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.

Reflecting on the experiences of two graduate students from speech-language pathology (SLP) who became generalist writing consultants, this article examines the intersections between the academic homes of generalist graduate consultants and their writing center education and work and analyzes what these intersections tell us about consultant education. We briefly introduce SLP and identify the specific ways that both fields address writing. We then explore how the disciplinary intersections enhance or hinder the work that graduate students do in either field. Based on this foundation, we propose a four-step process for educating graduate consultants that promotes an awareness of how similarities enhance work in either field, how differences can hinder the work, and how bidirectional transference between fields can benefit graduate students as both consultants and as academics in their home discipline. Ultimately, this paper highlights the untapped potential of the theory and pedagogy of consultants’ home disciplines for effective generalist consultant education.

This reflection came together over the course of a semester while the co-authors were working in their University Writing Center and at community partner sites. Only a handful of writing center scholarship has investigated how time as an agent plays into pedagogical performance (Geller, “Tick-Tock”; Geller et al., The Everyday Writing Center ; Terzano, “Short-Time Tutorials”). Yet, across writing centers we’re all negotiating these material and temporal realities as part of the daily structure of our work. And, as Powell and Hixson-Bowles point out, writing center studies often publishes about the writing self-efficacy of the students and clientele of center services but not tutor self-efficacy. We therefore use time as a lens with which to view and better understand our individualized tutoring efficacies. The co-authors’ stories demonstrate how time can be a valuable reflective lens for connecting theory to action within a session and for the development of one’s sense of self as a writing center professional (their tutor self-efficacy) across sessions and spaces. By so doing, exploring time as a pedagogical influence, tutors can carve out more confidence in themselves, authority in their self-efficacy, and find success in familiar and unfamiliar writing center terrains.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Abstract From fall 2013 through spring 2016, 1,301 students were enrolled in composition courses on our regional campus, with 349 of these enrolled in developmental courses. Our writing center serves approximately 14% of the campus population every year, a number we have seen increase since two professors in 2013-2014 began requiring students in their developmental courses to attend a minimum number of writing sessions each semester. The D-F-withdrawal rates for developmental writing courses on our campus have averaged 32.7% over the past six semesters, an improvement over previous years. Analysis of data from a study of student outcomes during this period demonstrates that requiring frequent visits to the writing center in early semesters results in a statistically significant, positive relationship with increased passing rates and voluntary usage of the writing center.

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.

As a pedagogical tool, “style” in writing center lore has been cast as a lower-order concern. This marginalization stems not only from the difficulty of defining the word itself, but also from a persistent belief that “style” exists in a vacuum separate from “content,” “development,” and grammar, thus being of secondary importance to tutors and administrators. In this article, Edward Santos Garza challenges this clinical framework, arguing that style, a vital, permeating force, has much to offer those in writing center work. He positions style as a tool to help WC visitors more fully discuss, assess, and strengthen themselves as writers. Asserting that style is equally valuable for thinking about writing with regard to identity, Garza envisions how WC staff could productively foreground it in sessions and training.