From the recognized beginning of the “laboratory” movement in composition instruction, teachers have sought to employ new and more practical methods useful in developing student writing. Such trends continue today as new generations of students enter the academy and new challenges emerge. From such conditions, we might see how components within a system of activity work together to meet objectives and develop outcomes within the shared dialectic of an activity system. With this idea in mind, this article reviews writing center-related scholarship from the late 1880s through the early 1940s to trace emerging contradictions in laboratory teaching’s praxis. Through the evaluation of laboratory teaching’s textual artifacts using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), I present a narrative about the development of the earliest writing center praxes: The Formative Period. With this article, I look to narrate an epochal beginning for writing center activity and present the development of guiding principles we find in our writing center work today. Through the process of revealing historical impulses, this article offers a view of writing center praxes in their elemental stage: The Formative Period, early 1890s-early 1940s. Ultimately, this article will show how the writing center is an activity that, over time, has mediated old system contradictions and developed new methods born of self-reflection, debate, evaluation, and progressive mediation, which continues to evolve. As communities like writing centers re-create themselves—through pushing and pulling, conflict and resolution, tension and release—they birth new realities, which all begins with the Formative Period.

Writing is central to the academic and professional success of STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) students, yet there is little writing center scholarship examining how STEMM students use and perceive writing centers. This article presents quantitative findings from a mix-methods survey study examining STEMM undergraduate students’ usage of university writing centers. The study was conducted at a mid-sized, public health sciences research university in the Southeast. Findings from the survey suggest that STEMM students are likely to visit writing centers, but their visits overwhelmingly focus on coursework in the core curriculum rather than coursework within their majors. These students tend to view disciplinary writing as formulaic and content-driven, which affects writing center usage. They also express concerns about the ability of writing center staff to assist with scientific and technical genres. Throughout the presentation of results, the authors offer insight into practices they plan to implement to provide better outreach and support to STEMM students at their university. While study results are not generalizable to other institutions, they still provide insight into usage behaviors of STEMM students that can be useful to a variety of institutions as they work to support STEMM writers.

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.

If the two of you are sitting there together, your reading silently squanders the interaction time on something that is very one-sided. If you respond to the text as a reader, as you proceed, the writer can get a better sense of what happens for a reader as the text unfolds. When you read aloud, the student can hear how the writing will sound to someone else (1-2). --William J. Macauley,“Paying Attention to Learning Styles in Writing Center Epistemology, Tutor Training, and Writing Tutorials.” [W]hile tutors had been trained to consider and discuss the intersections among audience, genre, and discipline with their students, their working understanding of the role of audience in this relationship seemed to operate on a global level with only fleeting or intuitive (and therefore inaccessible) considerations at the local level. Thus, while tutors had a conceptual understanding of readerly dynamics. . . they had less practice articulating the impact that discrete elements of a text have on a reader (14). --Amanda M. Greenwell, “Rhetorical Reading Guides, Readerly Experiences, and WID in the Writing Center.”

My article reports on an annual series of workshops I launched as director of my writing center. This ongoing initiative, titled Workshops on Real World Writing Genres, aims to introduce undergraduates to genres they will practice in their prospective careers. It is part of a larger effort at the University of Toronto to support students as they think ahead to life beyond their degrees. Drawing on material from workshops covering print journalism, law, public policy, medicine, and fiction, the article reflects on how well our theoretical presuppositions about genre help us prepare students to apply in their professional lives those critical thinking skills we seek to foster in our teaching. By regarding all knowledge as socially situated, contemporary genre theory has raised doubts about the capacity of our students to transfer even knowledge from one context to another. Insofar as genre theorists focus on the social creation of meaning, their account of genre, like their account of knowledge, must, I argue, remain incomplete. An exclusive focus on writing as social practice reflects a problematic division of labor in the academy between the sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other. The notion of writing as radically situated has always posed a problem for writing centers, since we do not typically find ourselves situated in the same communities of practice as our students. The recent interest in transfer in writing center scholarship reflects a promising shift towards a vision of the disciplines as interconnected.

Abstract After a decade of working in writing centers as a tutor and administrator, I have experienced and witnessed many challenging consultations. A particularly vexing type of consultation occurs when tutors work with advanced students writing in unfamiliar disciplines and genres. In this article, I consider whether the reading method employed during such consultations supports or detracts from tutors’ efforts to offer helpful advice. Specifically, I ask: When and how should writing tutors read students’ drafts to best support and engage them? How do the specific needs of student writers factor into selecting the best reading method? To respond to these questions, I first describe the results of a review of 70 well-known universities’ writing center websites, which reveals that the majority of centers require tutors to read students’ writing for the first time during consultations. Next, I posit some limitations of during-consultation reading models and argue that the read-ahead model may better meet the needs of some student-writer populations. To provide a framework for the read-ahead model, I illustrate strategies that may be implemented to prepare tutors for consultations, drawing on research-based techniques that a more-senior director and I used at a private doctoral-granting university as we established the first writing center on the campus. I conclude by suggesting that directors consider the read-ahead method as yet another tool in their vast arsenal of pedagogical techniques, particularly when tutors must work with advanced writers from unfamiliar disciplines.