In the past ten years, scholarship has increasingly directed attention to the intersections between disability studies and writing center work, emphasizing the importance of multimodality, Universal Design Learning (UDL), and academic support for students with disabilities. Though the literature on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in writing spaces highlights the personal narratives of student writers, tutors, and administrators (see for example, Garbus, 2017; Stark & Wilson, 2017; Zmudka, 2018), empirically-based research on the topic remains rare. This empirical study looks at how a seemingly invisible disability, like ADHD, affects tutors and clients in the writing center. Results from this study’s survey of existing tutors and clients, in conjunction with semi-structured interviews, revealed tutors and clients’ need for more conversations around neurodivergence, as well as better support and equity in the writing center and in other institutional organizations and academic resources on campus. Participants also highlighted the need to foster a culture of understanding and mutual listening rather than relying on disclosure, to provide accessible modes of tutoring for clients, and to include training around disability literacy in tutor education. Overall, this paper unwraps the often hidden stories of tutors and clients with ADHD and provides ways to (re)think neurodivergence in writing center work. As an international graduate tutor in my writing center, receiving my Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnosis as an adult made me highly cognizant of the issues that neurodivergent [1] students like myself face in academic spaces, including how to navigate our classes, maneuver teaching and tutoring, and educate ourselves and others on the reality of disability (in)justice. Almost three years ago, I encountered a client who disclosed having ADHD in the middle of our face-to-face session. The first-time client had a poster on mental health concerns for her psychology course. She expressed needing help to organize her poster and make sure its content is clear. At one point in the session, she disclosed having ADHD, to which I blurted, “I have ADHD too!” I noticed her demeanor change, as she eased up in her chair. It was my first time disclosing that I have ADHD. In retrospect, my self-disclosure served as an act of awareness, understanding, and reassurance. I also wanted to normalize discussions surrounding disability in the session because it pushed us towards an open and honest conversation about what I could do to adjust my tutoring approach and best support her as a writer. Our overall exchange prompted me to consider what happens when disability comes into the equation in a writing center context. In the past ten years, scholarship has highlighted the intersections between disability studies and writing center work. Much of this work emphasizes the need to conduct more studies on disabilities and neurodivergence in the writing center (Babcock, 2015; Babcock & Daniels, 2017; Daniels et al., 2017; Dembsey, 2020; Hitt, 2012, 2021; Kleinfeld, 2018; Rinaldi, 2015). In particular, Babcock (2015) urges writing center practitioners to produce more empirically-oriented studies on less visible disabilities, including ADHD, one of the most common disabilities among college students. More importantly, this study challenges the problematic rhetorics of disability that show up in our writing center communities, as the writing center is one facet of how an institution functions. Hitt (2021) points out that dominant discourses of disability in writing center work are often concerned with diagnosis and accommodation, which coincides with a remediation model that treats disabilities as problems to diagnose and overcome. Dembsey (2020) sheds light on the discrimination that disabled individuals face in writing center instruction and environment, like questioning whether disabled writers need support, perceiving disability as something to “fix” in a writing center context, and placing burden and judgment on disabled writers and tutors who self-disclose. In response to the positioning of disability as deficit in the writing center, writing center practitioners have challenged this notion and taken the lead on rethinking the disability discourse (for example, Anglesey & McBride, 2019; Degner et al., 2015). This notion coincides with Denny’s (2005) call to think of writing centers as liminal spaces that can disrupt the norm and “destabilize conventional wisdom of what we do and who we are” (p. 56). In the same spirit, this study aims to challenge the problematic discourses that linger in writing center research on disability. Its goal is to also envision the writing center as a rebellious space that can amplify the voices of neurodivergent tutors and clients, promote a culture of intentional listening and accessibility, and adapt to the needs of its diverse tutors and clients. In this empirical study, I focus on the experiences of neurodivergent tutors and clients with ADHD in the writing center space. Using an initial brief survey, followed by semi-structured interviews with tutors and clients with ADHD, I explore how clients and tutors with ADHD recount their experiences in past tutoring sessions and how they describe their writing process(es). I also discuss how clients and tutors with ADHD can be supported in the writing center.

Writing centers in Brazil emerge from an internationalization initiative that combines tutoring students on academic assignments and translating Portuguese articles written by faculty and graduate students into English. Thus, they arise from local needs and contexts. Three articles about writing centers in Brazil have been published, and only one mentioned student tutors’ views. This research aims to understand their views on being part of a Brazilian writing center while pursuing their majors and graduate courses. Through narratives, four participants have voiced challenges regarding dealing with texts from a diversity of fields, handling technical terms, and expressed varying degrees of self-confidence when working with a text written by an individual in a scholarly higher position. Regarding growth opportunities, the student tutors mentioned the development of soft skills and teamwork, improvement in performing reading and writing tasks in their undergraduate programs, and opportunities to increase their knowledge in other fields. The discussions presented in this paper contribute to tutors’ training and to other research on student tutors, as well as to the landscape of what writing centers do in the domain of international publishing. In the U.S., writing centers emerged from labs and clinics (Carino, 1995) and were a resource for college writing assistance for undergraduate students from the 1970s on. However, this is not a common scenario in Brazilian high schools or higher education institutions. Universities in Brazil originated in the 1900s, meaning that higher education is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Brazilian educational system was established based on a “banking model of education” (Freire, 1970/2007), a metaphor used to describe students as containers into which educators must deposit knowledge, reinforcing that knowledge came from outside. Students were not encouraged as creators of new ideas and little was done to develop students’ critical thinking and writing skills, bearing resemblance to the observations made by Mora (2022) on her Mexican context. In this regard, writing centers are not a national reality and are not found in high schools or universities, as most of the writing practice is devoted to the essay students need to write to be accepted in the university entrance exam (Cons & Rezende, 2024; Martinez, 2023). Brazilian undergraduate and graduate students struggle to meet the demands of higher education, accomplishing academic tasks such as an undergraduate thesis and writing for publication without the help or the culture of pursuing the assistance of a writing center. Additionally, the pressure to publish internationally is an obstacle that faculty and graduate students must face, especially since high-impact journals publish in English and the Brazilian population is not bilingual. English language schools are profitable businesses in Brazil as compulsory education does not provide proper conditions for learning foreign languages. Thus, to cope with this demand, most graduate departments are applying part of their budgets to pay for translation and editing services (Martinez & Graf, 2016). Prof. Ron Martinez observed this scenario at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) and proposed the creation of the first Brazilian writing center – CAPA – Centro de Assessoria de Publicação Acadêmica (Academic Publishing Advisory Center) in 2016 to offer both translation and tutoring services (Martinez, 2023). Through this action, he aimed to apply resources inside the institution and provide academic and professional development to the students and faculty. Following the creation of CAPA, seven other writing centers were established in the state universities of Paraná, Brazil in the second semester of 2021. The writing center at our university is one of them. Since its creation, our center has offered tutoring and translation services, with its staff comprised of a university lecturer as a coordinator and graduate and undergraduate students as tutors and translators. These student tutors use English as a second language and are majoring mainly in English Language and Literature; however, students from other areas are welcome and have been part of the center. The increasing popularity of paid editorial services (Hartwood, 2019; Martinez, 2023) underscores the importance of writing centers offering sophisticated machine learning (ML) editing assistance, ensuring that all individuals may benefit from these services irrespective of financial circumstances. These two realities demonstrate that globalization and internationalization initiatives have influenced the tasks performed by some writing centers. In Brazil, student tutors are mainly involved in translation services from Portuguese to English, editing manuscripts in Portuguese and English, and tutoring undergraduate students in their academic tasks in Portuguese or in English. Performing these responsibilities involves challenges, and as a result, we want to explore the challenges and benefits of working as a tutor. Though inspired by aspects of American models, writing centers in Brazil arise from local needs and contexts that display their distinct histories (Martinez, 2023). They emerge from an internationalization initiative that combines tutoring students on academic assignments and translating Portuguese articles written by faculty and graduate students into English (Cons & Rezende, 2024). There are only three international publications about Brazilian writing centers: Martinez (2023), Cons and Rezende (2024), and Cons et al. (2025). Martinez (2023) explores the emergence and development of writing centers in Brazil, using the author’s experience as the founder of the Academic Publishing Advisory Center (CAPA) at the Federal University of Paraná. Cons and Rezende (2024) conducted their research at CAPA and focused on one particular consultation as a case study. Cons et al. (2025) discuss preliminary tutor impressions about Generative AI and evaluate how formal training on the use of Generative AI has impacted the translation and tutoring practices at CAPA. Even though these three articles present the Brazilian reality, none of them look at student tutors’ perspectives on working at a writing center in Brazil. International publications that focus on tutors (Thompson et al., 2009; Thonus, 2001, for example) have centered their research on the North American context. The current research presents the tutors’ voices on being part of a Brazilian writing center and advances the discussion about how writing centers in Brazil create situated practices with transnational applications (Mora, 2022). To contribute to the landscape of what writing centers do (Jackson & McKinney, 2012), this article addresses the following questions: What are the challenges faced by these student tutors? To what extent do student tutors at one Brazilian writing center perceive their work at the center as beneficial for their individual growth?

Innovation and technological adoption are continuous processes, which makes them difficult to periodize. At the same time, acquiring new tools and literacies inspires in the adopters a reflection, however brief, on their preparedness for the acquisition. Adopters may face the new technologies with confidence, excitement, curiosity, trepidation, or all the above. The emotions often result from a sense of how equipped adopters feel to receive the innovation. Yet the speed of innovation, and the social and professional need to keep up, might obstruct self-analysis that would ideally help define and sharpen the relevant skills and knowledge. This talking picture book documents how the Hendrix College Writing Center staff reflects collectively on the transition that the arrival of generative artificial intelligence has ignited. As of the Summer of 2024, our writing center has not yet implemented solid AI-related policies and procedures, working instead on research. By responding to four questions about encounters with AI with a still image and an accompanying oral, recorded narration, four student consultants and the center’s director make material memories about the current moment, which the rapid technological development has rendered elusive and even distant. The idea is to create a nostalgia for the present to intensify our recollections of the experiences and abilities that would enable us to interact and grow with AI when it becomes part of our regular operations. Keywords : technological adoption, the speed of technological change, assistive technologies, reflection, still photograph and the imaginary, voice recording and the real, preparedness This work—a collection of still images and voice recordings—examines a part of the process by which a writing center adopts a new technology—a reflection on the staff’s readiness. The Hendrix College Writing Center serves a small, liberal arts, private institution with around 1200 undergraduate students. With that in mind, we are designing procedures (for individual appointments, workshops, course collaborations, and so on) to tackle the AI-related needs of students and faculty. We have not formally implemented any of those procedures under the belief that we still need to learn more. Whether we will know when we have reached a critical mass of knowledge for the implementation to happen remains an open question (although we are certain the learning process will not stop). What we do know is how much self-reflection the recent prominence of text-generating AI has ignited in our center. Contemplation must eventually give way to actionable conclusions for the current moment, even if they might come with an expiration date. That fact does not mean we can’t extend the contemplation a bit longer for the purposes of investigating our Center and our campus at what will certainly be an inflection point. This piece attempts to stage two artificialities to give us more room to think and match the condition of its subject. The first artificiality concerns something that technological development never deliberately affords most citizens: a pause to consider who citizens are (a sense of their place in their lives and in their communities), and how ready they feel, before adopting a new technology. Everett M. Rogers’s (1962) technology adoption life cycle indicates that citizens incorporate technical advancements at different times, classifying them into five groups: “innovators,” “early adopters,” “early majority,” “late majority,” and “laggards” (p. 161). Given the particularity of the experiences and circumstances around every citizen, Rogers warns that models to track the timeline of technology diffusion across populations are “conceptual,” a useful tool to understand the impact of a continuous phenomenon and to identify trends. Something that becomes clear from following the spread of innovations is that innovators rarely spend time speaking to consumers about the effects and implications of their work before that work is widely available. Educational, legal, and governmental institutions struggle to anticipate technologically driven change. Instead, they react to every development. The lag happens because, for Preeta Bansal (quoted in Wadhwa, 2014), codified behaviors require social consensus, while technological innovation does not. The speed of the “technological vitalism” (p. 45) of which Paul Virilio (1986) speaks runs right past the much more difficult optimization of agreement. Our project is similar to Rogers’s in that it also exists on a conceptual plane: it conceives of a reflective stoppage in technological adoption as a situated, almost nostalgically defined period. This talking picture book imagines what it would be like to expand the reflection before a community (in this case, the writing center) creates protocols to mark the perhaps irreversible presence of artificial intelligence in their practice. Like Rogers’s device, making visual and aural mementos of the current moment means to contain, however abstractly, an ungraspable and ongoing process. Yet we differ from Rogers in one respect: “Each adopter of an innovation in a social system could be described, but this would be a tedious task” (p. 159).  As believers in the counterhistorical value of the anecdote, however, we propose describing this small group of adopters in some detail, so that a fuller picture of AI’s spread comes into view—one harder to categorize in one of the five groups above. We distinguish between that pause and the preliminary groundwork for institutional change because, so far, the preparation we have undertaken has relied on current, forward-looking research. The past, the a priori of our technological and disciplinary knowledge, always informs the envisioning of our future. Still, our center has not defined that past in concrete terms. We have not named what we possess that would let us inhabit a practice alongside AI. Defining our past would, in turn, clarify our present, a perpetually in-flux moment that never stands still long enough to comprehensively assimilate it. An analog detailing of the conditions that shape the adoption of new tools at the writing center appears in research on the selection of assistive technologies for writers. Nankee et al. (2009), for example, break down the factors involved in writing: visual perception, neuromuscular abilities, motor skills, cognitive skills, and social-emotional behaviors (p. 4). While the authors composed this list to select assistive technologies for students with disabilities, reading the factors makes it clear that anyone who intends to write or even assist in writing needs to consider them. The same can be said of the writing process itself. In a discussion about assistive technologies in writing centers, DePaul University blogger Maggie C (2015) cites a study by Raskind and Higgins (2014) that shows text-to-speech software enhanced proofreading for students with learning disabilities. In their analysis, Maggie C observes that the issues “that all writers struggle with (proofreading, catching errors, etc.) [aren’t] unique because the people in this study had learning disabilities” (para. 3). Indeed, this kind of capabilities analysis can apply to the writing center staffers as well. Even if right now we do not treat AI as an assistive technology, framing its adoption in terms of what prepares and allows us to incorporate it reveals areas of interest to influence our eventual policies. So we propose taking stock not just of our capacities but of our collective mood before letting AI take residence in our writing center. The piece represents how we have identified the signals of change, or how we have developed a notion, however tenuous, that a (perhaps paradigmatic) shift is coming. We are conscious that the past and present we will try to articulate are largely fictional—the second artificiality this work hopes to render. Artificial intelligence, and its applications to writing, have been with us for some time now. While students, faculty and staff at Hendrix College work, together and apart, to respond to its challenges and fulfill its opportunities, AI has made its way into our practice. To some extent or another, often inadvertently, we have adopted AI, further complicating our identification of a pre-AI moment. That fiction, however, remains useful because it will allow us to recognize (and perhaps even invent) qualities upon which we may rely to work with AI. Generative speculation represents a significant part of the exercise, as we list skills that both intuitively and counterintuitively empower us to face AI. It will also give us a reference point, a purposefully constructed memory of a period that we might need to revisit moving forward. It will provide a starting place for an approach to understanding the transition. Call it a preemptive act of writing center archaeology. We are building evidence for future excavations. To create a reflective pause, generate a fictional past, and capture a mood during transition, we turn to a multimodal approach combining photographs with voice narration. The process began with four questions: The authors shared still photos that reminded them of their encounters with AI. Then, they recorded spoken descriptions of the photos, explaining their relevance to the questions and the memories they elicit. At times, the question prompted only the recorded reflection. In those cases, the door to our old writing center supplies the background image. The result is organized by the questions but also allows the audience to view and hear it in any order as if browsing through a family album. The choices of modalities follow the ideas of theorists Vilém Flusser and Friedrich Kittler. For Flusser (2004), photography “ has interrupted the stream of history. Photographs are dams placed in the way of the stream of history, jamming historical happenings” (p. 128). It’s this “jamming” that makes still images an appropriate medium for this project, which temporarily and imaginatively arrests time to acquire an advantageous perspective on our history. On a personal level, we might be familiar with the connection between still images and remembrance. The essay is, in part, a picture book of our days before adding AI to our mission statement. The photographs literalize the piece’s title. As for the voice recordings, we recall how Kittler (1999), in his psychoanalytic analysis of media, associated the gramophone and its capacity to mechanically store and reproduce sounds with the Lacanian Real, or the part of the world that exists beyond human signification (p. 37). For Kittler, when we record someone’s voice, we capture words, but also the uninflected, unintentional, unstructured noises that reveal something true about the speaker. Our tone, tics, and silences (those sounds free of signifiers) express the authenticity of our responses to AI and our ideas of how it will alter our writing assistance. Kittler, incidentally, would have something else to say about photography to elaborate on Flusser’s thoughts. As a mechanically constructed image of the world, the photograph belongs to the Imaginary—it creates a double of the world onto which viewers can project their ideals. In short, the affordances of still photographs and voice recordings allow us to weave our imagined past and pair it with the real hopes, mysteries, and anxieties involved in our incorporation of AI. Our goal is to evoke our world before that revolution. Before moving on to the picture book, here are a few words of the Hendrix College Writing Center staff who participated in this project: In the writing center, I begin my sessions away from the page. I start a conversation sparked by questions like What do you want to say? What’s blocking you from that right now? What gets you fired up about this piece? I sprinkle in camaraderie and a touch of humor: Oh yeah that class is ridiculously hard or yeah one time someone came in here twenty minutes before their paper was due! The specifics vary, but the point is to create a space at the intersection of talking, thinking, and human connection. That’s where writing begins. It doesn’t spring magically into existence out of the end of a pen. I’m critical of that sort of “natural” approach to human writing. The idea that writing should “flow.” There’s nothing natural about the act of writing. It’s agonizing. It’s counterintuitive. So, I tend to start with conversation. I ask the writers who visit me to say what they’re trying to communicate. I let them think aloud until something greater than the separate pieces of our conversation emerges. Only then do we shape those thoughts into written form. I suppose I should mention my skepticism about AI. I’m not convinced AI can or will allow something greater to emerge. I’m reminded of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s (2012) description of cliché as “the debris of someone else’s thinking” (p. 45). Might that be an apt description of AI as well? To me, a writing center’s strength lies in its ability to create human connections. Before implementing AI in the writing center, we should ask ourselves how it supports that strength. My general approach to writing assistance is to analyze works for structural issues (how do ideas flow, satisfactory resolutions to concepts set up earlier, etc.) first and foremost and to center any aid around my findings. To me, AI has the downside of cheapening this process by reducing the structure of an essay into a template of what it could be, reducing the potential impact a work could hold. In addition, AI isn’t very good at following along with these threads of ideas when fed a paper, so it doesn’t do me much good to ask ChatGPT or so such about a paper I’m meant to look over. I approach my duties as a writing consultant as if I am helping a friend with their homework without doing it for them. I see myself as the bridge that connects their contemplation of the assignment to their final project. This approach consists of talking to me as if I am a friend, where I listen without judgment. They simply describe what they think the rubric means or, if they’ve already begun writing, what thought they are struggling to put on paper. From there, we work to make the thought clearer and the assignment criteria more reachable. I have seen firsthand how AI is a tool that can make the rubric digestible. It is a tool that can also help with spelling and grammar. This can be helpful because patrons are then able to enter the appointment already understanding the assignment, thus having questions and drafts ready. At the same time, however, AI can interfere as it makes it easier for someone to lapse in their work ethic, comprehension, creativity, and originality. When those lines are crossed, so is academic integrity. During my time as a writing consultant, I was a student majoring in psychology and minoring in biology. I think that my background in science afforded me a unique approach to writing assistance and writing in general, which contributes to my reservations about using AI in spaces of writing assistance. AI, by nature, does not allow that uniqueness or human variability, which can sometimes make all the difference in writing and helping others to write. In my experience, there are times in which the person-to-person conversations and connections create a soundboard that facilitates breakthroughs in a peer’s writing far more than any technical edits. Maybe it is arrogant, but even as AI continues to develop and earn its place as a supplement to writing assistance, I do not think it will ever replicate the peer-to-peer experience. As long as we respect AI’s limitations and honor the value of traditional writing assistance, I believe the two can work together to empower individuals in their writing journeys. If I invoke some clichés about mixed emotions at the arrival of generative AI, it is because they feel true. They also feel appropriate because I believe writing and writing assistance are about mixed emotions. I believe that, to find ways to express thoughts, writers and their readers need to embrace being a bit unsettled. I try to cultivate comfort with uncertainty as a necessary mindset for successful, truly exploratory writing. After advocating for such a double consciousness for years, I feel generative AI is the biggest challenge so far in practicing what I preach. Looking at the pictures we put together for this piece, I find great serenity— a reminder of how we reacted when we first realized how quickly a full-fledged essay could appear on an app’s screen.

Writing centers, as communities of practice, often fail to question their own praxis since it is work reinforced by shared ways of knowing and being within a community. However, change cannot occur without examining and challenging assumptions and commonplaces individually and collectively. During a three-year action research study focused on training mostly monolingual tutors to engage in scaffolding and multidirectional learning with ELL, international student writers, commonplaces emerged related to contextual nature of writing, and the role of sentence-level language in tutoring and writing. Using the theoretical constructivist frameworks that inform writing center work, this article examines those commonplaces and connects them to existing interdisciplinary scholarship. While the work of examining and eliminating assumptions is an ongoing endeavor, the action research and consideration of commonplaces have led to tutor education aimed at equipping tutors to empower multilingual writers by encouraging discussions of objectives, options, outcomes, and ownership. Keywords : ELL writers, writing center, writing tutor, commonplaces Although writing centers exist in the overlap of literacy, learning, and language, we have yet to understand this positioning or resolve what it means to support learners who share this intersectional space. In fact, writing center history with ELL writers has been notably problematic. As a larger community, we have othered such writers through tutor education (Moussu, 2013; Nakumara, 2010; Thonus, 2014), non-directive pedagogies, policies restricting or refusing to assist with sentence-level language concerns, and policing of contextual language and literacy practices (García, 2017; Green, 2016; Greenfield, 2019). At the local level, as a writing center administrator, I have spent the better part of two decades fielding repeated tutor and faculty requests for more tutor training for working with ELL writers, as if the writers were the challenge rather than the systems they navigate. In 2019, as part of a doctoral program at Arizona State University, I completed an interdisciplinary three-year, cyclical action research study to improve the ways Brigham Young University’s mostly monolingual, native English-speaking tutors facilitated learning with ELL, international student writers in tutoring sessions. Initial rounds of this IRB-approved study revealed that the tutors felt comfortable instructing and motivating ELL writers, but scaffolding remained a space of uncertainty. This was notable, since scaffolding involves tailoring “the learning process to the individual needs and developmental level of the learner. Scaffolding provides the structure and support necessary to progressively build knowledge” (Kolb et al., 2014, p. 218).  Since scaffolding is central to the experiential, co-constructed learning that occurs in tutorials, I focused my study on a training intervention designed to help tutors improve scaffolding with ELL writers. As part of the training intervention, tutors participated in classroom instruction on the contextual nature of writing, scaffolding, and sentence-level language. Tutors also completed peer and administrator observations and post-observation reflective discussions. The effectiveness of the intervention and improvement with scaffolding was measured by tutor surveys, pre- and post-intervention tutor interviews, tutorial observations, and surveys and focus groups with ELL writers (Bell, 2019). Research results indicated that scaffolding and multidirectional learning and participation improved within tutorials; however, as the semesters and research cycles progressed, it became clear that the disconnect between the mostly monolingual tutors and ELL writers was less about scaffolding and more about unpacking systems and psyches. Scaffolding was a tool to facilitate multidirectional learning, but dismantling deficit thinking and systems of silos was the larger work. In communities of practice, such as writing centers, we often fail to question our own praxis since it is work reinforced by shared ways of knowing and being within a community. However, as Nancy Grimm (2009) noted in an address to the writing center community, “significant change in any workplace occurs when unconscious conceptual models are brought to the surface and replaced with conscious ones” (p. 16). The multiyear action research study resulted in a bound dissertation on a library shelf, but the work of addressing the disconnects between writing tutors and ELL writers continues because it is the work of rattling and revising our commonplaces. Although ELL writers’ and writing tutors’ questions, explanations, and asides were not measured alongside the effectiveness of the training intervention, the commonplaces they exposed revealed the need for ongoing cognitive and affective attention and sent me back to the scholarship where patterns and relationships continued to emerge and inform the work. While the focus of the initial IRB study was a training intervention within a specific writing center, this article focuses on the commonplaces and assumptions about tutors and ELL writers uncovered during the iterative, interdisciplinary research process, including how writing center work involves issues of identity and power dynamics, communities and systems, the contextual nature of writing, and the layers of sentence-level language. This examination of commonplaces offers no concrete solutions but reinforces the importance of objectives, options, outcomes, and ownership as tutors and ELL writers interact in tutoring and learning exchanges.

While rich scholarship has delved into the lives, accomplishments, and struggles of writing centers, the closing, or “death” of writing centers has been largely underexplored. With a survey and a focus group, this study examines students’ perceptions of and reaction to the closing of a satellite writing center on a regional campus of a Northeastern, mid-size, public research university in the United States. This study revealed: 1) the student participants not only viewed the satellite writing center as an important resource but also a community, 2) they expressed sadness and disappointment toward the writing center closing, maintaining that the writing support should be offered to students, and 3) after the writing center was closed, some of them utilized various alternative writing support, while others did not. By inquiring into the death of a writing center, this study enriches and complicates the writing center grand narrative that McKinney (2013) calls us to problematize. Furthermore, based on findings that revealed students’ writing-related help-seeking behaviors in response to dramatic changes, implications are offered to writing center professionals and educators who seek to cultivate students to become resourceful and resource-savvy writers, especially in a time of challenges and changes. Keywords : Writing center closing, satellite writing center, writing center storying, writing resourcefulness “It’s been a fun ride: Armstrong State University says farewell to the SWCA Annual Conference” “Writing center closes due to lack of funding” “The death of a ‘writing center’?” “Farewell,” “close,” “death,” … these words are sad, final, and carry a sense of despair. When such words are associated with writing centers, they tell sorrowful stories that dishearten us writing center professionals. As a scholar dedicated to writing center work and research, I have not only heard about such stories but also lived one myself. With my exciting experience of creating a writing center from scratch with my colleagues in China and directing it for three and a half ye ars, I found it all the more difficult to witness the death of a satellite writing center in a United States university during my first doctoral year as a graduate assistant. Having worked at this small satellite writing center as the assistant director for a semester, I still remember how I felt when I first stepped into the cozy, colorful room that we called “writing center” on that small regional campus, which is about 33 miles from the main campus of a Northeastern, mid-size, public research university: I felt joy, excitement, and promise; I was ready to work closely with student writers, create new initiates, and make real changes within my anticipated two years there—the same kind of vitality and aspiration that I had when I created my writing center at a Chinese university four years ago. However, I did not have all that much time to compose my chapter in the story of this writing center—my chapter came to an abrupt end in the m iddle of the academic year. Without much of a warning, the decision to close the satellite writing center was passed down and all of a sudden, I found myself helping my director take down posters and students’ works from the wall, packing books and tutoring records with huge, black plastic bags, and giving stationery away to students. We finished it within a few hours, so quickly that I couldn’t help asking myself: so, this is it? That’s how we ended the life of a writing center after it had served the campus for more than a decade? Had it served its purposes? What about our students? What are they going to do when they need help with their writing? My head was spinning. I didn’t know. A winter break later, I start ed my new assignment working at the university writing center on the main campus, but those questions did not cease to bother me. In a quiet corner of my heart, I kept wondering about my closed satellite writing center and the students who I used to spend time with. I wanted to know, out of personal concern and curiosity, whether the disappearance of the writing center had any impact on the students and how they reacted to the loss of this long-existing campus resource; meanwhile, as a writing center scholar who found little literature on writing center closing, I wonder what knowledge we can gain by delving into the death of this small writing center to enrich our understanding of the lives of writing centers. To me, the life story of my writing center was finished without an ending. To tell its full story and to make meaning that might speak to many other writing centers’ (untold) stories, I conducted an empirical study to probe into my most pressing question: how did the students on the regional campus perceive and react to the closing of the satellite writing center? With a qualitative design that consisted of an online survey and a focus group discussion, I obtained input from the academic students who the satellite writing center had served, striving to draft the final chapter of this writing center’s life through students’ voices. As such, the significance of my study is two-fold: 1) by investigating how students felt about and coped with the closing of a satellite writing center, I examine the impact of the writing center closing through students’ voices, and 2) unlike the more prevalent research that has looked into the vigorous life of writing centers, I seek to tell another side of writing center stories through an iconoclastic inquiry into the death of a writing center, which can enrich and complicate the writing center grand narrative, one that Jackie Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls us to problematize. Furthermore, based on my findings that revealed students’ help-seeking behaviors in response to dramatic changes, I offer implications to writing center professionals and educators who seek to cultivate students to become resourceful and resource-savvy writers, especially in a time of challenges and changes. Amid scholarship that documents and theorizes the lives of writing centers, the “deaths” of writing centers are largely underexplored, and research that specifically examines writing center closing is rare. With the bulk of our scholarship focusing on the development and improvement of writing center praxis, we tend to perpetuate the writing center grand narrative, which depicts writing centers as “comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” (McKinney, 2013, p. 3). However, if we honor this representation as if it were the solely true version of writing center story, we risk creating “a sort of collective tunnel vision” (McKinney, 2013, p. 5) that fails to capture the complexity and richness of writing center storying—writing centers do struggle, they get eliminated, and their closing is by no means inconsequential. Writing center closing deserves scholarly attention, because they are not only a phase of writing center life, but also a generative component of writing center storying. Thus, one promising research direction is to delve into how the closing of a writing center impacts the students it used to serve. As such, this study aims to contribute new insights to the writing center community through an investigation of students’ perceptions of and reaction to the closing of a writing center. To do so, I review extant literature on writing closing as follows. Outside of traditional academic publication venues, brief reports of writing center closing have appeared on webpages, such as McDonald’s (2016) online article reporting on students’ and staff’s anger over the New Jersey City University’s plan to shut down their writing center, Spitzer-Hanks’ (2016) blog post about the shutdown of tutoring services at the University of British Columbia Writing Center, and Farley and Nealey’s (2017) report on the closing of the writing center at Savannah State University due to the lack of funding. However, all of these sources only report on the closings without in-depth discussion about their impact. On the other hand, writing center scholarship, especially empirical research, rarely investigates the reasons, processes, and repercussions of writing center closing, except for bits and pieces that scatter over literature. For example, in her study that examines how writing centers are positioned in the political-educational climate in the United States, Salem (2014) mentions in her method section that with a sample of nearly 400 accredited institutions, “a number of institutions included in the original sample ultimately had to be dropped from the analysis. Some had closed or lost accreditation, and others had stopped offering baccalaureate degrees” (p. 21). This statement reveals that some writing centers closed due to the closing of their housing institution, which is only one reason for writing center closing. Similarly, Essid (2018) states that the integration of writing centers to learning commons has appeared to be a means to re-structure academic entities, while Reese (2017) suggests that the merging of universities has led a university writing center to become a satellite institution. H owever, little research appears to delve into the disappearance, closing, and “deaths” of writing centers, which calls for thorough inquiries into the impact and consequences of writing center closing. An exception is Cirillo-McCarthy’s (2012) year-long comparative study of two writing centers through ethnographic and textographic methodologies: The University of Arizona Writing Center in the U.S. and London Metropolitan University’s Writing Center in the U.K. Cirillo-McCarthy (2012) discusses three crises that these two writing centers reacted to, including crisis of access, crisis of literacy, and crisis of funding. In particular, despite their director’s efforts of gaining support from international writing studies and writing center scholars through support letters, London Metropolitan University’s Writing Center was rendered in a reactive instead of proactive place and was finally eliminated due to the lack of funding. In contrast, although it was also faced with a funding cut, the University of Arizona’s Writing Center survived by reacting stra tegically, including finding a new home in a centralized student tutoring space and charging a nominal fee to all students. The struggles of these two writing centers portray a realistic picture of the various and mundane crises that writing centers face as well as the different fates of writing centers resulting from different reactions toward crises. In the case of the present study, the satellite writing center in question had also suffered from different crises prior to its closing: 1) it received little funding from the university (e.g., when activities such as a scavenger hunt was held at the satellite writing center, the director brought home-baked muffins rather than receiving financial support from the university), and 2) the drastic shrinkage of academic student enrolment on the regional campus—from several hundreds to around twenty five—called the necessity of the satellite writing center into questions and further threatened its already peripheral status, which all contributed to its final closing. In short, because the limited literature on writing center closing are either brief reports on closing or studies that approach the issue from the administrator’s perspective rather than the student’s perspective, our knowledge about writing center closing is limited to the reasons for closing and the fight against closing—which tends to end with the closure itself. Ther efore, by in vestigating the impact of writing center closing in a post-closure fashion and through students’ voices, the present study is the first of its kind. With a focus on how the students perceived and reacted to the closing of a satellite writing center, I aim to draw writing center scholars’ attention to and initiate much-needed conservations about writing center closing.

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