This article offers a narrative account of how we, graduate assistants at a private, Vincentian university writing center, confronted and addressed sexual harassment within our space. Beginning in the spring semester of 2022, we saw an increasing number of sexual harassment incidents in our writing center. Desperately searching for more effective practices to protect our consultants and clients alike from these experiences, we drew inspiration from Kovalik et al.’s (2021) concept of a community contract, developing a contract tailored to the specific needs and dynamics of our writing center environment. By recounting our experiences, this article highlights the challenges faced by the consultants we mentor when dealing with harassment in their workplace, as well as how we balance policy and agency when looking for a solution. There is little literature currently on sexual harassment in writing center scholarship, so it is our hope that our experiences will inspire future research as well as fill some existing gaps in the academic landscape. We conclude this essay by reflecting on the outcomes of our initiatives and the lessons learned in the process. We hope that this framework will prove valuable to other writing centers currently dealing with similar problems, and that by implementing a community contract, writing centers may preemptively avoid such situations. Keywords : student misconduct, sexual harassment, community contract, writing center policy We quickly learn as writing center consultants that one unanticipated comment can throw off an entire session with a student, no matter how well the session had been going before. This becomes even truer when it comes to unwarranted sexual advances, observations about one’s identity, or illicit, uncomfortable conversation topics. This was true for Maya, [1] a senior writing consultant at our center. The session began as most do, exchanging pleasantries, ensuring that the student-client is comfortable, and determining how the next 45 minutes will be best spent. It was not until a few minutes into the session that her client, a white, male peer, derailed the focus of the session with one comment: “Hey, you’re pretty for a brown girl.” In this moment Maya, taken aback, must take stock of her positionality, the student-client’s positionality, what is at risk, and her own emotions, and then determine how to move forward. Does she address the inappropriate nature of this comment? Does she smile and brush off the affirmation of colorism, moving the session forward? Does she find a graduate assistant or another leader in the writing center and escalate the matter higher? In mere seconds, Maya must navigate an unfair and unjust situation with the means available to her. Though there may be resources available and support surrounding her, at this moment it is very easy for her to feel alone, targeted, unsafe, and unsure. Unfortunately, situations like these are not uncommon. The Association of American Universities (2019) found that on college campuses, 59.2% of women experience some degree of sexual harassment during their time at the university (p. viii). While there is not enough definitive research to confidently assert that these staggering statistics are reflected in writing center spaces, it is clear to those working in these spaces that some level of harassment is making its way through the writing center’s doors from the campus at large. We have found this true in our own writing center especially, a writing center at a private Vincentian university, with the rates of student misconduct growing exponentially in the two semesters following the height of the Covid-19 pandemic (namely Spring 2022 and Fall 2022). From racialized comments like the one Maya endured to inappropriate gestures during consultations, from clients derailing writing conversations in order to ask for consultants’ phone numbers to severe incidents of stalking, our writing center has been the background for an array of concerning incidents. As we saw the number of weekly incidents rising, we questioned how to move forward and what the best practices were to keep our consultants safe while maintaining the “homey” and welcoming feel we, and many other writing center administrators, desire our writing center to emanate, for better or for worse (McKinney 2013). The way forward was a journey for us, a journey on which we hope many more writing centers will join, as the work is nowhere near its endpoint. With this goal in mind, in this paper, we will discuss our lived experiences in our writing center as graduate assistants through a narrative format and the way we handled the threat of sexual harassment in our space. We share our collaborative process of creating a community contract for our writing center and offer the final version as a foundation for others to build upon. We create a framework that balances student agency and autonomy with necessary, protective policy that can easily be adapted by other writing centers negotiating their way through the muddy waters of student misconduct in their space. We believe that our work bridges gaps in existing research by demanding an intellectual consideration of sexual harassment in writing centers as a focal issue within student misconduct, something that desperately needs recognition within this field. We both work at our writing center as graduate assistants, so we are invested in the day-to-day operations of our center as leaders. [2] We toggle between our identities as administrators, mentors, and students, and this gives us a complex and unique perspective from which we conduct our leadership. [3] We see what is going on from a higher level– we know what needs to happen from an administrative point of view, what kind of training needs to happen, and how to keep the center running smoothly. But we also see how the job affects our undergraduate consultants in a very real way as we are “in the weeds” with them. Our campus is diverse in race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, economic backgrounds, and more. With this diversity at the forefront, we want our center to be a place that celebrates it, that champions students’ voices, and that feels like a safe space. When we started to notice that some sessions were impacting the space in a negative manner – for both consultants and for clients – we responded as both peers and student-leaders. Because of our unique position as graduate assistants, in many cases, we either saw or heard the incidents that occurred in our space, or were notified shortly after. Additionally, because we share close relationships with both the writing center’s director and assistant director, we felt empowered to act on behalf of our staff while knowing we were fully supported from above. While there were an alarming number of incidents, we have chosen to highlight the three that, along with Maya’s story, exemplify the crux of the issue at hand: blatant entitlement. In the spring semester of 2022, our campus was slowly transitioning back to its pre-Covid status quo. Masks were no longer required, distancing was loosened, and students were opting, once again, for in-person classes. This also meant that the writing center experienced higher traffic than it had in over a year, bringing in new students every day. One of these students was Arthur, a nontraditional student who frequented the center daily. At first, consultants found him a bit creepy but had difficulty articulating why. He had a certain suspicious demeanor about him, and many interactions with him seemed off-putting. He would lurk about the center, even if he did not have appointments, and began to make certain consultants uncomfortable with his presence. He had the tendency to “sneak up” on consultants and startle them when he wanted to ask a question and had little to no awareness of personal space. He acted as if the writing center was his alone, to the point that many consultants acknowledged that they felt that they no longer had access to their own workspace. As his behavior began to worsen, consultants took note. Many refused to be in spaces near him, and others requested to not work with him. When he would make appointments, he refused to make them himself online (as is our center’s policy) but would wait by our front desk until a female staff member was working there and then insist that that staff member make an appointment for him. Similarly, he would consistently book sessions only with our women consultants and come unprepared with no clear goals, thereby putting extra work on our consultants to direct a session that had no inherent direction. Often, he would also demand that these consultants do tasks outside their responsibility, such as plugging in his laptop for him. In one specific instance, one of our strongest and boldest consultants attempted to terminate the session after he presented no assignment to work on; this resulted in his refusal to leave and an attempt to cause an angry scene, demanding to speak to our director (also a woman). After this incident, we asked Arthur to leave our space and deactivated his account on our scheduling platform. He attempted to return in the fall of 2022 and, once again, put up quite the fight with our director, but we were able to stand our ground to ensure the safety and comfort of our consultants. We hoped that this was a one-off incident, but we were sadly mistaken. Our situation with Arthur only seemed to begin an influx of these types of events, heightening our awareness as leaders. In the fall semester of 2022, incidents began to increase both in intensity and number. Lauren, a senior consultant, came to us to report unwelcoming and hostile incidents with a client who happened to be a co-worker in her other campus job as a resident assistant. This co-worker had crossed boundaries multiple times outside of the space, including an instance where he refused to leave her dorm room. This particular client began making appointments with Lauren and usually did not convey clear goals or a specific assignment to work on. Other times, he would neglect bringing in any kind of writing assignment at all; he made appointments simply to chat with Lauren as his consultant. The advances he made during these types of sessions were unwanted and unencouraged, and altogether made Lauren feel unsafe. To address these incidents, we began by simply moving his appointments to other consultants. The student became apoplectic at the thought of his appointments being moved and complained to both the director and assistant director of the writing center, both of whom kindly explained the policy behind their decision. He responded that working with Lauren was a “clear right” as he pays tuition money that funds the center, and by that logic, funds his access to Lauren’s person. The disturbing nature of his presumptuous ownership over Lauren, a black woman, was made further alarming by their racial identities: as a white man, this client’s rhetoric embodied the financial entitlement that has historically commodified black women’s bodies and their labor. His response to our administrators demonstrated the full extent of his assumed privilege to consultant access, time, and intimacy of the consultation space in the center, a notion that we found to be increasingly shared by a vast number of the student population that utilized writing center services. At the same time, the student began to show up in Lauren’s place of residence, unexpected and unannounced. Because of the nature of these advances, the matter had to be reported institutionally with the Title IX office. This student had access to both of Lauren’s places of work, one of which was also her home as an RA. The harassment cornered her in almost every aspect of her daily life, causing distress and questioning/jeopardizing her safety. We wondered if working with a specific consultant truly was a “right,” and if any codes of conduct existed that would suggest otherwise, but our search into this matter institutionally came up empty, prompting us to fill the gaps. During the evening hours at our writing center, a student came in with a creative short story he wanted to get an opinion on. Once again, Lauren was the consultant for this particular session, and by this time, had unfortunately become accustomed to working through difficult sessions. The session began normally, and the story seemed innocent at first. It followed a budding college romance in the residence halls, but the story took a dark turn when the plot morphed from romance to murder. The story specifically explained in detail how the main character kills his love interest, proceeds to rape her inside their residence hall, and later eats her. Reaching this point in the story, Lauren became increasingly uncomfortable and excused herself to alert one of us and asked how she should move forward. At our writing center, we, of course, encourage writings of all types and typically instruct our consultants to help clients even if they disagree with the viewpoints being articulated as it can be a good chance for education and for changing the rhetoric surrounding oppression (Suhr-Systma & Brown, 2011). It is also the responsibility of both the reader and writer to authentically respond (Elbow & Belanoff, 1999). However, with the explicit nature of this story and Lauren’s clear uneasiness, we made the decision to shut down the session. When we explained this to the client, he stated that “he had the right to bring in whatever he wanted ” and work with whomever he likes. We wondered how far is too far with writing, what consultants actually consent to as they enter a session, and how much we can actually protect our consultants from uncomfortable situations. We share these stories to paint a realistic picture of our writing center and to express the urgency we felt to “deal” with the problem. Stories have a unique way of drawing storyteller and listener together into a relationship, even if temporarily; the hardships faced by one will by proxy be felt by the other (Dixon 2017). With this in mind, we invite you into the weeds of our writing center and share with you our collaborative process for overcoming the sexual harassment we saw. With our consultants’ safety risk increasing simply by existing in our space and doing their job, we knew we had to find a new way forward as leaders. To begin, we borrowed Dixon’s (2017) framework of accepting the messy, everyday parts of writing center work as integral to what we do. Rather than looking at these incidents as something to overcome, move past, and forget for the sake of trying to create an idealistic – yet unattainable – space, we addressed the discomfort these incidents left behind. In her research on queering the everyday of writing centers, Dixon (2017) suggests that negotiating sexual harassment and other incidents comes from working through unsettling events and asking how they “complicate our understanding of what it means to make meaning in the center.” In our case, what do these new levels of harassment mean? Do they affect how consultants interact with each other and/or with clients? What kind of environment do we want to build, and how do we get there? Next, we collected whatever resources we could find on sexual harassment and similar occurrences in writing centers. While the scholarship on the subject was relatively limited, a handful of studies aided us in our journey. Harry Denny’s foundational work, Facing the Center, situates sex and gender dynamics in the writing center as a pivotal point of study. He writes that “our sex, our gender, and the politics attendant to them are ubiquitous in writing centers and to the people that circulate through them” (p. 87). To ignore the different power dynamics, privileges, and potentials for harm that accompany sex, gender, and its intersections across multiple identities is to ignore a key component of the work being done in a writing center space. Denny reminds us that though we cannot fight every battle, we must find strategic moments to fight the gender and sex oppressions we see in our centers (p. 111). This sentiment reinforces the importance of the work we are attempting to accomplish. Dixon and Robinson (2019), and Nadler (2019) pushed us to question the space of a writing center itself – we want our spaces to be welcoming, but what does that mean? And at what cost? Nader (2019) discusses online writing center spaces and what kinds of behaviors and attitudes are welcome there. Specifically, he addresses tutor consent– by entering online space what exactly are tutors consenting to? Is this consent clearly defined (typically, the answer is “no”)? Similarly, Dixon and Robinson (2019) tackle what “welcome” means inside an in-person writing center, especially when institutional positionality is considered. The university places rules and regulations on a writing center that directly impact what shape “welcome” takes and who exactly is welcome. They call us to redefine comfort, space, ideology, and practice in order to consider what “welcome” means in practice. This is a call we took seriously as we strived to address the incidents in our writing center because we did not want our space to welcome harm. As Dixon and Robinson (2019) express, writing centers are situated in the midst of institutions that, more often that not, have conflicting agendas concerning the handling of sexual harassment. This is an area that writing centers need to tread carefully, balancing institutional responsibility with the well-being of the students who inhabit the space. Prebel (2015) writes of the implicit harm in mandatory reporting. She argues that mandatory reporting in centers, and across the institution, in reality victimize those who have experienced sexual harassment. Meadows (2021) builds on this work, highlighting key ideas that she believes will spark conversations in writing centers and move us toward finding a solution to sexual harassment that does not leave victims isolated and defeated. She asserts that we must start these conversations with each other and push for some sort of institutional reform – two things we look to accomplish through our work here. Using Prebel (2015) and Meadows (2021) as a springboard, it seemed clear that we needed to tackle the problem of institutional policies versus internal, departmental policies. We had no internal policy in place to deal with sexual harassment or other forms of student misconduct at the time these incidents began to occur. In our center, we try to have as few hard-lined policies as possible because we believe that policies, no matter how good-intentioned, typically tend to fail to serve the entire population which they are intended to regulate and can easily become tools of oppression. Our greatest desire is for both our consultants and our student-clients to have agency in the sessions, and we find that the best way to ensure that is to lessen the authoritarian policies in place. We adopted this mentality from the work of Natarajan, Cardona, and Yang (2022), who write about the policies on writing center landing pages from an anti-racist lens. They argue that policies even as simple as “no proofreading” or appointment allotments can send subtle yet clear signals as to who is welcome or not welcome in a space. Sometimes, policies are created with implicitly biased rationales. While many policies seem neutral when taken for face-value, underneath they expose roots in racism and ableism, disproportionately affecting already marginalized student writers and tutors. To combat this potential marginalization, Natarajan et. al (2022) suggest focusing on the students themselves and how policies affect them, rather than focusing on the nitty gritty of the actual policy. They delineate the distinction by focusing on the who rather than the what : We wanted to adopt their ideology of people-focused versus policy-focused procedures in our space. While policies do help standardized practices so that every student at the writing center, both writer and tutor, has the same foundation, these policies can also affect the students in different ways. This is something that writing center administrators must be aware of while working with students and when creating the policies meant to protect them. We took this thinking to heart in our writing center, wanting to respect the diversity of our space by keeping rigid procedures to a minimum. We intended our space to allow allow creative expression and autonomy for both writers and tutors to set the boundaries of their consultations. Yet, in doing so, we found that when things get dicey in a session for a consultant, especially concerning sexual harassment, the lack of clear, available policy works toward our disadvantage. Until these incidents, we had almost been scared of power and authority as concepts; it was now our chance to remedy this stance and find a healthy balance between power and autonomy. In writing centers and related scholarship, there is more often than not an acute need to move away from any sort of hierarchy to ensure that work can be done. We know and live by the mantra “produce better writers, not better papers,” focusing on equipping writers with transferable writing skills rather than making sure they have an A+ paper ready to go by the end of a session (North 1984, 438). Similarly, we strive for our centers to be welcoming homes and not stuffy classrooms or remedial-only spaces. Carino (2003) reminds us that peership is elevated in writing center scholarship as the ultimate form of tutoring, a practice we actively promote in our own center. It represents “writing centers as the nonhierarchical and nonthreatening collaborative environments most aspire to be” (Carino, 2003, p. 96). We see consultants and their clients as two equals, two students, two friends . But should friendship truly be the goal of writing consultations? Of course, considering friendship is helpful for many consultations, especially when the clients come into their sessions eager and ready to dive into their writing. But more often than not, it can create an awkward dynamic between tutor and writer. Students do not always come into our writing center with the intention to learn and do so happily; many times, students come into our space with the intention of getting extra credit, having someone to write their papers for them, or, in extreme cases, crossing boundaries. If I only see my tutor as a friend, what is keeping me from crossing boundaries and making inappropriate advances? Friendship is a familiar relationship, one that suggests intimacy. Yes, there is inherent intimacy built into the work of consultation as sharing writing is extremely personal and often feels like sharing oneself. Yet, at the end of the day, writing consultation is a job with specific goals. We want clients to feel welcome, safe, and productive while doing their work with a tutor, yet this desire should never come at the cost of our student tutoring staff’s well-being, all for the sake of “friendship.” There must be some sort of balance between the two extremes of hard-lined policies and idealistic friendship. Tutors need to have agency in their sessions to direct their clients as needed and to add whatever personalization feels right to them, but clear boundaries also need to be established between tutor and client for a safe working relationship to exist. We cannot turn a blind-eye to the power dynamics at play in tutor-client relations for the sake of friendship; this becomes especially important when sessions become difficult. Acknowledging that there is some sort of power dynamic occurring in sessions can help consultants embrace their desired autonomy, not only when shutting down unwanted advances but also in the more predictable difficult sessions, such as when clients are on their phones or clearly have faulty expectations of what writing center consultants can do. Carino (2003) reminds us: While we do not want to cross the line into an authoritarian regime where administrators dictate exactly what can occur in a session and create rules for every little thing, some level of actual authority given to our consultants and policies in place to help guide sessions truly can be a healthy thing. In order to create policies that brought us closer to this healthy foundation, however, we had to navigate institutional systems and authority, which many times proves to be a much trickier task. When it comes to institutional responsibility for a sexual harassment or student misconduct case, the path to accountability and due process can often come with difficulty to alleviate a threatening situation. Institutions are responsible by Title IX to ensure that there is equal access to all University spaces and that such access is not hindered, for example, by another student’s threatening presence. However, institutional responsibility also includes ensuring compliance to reporting, evidence, and investigation standards, some of which have come under scrutiny for taking agency– and consent– away from the victim/survivor. When writing centers welcome individuals into sessions, they do so with the other person’s consent and right to self-determination, but this culture comes to a halt when mandatory reporting practices bind writing centers to situate the victim/survivor outside of their own autonomy. Holland et al. (2021) write that “lack of consent lies at the heart of both sexual assault and universal mandatory reporting” (p. 3).  Regaining this lost sense of autonomy and control is “essential to recovery and healing after individuals experience sexual trauma” (p. 2). However, when an individual– client or consultant– reports to their graduate assistant or directors at the writing center, they may then be subjected to a series of interrogation from one department to another. This may require them to reiterate their stories and endure trauma for the sake of attaining justice, as well as have their consent to privacy be undertaken by university surveillance, the police, attorneys, private investigators, and the perpetrator– all of which came from one nonconsensual report (Know Your Title IX 2021). The ramifications of mandatory reporting become even more pronounced when consultants occupy marginalized racial identities. In these instances, the consequences extend to issues of racialization, mistrust of authority, and the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes. As with the consultants in our story, the victim/survivor’s racial identity increases their susceptibility to harm from surveillance measures. As Holland (2021) reminds us, mandatory reporting can reinforce the mistrust persons of color already carry as a result of previous racialization, over policing, and personal experiences of police brutality. The fact that “providing safety and support has become synonymous with increasing police presence [and] surveillance” shows what little consideration mandatory reporting policies give to this mistrust (Méndez, 2020, p. 98). In this way, white supremacy becomes enmeshed in mandatory reporting and decreases a student of color’s likelihood of reporting. For Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC), specific gendered and racialized stereotypes can further inhibit them from reporting out of self preservation. Black women who report face being stereotyped as the “angry black woman” to minimize justified anger over sexual harassment (Morrison 2021). Furthermore, race-specific stereotypes that label Black and Brown women as overly promiscuous can lead institutional authority figures to orient their investigation towards the victim/survivor’s credibility (Buchanan 2002). Surveillance as a result of mandatory reporting then turns into a measure of scrutiny rather than safety for BIWOC victims/survivors. For writing centers, this dilemma of institutional responsibility and ethics of care is crucial to our commitment to social justice. In her work on mandatory reporting in writing centers, Bethany Meadows (2021) asks, “if we believe students have the right to their own language and voice, then why do we remove survivor agency with mandatory reporting?” If we acclaim students’ self-determination in consultations, then how can we implicate ourselves in processes that remove autonomy, forcibly re-traumatize, and subject survivors/victims to surveillance from institutions that systematically oppress the racial and gendered identities of those who come forward? For writing centers, these dilemmas of institutional responsibility and ethics of care are crucial to our commitment to social justice. Mandatory reporting removes students from a place where they “can experience some distance from institutional authority” to a space where “the center– and consultant– is more in consensus with the institution than in collaboration with the student” (Prebel 2015). In our cases of consultants facing harassment from clients, the balance between institutional cooperation and the culture of collaboration and care we shared for each other became complicated. As Méndez (2021) asks, “to what extent is having Title IX as the only option available to address sexual misconduct one of the preconditions for silencing a diverse range of survivors?” To be able to actualize the work of reducing institutional harm, writing centers must build “viable responses and healing options for the range of survivors who have been deemed systemically disposable” (Méndez 2021). At our writing center, we created our own code of conduct to give our consultants the option to resolve peer harassment without creating unwarranted surveillance or pressure on a student. Doing so, we hoped to enact an ethics of care for our consultants alongside the ethics of care we pursue for student-clients. Throughout the commentary on the newest revisions to Title IX regulations, there is much debate over the requirement that indirect disclosures, such as through an assignment, must be reported. Under these guidelines, “nearly all employees will be required to report when: they have information about conduct that could reasonably be understood to constitute sexual harassment and assault because they… learned about it ‘by any other means,’ including indirectly learning of conduct via flyers, posts on social media or online platforms, assignments, and class-based discussions” (Holland, n.d., p. 186). According to Prebel (2015), “disclosures of sexual assault made in student essays and reflective pieces like personal statements are considered reportable” and under these circumstances, “the mandate to report can thus be interpreted as a form of textual interventionism, a limit on how individual writers might ‘own’ their texts or develop agency through their writing” (p. 4-5). While Prebel references a client’s disclosure about being a victim/survivor, you will remember from Lauren’s story that our writing center was faced with a client’s fictional first-person narrative, whereas the narrator perpetrated sexual violence and murder, including rape, necrophilia, and cannibalism in a dorm setting. The client’s consultant, feeling physical and mental discomfort, removed herself from the session and a graduate assistant explained to the client that he would not be allowed to bring in writing that was harmful to the consultant’s psychological being. The student-writer lodged a counter complaint that they were denied their right to write about and seek consultancy on any subject matter. This is not a debate distant from writing center scholarship as many have reported the complications arising from “questions about whose it is to adopt or accommodate to whom and to what effect” when it comes to working with a client whose writing threatens respect and dignity for the existence of one or many fundamental identities of the consultant (Denny 2010). However, the social injustices that emerge from a passive or indifferent response to these works create a culture that de-prioritizes the consent and inclusivity of consultants and even other clients. The crux of the issue lies in how a writing center approaches inclusivity. As Dixon and Robinson (2019) write, “inclusivity becomes complicated when writing centers have clients who visit the center with racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, or otherwise oppressive papers.” Arguments to maximize inclusivity of these clients and their ideas often root in taking a writing-based approach that perhaps challenges sources and evidence, but not ethics. While this more objective angle does enhance the comfortability of the client, it does not serve social justice and through performance, indicates an indifference to the personhood of consultants or clients who share the identities being oppressed. Critical to this proposition is the radical social justice praxis set forth by Greenfield (2019) who addresses the issue of allowing writing consultants to help authors “be more effective in communicating their racism or misogyny” (p. 4). Considering the writing center’s positionality within the larger institution, “our privileging of writers over righteousness risks in both small and large ways our field’s complicity in enabling or even promoting systems of injustice many of us personally reject” (Greenfield, 2019, p. 5). When “the work of writing centers is implicated in these various systems of oppression,” then “we have an ethical responsibility to intervene purposefully” (Greenfield, 2019, p. 6). Others may argue that textual or even verbal intervention in violent writing contradicts the core writing center value of championing a client’s language and voice, but then one must also ask, whose voice and what message is upheld in that apathy? Moreover, where is the consultant’s consent to hear and handle writing directly opposing their existence? While consultations often defer control to student-clients in order to practice student-centered approaches, it does not mean that consultants also drop their subjectivity. The process of recognition and response is alive on both ends, and both clients and consultants work to balance the inherent power dynamics in their relationship.  However, when a client presumes entitlement to a consultant’s right to self-determine their boundaries in a session, including a consultant’s right to remove themselves from a space where their existence or autonomy no longer felt welcome, power is wielded to enact control and oppression. An ethics of care for clients grounds much of our considerations on what “comfortable” and “welcome” mean for a given space.  However, it is time that an ethics of care for consultants is also closely considered. It is in that deeper examination that we found the larger implications of student misconduct on our space. Primarily, student misconduct reveals gendered assumptions of consultant work and a client’s rights to the consultant’s mobility, time, intellectual resources, and emotional faculty. Writing center staff is typically female-dominated, perpetuating the stereotype of women as helpers. The notion that women should exist in remedial spaces and provide help to the men that need it and/or desire it, though the men (more often than not) are reluctant to accept such help, is a persistent problem. Denny (2010) writes of this issue: Thus, how we interact with gender in a healthy manner is of utmost importance for the safety of all students that inhabit our spaces, consultants and clients alike. Denny (2010) writes that “our gender and sex are among those political and historical variables that cut through the scene of tutoring. For some, the point of entrée into this conversation vis-à-àvis writing centers revolves around gendered notions of writing—that there are uniquely male, female, feminine or masculine ways of doing and learning it” (p. 89). Gendering in writing centers cannot be escaped– gender is such an outward-facing expression of our innate identities that it is difficult to hide or ignore, even if we wanted to. Similarly, as Morrison (2021) points out, consultants do not leave their race at the door of writing centers, and “racism itself is not dropped at the door of the writing center by anyone” either (p. 120). In and out of the writing center, “experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1243). At these intersections, the dual axis of marginality imposes extra layers of emotional taxation in addition to being stereotyped as nurturing “helpers.” For women of color, their racial identity presents an additional axis that increases the emotional labor placed on them. BIWOC consultants are placed “in a position of constant negotiation” of identity politics, having to perform what Morrison (2021) calls a “balancing act” of filtering responses to racialized hostility to maintain a hospitable work environment, especially if it’s lacking a conscious commitment to anti-racism practices (p. 124). The lack of a conscious commitment to anti-racism practices amplifies the challenges that women consultants of color face, perpetuating an environment where racialized sexual harassment can thrive. For example, while some instances of racialized sexual harassment may be more overt, such as “hey, you’re pretty for a brown girl,” other instances may be more covert, making it harder to validate feelings of racial targeting within sexual harassment. Such experiences “can be incredibly direct and personal for those who live them, while those who perpetrate the acts may deny them or fail to notice them and their exclusionary effect” (Morrison, 2021, p. 128). In the case of Lauren’s client, implying that access to Lauren was “paid for” by his tuition may have been just one final attempt to pre-approve his harassment; but for Lauren, these comments may invoke a scary reminder of the present manifestations of racial capitalism. The sexual harassment here was apparent. However, the racism Lauren felt may go unacknowledged for multiple factors: its covert presentation, the consultant’s need for self-preservation from gaslighting, and the racial consciousness of the writing center at hand. To cultivate an ethics of care for all consultants, it is essential for writing center culture to commit to addressing overt and subtle expressions of systemic racism and the emotional labor they require to overcome. Because writing center spaces offer a welcoming environment that encourages empathy and collaboration, they can often be misinterpreted as informal environments where anything goes. Regardless of gender, consultants have to engage in various forms of emotional labor as part of their daily work. It follows, then, that women consultants are already doing a great degree of this type of labor before adding in the gender bias that disproportionately affects them. Navigating gender bias itself takes a great degree of emotional labor, a labor that could easily weigh on a consultant long after the session concludes. This begs the question of what kind of emotional labor is required of students in writing centers, especially of consultants. Mannon (2021) asserts that emotional labor is typically something we simply expect of writing center consultants without training. It is something we believe is central to working in a writing center, yet we treat emotional labor as if it is something consultants should inherently understand and know how to navigate. It is not something trained or taught; rather, it is simply expected. However, when we ignore this type of work as a very real and very valid part of the writing center experience, we create a space “where the work of managing writers’ emotions is invisible, devalued, and disheartening” (Mannon, 2021, p. 145). Complicating further the consultant’s emotional burden is the neoliberal idea that students at a university are consumers whose needs must be met at any cost. As displayed in the three stories we shared, there is an overarching theme of entitlement– entitlement to the consultant herself, her time, to the writing center space, to have any sort of behavior accepted, etc. Universities do everything in their power to attract high performing (and high-paying) students, promising an array of services in return, ranging from state-of-the-art gyms to trendy residence halls and to, of course, writing center and tutoring services (Mintz, 2021, p. 88). In this kind of framework, the “customer is always right,” which leads consultants in writing centers to consistently navigate what the client expects of them– another emotional juggle that is not taught, and further, should not have to be. This becomes extremely problematic in writing centers where the front-facing consulting service is primarily conducted by women. The underlying notion of client-as-consumer tips the scale of the power dynamics between client and female consultant before the session even begins. When dealing with the emotional labor and trauma that accompany sexual harassment in sessions, the conjunction of neoliberal ideals and gendered expectations exacerbates the problems faced by our women consultants. By failing to create a space where emotional labor is validated as hard work as well as having limited policies in place that empower consultants in this emotional labor, both consultants and clients suffer. Nadler (2019) affirms this when writing about student consent for both student-consultants and student-clients. What do we consent to? What do we not consent to? How is this communicated? How does this change depending on the space we find ourselves in? He asks, “when consultants lose agency because of undesirable circumstances they have no choice in entering, how is that not the ultimate form of harassment?” (Nadler, 2019, pt. IV). We centered this question when attempting to find a way forward in our own sexual harassment situation and determined that lacking space for the acknowledgement of emotional labor and the protection of agency in our own center was becoming increasingly problematic. Protecting the consultant’s agency and giving them a clear route to achieve this became our top priority. Searching for a way forward proved difficult as we wanted to strike an appropriate balance between policy and agency. Denny (2010) raises the question of gender and sexuality in the writing center, asking, “whose burden it is to adapt or accommodate to whom and to what effect. Like the dynamics around sexuality, these moments of gender conflict are fraught with policy and political complications” (p. 93). How do we protect consultants? How do we have clear policies while steering clear of total authoritarian attitudes? We found a solid foundation in the work of Kovalik et al. (2021). Their work in community contracts for online spaces gave us a foundation for our own solution and ushered in a new way to handle policy in writing center spaces. Given the problem of emotional labor Mannon (2021) makes clear, the weight of responsibility writing tutors have when sessions go awry is clearly problematic, especially considering power structures, different identities, and different uses of language. The issue of harassment and misconduct in a writing center muddies the waters for tutors and can cause harm in a space that is supposed to be open and safe (Kovalic et al., 2021). Additionally, because students are typically not trained to handle misconduct (and we must ask – should they be? Is this their responsibility? In their pay grade?), the responsibility falls solely on the tutor experiencing the problem, isolating them and asking them to negotiate in the moment far more than a session agenda. Many tutors shrug “off their uncomfortable interactions, thinking they would never come into contact with the student again– so why bother?” (Kovalik et al., 2021, p. 2). Their idea to combat these inequitable dynamics was to create a community contract, specifically for their online sessions, to take the full responsibility off of their tutors and to share the responsibility equally across the tutor-client relationship. The contract stated what a session is, what its purpose is, what will happen in the session, and what is not to happen in a session. Everyone must sign the contract, ensuring that everyone understands what is expected. This study by Kovalik et al. (2021) became the bedrock of our own– it revealed to us an equitable way forward and promised a bright solution to the problem that had been darkening our center. In brainstorming sessions with upper administration, there were questions about what this contract posed theoretically for the power dynamics within writing center culture. Contracts, in a broad sense, are prescriptive agreements between two parties, a set of rules and regulations to abide by that are designed to protect individuals by limiting interpretation and scope. Given that writing center practice prioritizes anti-hierarchical and student-centered approaches to collaboration, contracts in the space can seem too authoritative on the consultant’s end, considering the power they inherently bring to the session. However, according to the collaborative theory of contracts (Markovits 2004), a shared sense of intention and obligations actually sustains cooperation and collaboration better than otherwise. Framed as a legal theory in this context, Markovits’ theory the sustainability of collaboration and community through contracts or promises holds profound implications for how writing centers can reassess the importance of establishing healthy, clear, and secure boundaries. This reconsideration can enhance the comfort of both clients and consultants, fostering a collaborative environment where they can work towards a common end-goal without apprehension of inappropriate motives. Having a community-contract certainly changes the relations among the clients and consultants who engage in them, but these changes can enhance opportunities for collaboration despite their formality. Markovits (2004) writes that promises “increas[e] the reliability of social coordination and promot[es] the efficient allocation of resources” (p. 1419).  This is because promises “establish a relation of recognition and respect– and indeed a kind of community– among those who participate in them” (Markovits 2004, p. 1420). Recognition and respect are the feedback loop which defines the bond between a consultant and a client. As Trachsel (1995) writes, “the intersubjective dynamic of recognition and response, the relational self in close connection with another self, is crucial to the successful enactment of a learning process centered around the student” (p. 38). Even more so, staying honest to a promise or contract “enable[s] persons to cease to be strangers by sharing in the ends of the promises” and fulfillment of their joint intentions (Markovits 2004, p.1447). When clients and consultants can each hold up their end on the promise to conduct themselves with respect for the other’s boundaries and self-determination, they “cease to be strangers and come to treat each other, affirmatively, as ends in themselves, by entering into what I call a collaborative community” (Markovits 2004, p. 1451). Within the nuances of this theory and its application on our own writing center community contract, one can see how what seemed authoritarian actually comes to be integral in sustaining a respectful community. With the spirit of collaboration and an ethics of care, our methodology for designing a contract included an all-staff meeting as well as an accessible brain-dump document where all consultants could anonymously pose suggestions for what boundaries would allow them to ensure safety and self-determination in a session. It was easy for us to invite the consultants into these conversations as non-hierarchical collaboration is modeled to us through our own position as graduate assistants, and because their voices are incredibly important to a document that directly affects their experience in their workplace. Consultants were eager to be a part, and were active participants throughout the process. Our writing center staff is committed to one another, as friends and as colleagues, so everyone took the drafting seriously in the hope it would strengthen the already existing bonds in our space. As we can see here, many of our consultants posed their concerns side-by-side in what textually feels like solidarity to protect each other and themselves. The root of many of these issues– such as phone distractions, expecting a consultant to “fix” papers, crossing personal boundaries– rested in the harmful assumption that a consultant’s time and intellectual resources could be disregarded and disrespected. In this document, the staff brought together what they believed defined the contractual obligations or promises of the relationship between consultants and clients from their personal experiences. Most of all, they emphasize a need for shared intention to be present and active with writing to work on in a session. Shared intentions, as per Markovits’ (2004) analysis, is the foundation to coordination. For example, one of our consultant’s suggestions, “must have intention to work on their own writing” better allows for both client and consultant to move forward with the session. When one party does not share this intention, then the consultation moves backwards in progress. These statements relate to our mission, to the expectations of a client so that a consultation can be collaborative, and to the non-negotiable behavior in a workplace. We wrote this first draft of the contract towards the end of the semester, when student misconduct and sexual harassment reports had lessened, but we still felt its impact across the space. Examining the language here, such as posing every statement with “I agree” and requiring initials, one can interpret how we feared losing the safety of the writing center space, alerting us of a need to be stricter with policy writing and interpretation. To the process of initialing and signing, we also added that these were “non-negotiable” rules for a client to “abide by.” While the language here emerges from the anxiety and need to protect interpretation so that another client could not bend our policies to justify their inappropriate behavior, it nonetheless exacerbated power dynamics in client-consultant relationships. It was focused on giving the power to dictate rules and control interpretation to the hands of writing center staff, rather than welcoming collaboration from our community– something we would later revisit and revise. Writing this draft, there was much concern about how certain terms would be interpreted and how we could best enforce a culture of accountability that served social justice. One critical method we implemented here was writing what would be considered a breach of this contract. As Markovits (2004) theorizes, “contracts enable persons who are not intimates nevertheless to cease to be strangers; and breaches do not just reinstate the persons’ prior status as strangers but instead leave them actively estranged” (p. 1463).  This means that a contractual relationship allows for community building (rather than remaining strangers post-consultation) when recognition and respect of intentions, goals, and obligations are met. However, when they are breached, the contract itself contains the codified authority that allows for a clear discontinuation of that relationship. Because we did not have a clear policy on student misconduct and what breached appropriate behavior in our writing center, clients often felt not only entitled to returning to the writing center but also entitled to working with the same consultant that they had harassed. By having a written document that clearly defined what constituted a breach of appropriate behavior and the consequences for such, consultants and clients could easily point to their right to remove themselves from a consultation and disengage in any unwanted future relationship. After we had returned from break, graduate assistants and upper administration sat down with our previous draft of the contract. Significant changes were made as we had returned to the community contract with our mission to practice care, collaboration, and non-hierarchical praxis in mind. We removed the initials and replaced “I agree” statements with language to indicate these terms as expectations rather than rules. Removing initials and signatures came from our desire to emphasize that this is a shared community document and to maintain a horizontal relationship with our clients and each other, rather than the traditional vertical hierarchy of promisee and promisor often found in more traditional contracts. By doing so, we also hoped to reiterate these guidelines as part and parcel of community-building in the writing center. We removed the term “non-negotiable” from the title as we began to realize that “writing centers become arenas where the support they provide and the cultural assumptions that go along with them present unfamiliar points of contact between people who might not otherwise be thrown together” (Denny 2010, p.100). As Denny questions in his article, we too considered how we might ensure the safety of our staff while still maintaining spaces that “embrace a diversity of bodies, identities, and practices?” To this point, we altered the language of this contract to match our embrace of restorative rather than punitive approaches toward clients who commit misconduct while still upholding the consultant’s autonomy and feelings as valid and deserving of a righteous response. Our final community contract and its terms represent a culmination of emotions, thought, scholarship, and advocacy we all experienced in the previous year. Outside of structuring the contract in a more welcoming and supportive tone, we also hoped that our specific terms would assist us in facing interpersonal as well as larger institutional issues we encountered. Our first item establishes our intentions and goals as consultants by pointing clients towards our mission statement. Items two and three as well as term five continue on the mission of creating available and clearly stated expectations to be shared between consultants and clients for greater cooperation. Item four is designed to lower instances where a consultant feels overburdened in the emotional labor they provide to a session. As Mannon (2021) writes, “affective engagements are central to writing center practice” (p.144). By asking clients to come to a consultation when they are ready to be actively engaged and indicating exactly what that labor of engagement involves, clients can hopefully better imagine this often-invisible emotional laboring on the client and consultant’s part. For consultants, “emotional labor might take less of a toll in environments that define it, value it, and establish conditions where it resonates positively” (Mannon 2021, p.161). Mindful of this, term seven also seeks to validate a consultant’s autonomy by authorizing their feelings as sufficient enough reason to end a consultation. Items six, seven, and eight are designed to protect consultants and clients psychologically and physically. Specifically, in term eight, we sought to clearly answer what Dixon (2019) asks writing centers to contemplate: “We perpetuate the idea of comfort to foster a setting for vulnerability, yet how do we know what is comfortable, what welcome means, for everyone who comes into our space? Who do we prioritize welcome for and how?” In term eight, we assert consultations as spaces with professional boundaries despite being peer-to-peer relationships. In both of these terms, we also hoped to “intervene purposefully” (Greenfield 2019) in the institutional taking of survivor/victim consent through mandatory reporting. By asserting the right of clients and consultants to end a session without having to report to others, we hope this contract can provide one template by which writing centers can “expand anonymous and voluntary reporting options that survivors can control” (Holland 2021, p.3). Following our student-centered model, this contract as a whole provided our writing center the status of a community with a heightened sense of empowerment and choice. Rather than enforcing the hierarchical practice of signing the contract, which demands a client’s acknowledgment toward the higher power of the staff’s voice against theirs, we decided to place the contract at the bottom of our homepage for clients to view and know before entering a session (see figure 4). While the client still retains the responsibility of knowing the terms of the contract, we do not necessarily present the contract in a way that might fashion hostility before the consultation even begins. At its end result, this contract shows how collaboration works best when boundaries are clearly drawn, rather than ambiguously assumed. This becomes increasingly important as the writing center at our university is a female-majority space where consultants’ identities are publicly visible via our scheduling platform. With high rates of sexual harassment on campuses, a female-majority space requires distinct protections necessary for collaboration to flourish. While there is a concern that boundary setting will enforce too much formality, thereby prohibiting consultants and/or clients from feeling comfortable in their sessions, it is important to note that these boundaries in actuality enhance the comfortability of both clients and consultants to work without fear of losing their agency or of tolerating inappropriate behavior (Carino 2003). With the contract in place, consultants and clients enter sessions with clear expectations of what comprises successful sessions, and they have a written and agreed upon exit strategy should a session go awry for any reason. It is our deepest desire that the steps that we took at our writing center will bring a tangible lasting change. As both of us are moving on from that university, our involvement in the day-to-day interactions with consultants will be at a minimum, so we lose a little of our ability to monitor the contract’s success. However, we left ways for the future graduate assistants in the space, as well as other administrators and consultants themselves, to keep track of the safety of our consultants. We employed, like Kovalik et al. (2021), a behavior log to keep track of student misconduct and the circumstances surrounding it. This will help our writing center keep track of incidents and potentially be able to predict them before they occur if we see patterns form. We will do this through the center’s scheduling platform, WCOnline. Typically, consultants create client report forms to send to the client as a recap of the session, but they can also be internal reports for the center itself. If there is any problem, discomfort, or misconduct in a session, we can make a report that stays in our system. This will be useful for any future research that will be done in the space and will be helpful for us as we monitor the appropriateness of sessions. Additionally, we suggest that the future graduate assistants do regular well-being checks with the staff at staff meetings, to see how things are going from their perspective, as well as work to educate new staff on the contract. Because we are a staff completely composed of students, there is much turnover, a problem any academic knows too well. While the student staff that helped create the contract knows the contract well and understands its importance, it is imperative to continually educate future hires of the contract as well, so that it does not lose its credibility or its place in our center. In the same vein, it is our hope that this contract will be a living document, constantly evolving to suit the needs of the writing center population. As new staff comes in and learns of the importance of these policies, we invite new conversations to be had and new iterations of the contract to be created. This is not a project to be sealed shut and packed away– active contributions will keep it alive and ensure that the spirit of the project remains. We share this process in the hopes that other writing centers across universities will be able to adopt and transform this framework in ways that accommodate their unique spaces and students. We also share the process with the keen desire that we see more scholarship addressing these issues as our work is in no way comprehensive. There is an array of different writing center environments and factors that could change the scope of this work and must be considered. We pose a few lingering questions for future researchers: what happens when misconduct occurs in a center that has evening hours when no administrators are around? What happens when the sexual harassment or misconduct occurs between members of the staff, rather than between a staff member and a client? Even more severe, how do we come alongside students that may feel harassed by their own administrators, beyond whatever institutional measures are already in place? And, lastly, while this work accounts for the sexual harassment of women, especially BIPOC women, how might we consider the other communities that may be at risk of this type of harassment, namely the LGBTQIA+ community? We also want to encourage the administrators who deal with student misconduct in their centers to remember that they are not alone. Because of our deep level of care for our center and for the students we interact with everyday, we experienced extreme fatigue while working towards a solution. We often speak of protecting the emotional labor of the writing consultants, but confronting and mitigating these incidents requires emotional labor on the part of the administrators as well. Unfortunately, as administrators, there is sometimes no higher authority who can offer the validation of having your needs and labor recognized. This further adds to the emotional labor taken upon by administrators. We experienced this in real-time, and we want to acknowledge how painful it is to juggle institutional expectations and personal commitments. It can sometimes feel fruitless, especially when the atmosphere of your space has changed, and you work desperately to get it back. It is hard but meaningful work. If you are feeling these things, give yourself some grace. Know that the work is worthwhile. All in all, we believe that the community contract is a helpful tool to writing centers to make concrete policy that protects student workers and student clients alike, all the while maintaining the collaborative, non-hierarchical feel that most centers desire to achieve. We are incredibly grateful to have been able to work with each other and with the undergraduate staff at the writing center to develop this community contract. After seeing the toll that these numerous accounts of student misconduct had on our undergraduate consultants, it feels good to know that we have something in place that will hopefully be able to help. Sexual harassment is an ongoing and under-researched problem in writing centers, something we would like to see change in the near future. We hope that these narratives along with our solution provide inspiration to other centers to begin to tackle the problems of sexual harassment head-on. The work is not over, and it will take all of us, writing center staff and students alike, to change the writing center landscape for the better. [1] Throughout this paper, all names will be changed, and stories anonymized to protect the identities of our student population [2] We would like to take a moment here to acknowledge and thank the third graduate assistant in our WC, Chris Ingram, who worked closely with us as a student-leader as these incidents were occurring. He was instrumental in helping us mitigate these issues in real-time, as well as helping us consider alternate strategies of addressing the misconduct, some of which can be found in Appendix B. [3] Our position is relatively undefined. We exist in a liminal space between the WC’s administrators, the director and assistant director, and the undergraduate staff. We work closely with the center’s assistant director and help him with any administrative tasks (such as scheduling and leading staff meetings) that need to be done. Our primary role, however, is still one of consulting and working with students one-on-one. Approximately 30% of our work is administrative. This makes our position as graduate assistants very fluid; no one day is the same. We often find ourselves liaisons between the administrators and the staff, simply because we are part of both “worlds.” Buchanan, N. T. P. D., & Ormerod, A. J. P. D. (2002). Racialized Sexual Harassment in the Lives of African American women. Women & Therapy , 25(3-4), 107–124. https://doi.org/10.1300/J015v25n03_08 Carino, P. (2003). Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring. In M. A. Pemberton & J. Kinkead (Eds.), The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship (pp. 96–113). University Press of Colorado. Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review , 43 (6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039 Denny, H. C. (2010). Facing Sex and Gender in the Writing Center. In Facing the Center (pp. 87–112). University Press of Colorado. Dixon, E. (2017). Uncomfortably queer: Everyday moments in the writing center. The Peer Review , 1(2). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/uncomfortably-queer-everyday-moments-in-the-writing-center/ Dixon, E., & Robinson, R (2019). Welcome for Whom: Introduction to the Special Issue. The Peer Review , 3(1). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/welcome-for-whom-introduction-to-the-special-issue/ Elbow, P. & Belanoff, P. (1999). Sharing and Responding (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill Humanities. Meadows, B., T. (2021). Cracks in the system: Ethics and tensions of mandatory reporting for writing center professionals. The Dangling Modifier. https://sites.psu.edu/thedanglingmodifier/cracks-in-the-system-ethics-and-tensions-of-mandatory-reporting-for-writing-center-professionals/ Greenfield, L. (2019). Introduction: Justice and Peace are Everyone’s Interest: Or, the Case for a New Paradigm. In Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement (pp. 3–28). University Press of Colorado. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvg5bszx.4 Holland, K., Hutchison, E., Ahrens, C., Goodman-Williams, R., Howard, R., & Cipriano, A. (n.d.). Academic Alliance for Survivor Choice in Reporting Policies (ASC) Letter on Proposed Title IX Regulations. https://psychology.unl.edu/sashlab/ASC%20Response%20Letter%20to%20Proposed%20Title%20IX%20Mandatory%20Reporting%20Regs.pdf Holland, K. J., Hutchison, E. Q., Ahrens, C. E., & Torres, M. G. (2021) Reporting is not supporting: Why the principle of mandatory supporting, not mandatory reporting, must guide sexual misconduct policies in higher education. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences , 118(52), 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2116515118 Know Your Title IX. (2021). The Cost of Reporting: Perpetrator Retaliation, Institutional Betrayal, and Student Survivor Pushout. Retrieved from https://www.knowyourix.org/wp- content/uploads/2021/03/Know-Your-IX-2021-Report-Final-Copy.pdf Kovalik, J., Haley, M., & DuBois, M. (2021). Confront student misconduct at the writing center. The Dangling Modifier , 27. Mannon, B. (2021). Centering the emotional labor of writing tutors. The Writing Center Journal , 39(1/2), 143–168. Markovits, D. (2004). Contract and collaboration. The Yale Law Journal , 113, 1419–1514. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/224_ah6tbit6.pdf Méndez, X. (2020). Beyond nassar: a transformative justice and decolonial feminist approach to campus sexual assault. Frontiers, 41(2), 82–104. Mintz, B. (2021), Neoliberalism and the crisis in higher education: The cost of ideology. Am. J. Econ. Sociol., 80: 79-112. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12370 Morrison, T. H. (2021). A Balancing Act: Black Women Experiencing and Negotiating Racial Tension in the Center. The Writing Center Journal , 39 (1/2), 119–142. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27172216 Nadler, R. (2021). Sexual Harassment, Dirty Underwear, and Coffee Bar Hipsters: Welcome to the Virtual Writing Center. The Peer Review , 3(1). Natarajan, S., Galeano, V., Cardona, J. B., & Yang, T. (2022). What’s on Our Landing Page? Writing Center Policy Commonplaces and Antiracist Critique. The Peer Review , 7(1). North, S. M. (1984). The idea of a writing center. College English , 46(5), 433. Prebel, J. (2015). Confessions in the writing center: Constructionist approaches in the era of mandatory reporting. The Writing Lab Newsletter, 40(3–4), 2–8. https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v40/40.3-4.pdf Suhr-Sytsma, M., & Brown, S.-E. (2011). Theory in/to practice: addressing the everyday language of oppression in the writing center. The Writing Center Journal, 31(2), 13–49. Trachsel, M. (1995). Nurturant ethics and academic ideals: Convergence in the writing center. The Writing Center Journal, 16(1), 24-45. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/43441986

This study reviews the current underlying theories relevant to writing centers as well as the research methods being used in the early 21st century. The first section covers the theories used in writing center scholarship from the 1980s onward based on influential articles and texts. The second section covers published research both in the Writing Center Journal (WCJ) and other publications from 2010 onward and discusses the current state of research methods. Readers may not be aware of some of the fine divisions of theory; for example, the distinction between collaborative learning and social constructivism. Researchers may benefit from the overview of methods, which covers the most popular and current methods (survey and textual analysis) and promising but little-published research methods, such as ethnography. Keywords : collaborative learning, social constructivism, writing as a social process, Zone of Proximal Development, scaffolding, cognitivism, feminism, transfer of learning, threshold concepts, tutoring encounter, social and environmental justice, survey, mixed methods, textual analysis, descriptive studies, theoretical research, archival research, quasi-experiment, quantitative methods, narrative inquiry, grounded theory, case study, usability, ethnography

This article explores an incident of microaggression experienced by an Asian American female professional writing tutor working in a predominantly white institution (PWI). Using the genre of counterstory, the author hopes to show a racial Other’s processing of emotional trauma and its larger implications for anti-racist pedagogies in writing center work. Keywords : Counterstory, Imposter Syndrome, racial Other, anti-racist pedagogies I felt validated when the Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association (RMWCA) chose to read Counterstories from the Writing Center edited by Wonderful Faison and Frankie Condon for its Summer 2022 Book Club. I had voted for it in RMWCA’s online survey because I believed it would serve as a timely reflection of where the field of writing center is heading in the future. As a feminist of color and a professional writing tutor working in higher education, I am especially interested in exploring the genre of counterstory and its rhetorical purposes in combating institutional racism on all levels. Aja Y. Martinez incorporates this concept and method of counterstory from critical race theory (CRT) to center the “lived and embodied experiences of people of color” (p. 33). Although people of color must confront interlocking systems of oppression on a daily basis, the stories of our struggles are hardly ever heard in a white supremacist society that tends to dismiss such lived experiences, leading to “the everyday erasures, exclusions and repression of narratives…that trouble, challenge, [disrupt] and destabilize ‘meaning in the service of power,’ its frames, its style, or rhetoric” (Faison & Condon, 2022, p.7).  Therefore, Faison and Condon claim that telling counterstories is enacting anti-racist praxis for the following reason: Counterstory insists on the legibility and intelligibility of that which has been treated as illegible and unintelligible under the aegis of white supremacist discourse: the racial Other, her lived experience, her resistance, refusal, survival, her brilliance–and the languages, discourses, genres in which she speaks her being. (p.7) After I re-read this statement word for word, over and over again, it seemed like Faison and Condon were calling out to me to tell my very own counterstory.  In her article “Asians Are at the Writing Center,” Jasmine K. Tang (2022) invites “fellow Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center… [to join] in a conversation we can have together about the multiplicity of our experiences at writing centers” (p. 11).  Although I cannot claim to work in a place called “a writing center,” I hope to use my personal experience to contribute to this critical dialogue, thus continuing Tang’s work. Similar to Martinez’s counterstory that explores Alejandra’s fit in the academy (Martinez, 2014), I explore how well I, as an Asian American woman, fit in my role as a professional writing tutor at a small, private predominantly white institution (PWI).  The conclusion I have reached through exploring my experience of microaggression is that certain historically marginalized bodies do not fit well in the academy, at least not in prescribed roles of authority. Thus, their uncommon presence is manifested through imposter syndrome. What follows is my account of how this incident of microaggression has profoundly transformed me. In Spring 2022, the coordinator at my college’s academic support and tutoring center distributed copies of the manual How Tutoring Works: Six Steps to Grow Motivation & Accelerate Student Learning, for tutors and teachers (Frey et al., 2022) to all the professional math and writing tutors. We were supposed to read the manual in our down time, when we were not working with students, to enhance our tutoring skills. Later in the semester, we would have a staff development meeting to discuss the manual. However, for whatever reason(s), that meeting was never scheduled. Moreover, during the Summer 2022 break, the coordinator informed the tutors through email of his abrupt departure from the center because he had decided to accept another (better) position within the college. As a result, I was left “hanging,” having read the manual but not having had the opportunity to discuss my criticisms of it with the coordinator and my fellow tutors, with whom I had hardly any (in-person) contact since the disruption caused by the COVID 19 pandemic. Although I found that the manual did offer some useful, objective strategies for tutoring in general, I observed that the master narrative embedded in the manual did not address critical factors such as how tutors’ and tutees’ embodied subjectivities could dynamically affect the outcome of a tutoring session. For example, in Chapter One “Effective Tutoring Begins with Relationships and Credibility,” the authors claim that the teacher/tutor’s credibility greatly affects student learning outcomes, and that it is consequently imperative to establish mutual trust between the tutor and tutee.  The authors define teacher/tutor credibility as “a measure of the student’s belief that you are trustworthy, competent, dynamic and approachable” (Frey et al., 2022, p. 20). Furthermore, they elaborate that students are the ones who determine a teacher/tutor’s credibility: “We don’t get to decide if we’re credible. It is perceptual, on the part of the learner. They decide if we are credible” (emphasis in original, p. 20). Finally, the authors offer some cogent suggestions to teachers/tutors to show them how they can effectively try to boost their credibility in their students’ eyes. However, what happens when a student walks into the center with preconceived notions of who is trustworthy and competent based on his own implicit (unexamined) biases? In such a challenging scenario, what can the tutor really do to effectively and efficiently gain the student’s trust when the student is suspicious of the tutor’s competency from the start of the session? As an Asian American woman working as a professional writing tutor at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college, I found myself in such a thorny situation with a young white, male student several years ago. I recall that after I had briefly introduced myself as the writing tutor he would be working with for that hour, the student immediately asked me, “Do you even know what you are doing?” Within the cultural context of the Chinese immigrant community I was raised in, it would be considered extremely rude and inappropriate for a student to question the teacher’s authority.  Therefore, I was very surprised when I was confronted with the doubtful tone in his awkward question.  I was particularly disturbed by the connotation of the adverb “even,” which according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary may be “used as an intensive to stress an extreme or highly unlikely condition or instance,” which implied in that case he did not believe I was even knowledgeable enough to assist him with his written assignment. However, I confidently reassured him of the fine quality of the services offered by the center. (The center has a very strict policy of only hiring professional writing tutors with advanced degrees, although this policy does not extend to math and other subject area tutoring, where there are both professional and peer tutors.) Despite my elaborate explanation, the student still did not seem too convinced of my expertise because he kept repeating the same nagging question throughout our session: “Do you even know what you are doing?” Since the writing consultation was supposed to be a collaborative process, I had to figure out how I should navigate the rest of the session with a student who was stubbornly unwilling to work with me in the first place. After that session was finally over, I had to craft a meticulous note in my client report form on WC Online stating that the writer seemed very reluctant to work with me, harboring serious reservations even after I had explained to him that I was indeed an experienced professional writing tutor with expertise in composition. The client report form would serve as my best and only real defense in case the student ever did file a formal complaint against me, claiming that I was incompetent, or that I failed to address his needs during the session. Since the center, as a designated student support service, is supposed to be student-centered, its most important policy is that the tutor must always strive to reasonably accommodate all the student/client’s needs first and foremost. Simply put, we, the tutors, exist to serve the students who visit the center. At the beginning of every academic year when we complete our hiring paperwork, all tutors must sign the tutor’s responsibilities agreement to acknowledge that we would comply with all of the center’s policies as a condition of employment. As a result, that client report form might be used as written evidence, a record of accountability that would document what occurred during the session, which I could use to support my claims in case of any disputes.

This reflection offers an example of how one Writing Center director decided to approach antiracism through practices of mindfulness. Rather than a “how-to guide,” it encourages practitioners to think about what would work best for their contexts and offers a couple flexible activities one could adapt for their center at any given time. On June 19, 2020, Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts observed Juneteenth for the very first time in its 100-year history. There was music, guest speakers, and about 300 virtual attendees who not only listened but also participated in challenging break-out discussions. Although I had only been hired as the Director of the Writing Center for less than a year at the time, I could tell it was an important historic moment for the Babson community, and it further cemented my commitment to ensuring that our Writing Center be an explicitly antiracist space on campus. Essentially, like many of us have felt over the course of 2020, it was another one of those “What can I do?” moments, and it felt incredibly urgent. With so much feeling out of my control and so much energy going towards immediate concerns over funding and safety, I turned to practices of mindfulness to ground the clouds of thought that were continually generating questions of what and how . I turned to breathing and writing, eventually making lists of the steps I could take: review the literature, talk to colleagues, survey my staff’s interest in pursuing this work with me, and reflect on my own position and motivations. For each task on the list, I broke it down into smaller steps I could take, realizing that, while the exigence was there, it didn’t have to happen in a day. That’s when it hit me: perhaps mindfulness could be the key. When hearing the word mindfulness, one might imagine a practice of “clearing your mind”; however, rather than pushing thoughts away, the goal of mindfulness is to be fully present—to be fully aware of one’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations of the body. This can be difficult, especially when experiencing difficult emotions, but our bodies are built with internal rhythms to help us relax and reduce spikes in cortisol (the stress hormone). Certainly, tools like guided meditation and movement can help when we cannot focus, but mindfulness offers something much simpler and accessible: slowing down and allowing space for your mind and body to connect, which could involve taking three intentional breaths or pausing for a few minutes to notice the sound outside your window. Mindfulness involves an intention and a goal to self-regulate—to honor one’s embodied thoughts and feelings before acting. Theories and practices of mindfulness complement many of the tenets of writing center work in important ways regarding student emotion (see Johnson, 2018; Kervin & Barrett, 2018), mentoring current tutors (see Concannon et al., 2020; Mack & Hupp, 2017), and training new tutors (see Emmelhainz, 2020; Featherstone, Barrett, & Chandler, 2019; Godbee, Ozias, & Tang, 2015). Although the scholarship cited here paints a picture of something relatively new, we understand that contemplative practices have been a part of human existence for millennia. In times of trouble, it is not uncommon for a person to deeply reflect on a situation whether through breathing, meditation, prayer, writing, or other modes of thought. Similarly, a review of the literature may suggest that attention paid to writing centers and antiracism is relatively new (see especially the International Writing Centers Association’s antiracism annotated bibliography prepared by Godbee, Olson, & the SIG Collective, 2014) though we’ve long known in this field that the same systems that have allowed writing centers to flourish are some of the very same systems that perpetuate oppression. As a POC, I have had to think about my own complacency in such systems and consider how I can do better. Can we have a “cathartic repudiation of white supremacy” at Babson (Coenen et al., 2019)? How do I embrace the “willingness to be disturbed” (Diab et. al, 2013)? What informs an explicitly antiracist center? Given this topic explicitly centers around bodies, and thoughts and emotions associated with bodies, a potential entrance into this conversation could start from within our own bodies. In their article “Reflections on/of Embodiment: Bringing Our Whole Selves to Class,” Trixie Smith et al. (2017) explain that embodiment scholarship “works to continually remind readers, writers, researchers, and pedagogues that bodies matter to the paradigms, perspectives, relations, and decisions one has in a given situation” (p. 46). Like with teaching—and perhaps even more given the interpersonal proximity and less hierarchical relationship—tutoring professionals cannot separate the mind from the body in this work. Since bodies feel and then act on those emotions, it is important to reiterate Micciche’s (2007) argument that bodies do emotions; emotions do not just happen. Moreover, Micciche (2002) reminds us that writing projects are “a training ground for emotional dispositions that coincide with gender, race, class, and other locations in the social structure” (p. 438). In essence, writing tutors are always engaging in an emotional space when collaborating with students, which has only furthered my thinking that perhaps mindfulness could be a way to honor our emotions and work together through both the joys and difficulties. As Christie I. Wenger (2020) writes in her chapter on mindfulness from The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration , “Mindfulness helps develop resilience because it emphasizes agency; we practice mindfulness to cultivate resilience as a rhetorical choice and action in collective and communal networks” (p. 262). While I’m certainly not the first to do so, I do find an emphasis on embodiment and mindfulness to be a radical move for our writing center, which I view as a fruitful place for social justice work for reasons articulated by Laura Greenfield (2019) given the ways we are able to question ideas of power, negotiate identities and experiences, and have meaningful engagements wherein we recognize, particularly when working with multilingual students, that “we all stand in some kind of relationship to each other—indeed that our experiences are mutually constituted—but that our experiences differ because we are positioned differently within the systems of power in which we all operate (globally and locally)” (p. 123). That being said, I do think this is easier said than done and that we need more spaces that allow for students and administrators to start from within. In Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education , Beth Berila (2016) discusses the necessity for embodying knowledge. She writes, “One can be an expert on the sociopolitical factors that cause something to happen and still not know how it manifests deep in one’s body or why it produces certain responses in others” (p. 45). In order to undo systemic issues, we need both knowledge and presence; we need both body and mind. We can read articles from scholars like Romeo Garcia (2017) and Asao B. Inoue (2016); we can try to understand the “new racism” that scholars like Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan (2011) have put forth for us; but how do we embody the work especially as non-BIPOCs? Could, as Berila suggests, we make room to excavate ourselves in order to begin to recognize the power dynamics that we benefit from or that sustain our oppression? I started developing a way to do just that—to help our students look inward, perhaps uncomfortably, at the self in relation to our larger goals and communities. This ongoing project draws from practices of mindfulness to engage tutors and students in more-holistic approaches to antiracism in the writing center. It’s based on the idea that shifting a culture takes time, and I share its goals here now—in the middle of it all—not to showcase the findings of such a project but to perhaps inspire those who, like I had been, just aren’t sure where to start (particularly of the mind that we already try to design writing centers to be some of the most welcoming, most inclusive spaces). What are some small, concrete steps we could take based on the contexts of our own centers given the constraints of a global pandemic? As we weren’t building an antiracist center from the ground up, my first step was to get a sense of how my writing consultants viewed race in the Writing Center. When creating the fall schedule, in addition to the typical questions I ask about preferences for hours and if they’d be interested in visiting first-year writing classrooms, I asked consultants to freewrite on a few questions relevant to Fall 2020. Here are the instructions and questions I gave: Please freewrite on the following questions for 2-3 minutes each. With freewriting, I want you to just jot down what comes to your mind—no need to worry about spelling, grammar, or getting it “perfect”; rather, I just want to get a sense of where your head is at before we start working together this fall. Please set a timer so that you don’t spend too much time on this! That being said, if you feel particularly compelled to keep writing, that is fine with me. The answers to the social question elicited some very thoughtful responses as one might imagine when thinking of their own thoughtful consultants, and, as suspected, there seemed to be a spectrum of students who were clearly interested in talking more and some who weren’t sure what to say. With Berila’s idea of embodying knowledge for social justice in mind, I planned to have consultants look inward by examining their own thoughts on race before moving our way to examining the larger forces at work within our institutional context. I had my first decision to make: do I fold this work into our regularly scheduled staff meetings, or should this be a separate series of workshops? As no one was studying abroad or otherwise taking time away from the Writing Center, I had already decided that having more small-group staff meetings for our much larger staff would be helpful in keeping a sense of community and giving everyone the space to speak, and I took my own advice to start small. When creating our small groups that would meet every other week to talk about tutoring, I asked for preferences on foci, which included antiracism, marketing, and online tutoring strategies. We had a core group of students who wanted to talk about antiracism and the Writing Center, and I figured we could co-construct ways to talk about race on a larger level with the whole staff eventually. Inspired by the article “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center” (Coenen et al., 2019), I recreated a version of an activity from the antiracist workshop the authors described. I asked my consultants to freewrite on when they first became aware of race as a concept. After the time was up, I then asked that everyone turn their writing into a six-word story (or thereabouts) that we would share anonymously. In the workshop described by Coenen et. al (2019), participants wrote their six-word stories anonymously on sticky notes, which were stuck along the walls of the room; participants then walked around the room and responded to the stories, again anonymously with sticky notes, before having a larger conversation. Given our online environment, I used Pinup , a free online sticky note generator that allowed participants to be anonymous . Each participant typed their story onto their own individual sticky note. Then I let them comment on each other’s posts by simply typing below the original story. With permission, here are some of the stories we shared: Again, imagining your own consultants, you might have a sense of how compassionate they were with one another’s words and how much thought these short, gentle excavations could reveal when we started thinking about them more deeply. While my intention was to simply talk about what we noticed overall, some students took ownership over their stories—“Okay, that one was mine”—and generously answered questions. As my main goal for this project is to start by meeting consultants where they are in terms of their discomfort with looking inward and gently excavating to better understand the larger systems of oppression that most likely benefit the majority of our staff and students, my expected goal is for all individuals involved with the Writing Center to take one small step forward in being mindful of their current contexts. To meet this goal, we’ll continue integrating writing and discussion activities to investigate the role that race plays in writing and interpersonal communication. Although we do need staff meeting time to talk about tutoring, I have to prioritize these types of discussions to slowly shift the culture of students currently working there. The end goal is to gently excavate our embodied experiences surrounding social justice issues in order to challenge our own practices while potentially also implementing more structural shifts in our center. I see this happening on three levels to start—in our ongoing professional development (staff meetings) for current tutors, in our sessions with students, and in our training for new tutors—though I could see this being of interest to those beyond the center’s immediate reach. In addition to the steps outlined above for current consultants, for students coming in to work on writing assignments, another goal will be to see if a mindful turn inward to thinking of self (i.e. excavating on the fly) will complement their writing processes especially as we see an increase in assignments grounded in social justice. Based on what we learn from our consultants and students, we should eventually be in position to implement changes into the tutor-training practicum—a full semester, advanced course—thus developing an antiracist curriculum that comes from the ongoing experiences of those living and working within the context of our institution as opposed to assuming a one-size-fits-all approach. As a team, we will keep reading, writing, discussing, and excavating in order to develop the kind of center that continually looks in and mindfully builds out.

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

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.

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 conversation shaper synthesizes research on neurodiversity, intersectionality, and writing center pedagogy, highlighting how these elements can shape inclusive practices for all students, particularly neurodivergent students. By focusing on the intersections of neurodiversity, race, and gender, this review aims to challenge writing center practices to better serve diverse learners and foster more accessible educational environments. Understanding the complexity of students’ identities is essential in crafting more inclusive, flexible pedagogical strategies that cater to neurodivergent students.