing center experiences. This study applies the cognitive and motivational scaffolding coding schema set forth in Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson’s Talk About Writing (2015/2018) to second-language writers—a student population that was excluded from their study. Drawing on data collected from observations and post-session semi-structured interviews with ten undergraduate Chinese international writers and experienced graduate tutors, this study sought to qualitatively analyze which scaffolding technique was most effective in supporting students’ language acquisition. Trends in the results indicate that second-language writers’ perceptions of tutoring techniques may be more important than tutors’ intentions. Furthermore, the results of this study indicate that second-language writers may perceive tutors’ use of sympathy and empathy to be inauthentic. Finally, students’ representations of their linguistic self-confidence should impact tutors’ choice of scaffolding strategy. The implications for writing center practitioners include utilizing the opening stages of the session to more strategically adapt both verbal and nonverbal scaffolding strategies to the needs of the writer.

This study investigated how English as a Second Language (ESL) writers perceive their use of Grammarly , an online grammar checker, in relation to face-to-face tutoring at the writing center. Forty-three (N= 43) international ESL writers studying at universities in the United States participated in an anonymous online survey. Mixed methods were employed to examine participants’ perceptions of Grammarly and face-to-face tutoring at the writing center respectively as well as their perceptions of Grammarly in relation to face-to-face tutoring. Results rendered from descriptive analysis of the data revealed: 1) participants perceived both services with advantages and limitations; 2) participants used Grammarly more frequently than visiting the writing center, while they used face-to-face tutoring for a wider variety of purposes compared to Grammarly ; 3) participants reported a both/and approach toward these two writing resources and used them to meet different needs in different contexts. Implications were offered for ESL writers, instructors, writing center tutors, and Grammarly program developers.

As more writing centers move to include synchronous chat as a writing center consultation option, writing center researchers and practitioners must continue examining the affordances and constraints of the medium. In this article, we analyze four synchronous online consultation transcripts from one writing center’s pilot program to evaluate consultation patterns and arcs, approaches to teaching and tutoring, and the role of digital language, or netspeak (Crystal 19), in tutors’ feedback. We use this preliminary analysis to argue that writing center tutors can effectively use synchronous tutoring to meet the needs of diverse student populations, but these consultations might be more effective if tutors thoughtfully utilize some of the best practices of face-to-face tutoring. One finding suggests that tutors might engage student writers in online consultations more effectively by employing soliciting and reacting techniques more often than unintentionally using directive structuring practices, which can serve to limit dialogue with student writers (Fanselow 21; Davis et al. 29). Additionally, although netspeak can potentially establish common linguistic ground with writers, tutors should be aware of the disadvantages of using an informal tone and non-academic language in chat consultations; in fact, student writers might benefit from reading tutors’ chat feedback in Edited Academic Discourse. By employing the positive elements of face-to-face consultations in chat sessions, this medium has the potential for effective tutoring in a space where many students feel most comfortable. Our analysis may serve as a heuristic for others to use in assessing chat consultations, developing tutor training, and initiating future research on this consultation option.

The abstract should provide the reader with a summary of the experiment. The summary should provide broad context for the necessity of the work, a brief sense of the methods and results. It should also clearly state conclusions and implications of the work. Students frequently struggle with deciding what information should be included since concision is highly emphasized in this section.

Tutor education courses that prepare students to serve as peer writing consultants often include service learning; a typical service-learning tutor education course involves sending students to tutor in local schools, usually in underserved neighborhoods. Existing writing center scholarship on service learning tends to overlook the limitations of this model. This article advances a radically different approach for tutor education where the course acts as an incubator for social change on campus. Informed by the principles advanced by the critical service learning movement, the course described here invites students to design and implement campus-based community building projects. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that a course focused on community building, rather than tutoring theory and strategies, can effectively prepare students to serve as peer writing consultants while imparting a heightened awareness of social inequities and a deep investment in the campus community.

This article examines the literature on writer resistance to feedback (Elbow, Sommers, Straub) and presents the results of a study designed to examine how tutors-in-training can develop a greater understanding of that resistance. In this study, we asked students in two writing center education courses at two different schools to provide written feedback on each other’s writing and then followed up with two interviews with selected participants. The exchange invited the tutors-in-training to engage in the challenging experience faced by every writing center client: receiving feedback on their writing. Our purpose was to identify whether this exchange improved the tutors’ ability both to give feedback and to understand how to receive feedback effectively (Stone and Heen). Could engaging in an exchange with tutors-in-training from another school help them appreciate feedback as a problematic form of communication? Does the experience of receiving such feedback—and reflecting on it—influence future tutors’ thinking about their approach to tutoring others? We found that the experience enhanced tutors’ awareness of writers’ resistance to feedback and the need to tailor feedback respectfully and responsively.

This pilot study details how a Practitioner Inquiry methodology was implemented as both a practice and research heuristic in our center. I explain how I draw from the foundational tenets of Practitioner Inquiry (Nordstrom) to foster collaboration among consultants and between consultants and the director in the running of our center. At the same time, I employ Practitioner Inquiry as a framework to produce Replicable, Aggregable, Data-supported (RAD) research to determine the efficacy of this approach in terms of consultant learning and their professionalization through qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis on consultants’ end-of-semester anonymous evaluations of their experiences working in the center. Recent scholarship points to the potential benefits that working in writing centers facilitates for consultants (Kail et al.), and represents our centers as pedagogical spaces that engender consultant learning and professionalization. This article furthers this work through an empirical investigation of the less examined subtopic of the director-consultant relationship in the context of the administration of the center. In addition, it acts as a case study that illustrates the efficacy of Practitioner Inquiry as a methodology for both practice and research.

In the University of Minnesota’s Student Writing Support program, we gather, record, and share student and course information in order to support consultants in their work with writers; to assess and improve our own practice; and to make compelling, data-driven arguments for the center’s continued existence. Recognizing moments when these data-collection practices worked against the relationships we wanted to build with student writers, we began to critique these practices, with the goal of creating more intentional criteria and methods for soliciting client information. In Fall 2013, we developed and introduced an online Student Profile tool where clients could indicate their preferred name, provide a guide to pronouncing their name, include their gender pronouns, list any language(s) they speak and/or write, and indicate anything else they would like our consultants to know about them as writers/learners. We have become particularly interested in what students choose to share about themselves in that last open-ended prompt: When we give students opportunities to disclose aspects of their identity, what do we learn about them and about how they construct their identities in the context of a writing consultation? In this article we share our analysis of client data we collected in 2016–17, which reveals students’ awareness of their identities as writers, students, and learners as well as the complexities of these identities in a writing center context. Our findings also speak to larger conversations about the ways student identities are constructed and created within higher education.

Abstract This article speaks into the pervasive silence on the subject of faith in writing center and writing program work. Through revisiting Sharon Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse and investigating silence, we encourage “ counterfudamentalist work ”: work that counters fundamentalist methodology by inviting fundamentalists and believers and nonbelievers of different kinds into nonliteralist and open-minded ways of reading writing-centered experiences involving religious faith and secularism. The three authors of this article offer personal narratives about their own experience with faith in their centers/programs and use different theoretical perspectives to start a necessary dialogue on faith and religious experiences. By interweaving theoretical perspectives, research, and personal narratives involving our WPA work, this article argues that writing center/program administrators must do the same, and we hope to model the types of conversations we must bring into our centers.

This article explores how archival research can be used in staff education courses to work toward what Ann Ellen Geller et al. call a “community of practice”: a writing center culture that emphasizes constant, continual, and recursive thinking and learning among directors and consultants. Offering voices of tutors and directors captured in a three-year study of an archival project, the authors maintain that this kind of research offers several gifts, as it cultivates flexible conferencing practices, dismantles hierarchies, and establishes a cross-generational community. To help writing center directors and assistants incorporate such research into their own center, this article concludes with assignment instructions, tips for archival research, and suggestions for building a writing center archive

Writing centers are at once a part ofand a response tothe neoliberal academy, a phenomenon that Ryan King-White describes as a place where, “students have come to be regarded as customers, academic researchers are thought of as entrepreneurs competing for external grant funding, and the university itself more closely resembles a business model than an institute of higher learning” (223). Using that as a starting point, this essay functions part historiography, part diagnosis, and part synthesis, with three main goals: (1) redefine “neoliberalism” as a framework of critique for contemporary higher education within the United States, (2) diagnose writing centers situatedness within the neoliberal academy, and finally, (3) identify how emergent social justice scholarship—here defined as those theories accounting for access and ability, anti-racism, braver space, mindfulness, and labor—within Writing Center Studies are particularly suited as responses to neoliberalism. By expanding disciplinary praxes to examine how writing centers function within the neoliberal academy to incorporate a broader range of identities, theories, and people, writing centers can be better equipped to identify the reifying practices of our centers and develop ways to resist the harmful effects of neoliberalism that evoke these responses.

The IWCA Special Interest Group (SIG) on Antiracism Activism “is a group committed to undoing racism at multiple levels: in the immediate context of the writing conference and local writing center, and more widely through systematic cross-curricular and cross-institutional initiatives” (“WCActivism”). This piece features the SIG’s participation in the 2018 online IWCA Collaborative at CCCC: the SIG leaders assembled a diverse panel of scholars and practitioners from different races, ages, institutions, and varying levels and types of writing center experience, but with useful and firm beliefs in action. Using Rasha Diab et al.’s 2013 article “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable” as a starting point, the panelists drew on their various perspectives to examine the potential for and barriers to actionable antiracism activism within both the writing center and the IWCA. The authors reflect on antiracism action in, through, and by writing centers and those who work in them, situated within writing centers’ local, academic, and institutional contexts.

Abstract The article describes the process that four writing center consultants took to design and implement an antiracist workshop at the Oklahoma State University Writing Center (OSUWC). Using antiracist pedagogy, feminist invitational rhetoric, and inclusive writing center pedagogy, this essay documents the creation of an antiracist workshop designed for writing center staff and consultants, our presentation of the workshop at the South Central Writing Centers Association conference, the revision process, and training of writing center staff at the OSUWC. Rather than outline a one-size-fits-all workshop, this article provides a framework for addressing racism with reflexive, context-based resources.

This article investigates my lived experience as a black queer writing center tutor for the purposes of theorizing the transformative power of learning centers. Drawing on several perspectives and methods offered in Praxis ’s special issue on Access and Equity in Graduate Writing Support , this article argues that the antiracist potential of writing centers depends on more comprehensive analyses of how writing centers function as racialized places. Using the metaphor of the “academic ghetto,” I signify on the misconception of writing centers as places for correcting deficiency. I apply my analysis to both an Undergraduate Writing Center (WCs) and a Graduate Writing Center (GWC) space to systematically discover how racial biases mediate and construct these learning spaces. In particular, I structure my discussion through a blend of personal narrative and critical analysis that illustrates the epistemic conflict and character of the “academic ghetto.” The article concludes with a call to invent antiracist practices for writing centers that model more inclusive methods of living in these spaces.

Abstract In this article I report the results of action research focused on white writing center tutors’ attitudes toward white privilege. I studied four semesters of my tutoring internship course at a linguistically and ethnically diverse university, analyzing white tutors’ written responses and classroom discussions connected to a survey and an assigned article focused on white privilege and tutoring. The themes that emerged in tutors’ “white talk” (McIntyre) regarding initiating/assimilating students to academic discourse caused me to rethink my curriculum and make white privilege a more central part of discussions about tutoring throughout the course.

Abstract Why do conversations regarding students’ right to their own language and antiracism in the writing center still invite insults and agitation? After all, these struggles for students’ rights to self-determination and their own language in composition are far from new. The narratives present within this writing move beyond mere analysis of how and why established institutions attempt to control, and, rather, put Laura Micciche’s theories of emotion and performance to the test. When teaching tutor training, readings regarding students' right to their own language and race potentially cause conflict and can, at least at first, elicit strong emotional responses. This article explores the value of such early emotional reactions to these readings. Can the tutors’ emotional performances, both in action and voice, eventually help to bring attention to, or subvert the backlash and attacks antiracism rhetoric tends to invite? Within its pages, Micciche’s Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching suggests that we perform emotional appeals rather than simply make them. Through performance, she claims, we present emotion, not as something that resides in people to be shared or withheld, but as encounters between people. This article’s narrative “reenactments,” then, are set to reveal the fears and desires behind the resistance I’ve both witnessed and encountered all while promoting what I deem to be a necessity for emotional performance in antiracism and writing center work.

The recent call for replicable, aggregable, and data-driven (RAD) research of writing center effectiveness motivated this study. In writing centers, the primary objective is to improve writers through one-to-one conversations. Improvement in writers, defined here in terms of rhetorical awareness, has proven difficult to measure. In this article, the authors describe how they developed a scale to measure rhetorical awareness, specifically purpose, genre, and audience awareness. Using both discourse and content analyses, they applied the scale to student responses on reflection forms collected over two semesters at an HBCU to see if rhetorical awareness might be observable and measurable. Although the responses of students who visited the center more than once within six months did not show changes in their rhetorical awareness, as the authors had hoped, the results seem to reveal more about the social context than individual students, suggesting that current-traditional pedagogy persists. Aggregating data with this methodology may open new lines of inquiry for researchers of writing and allow them to track trends in discourse on writing.

African American rhetorics and knowledges can be understood through a rhetorical method that is concerned with what circulates as Black, but is not limited to Black bodies, while avoiding becoming mired in the quicksand of authenticity. (27) —Vorris Nunley, Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric