In the framing statement of this conversation shaper on tutoring controversial topics, I provide a personal reflection of this problem to establish rationale for my interest in the issue. Additionally, a general explanation is provided to clarify what constituted inclusion for the recommended resources on this problem. In the bibliography section, full citations are provided for all 25 texts chosen as representative for understanding how to better tutor controversial topics. Finally, the field shaping section includes possibilities for future research, especially as it pertains to potential revisions for writing center policy, philosophy, and training. Keywords : tutoring, controversial topics, writing center

The field of Writing Center Studies continues to develop new frameworks and points of entry for engaging intersectional identities like race, class, sexuality, and gender; however, the field has not yet developed a similar discourse on the intersections of disability and writing center work. This article interrogates this gap in the field’s scholarship and provides a new point of entry for writing center professionals who seek to foster access: the writing of an Accessibility Statement. Engaging in the process of creating an Accessibility Statement is an act of restorative justice because only through examining how our practices, beliefs, or research act as gatekeepers to inclusion can we truly restore dignity, community, and agency to all writers. The article contains two major sections: an overview of the critical theory and research that inform our perspectives on writing centers and disability, and then a praxis section providing guidance to those interested in writing an accessibility statement for their center. we argue that to engage the work of fostering access is a form of restorative justice; only upon examining how our practices, beliefs, or research act as gatekeepers to inclusion can we truly restore dignity, community, and agency to all writers. We want to acknowledge, as this article begins, that we made several intentional rhetorical moves in the essay that you might find unusual or surprising. Some of these moves are textual: for example, we have included numerous hyperlinks in text to help readers find further information or explanation if they need it and we have broken the article into multiple headlined sections for ease of access. Some of these moves are tonal: we wrote this article believing it will have multiple audiences with multiple points of entry or reasons for reading, and we wanted to write for / include all these audiences; shifts in style and voice represent different purposes in the writing and perhaps different readers of that writing. We feel it extremely important to ensure that as much of this article’s language as possible is clear, accessible, and share-able amongst communities of readers and writers. Lastly, our audio components for this article were broken into shorter sections as well in an attempt to create ease of access.

This article reflects a study conducted at the University of Memphis to gauge effective methods for inviting each students’ cultural English into the writing classroom with the help of code-meshing workshops provided by writing center tutors. Because writing center tutors are trained to work with students, rather than assess and score their writing abilities, we can create a non-intimidating classroom environment for writing experimentation. This workshop challenged students to mesh their home language and vernacular within their academic prose, thus expanding the limits of effective written text and preventing a sense of double-consciousness felt by students whose own culture—rather based on race, class, gender, or sexual orientation—has been historically marginalized. This article also adapts the outcomes of the study into writing center pedagogy through necessary perspectives from students. This study is a bottom-up approach (student to tutor) rather than another top-down approach (tutor to tutor then finally to student). Keywords : code-meshing, Students Rights to Their Own Language

The University Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at El Paso, located on the U.S-Mexico border, employs mostly tutors who are bilingual, Spanish-English; however, there are a significant number of international tutors with different linguistic backgrounds. Using a qualitative method approach, this article discusses findings from focus groups and interviews with international multilingual student tutors who worked at the UWC. Through our analysis of the data, we found that international tutors face a unique set of challenges, but also bring a wealth of knowledge to working at the writing center. This article focuses on three major themes discussed by participants: varying degrees of confidence, feelings of being othered, and issues related to linguistic diversity that arise during tutoring sessions. Tutors’ experiences in leveraging linguistic and cultural differences prompted the need for the UWC to implement changes to its tutor training and policies to support international tutors. As institutions in the United States become more diverse, writing centers need to challenge who best practices in the discipline were created for and who they serve, all while critically examining how we can leverage the experiences of international tutors to reshape writing center pedagogy. Keywords : international writing tutors; multilingualism; linguistic diversity; Hispanic-Serving Institution; writing center pedagogy; tutor training The University Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is located in El Paso, Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. El Paso, combined with its sister city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, make it one of the largest bi-national areas in the world. Residents of Juarez frequently commute over the international bridges daily for work; many of these commuters include students at UTEP. UTEP is a Hispanic-Serving Institution where 80% of the student population identifies as Hispanic or Latinx (UTEP, 2019). Furthermore, 20% of these students are students from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and an additional 5% of students are international students from around the world (UTEP, 2019). Due to the diverse and complex linguistic and cultural lived experiences of students at UTEP, the UWC is informed by theories on multilingualism, antiracism, and equity. It is often cited that writing centers are not just places that enact marginalization, but centers for those who are often marginalized in academia. The UWC has drawn from these theories to develop its programmatic identity, including its goals, tutor training and pedagogies, and professional development, in order to adopt socially just practices. This work, and the theories motivating the work at the UWC, serve as a direct response to our institution and to the students it supports. In a typical semester, the UWC assists over 8,000 students with their writing. The UWC offers face-to-face and synchronous online tutoring, employing about 30 writing tutors, undergraduate and graduate. The undergraduate writing tutors are all hired directly by the UWC, and the graduate students are those who have been awarded a master’s or doctoral teaching assistantship through the English Department or the Creative Writing Department. This year alone, over 40% of the 30+ tutors working at the Writing Center are international students and bi/multilingual with languages ranging from Spanish to Nepalese. Needless to say, this creates a linguistically and culturally diverse work environment as international writing tutors assist students with their writing at the center. This diversity of languages is at the core of our approach to training and pedagogy for writing center tutors. An intricate dynamic develops between writing center tutors and students who often have different home languages, many of whom are English language learners often working towards enacting Academic English as their writing assignments require. While the majority of writing center pedagogy focuses on how to tutor English as a Second Language students and many tutoring books include chapters on working with ESL students or multilingual writers (Bruce & Rafoth, 2009; Gillespie and Lerner, 2009; Ryan & Zimmerelli, 2015; Bruce & Rafoth, 2016; Lape, 2020), very little has been written on the experiences of international tutors from the tutor side. This project started in 2017 when the UWC Director and Assistant Directors were approached by several international students who had been writing tutors, one who is currently the Assistant Director of the UWC and co-author of this piece, asking how training would account for the linguistic differences between the new students joining us from Nepal and the majority of the Spanish speaking students who visited the writing center. Through multiple conversations with international student tutors about their experiences working at the UWC, we were confronted with addressing the following questions: What are the experiences of international tutors working at the UWC? How do non-native English speakers navigate assisting students who are native English speakers, or, in the case of our institution, many non-native English speakers with a different home language? The UWC’s week-long training at the beginning of each academic year includes an entire day focused on tutoring multilingual students, with a larger emphasis on Spanish speakers and writers. However, this was a destabilizing question and set us on the path to try and learn about the experiences of international tutors working at the writing center. In an effort to learn how international writing center tutors navigate concerns about language usage, the UWC needed to reconceptualize training to better account for linguistically and culturally diverse interactions during tutoring sessions. Our article’s contributions to both this special issue and the writing center community opens with an overview of the theories which inform our work at the UWC. First, we came to realize that applying writing center theory and best practices in the UWC was problematic, as some of these best practices did not resonate within the context of UTEP and the UWC–a clear indication of the highly contextualized linguistic ecologies of writing centers on college campuses. Most importantly, these best practices were developed from the ground up and informed by the experiences of students and tutors. Next, we provided a brief description of our study and data collection process. We then structured our data findings into three themes: varying degrees of confidence, feelings of being othered, and issues related to linguistic diversity that arise during tutoring sessions. Lastly, after discussing the most insightful aspects of our findings and how they informed changes to tutoring training at UWC training, we offer readers insight for how writing centers can reconceptualize and reframe the linguistic and cultural knowledges of international tutors as rich resources to learn from, and move away from the deficit rhetoric that has traditionally circulated about non-native English tutors.

Through the genre of musical theatre, Writing Center, The Musical (WCTM) examines how peer-to-peer writing centers can help bridge the divide for marginalized students. It also explores the tension that manifests when new writing center theory is not supported by an institution. When writing centers do not get buy-in from the institution, for this type of work, it can create backlash towards the writing center and student writers.

This article argues the importance of viewing asynchronous screen-capture tutor feedback as a kairotic space that subverts normative views of time, writing process, and accepted tutoring practices such as a preference for non-directivity over directive feedback. The author argues that viewing asynchronous online feedback as “kairotic” enables writing center tutors to develop practices and pedagogies rooted in disability theory. The development of tutoring mindsets that embrace difference helps to support students with disabilities via asynchronous videos that mesh multimodal affordances with Universal Design principles. Keywords : Disability, neurodiversity, autism, Writing Centers, asynchronous online feedback, Universal Design, kairotic space

In order to disrupt standard writing center norms and shift to an inclusive and socially just space, writing centers need to re-envision their culture and tutoring practices. In 2016, we embarked on a transformative journey through a multilevel effort to shift the ethos of the writing center to be more inclusive and supportive of diversity in all forms. Informed by theories of translingualism, multiliteracies, and social justice, this article narrates our journey in developing hiring, training, and outreach initiatives to transform the writing center. In addition, we reflect on our successes and challenges and offer our future directions to serve as an example for centers wishing to create more racially and linguistically just multiliteracy centers. Keywords : social justice, translingualism, multiliteracy, community of practice

The writing center and multimodal projects play an integral role in restoring justice to students and giving them ownership over their own voices. Too often, students, especially students who need extra writing support, come into the composition classroom believing that they are “bad writers” because they struggle with the traditional academic essay. Oftentimes, these students initially feel overwhelmed by any assignments they are asked to complete in a composition course. Prior to college, many students only have exposure to the traditional academic essay, which epitomizes “good writing” for them, and this lack of exposure to other kinds of composing causes students to carry the baggage of failure. This is where the writing center comes in. Providing additional training to writing tutors to prepare them to work with students on multimodal projects allows them to begin the work of restoring justice because the “job of the tutor is to help human beings…” (Fitzgerald & Ianetta, 2016, p. 167). Students sometimes show up in the writing center with an assignment that asks them to make a poster presentation for their biology course, a podcast for their English course, or a video for an education course. By coaching students on multimodal assignments and working students through feelings of intimidation and the baggage of previous writing courses, the writing center teaches students to repurpose their existing skills and overcome obstacles to become confident, capable writers and composers. Keywords : writing center, multimodal, justice, voice, rhetoric, visual design, coaching, multimodal assignments, multimodality

As a writing center community, we are constantly striving for ways to address underrepresentation to help restore justice in our centers. In this article, I discuss how the current makeup of writing center administrators does not reflect the U.S. student population. As a response to this historic underrepresentation in writing center administration, I propose that we utilize structures from mentorship theory to develop actionable ways to bring diverse student voices to the forefront of writing center leadership. These methods for increased representation include tutor-led Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound (SMART) projects, tutors serving as professional development facilitators, and rap sessions. Ultimately, this article should serve as a guided starting point to help writing center administrators to continually critique and reflect on how they represent the voices of the student populations they serve. Keywords : administrative underrepresentation, peer mentorship, professional development, student diversity, writing center leadership

Writing center training often teaches tutors to be aware of the “writer not the writing” (North) across from them—the whole person —but tutors are less-informed on how to bring their whole person to sessions. In this article, we question how tutors can practice restorative justice if they aren’t aware of the harm, hurt, or, even at times, healing that our whole person, as tutors, can bring to the table. To do this, we weave together stories of and theoretical influences on the planning and implementation of our undergraduate writing center theory and practice course. Further, we provide a course model for administrators interested in moving away from tutor training as a set of how-tos and inoculations, and toward a more embodied training that relies on centering the experiences of the whole student and the whole tutor in the writing center. Similar to our time together teaching the writing center theory and practice course, we include here an ongoing conversation alongside the main text in which we reflect on our experience and model the ongoing critical reflection necessary to embody a restorative justice ethos. Keywords : restorative justice, tutor training, wholeness, canon “Similarly, issues around gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, and physical ability will inevitably arise in a writing center and the available responses to these issues vary greatly among cultures. A general, short text such as The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors cannot adequately cover all possible situations and issues, and so we invite you to explore more deeply with your tutors the concerns of subjects that affect the writers who visit your writing center.” (Ryan and Zimmerelli, 2016, p.VI) During the summer of 2019, we (Shelby, Floyd, and Rachel) met together in a conference room that was always too hot and crowded with obnoxiously loud chairs. We were meeting to discuss plans for the upcoming writing center theory and practice course for the Fall 2019 semester. Shelby, a master’s student; Floyd, a PhD student; and Rachel, a PhD candidate, met to talk about the course they would be working on together. Rachel, as the instructor of record, created an agenda for the meeting that included looking over previous versions of the course, the service learning component, and what Shelby and Floyd’s roles would be, as two graduate student teaching assistants. We talked about our respective experiences in tutor training courses and how that preparation looked unlike what we had all come to know as writing center work, particularly when we considered the movement the Writing Center @ MSU was undergoing as we rolled out our Language Statement . Our “rollout” included a Speaker Series of invited lecturers and focused workshops on languaging in the center. We felt more traditional writing center training courses often create a utopian ideal and then complicate it, retrofitting the course to accommodate a checklist of writer identities. However, it was the complications of writing center work that felt more urgent for us in light of our center’s current initiative. We asked ourselves, how do we get new tutors, in just 15 weeks, to do this complex people-work in a way that is responsible to marginalized folks who are disserved by the institution. It was our responsibility to construct a primer that is built on social truths like systemic oppression. Accordingly, we began to construct a course that worked against writing center commonplaces and toward a social justice framework that we hoped would foster a more equitable, embodied, and human tutoring practice. Our epigraph, pulled from Ryan and Zimmerelli’s (2016) The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors , one of the most ubiquitous tutor training guides, frames identity as “issues that might arise,” tertiary concerns to the foundations of writing center work. Conversely, we tried to create a new vision of what the “basics” of writing center work entails, shifting away from the traditional trope of introducing new tutors to writing centers via the pathway: North’s “Better Writer’s”>History>What is Tutoring>Styles>Types of Students. Shifting away from this comfortable pathway was welcoming for us as teachers but still unsettling for our new tutors. We leaned into this discomfort because for us, this act was one of restorative justice. In fact, when we deviate from that pathway, we might be more likely to see the harm that the WC, as an institution itself, is complicit in and work to neutralize it. We must stop onboarding people to orientations that do harm—we must begin to reduce the need for restorative justice as an after-thought and, instead, consider the history of writing center tutorial training and courses as unjust and reorient ourselves to centering marginalized voices and bodies as the explicit way of introducing newcomers to the field of writing centers. This reorientation to the work of tutor training, in our minds, is a restorative justice stance that lends itself to writing center faculty and staff who are the stewards of the profession—those of us who are charged with undoing the harm of writing center lore that was once held sacred. Given our experiences and understandings of this charge, in this article, we offer three stories from our unique perspectives working on this course that further illustrate how restorative justice work uses the whole person—writer, tutor, teacher, and administrator—to create a tutor training course centered on restorative justice. Further, we provide a course example for administrators interested in moving away from tutor training as a set of “how-tos” and inoculations, and toward a more embodied training that relies on centering the experiences of the whole student and the whole tutor in the writing center. As you read our article, we want to offer our intention behind the format. While textually we follow a fairly typical organization pattern, we’ve additionally interspersed the article with comments. We did this so that we could use our individual voices to talk back to our collective voice and reflect more personally on specific moments in our experiences. They also provide space for smaller ideas that don’t easily fit into the larger narrative of our article but that still have great importance. We think these comments are representative of collaborative writing in general, but more specifically, they represent what tutoring looks like: a back and forth conversation, sometimes, even, across time and space.

The Saint Louis University (SLU) Prison Program has made higher education accessible for incarcerated residents and prison staff. However, due to geographical and technological limitations, the incarcerated students are excluded from much-needed academic support. This situation led SLU’s writing center administrators to develop a partnership with the SLU Prison Program to better serve incarcerated students by providing access to asynchronous writing center services. In this article, we share the logistics of how we developed our partnership with the SLU Prison Program and our initial approaches for training our consultants. Using prison classroom pedagogy as a foundation and taking into consideration the nature and limitations of traditional consultation strategies, we developed a consulting approach specifically designed to meet the unique needs of this student population. We then discuss how the partnership worked in three different classes. We end by discussing some of the obstacles we faced when putting the partnership and our practices in action as well as possibilities for the future, both for SLU and for other writing centers who may hope to create similar partnerships of their own. In doing so, we hope that readers will join us in striving to redefine the academic commonplace for incarcerated students and in exploring ways that we can promote justice and accessibility in writing center work. Keywords : consultant training, prison education, prison pedagogy, writing centers, writing center pedagogy

This position paper exemplifies potential and existing applications of bilingualism, multilingualism, and translingualism in tutoring sessions with support from existing literature and contextual examples from a public state university’s writing center. The authors advocate for the acceptance and incorporation of a diverse range of languages, dialects, and accents in writing and tutoring practices, providing local context to support the development of the writing center as a hub for diversity and a sense of belonging, to the benefit of participating students. Using reviewed literature, this paper examines existing strategies and how they can be applied to a specific writing center environment and describes its broader implications and methods of possible replication in other writing centers. Through a video by a conversation circle facilitator at the aforementioned state university writing center, this paper describes the benefits and means of developing cross-cultural communication skills in the increasingly multicultural and multilingual university context. Further, this paper provides examples of specific strategies used at the writing center, both online and in-person, that spread awareness of a writing center’s multilingual offerings and can be replicated at other writing centers in different regional settings. Combining strategies from literature and the center’s own practices, this paper contributes a unique perspective on the applications and benefits of embracing bilingualism, multilingualism, and translingualism beyond local contexts; other writing center administrators, tutors, and tutoring practitioners alike can incorporate the discussed strategies that are appropriate to the unique linguistic needs of the students at the universities they serve. Key words : linguistic diversity, inter linguistic, interlinguistic, intra linguistic, advocacy of writing across languages

This article describes a womanist approach to antiracist, racially just writing center administration from the perspective of a Black cisgender director of a writing and speaking center at a PWI. Drawing on womanist ethics and scholarship on race and writing program administration, the author explains the ethical commitments informing the curation of tutors, tutor training, and a cultural rhetorics art display. This womanist work occurs in the midst of intersecting traumas—rising hate crimes against people of color, ongoing anti-black police violence, longstanding systemic racism, and a global pandemic disproportionately impacting Blacks. In response, the author presents the article as a reflective three-part lament and closes with an invitation for solidarity. Keywords : womanist, antiracism, racial justice, cultural rhetorics, writing center administration, lament

Calls for antiracist pedagogies in university writing programs have gained attention and momentum in recent years. Many BIPOC scholars, and some white scholars, have been making arguments for more equitable university writing instruction and writing ecologies for decades. Yet, conditions have largely stayed the same. Undoing systemic racism in our institutions, programs, and ourselves is an individual and communal process that requires commitment and action. In this article, the authors describe a multiyear engagement with Equity-Centered Community Design, a framework offered by Creative Reaction Lab, that facilitates the process of seeing and recognizing systemic racism as intentionally designed to produce outcomes, so that what is designed may be dismantled and redesigned for equity. The multimodal composition of the article aims to convey the fluid, dynamic, and embodied process of doing this work that goes deeper and reaches farther than more typical writing center and writing program work. The goal is to offer a tool to writing centers, writing programs, departments, colleges, and beyond for turning antiracist support into antiracist realities. Keywords : Equity-Centered Community Design, antiracist pedagogy, writing centers, writing programs, design, equity Below is the preferred composition of this article. Please click in the in top right corner to open in a new tab and view as intended.

Although many college students are parents and postpartum depression (PPD) is common post-birth, there is a lack of writing center scholarship on supporting students with PPD. This article fills this gap by offering approaches to defining PPD for consultants and strategies for supporting writers with PPD in the writing center. It also makes visible the intersectional forms of emotional labor that are connected to PPD in the writing center and wider academy, contributing to emergent conversations about the emotional contours of writing center disciplinary labor. The authors take a narrative-based, auto-ethnographic approach in order to challenge stigmas associated with PPD and shed light on how it impacts college writing and working in writing centers. Their stories are grounded in scholarship from feminist theory, trauma studies, critical race theory, medicine, psychology, and neuroscience and build on existing writing center literature on emotionalism, wellness, dis/ability, and disciplinary labor.

This article is meant to serve as a practical guide for writing center practitioners and provide strategies to help make writing centers more accessible for all learners. These strategies specifically focus on ways to increase accessibility for dyslexic individuals , regardless of whether the writer has disclosed their disability or not.

d/Deaf students face a unique set of problems in the education system. Most of these struggles stem from their use of Signed language systems, such as American Sign Language. However, the current education system is also Problematic, as it promotes an Audist-centric learning environment. Additionally, many educators do not understand That signed language systems are completely different from spoken or written English and thus do not treat their d/Deaf pupils as multilingual learners. College writing centers, while heavily influenced by the current education System, have an ability to be incredibly flexible with their methods when working with students. This flexibility that Writing centers allow can be used in tandem with the translingual theory of writing when working with d/Deaf Students to revolutionize the way d/Deaf writers and students are taught in the education system. Keywords : d/Deaf students, signed language systems, Writing Centers, Translingualism

This study explores the identity construction of an individual multilingual writing center tutor in tutoring sessions at an American university. Discourse analysis approach is applied to analyze this multilingual tutor’s language use when interacting with his tutees. The findings indicate that the participant tutor takes on multiple identities: a writing center tutor, a negotiator and collaborator, and a language ambassador. These identities are contingent, fluid, and multifaceted depending on the interactions between the tutor and his tutees. Furthermore, this participant tutor’s identities are co-constructed in the interactions with his tutees through the incorporation of his multilingual resources, and through language and linguistic features which are assigned social meanings by writing center communities. Keywords : multilingual tutor, identity construction, writing center, language indexicality