This article contributes to the writing center scholarship in three ways. First, it revisits and further develops the discussion on course-embedded writing support programs; in particular, it builds on Kelly Webster and Jake Hansen’s “recursive reflection about course-embedded tutoring” and responds to Mary Tetreault et al.’s call for utilizing archival research as a resource for tutor education. Second, it takes a unique approach to tutor education by exploring how embedded tutors for first-year composition classes develop their expertise outside of the formal training sessions. Third, it applies the theoretical framework of rhizomatic learning that has not been previously utilized to investigate the diverse experiences embedded tutors undergo as they acquire and refine their tutoring skills. The qualitative data for this case study were obtained from the Coordinator of Composition Tutoring’s reflective journal as well as session logs and reflections completed by course-embedded peer tutors for composition courses at a four-year Northeastern institution over the period of four semesters. The analysis of the data reveals the rhizomatic character of embedded tutors’ learning, where elements of the learning processes are interconnected and ever-expanding (Deleuze and Guattari; Grellier). The discussion includes a set of questions designed to encourage tutors to reflect on their learning processes. Writing center administrators can use these questions to gather data on how tutors develop their skills within their specific contexts.

This article arose out of a need to better understand what happens in university writing center (WC) appointments that are incentivized or mandated by instructors. While the topic has received attention in WC literature, previous research focuses largely on student attitudes toward mandated WC appointments and only rarely addresses the interpersonal dynamics of these sessions. To address this gap, we conducted an IRB-approved, survey-based study investigating the impact of WC tutorial incentivization on writing tutors’ assessments of sessions’ effectiveness, comparing tutors’ scoring of different session types and conducting statistical queries on some of the larger categories. Our results challenge the widespread assumption that mandatory or incentivized writing center sessions are always an obvious tradeoff of “quality vs. quantity.” Specifically, we found that differences in tutor scores between voluntary and mandatory WC sessions were statistically insignificant and did not present a clear tutor preference for voluntary sessions over mandatory sessions; however, when types of incentivization were compared, tutors showed a subtle preference for sessions that were incentivized through a class-wide mandate over those that offered extra credit or involved individual referrals. In this study, we also discuss common metrics for gauging writing tutorials’ success, suggesting that WC practitioners may be placing an undue weight on “engagement.” We hope, most of all, to encourage further research that examines (and expands) institutional approaches to mandatory sessions and encourages a more welcoming stance toward the writers who visit WCs at the behest of their instructors.

Terms used to describe writing support workers in higher education, as well as the location of their employment have sparked a long history of debate in writing center studies but have led to only scattered empirical research. The author examines the history of this debate addressing connotations of various terms and then aims to verify actual naming practice. The present study investigates the impact such debates have had on writing center practice by assessing public web pages from 575 university writing centers to see what terms are generally employed. The study shows that “writing center” is the most popular name for the location of writing tutorial services and that “tutor” remains the most popular term. This finding suggests that “center” has won out over other terms, but the popularity of “tutor” is much less decisive. At institutions with higher enrollment, in R1 institutions, and in the case of graduate student employees, the use of the term “consultant” increases. The general prevalence of the “writing tutor” and the rise of the more recent “writing consultant” and other variants may suggest a lag between scholarly critique and writing center practice, but it could also derive from institutional context. Alternative tutor terms could be employed, but an empirical study of efficacy would be needed to move naming from the realm of lore and conjecture.

Trauma is ubiquitous, including in post-secondary settings, meaning that trauma-affected individuals are present in every classroom or service setting. While research has investigated the engagement of post-secondary instructors with student trauma disclosures, this work has not extended to cover the unique role of post-secondary writing center staff. Writing tutors may encounter trauma narratives through written assignments or verbal disclosures and often labour under a degree of precarity and lack control over curricular and assignment design, giving them little preparation before encountering emotionally challenging material. As a “helping profession,” writing tutors may be at risk of secondary trauma, re-traumatization based on personal trauma histories, or unsustainable levels of emotional labour. Employing a critical disability lens and an equity-centered trauma-informed framework, this project engaged eight university-based writing center staff in Ontario, Canada in semi-structured interviews to explore how they perceive and narrate their engagement with student trauma and how this may relate to trauma-informed pedagogical practices. Based on a Reflexive Thematic Analysis, several themes are explored, including the relationship between writing center structure/labour conditions and trauma-informed practices, types of emotionally challenging interactions, strategies tutors employ to engage with students during trauma-adjacent sessions, and gaps in ability to provide trauma-informed service. These themes provide insight into tutors’ experience with student trauma and imply recommendations to improve staff and student well-being through engaging with trauma-informed practices in the writing center.

We trace the history of the global-local dualism, noting how writing center researchers and practitioners have employed it. We next discuss problems and complications inherent in the dualism, such as the way it obscures the interconnectedness of text components. We illustrate our points with excerpts from writing center conferences. We end by discussing possible implications of our analysis for tutor training. Our goal is to provide a more nuanced understanding of this ubiquitous dualism in writing center studies.

Utilizing three tutoring episodes as qualitative data, this article attempts to define and articulate multilingual labor in the context of the Southern US writing center while working with multilingual writers. Incorporating Betweener​ Autoethnography as a methodological lens and Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework, the author, a South Asian Rhetoric and Composition doctoral student from India and a multilingual speaker/writer, urges WC directors and peer tutors in the US how to consider fostering multilingual tutees’ writing development by intentionally critical creating moments where the languages of writers are received as assets, which often go unnoticed.

In this article, we describe a two-day, intensive STEM training that we piloted in summer of 2022 to prepare newly hired professional staff to support STEM writers. The training was created by the director and associate director and was offered to two professional consultants and two graduate assistant consultants in-person over a two-day period before the start of the fall semester. Staff training should always be responsive to local contexts, and we are aware our model may not transfer to other university settings. However, we do hope that our pilot offers a model that other universities can adapt to meet local needs and implement when training professional and graduate staff. Although we focus on professional staff, our model may also be useful for supplementing a generalist approach to training graduate and undergraduate peer tutors who work closely with STEM writers or as a primary form of training for embedded consultants working within STEM courses. As we discuss our model, we turn to writing in the disciplines scholarship to explain our choices and ground our pedagogy. We also turn to research on tutor training and writing center staff professional development. As we describe our training activities, we also identify areas for improvement based on our own perspective and that of our professional and graduate staff attendees.

In a writing center, we often hear about the relief a student feels following their session. However, there is little empirical data to support this claim. To address this gap, we conducted a survey in the Brigham Young University Family, Home, and Social Sciences Writing Lab (BYU FHSS Writing Lab). The survey was completed by undergraduate students who brought their writing to our writing center, both before and after a writing center tutoring session to measure the effects of writing tutoring on the highly applicable and relatable emotion that college students experience: stress. More specifically, we wanted to better understand perceived stress in conjunction with other variables, such as year in school, familiarity with the assigned citation style, whether the student had a plan for their paper, and whether they had visited the BYU FHSS Writing Lab in the past. We wanted to see how each of these variables were affected by a visit to the writing lab and particularly how students’ perceived stress levels were affected in turn. We discovered that visiting the BYU FHSS Writing Lab did significantly reduce perceived stress levels, and that many other factors play into this such as a student having a plan after their writing session or what year the student was in school. This research is important to writing labs across the country because by implementing our findings, writing centers may be able to maximize the help they provide to students and contribute to their stress relief.

Writing center scholars and tutor-training manuals historically emphasize the importance of tutors and writers collaboratively negotiating consultation agendas to maintain writers’ ownership over their writing. However, when tutors encounter advanced student writers, writers from unfamiliar fields, or writers with complex linguistic repertoires, they may struggle to read student writing, identify writing issues, and negotiate effective, mutual agendas. One tool for navigating these challenges is the “read-ahead method”—in which tutors read student writing in advance and prepare for consultations (Scrocco 10). While this method offers potential advantages, a brief survey reveals that some writing center administrators worry that tutors who read student writing in advance may hijack consultation agendas. This exploratory mixed-methods study examines thirteen tutor-supervisor planning conversations and subsequent consultations to assess the correspondence between tutors’ plans and consultations and to consider what factors may support or undermine writers’ agendas. Results suggest that tutors who use the read/plan-ahead method do not fervently push their planned agendas over writers’ agendas. However, very detailed or particularly vague pre-consultation planning may set tutors up for sessions that fail to negotiate and carry out cohesive, well-prioritized shared agendas. The most collaborative, coherent consultations in this study balance tutor and writer agendas. They begin with writers’ submitted concerns, identify high-priority global writing issues, engage in substantive agenda-setting with writers, explicitly link tutors’ plans with writers’ agendas, and abandon tutors’ plans when needed. The read/plan-ahead model works best when tutors remember to place writers at the heart of building, revising, and enacting consultation agendas.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

This meta-analysis of writing center scholarship surveys the last twenty years of empirical work from The Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. Writing centers are traditionally predicated on treating writers as both beneficiaries of tutoring and active collaborators in its success. Our pedagogy is tutee-centered in its practice and the benefits it produces, and although we pride ourselves in acting as team players in tutoring sessions, does the same quality emerge in existing research? This paper finds writing center scholarship is rife with studies where the writer-as-beneficiary takes precedence over the often-absent writer-as-collaborator. Put another way, we often attend to writers as recipients of tutoring, but we rarely address their perspectives as active participants in testing our pedagogical assumptions. This paper demonstrates historical trends in scholarship and recent moves to center writers in rigorous, participatory roles in evidence-based inquiry. By engaging with tendencies in data collection in writing center research, this project addresses an unconsidered gap between existing principles and the role of tutees in our evolving research practices. This project offers a custom taxonomy for tutee-based studies, and a thematically organized table of findings.

When writing center administrators (WCAs) consider educating tutors, they do so with a range of perspectives in mind. Tutors need to first be confident in both their tutoring and writing abilities. However, new tutors must also be able to put themselves in the perspective of a struggling student writer who they may work with in a tutoring session. In this article, we conceptualize this issue dealing with self-efficacy or “people’s beliefs in their abilities to produce given attainments” (Bandura 307). Research has begun to explore this topic (Nowacek and Hughes), but has not specifically called this “self-efficacy.” Composition research has a long history of examining self-efficacy, but little research has explored tutors’ self-efficacy. This research has not examined the relationship between tutoring and writing self-efficacies, nor has previously research considered how tutoring experience may impact self-efficacy. To extend this conversation, we developed and administered a survey to writing center tutors across the US to answer the following research questions: What are tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies? Do tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies correlate? Do experienced tutors have different writing and tutoring self-efficacies than new tutors? Results indicated that tutors had high writing and tutoring self-efficacies (mean scores were from 80-100), but the range varied pretty significantly (ranges for writing were 40-100 and ranges for tutoring were 49-100). Writing and tutoring self-efficacy scores were strongly correlated (r=.815 and p =.001). Finally, tutoring self-efficacy and tutoring experience were weakly correlated (r=.186 and p =.025). These results suggest that tutoring and writing self-efficacies inform one another and that tutors have different experiences with developing self-efficacy with their tutoring and writing, which suggests that tutoring and writing self-efficacy is very individualized.

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.”

Abstract Because of the author’s experience hearing from other writing center professionals at community colleges that community college students are not capable of serving as peer tutors, as well as survey data demonstrating that community colleges do not hire peer tutors at the same rate as other institutions of higher learning, the author conducted exit interviews of peer tutors at Salt Lake Community College in order to determine what peer tutors learn from their work experiences in a community college writing center. The purpose of the study was to establish what peer tutors learn, in order to correlate not simply what they take away from their experience, but also to substantiate that peer tutors can indeed help the writers they work with to learn. Since the results of this analysis were broad and represented a wide variety of concepts that are learned by peer tutors, the author designed a more specific survey to explore what they learned about writing and being a writer. The resulting data lead the author to conclude that peer tutors learn much from their work experience, allaying concerns that community college students are not capable of serving as peer tutors.

Abstract This longitudinal mixed-methods study assesses students’ perceptions of the writing center at a large (approximately 11,325 students) multi‑campus two‑year college. The survey was collaboratively designed, with faculty and student participation; it presents findings from 865 student respondents, collected by peer tutors‑in‑training. The study offers a baseline assessment (Fall 2014) of the writing center, prior to wide-sweeping changes in recruitment, staffing, and training models, as well as a post-assessment (Fall 2015) analysis of the changes in student knowledge of the WC and its purpose. It also offers data on the trajectory of student development in relation to number of sessions attended. In 2014, students’ experiences at the writing center were inconsistent; the poorly articulated mission of the WC adversely affected students’ knowledge scores, and the center’s reliance on editorial-like feedback, given predominately by adjunct faculty, contributed to inconsistent reportage in perceived learning by attended sessions. Many of these trends, however, reversed in 2015. This paper seeks to demonstrate the important role that RAD research can play in evaluating student learning within writing center contexts and articulating how and at what moments, and under what conditions, learning and development occurs in the student-writing center relationship. It also offers a replicable experimental method that researchers at other institutions can adapt and apply to their own institutional contexts and programmatic needs.

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.

Across the country, colleges and universities are reporting an increased enrollment of students on the autism spectrum. This is in part thanks to increased efforts in early detection during childhood, where students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are then enrolled in services outside and within public schools to help integrate them into mainstream classrooms. Yet such integrative services, by and large, fall short in higher education, and many students find themselves without the support they once received in their primary school years. Writing demands are indeed challenging for many—without securing basic college-level composition skills, the likelihood of student success is placed in jeopardy. Writing centers can be regarded as gatekeepers for autistic students, since their assistance can greatly impact student success. Yet problems remain with access and inclusion based on rhetorical situations, as well as a lack of tutor education. This paper provides suggestions based on April Mann’s methods of inclusion for writing center tutees with ASD, including spatial awareness and tutor education. I also outline other possible methods, including outreach to students with ASD to prevent further isolation among the university population.

The Burkean parlor has been integrated into the lore of writing centers, showcasing how writing centers have both conversational and collaborative elements. However, the ease for students to enter into the academic conversation is not as simple as this metaphor suggests. To rethink this concept, kairos, or the opportune moment, must be considered. This article will investigate kairos as spatial and how that conceptualization can deepen the Burkean parlor and the conversations within it. Breaking down the Burkean parlor into three stages—questions, metacognition, and choices—can benefit the practicality of the tutoring session. Kairos complicates each of these three points of the student writer’s integration into the conversation. The creation of kairos depends upon the student and tutor being mindful of these conscious and unconscious interactions and understanding how to most effectively disrupt the spatial boundaries of the tutoring session. Connecting kairos into the Burkean parlor metaphor differentiates the perspective of the tutoring session, encouraging both student and tutor to become more aware of the spatiality of tutoring and to redefine these boundaries.