Drawing on insights from environmental systems and cross-disciplinary knowledge about ecology, this multimodal video essay narrates the collaborative process of three writing center practitioners as they created a curriculum for a professional development series on writing center ecologies—a curriculum rooted in ecological principles of scale, relationality, care and wellbeing, belonging, sustainability, and justice. Utilizing the power of image, sound, and audio, the trio brings each principle to life, sharing their personal and professional stories to highlight the importance of understanding place, culture, and power in shaping writing center dynamics. They advocate for care, sustainability, and justice in writing center practices by considering the long-term and large-scale impact of daily practices and relationships on broader systemic issues. Through this process, they not only exemplify what an ecological approach to writing center work looks like in our ecosystems, but also imagine the possibilities of how it can enhance writing center values, practices, and policies.

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.

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.

This study explores the impact of multimodal feedback types on student experiences with asynchronous writing tutoring. Through analysis of survey responses from students who utilized Drop-Off Essay Review appointments at a small, private college, this study finds that the combination of written and video feedback enables students to better understand and engage with asynchronous feedback from their tutors. Findings indicate that most students prefer video feedback or a combination of video and written feedback, noting that the video feedback helps elaborate on the tutor’s written comments. Results also suggest that offering multiple feedback options may help writing centers reach a wider range of students, as participants expressed varying individual preferences for different feedback types. Furthermore, the asynchronous format appears to provide a more comfortable entry point into tutoring for some students. This study contributes to the limited research on multimodal feedback in asynchronous writing tutoring and highlights the importance of examining how combined feedback types impact student experiences. Keywords : asynchronous tutoring, multimodal feedback, writing centers, student engagement, inclusivity Asynchronous methods of tutoring, in which tutors and students provide and review feedback on their own schedule, have been increasingly introduced in many college and university writing centers. While asynchronous tutoring is not a new concept, such tutoring methods provide the opportunity for students to receive feedback on their writing without ever needing to meet with a tutor, which brought great value during the online times of Covid-19 and led to these methods becoming more widespread during and after Covid restrictions. Often, asynchronous feedback is received in a written format, though asynchronous tutoring can also utilize audio and video feedback from tutors. As a new tutor providing asynchronous feedback to students, I often noticed students would not review all forms of feedback provided to them; many would ignore the screencast video provided with their written feedback, and this brought forth the question: were both feedback methods necessary? This study aims to understand how multiple feedback types (written feedback, in which the reviewer uses forms of written communication such as imbedded comments, emails, or letters; audio feedback, in which the reviewer records their voice talking through their feedback; and video feedback, an expansion on audio feedback in which the reviewer provides a video both talking through and showing their feedback) impact student experiences with online writing tutoring when used in combination with one another. This article will first examine previous research on asynchronous feedback methods, looking at comparisons between asynchronous and in-person feedback, considering the specific pros and cons of asynchronous tutoring, and exploring the impact of written versus media feedback, before presenting data from a study that explores student experiences and perceptions of online, multimodal feedback. Overall, I argue that using multiple feedback types creates a valuable relationship between those methods, allowing students to better understand and address asynchronous feedback from their tutors. Previous research has compared asynchronous and face-to-face tutoring (where tutors and students meet at the same time to discuss that paper), finding that the online format can change various aspects within tutoring. In Bell’s study on 10 asynchronous sessions, she found that “tutors are not simply applying the tutoring techniques and strategies they use in in-person session in a new online setting, but they are adapting these tools and approaches” (2019). Buck et al.’s study investigating online tutoring comments also notes how an online setting impacts feedback, explaining that the asynchronous format “introduces many interpretations of the tone” which can shift how feedback is received (2021, p. 38). Separate pieces of research investigating the difference between in-person and online formats also comment on how this difference impacts the tutor-tutee relationship. Buck et al. explain that the “tutor and writer cannot have conversations setting the agenda for the upcoming session,” and that this lack of communication among each leads to a shift in focus between the two, with the tutor and tutee often maintaining different priorities (2021, p. 39). These researchers continue to explain that the lack of contact between the two results in the tutor being unable to adjust their tutoring style in ways that is often done within face-to-face sessions. As tutors are unable to see how students will respond to their feedback, they are unable to get to know their student as a writer in their session, which is often vital to adjusting tutoring feedback based on the writer’s abilities (Buck et al., 2021, p.  39). Bell also explores the tutor-tutee relationships in her research, noting that tutors often made more attempts to define roles between themselves and the student in their sessions in order to “define relationships in an asynchronous setting where participants are not both present to otherwise negotiate and establish roles” ( 2019). Bell also found that tutors adapted to the online setting by finding different approaches to keeping attention on the subject at hand. Within face-to-face tutoring, it is common for tutors to read papers aloud in order to stay on the same page as their tutees. Within Bell’s study, she found that asynchronous tutors utilized screencast videos as a visual prompt to draw attention to the section tutors focused on ( 2019) . Other findings on the shifts between in-person and asynchronous tutoring consist of the format itself. Breuch (2005) explains that the media within face-to-face tutoring remains consistent across sessions, with tutoring always occurring within a physical space and through speaking to one another. In online writing centers, however, there are numerous options to communicate, and communications can take place in a variety of formats such as email or Microsoft Word (p. 23). These differences between the tutoring methods can ultimately impact a student’s experience with writing tutoring. Various literature also demonstrates that many students prefer and value online options for tutoring specifically. A study conducted by Bell and others finds three common variables for why students opt for asynchronous appointments: time, physical space, and feedback. Students feel asynchronous options make “best use of what little time” they have available in their busy schedules, provide a space for those with distance to travel to reach the center or that is more comfortable for those not finding the physical center accommodating for their needs, and provide feedback types that students find favorable (Bell et al., 2021, pp. 6-7). Another study highlighting how many students appreciate online options for tutoring found that 40% of participants from asynchronous appointments said that they would only come for online tutoring, while 57% of in-person respondents said that they would only come for in-person tutoring (Barron et al., 2023 ). This fact highlights the value placed on each tutoring form by students and shows that despite the changes from in-person to online, both options are valued by different students. Aside from students’ preference for the option, online tutoring brings many advantages. As mentioned, previous research establishes the benefits of time, change in physical space, and feedback (Bell et al., 2021, pp. 7-6). Chewning (2015) also comments on the benefit of time in online tutoring, elaborating that such methods provide more freedom to students “particularly in terms of when contributions to the process can be made by either party,” allowing for both tutors and tutees to address the appointment when they are ready and able to (p. 59). Gallagher and Maxfield echo this sentiment, explaining that the online format allows for students to “take breaks and work on certain revisions” before revisiting feedback, allowing for students who might get overwhelmed from large portions of comments to review their tutor’s feedback at their own pace (2019). Another benefit brought from asynchronous tutoring is the permanence of the feedback. Gallagher and Maxfield (2019) explain, while students have to rely on memory and any potential notes taken in face-to-face tutoring to inform them while making revisions after an appointment, students in asynchronous appointments are left with written or multimodal artifacts to reference at any point when working on revisions. They further explain that such an artifact can be utilized by students “to build a personal library of supplemental material over time” (2019). Bell and others also discuss this advantage in their study, explaining that because feedback is given in a more permanent format through comments or videos, students are able to revisit this feedback whenever they desire (2021, p. 7). Finally, an interesting benefit brought from asynchronous tutoring methods is that such options provide the ability to reach new students, bringing an aspect of inclusivity that may be lacking from in-person opportunities. In a study that incorporated several new tutoring options onto their campus, including an asynchronous option that they refer to as Written Feedback, it was found that “the more traditional in-person modality was the only modality where a majority (54%) of writers identified as white (191 of 356 respondents)” which suggested that while white students opted for “traditional in-person tutoring,” non-white students tended to prefer non-traditional methods of tutoring (Barron et al., 2023 ). Thus, this study concluded that nontraditional tutoring such as asynchronous tutoring allowed the typical boundaries of the writing center to be stretched in order to reach students who wouldn’t utilize in-person options. A similar finding came in a study investigating why students choose asynchronous options, stating that “those using online tutoring services may do so because in-person writing center programming is not always easy to access and not always designed to be inclusive” (Bell et al., 2021, p. 8). Thus, various research indicates that asynchronous and online tutoring reaches new audiences, often including students within marginalized groups, who might not feel comfortable visiting the physical writing center. There are also various findings displaying the disadvantages of asynchronous or online tutoring. For instance, Chewning (2015) explains in his findings through implementing online tutoring in his institution that there is value from in-person tutoring that simply cannot be recreated through online tutoring without proper resources which come with financial cost and the need for more staff or training. Due to this need, he states that a hybrid approach where writing centers offer a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous tutoring options, rather than solely replacing face-to-face tutoring with online options, would be more effective for institutions like his that are unable to provide the necessary funding and staffing (p. 61). Breuch (2005) discusses how the frustration people have with online writing centers stems from expecting these online options to function the same as in-person tutoring, but online writing centers need to have their own approach and adapt to the online format in order to be best suited for their format (p. 32). Chewning (2015) discusses how personal preference also means that some writers or even professors may be more receptive to face-to-face tutoring over online options (p. 59). Other research establishes, however, that there is a lot of preference for online formats. A study conducted by Wolfe and Griffin (2012) found that “87% of student writers who participated in an online session either preferred the online environment or had no environment preference” (p. 81). Satisfaction with feedback was also analyzed, and the study “found no significant differences in our expert raters’ perception of the instructional quality of the sessions; moreover, participants were equally satisfied with the consultations regardless of environment” (p. 83). Research on the use of different feedback methods is also crucial to understanding how asynchronous tutoring works. While there has been investigation of the use of video feedback within instructors’ feedback to students for over 10 years, only in recent years have there been writing center-specific research about asynchronous videos. Despite this drawback, findings from outside of the writing center can still inform how writers interact with different feedback types. Research on written feedback is wide with many interesting results. First, there are various ways that written feedback can be provided. Gallagher and Maxfield (2019) discuss how asynchronous feedback delivers writing in the format of advice letters, which differs from the common practice of utilizing embedded comments in student papers. These researchers explain how this format “still allows the tutor to address very specific passages, just as embedded comments do, by copying and pasting them into the advice and making them an integrated part of a more global discussion,” allowing the written feedback to focus on larger portions of the text more easily than is done when embedding comments, which focus on a specific section of the paper. Another study incorporated a pilot program testing different online tutoring options. In this study, both email and message board tutorials were utilized as written feedback forms, and it was found that message board tutorials were more effective for this institution (Chewning, 2015, pp. 60-61). As marginal or embedded comments are a more common form of written feedback, however, most research focuses on this type. A study on the effectiveness of online tutoring (ETutoring) comments found that this feedback type results in effective revision from students, explaining that “student revision in response to tutor commentary is typically of a high quality” (Buck et al., 2021, p. 38). A study utilizing Microsoft Word to make marginal comments as a form of written feedback to students in the classroom found that this feedback type tends not to be perceived as conversational by students, even if the instructor makes specific attempts for feedback to be worded conversationally (Silva, 2012). In discussing audio feedback, many researchers point out the humanity that this feedback type brings to the table. Gallagher and Maxfield (2019) comment that “A student then knows from page one that the work submitted was reviewed by another person, that a human being has invested time and energy in the student’s success.” This sentiment is echoed within studies done in the classroom setting, in which students comment that their instructor’s video feedback “added a more personal touch” and that “it was fun to put a voice with a name” (Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, p. 126). Research on video feedback specifically, rather than simply audio feedback, finds that “Satisfaction with online asynchronous screencast tutoring was readily visible throughout the data, but the importance of offering other tutoring options was also clear” (Bell et al., 2021, p. 8). In her own study, Bell (2019) also analyzes how screencast videos impacts tutor feedback, explaining that “tutors rarely relied on a single technique or strategy” while creating their video feedback, and that “In addition to providing feedback, tutors appeared to use multiple tutoring strategies and techniques to encourage audience awareness, reflection, and critical thinking, encouraging and engaging writers in the learning process.” Furthermore, in video format, it is found that the combination of visual and auditory feedback provides opportunities for focus on larger concerns while still providing the opportunity to point out specific portions of text (Silva), similarly to how embedded or marginal comments function. Cavanaugh and Song’s (2014) research also noted some comparisons between the two feedback types. They explain, “Students in the study noted that the instructor’s tone was quite favorable when receiving audio comments. They found this in contrast to the tone communicated in written format” (p. 126). Their research also highlighted another difference between the two feedback types in which the focus of feedback provided shifted depending on the feedback type. Within written feedback, it was found that professors often focused on micro-level issues such as grammar and mechanics, while audio feedback typically focused on macro-level issues such as organization and overall topic of the paper (pp. 126-127). This finding was echoed within Silva’s (2012) research in which she explains that written feedback drew attention to specific sections of the paper such as specific words or sentences, while video feedback “afforded detailed discussion of macro level issues.” Students further noted that written feedback tended to be more specific, but audio feedback often was more detailed in providing examples (Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, pp. 127-128). In discussion of these findings, the researchers suggest that audio feedback provides a more similar experience to face-to-face instruction, which is echoed by some students’ opinions on how the audio feedback was more engaging in maintaining attention similar to when in the classroom (Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, pp. 128-129). Buck and others (2021) comment on similar findings as it pertains to written feedback, finding that students often utilized written comments from their tutors “to make the most formal revisions, such as changes in spelling, punctuation, and usage” (p. 38). In fact, this study finds that even when tutors do focus on macro-level issues in their written feedback, students “do not respond to those comments most frequently,” and instead opt to focus on micro-level issues (p. 38). Student preferences for feedback types tended to differ, with these studies by Silva, and Cavanaugh and Song highlighting the importance of both options. Both studies show that students found written feedback to be valuable for the revision process but enjoyed the more personal mode of feedback within the video or audio feedback (Silva, 2012; Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, pp. 127-129). In the case of Silva’s research, the students who participated requested that their professor utilize a “hybrid approach” of the differing feedback types at the end of the study. While the research above highlights many findings on asynchronous tutoring, this study intends to fill the gap in research on multimodal feedback methods within asynchronous writing tutoring. This study emphasizes the importance of how student experiences may change depending on various feedback types, particularly when one type of feedback is used in combination with another type. While previous research focuses on the impacts of separate feedback types, often not within a tutoring setting, this study investigates how a structure containing multiple feedback methods enables students to engage with their writing feedback in a tutoring setting. At a small, private, comprehensive college in the Mid-Atlantic, Drop-Off Essay Review (Drop-Off) was introduced to the Writing Center in the fall of 2019 to implement asynchronous tutoring alongside in-person and Zoom options. Students are able to sign up their paper, prompt, and rubric through an online submission form for a Drop-Off appointment and receive feedback from a writing tutor by 9 pm the same day as their appointment. Drop-Off utilizes three main forms of feedback: marginal comments left directly on the student’s paper, a cover page attached to the top of the student’s paper, and a screencast video made through Vidgrid provided through a link in the cover page. Tutors are provided instructions for conducting Drop-Off appointments. Such guidelines include leaving feedback that address higher-order concerns such as organization and local concerns such as grammar and mechanics feedback where appropriate. These guidelines also instruct tutors to utilize their recordings to either summarize or explain the feedback they provide through comments and the cover page summary. Finally, tutor instructions for Drop-Off are to spend up to 60 minutes on each appointment without going over this time limit. The cover page summary portion of feedback includes various pieces of information for students to review. First, the rubric provides a section for the tutor to greet the student and introduce themself by name. The next section of the cover page provides a link to the video summary or explanation that the tutor created, while the third section is optional for tutors to utilize whenever additional disclaimers are needed. A notable disclaimer is one warning the student that the tutor did not receive the assignment instructions, and, as such, was not able to ensure that the paper met all requirements; however, multiple disclaimers exist for tutors to utilize (Fig. 1). The rest of the cover page provides the assignment requirements and tells the student which requirements were met, provided that the student attached instructions to their appointment, and gives the three priorities that the tutor focused on when providing feedback. Then, the cover page provides sections for the tutor to point out what the student did well in their paper and what they could change to improve upon their paper. To view the full Drop-Off cover page and its contents, see Appendix A.

In this multimodal video dialogue, three writing center directors at small, regional, public colleges and universities discuss their experiences with remote tutoring amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Each speaker came into new writing center administrative positions during the pandemic. Speakers each discuss their recent experiences with the technological shifts they, their tutors, and their institutions have developed, and how those changes impact perceptions of collaboration and equity. In so doing, they hope to highlight the ways in which writing center administrators are thinking about technology’s influence on tutoring, instruction, and students’ daily lives, as well as highlight the challenges and opportunities this pandemic has provided them. Keywords : writing centers, peer tutoring, technology, online learning, critical pedagogy, higher education administration Click here for link to the audio/video recording for this transcript . Russell Mayo : Hello! We are three new writing center directors working at regional and local colleges and universities across the US, and we’re having a conversation together about navigating and adapting writing centers through a pandemic and justifying our work in new contexts. We’re going to introduce ourselves and talk a little bit and have a brief conversation around this work and the experiences we’ve had this semester. My name is Russell Mayo. I am an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University Northwest (PNW) in Hammond, Indiana. I’m also the Writing Center Director there. This is my first year at PNW. My teaching and research focus is on writing, pedagogy, and environmental humanities. Currently I’m teaching First Year Writing (FYW) courses, but I will also be teaching English Education and Writing/Rhetorical Studies courses in the coming semesters. Eric Camarillo : Hi everyone. My name is Eric Camarillo. I am Director of the Learning Commons at Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC). It’s a role I started in August 2020. I oversee testing, tutoring, the library, and user support services—and of course the Writing Center is contained within the Tutoring Center there. My research focuses really on asynchronous tutoring at the moment, but in the past I’ve discussed things like anti-racism in writing centers, as well as “neutrality” in writing centers and trying to break some “best practices” there. Elise Dixon : Hi, I’m Elise Dixon. I am the Writing Center Director and an Assistant Professor of English at University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP). I started that position in August. Currently I’m teaching FYW, Writing Center training courses, and currently I’m slated to teach a graduate course on activist rhetorics in the summer. My research focus is generally on queer and cultural rhetorics, and those intersections with activists making, and of course writing center studies. Russell Mayo : We are all former TPR contributors. We were all featured in the 2018 Special Issue 2.1 on Cultural Rhetorics (Choffel, Garcia, & Goodman, 2018). Eric and Elise, you have contributed to other issues as well, right? Elise Dixon : Yes. Russell Mayo : And so part of this conversation again is just to talk about our experiences in this unique semester, and especially being new administrators. So I’m going to start by talking a little bit about what I’ve been struck with in my work with FYW students and writing tutors this semester, which is this sudden shift to technologically-mediated education, and the pandemic has thrust this upon us whether we wanted it or not. And in thinking about this shift, I am reminded of the 1998 talk by cultural critic Neil Postman (2014) entitled “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.” I read this first with some of my students in a FYW class a few years ago where we focused on the social impacts of technology. I think it’s really great, and I think you should check it out. It might be really useful for yourself or for your tutors as well thinking about these questions. Postman (2014) asserts the five critical points on technology and change. While it’s quite old, I still think it speaks to our current lives in schools today. I’d like to quickly summarize Postman’s (2014) five main points, and then I’ll talk through a couple of them and how they relate to tutoring at the moment. These are the five Postman (2014) says: I want to talk about the first three. So the first one, “all technological change is a trade-off.” For this, Neil Postman (2014) is pushing us to think dialectically about how moving to something like remote learning has offered many benefits but also drawbacks for writers and tutors. So I have a lot of experiences and anecdotes to share for this; I’m sure you all do. I’m thinking about how, in a positive way, how nimbley and quickly so much of our peer tutoring work was able to shift online—especially in comparison to the struggles of K-12 education, FYW classes, or many other university functions. Rhetorically speaking, that’s because writing centers operate around a logic of one-to-one dialogue, an ethos of peer-to-peer learning, and we also harness the kairotic moments of learning (Bruffee, 1984; Kail, 1984; Harris, 1992; Wood, 2017). This is all instead of the top-down curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, happening at pre-set times and determined places that are common to other schooling arrangements. Part of what peer tutoring offers, I think, can remain in an online format, and we’ve seen that this semester, successfully (Yergeau, et al., 2008; Bell, 2006). But I think a lot is lost in the move online as well, as we want to make sure not to forget about those. I think in particular for the tutors, there’s a sense of a loss of mutuality and a shared sense of a space and a place where the tutors work together and interact together. Not during the session necessarily but before and after—those in-between times. We haven’t found a way to replicate that in any digital space. The camaraderie between tutors is not necessarily as strong. And I also think that potentially leads to some burn-out or some sense of dislocation: an unmooring for tutors. For some of them, the real joy was that in-between space of tutoring, and that also pushed them to be better, to ask questions of each other (Geller et al, 2007; Boquet, 2002). And the connections of an administrator certainly, and as somebody who teaches tutors really—a lot is lost when I don’t see them on a given day. So we’re really struggling to figure out how to train new tutors for next semester which we didn’t do this fall, given the lack of face-to-face interactions or the ability to overhear something in the writing center that you don’t quite do online. The second point that Postman made is about “the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies,” and the unevenness of that. Another way to say that is that COVID-19 has affected everyone, but not everyone is affected equally by COVID-19. This semester seems to have exacerbated the socioeconomic gap for tutors and for writers overall. The ‘haves’ seem to be doing fine. Many of them with the time, the space, the technology, the strong internet may even be thriving in an environment like this [1] . There’s wider availability of recorded lectures and teacher notes, and that level of accessibility really wasn’t a part of higher education before this point. But, on the other hand, I’m meeting with far too many tutors and writers who are taking a full load of classes and working full time. They’re calling into my class while at work. Many don’t have a reliable computer or internet access, or a quiet place to sit and learn and study, and they’re not able to do that in the way they used to on campus. This is true for the large number of our First-Gen students we have at PNW. I see a lot of people who are overworked and exhausted and just kind of going through the motions. They’re not experiencing any intellectual joy or connection that we have with in-person learning. What’s lost for them is due to no fault of their own. Many of them are going into debt for an education that is unfulfilling and unresponsive to their needs at the moment, and I think that’s something for us to think a lot about. The last point, and then I’ll end here, is that “embedded in every technology there is a powerful [but potentially hidden] idea.” I don’t really know what that is for Zoom. Is it that learning is done by lecture and presentation—a virtual TED Talk? Does Zoom reduce teaching to talking and learning to listening, what Paulo Freire (1970/2000) would call “banking education”? If so, has the pandemic-induced, video-mediated learning environment degraded the central closeness and connection we have sitting at a table together, listening to each other, looking together on a screen, and sharing and negotiation through speaking and listening in a common space that we once did and are not currently doing? These are just some of the questions that I think Postman’s (2014) work helps us to think about—as teachers, scholars, writing center administrators, and tutors—and keep me thinking about as I move forward. Eric Camarillo : Great, thank you. I think that kind of aligns with some of my own research with asynchronous writing center consultations. So I first became interested in asynchronous tutoring in Fall 2019 as part of one of my Ph.D. classes, when I realized there really was this gap in the knowledge of how we understand (1) how online tutoring works, and (2) asynchronous online tutoring and how that works. At my former institution, they had a really long track record of asynchronous tutoring. It was really part of their services, part of their suite of things they were doing. And so I never thought much about it, I just assumed others also understood how to do asynchronous writing center consultations. That turned out to not always be the case. At some places before the pandemic, they weren’t really doing any online tutoring: they didn’t have the platform, didn’t have the infrastructure. So for my own research, I draw a bit from a few different areas—really from Kathryn Denton’s (2017) “Beyond the Lore: The Case of Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research.” One of the points that she makes early on in the text, and kind of throughout, is this idea of asynchronous tutoring as being some kind of subpar alternative “step-child” of writing centers, where people don’t really want to do it. They will do it sometimes if they have to, if there’s a demand or if administration is like, “You should really be doing this.” They’ll do it if they really have to but there’s not always a lot of interest in it. By far, most centers are more interested in that face-to-face, traditional consultation, which is understandable. It’s a very rich, powerful form of tutorial, and steeped in history. It’s really where we’re getting a lot of our research and data from. There’s just decades of research—and probably more, if you want to go really, really old to tutoring generally (Van Horne, 2012; Neaderhiser & Wolfe, 2009; Breuch, 2005; Rosalia, 2013; Wolfe, & Griffin, 2012; Palmquist, 2003; Lerner, 1998; Casal & Lee, 2014). Certainly, with modern writing centers, decades of research on face-to-face consultation. The problem, I think, that many writing center administrators have with trying to implement asynchronous tutoring is that they’re trying to apply traditional writing center best practices to this model. I’ve argued elsewhere (Camarillo, 2020; 2020), where trying to just overlay best practices from a synchronous model to an asynchronous one is just not appropriate; it’s just not going to work. Because the key tenet in the best practices is this idea of “being there” with the student (Riley-Mukavetz, 2014). So a lot of that collaboration requires being there in real time with the student, especially when it comes to asking leading questions or Socratic questions, which don’t really make sense if you’re leaving feedback on a document in an asynchronous way. Because then your questions are acontextual; you have to do a lot more explaining in order to make them work. So coming from my background at University of Houston-Victoria (UHV), where they had a long history of asynchronous writing tutoring, to my current institution HACC, they had only really done drop-in tutoring for years. That was really their primary mode of tutoring. In early 2020, they started a pilot for online Zoom tutoring, and then of course by March that was all they were doing. And so it was very interesting comparing UHV’s experience to HACC’s. Because at HACC, when the pandemic started, pivoting to online appointments was really simple. We were using Upswing, which is a third-party product to help host all of our appointments and host all of our actual sessions. And so really it was just a matter of listing every tutor as an “Online” tutor. Very simple. HACC’s experience was a little bit different. Suddenly, you had to deal with Zoom links, making sure the Zoom room works, and making sure that everything was password secured, or that there was a waiting room because you didn’t want to get “Zoom Bombed,” things like that. I’m in this really interesting position of comparing, of trying to draw on one experience and comparing it to another. We’ve begun our HACC’s Online Writing Lab, which means students can submit essays to us electronically through email—but carefully tracked and assessed. To me, it’s just really exciting to be in this kind of position where everything is really new and everyone’s really open to new ideas. I’m able to bring some of my experience and my research that I’ve been advocating for about a year now, that we should really be doing more of. And so thinking about technology and asynchronous tutoring, and about how this will shift the way HACC, and probably other institutions, work in the future is also really exciting. How does that change tutoring for us? We’ve opened this door, right, and there’s probably no going back to just drop-in tutoring. I think students will always want the flexibility of doing something on Zoom so they don’t have to come to campus. Being able to submit things to an email account so they can go to work, and then in the evening, or the next day, they can come back and their essay’s there and then they can then apply that feedback. I’m at a community college, I’m working with students who work, and we’re trying to make sure that they’re able to access the services that we offer when they need to access those services. Elise Dixon: Okay, wow. You both brought up so many great points and I think I want to touch on a couple of things from what you both said. First, when I’m thinking about Postman’s “Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change,” I’m thinking about the fourth idea, actually, that “technological change is not additive, it’s ecological.” This to me really harkens back to cultural rhetorics, ideologies of understanding that our lives are made up of these layers of interactions with each other and the stories that we’re telling each other over time (Powell et al., 2014; Bratta & Powell, 2016). And I see that quite clearly at my institution right now, in terms of what we’re doing in the writing center but also what our students are responding to to the primarily technological education that they’re getting right now over Zoom. They key point that I wanted to talk about today was: I think, for me, at my institution, the writing center now has a lot of evidence—a lot more evidence than usual—of the big gap between student understanding of what’s going on in the course and teacher understanding of what’s going on in the course. I see that evidence popping up in writing and in the way that teachers are evaluating. It’s no longer just a hand-written note, but it’s something that is on Zoom, WebEx, or Canvas, that the student can then just send right over to me as the Writing Center Director. So the metacognitive capabilities of talking about the moves that writers are supposed to make, those are difficult skills for faculty members to learn. And it takes a lot of time, and it’s especially hard if you don’t have a rhetoric and composition or English background. I see those gaps in understanding all the time. The additional complication of that is that there’s now the metacognitive conversation about the moves we’re supposed to be making technologically over Zoom, or over an online course. One example I wanted to bring up was this: for some background, my campus is very racially diverse and very unique. We’re the most racially diverse campus in the Southeast. What I’ve seen is that there’s a big gap in what our faculty members say to primarily the students of color who come into the Writing Center. One example that I can think of is: one day, I received a phone call from a student who was desperate. And she said, I have gotten a note from my professor that says that I have “markup” on my paper, and that any further papers that I turn in with “markup” will be immediately given a zero. And she said, “I don’t know what ‘markup’ is, and I said, “I don’t know what ‘markup’ is either! I’m not sure what your professor means.” And she indicated to me that she felt a little bit unsure of asking this professor because not only was there a gap in understanding, but there was a gap in proximity. She’d never met this man in person. She did not know how to interact with him, and all of her interactions had been either over Zoom or via email. So I volunteered to give him a call or to send him an email to ask what this meant. I think she was hoping that the Writing Center Director could tell her like, “Oh, well, this is the overarching definition of ‘markup,'” but there isn’t one. So I emailed this professor and he got right back to me and said, “Her ‘track changes’ are on in her document, and I can see all the changes that she has made. But, I don’t want a document like that.” And so really it had nothing to do with her writing. But he was giving her zeros for not turning off her track changes. Technically, the problem was that she didn’t know to accept all of her changes before she turned her paper in. Because as we might know, from our own personal experience, you can hide the “markup,” but that doesn’t mean it goes away. So when I emailed the student back and told her, she informed me that he had given her zeros on five papers because of this, and that she had not even turned in one of the papers because she knew that he was going to give her a zero, even though she had no idea what it was. The gap in communication there was just one tiny explanation that could have been fixed if there was a better system for having a conversation, if there was an understanding of how much of writing is about the correct or adequate utilization of the technology that we’re given. How do we communicate those needs to our students in a way that gives them the space to make mistakes and still learn? It taught me a lot, I hope that it taught the professor something too because I emailed him back and said that, “Your student was just confused, and I told her what to do. And I hope that you give her points on this and the other papers you gave zeroes to.” For me, in those moments, it was a realization that technology has become a part of UNCP’s ecology. And it has become a part of how students and teachers interact or don’t interact with each other, and how students can feel supported or not supported. I was not blind to the fact that this professor was a white man and that this student was a Black woman. And I was very sensitive to the understanding of all the power dynamics that exist in that situation. Especially on a campus that is very racially diverse, I think it’s really important for instructors to understand that we can’t just expect our professors to have these metacognitive understandings of the kinds of moves that we need our students to be making in writing but also the kinds of moves that they need to be making with technology. We have to be able to know how to explain it well. And the Writing Center can’t necessarily always do that explaining when we’re not really sure what something like “markup” is. So I think I’ll stop there, and then we can kind of have a conversation from there. Russell Mayo : Awesome. Yeah, let’s kind of unpack these and talk a little bit more. And we just met really today. So we’ve also been sharing a lot about our campuses and our roles and kind of what we’re learning in the process of this pandemic semester as well. So, yeah, where should we start? Eric Camarillo: Well, I’m really intrigued by this idea of technological prowess, Elise, about the instructor using one set of vocabulary, and that just not translating at all to what the student is capable of doing or, you know, connecting with the student. And I think it’s one way that we assume a lot of knowledge on the part of students, both in terms of what they’re able to do maybe with writing or what we expect them to do with writing, but also in terms of what we expect them to be able to do with technology. So often, I mean, we call our younger students especially “digital natives,” but really, it depends on the context, right? Like, we know that they’re very comfortable with TikTok or Twitter or Instagram, right? Snapchat. So they’re very savvy with mobile applications. But the more professional suite of services, or a professional suite of applications, is something that’s really foreign to them. So they may or may not know how to navigate Word, right? I’ve met plenty of students who really have no idea they’re even in track changes. They have no idea that they’ve even turned them on. They just think it looks like that. Or when they need to print out a paper, they don’t know how to leave them on there so they can show their instructor what they did. And these are all things that they need training on. We can’t just assume that they know these things, but increasingly that’s become part of things we just expect them to know or to already have knowledge of. Elise Dixon: Yes, I think something that that experience showed me too was that the Writing Center is often treated by both faculty and students as a go between of what students should know how to talk about and what faculty should know how to talk about. And in that case, I was a go-between. And really, the truth was that it wasn’t just a gap in student understanding, but also a gap, in fact, of this faculty member’s understanding of how to talk about how to use the technology. And we know, I think, as writing center administrators, we’ve seen an assignment sheet that a student brings into a session that don’t make no sense. And then realizing that the faculty member might not really fully know how to express in writing their own expectations of what writing looks like. When we have now this big gap in interpersonal experience, we can’t sit in a room with someone and say, “What do you mean by ‘markup?'” or whatever, we don’t get that chance to do the back and forth. One thing that I wanted to say in my little chunk of time, Eric was, we also are doing a lot of asynchronous tutoring this year. And it’s going very well. But I’m finding that, again, the work for me is finding ways to articulate how to access the technology, in such a way—through the technology—I have to teach people how to access the technology through the use of the technology and find ways to verbalize it, or put it in writing in a way that is most useful to students, and that it just feels sometimes like that gap in understanding is really more like a cavern, you know. It’s very, very tough. Russell Mayo: If I can just jump in and add on to that, too. We’ve been working with asynchronous tutoring, which there was a little bit of that before [at PNW]. So similar to what Eric was saying, that is sort of new to the students and to the tutors. And, like you’re saying, Elise, communicating that through the technology rather than face-to-face, somebody just saying “I want an appointment, where do I even begin?” Normally, people would say, “go to the second floor, and go to that particular space.” And now they’re just emailing into the web and hoping that somebody can help them from there. But it reminds me, I think there are some really good points here about how, essentially, these are two different forms of communication—the face-to-face and the digital asynchronous—and how they require different levels of trust, and detail, and explanation, and back and forth, and all of these things that is really new to students, and also to us and faculty or administrators too. There’s a lot of learning going on, and learning is messy and frustrating and takes us, you know, one step forward and two steps back sometimes. I like this idea that you brought up, Eric, about how the Socratic questions and the “being there” nature of face to face tutoring is both something that we always talk about as being really essential. And, I talked about that a little bit in my talk as well, but also that sort of rhetoric allows us to overlook some of the potential benefits of asynchronous tutoring, like you said, for the student who needs to drop off the paper before work, who can’t just go to a tutoring session at noon. And you know, for our campus, we have two different campus locations across [Midwestern state] that merged in 2016. We have two different writing centers, one very small at the Westville campus, and one that’s a bit larger at the Hammond campus. This semester, we were able to pool those tutors together into our writing center online platform and to offer both online and asynchronous tutoring for people across the campus. So in a way, we are more accessible, we’re more versatile, and we’re more connected than we ever have been before. There’s something about being there, which is both a benefit but also potentially a drawback. Because if you’re not there, then you can’t take advantage of being there. But the tutors are really learning a lot about what it means to communicate, like you said. One of the ways we’ve been doing it is—and this is actually something that we did in my former university as a grad student at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is that they adapted that I think it was just brilliant—is utilizing the communication technology between the tutor and the writer. So rather than writing up the client report form as being something for us or internal or potentially something that you email to a professor, we started to formulate it as a letter to the writer. So at the end of each session, the writer gets a letter summarizing what they did, encouraging them to keep going, talking about next steps and making sure that they feel welcome to come back. And so creating those forms as a student-facing document, as the audience for those. If your professor wants proof you came, you can forward that on to them, but that’s something that you can have that agency to do. I think just sometimes changing some of these communication techniques can be really powerful in a lot of ways. And that’s something that I’ve been reminded of that is new to what we’re doing this semester, and I think has been really, really beneficial. There’s a lot more than tutor back and forth between the writer and the tutor after that session is over. Normally, it’s just sort of sealed, but now there’s a lot more of that back and forth happening because that letter is forward-facing and generative too. Eric Camarillo : Yeah, I think when it comes to, you know, face-to-face, or online or asynchronous, to me, it’s not really about, you know, “is one better than the other?” It’s that they’re different and they serve different students differently. Being able to drive half an hour to campus for an hour-long appointment, and then drive half an hour back is a privilege. Not all students can do it, especially working students who just don’t have time. And so being able to offer a variety of supports in a number of different ways, I think is a way to maximize that kind of accessibility. And I liked what you said, Russ, about a forward-facing document. UHV has something very similar, where they were essentially asked to do a couple of different things: they would leave feedback on the paper, they would write an email back to the students, and then they would write a form, just like a short note taking thing that was internal. And so the email was something that we spent a lot of time with training folks on how to do right, because one of the things made clear to me when I first came on board was the asynchronicity there where it’s the last thing that you’re writing, but it’s the first thing that the student is reading. So you have to take that into account as you’re generating it. And I think, Elise, to touch a little bit on your point too about how technology mediates this experience for students now and how we’re using writing to talk about writing. If students have to now read to understand, right, you can’t just verbalize it. So they already have to have, or try sometimes a little harder depending on who the student is, to understand what’s been written, so when working asynchronously, the student may not have as strong of a writing ability, but perhaps their reading ability could also be strengthened, right? And so there needs to be a bit more explanation, a bit more breaking down of things in that process. Which is why I wish there was more research on asynchronous tutoring practices, to be able to know what other institutions do and how they approach this kind of work. There are a variety of ways. One thing HACC is doing that I love that I never thought to do at UHV is that you as a student can submit a paper for feedback. And then they can request a Zoom follow up session about that paper, which I think is so cool. Because then you have a student and they’ve gotten this feedback and they want maybe more. They have other questions, they want to get that additional feedback. And now they can. They can just request a Zoom session through TutorTrac or sometimes a drop-in one if one is available, depending on the tutor’s availability. But I think this is one way, at least, I’m trying to maximize that flexibility that we currently have. What is for most people, a very stressful time to be anywhere but I think especially to be a student. Elise Dixon : That makes me think of, you know, when I read through various writing center scholarship about online writing centers, quite frequently in my own research, especially up until 2010, a lot of the research was about how do we replicate a face-to-face collaborative session, right (Yergeau et al., 2008; Reno, 2010)? We’ve all been there. And this pandemic has really forced us into—maybe not forced but have given us some opportunities—to think through what you were saying, Russ, about what opportunities there are in new technologies or in using technologies in a different way that look, perhaps on the surface as not collaborative, which is what we always want, to have a collaborative writing center space. And when I first came to UNCP, I had never done an asynchronous tutoring program of any kind. And we already had one going partially because of a money situation, we were using Tutor.com. And the administration had found out that our students were using Tutor.com—the writing portion of Tutor.com—and it was costing them $28 an hour, I think, to provide that service, when the writing center was already readily available and had open spots. And so our previous interim writing center director had a talk with our dean of the University College, and they both decided that it would probably be a best idea to just create an asynchronous tutoring opportunity through the writing center. So often in my meetings this semester, even though I had some reticence over how do I make this a “collaborative” experience, I was also sort of being pressured: “Are you having a lot of asynchronous appointments? We want to make sure that you’re having a lot of asynchronous appointments because it’s all about, you know, the bottom line.” But over time, what I realized is that my students were very organically doing what you both were talking about in terms of the front-facing documentation. Because writing center tutors are trained or shown through our own work that we’re peers, that we want people to progress, and want them to learn how to be good writers on their own through our guidance. My tutors started organically having those conversations with students over email and making sure that their feedback was really explicit and gave step-by-step: “Maybe you should do this? How about this? These are three options for what you might do.” We tend to have this idea, and I think sometimes it stems from really our oldest most original writing center scholarship, like Jeff Brooks’ (1991) “Minimalist Tutoring,” that tells us that in order to be collaborative, we have to be hands off, and in order to be hands off we can’t touch the paper. And it’s very hard to be hands off when you are doing an asynchronous session. But we’re never not collaborating, even if it’s asynchronous. And, gosh, if there’s anything the pandemic has taught us it’s that we’re never not collaborating when we’re online with each other because people have continued to get things done—albeit, in weird and exhausting ways. But we have continued to get things done over the internet in many different ways. Russell Mayo : To build on that point, Elise, I think it’s really good to point out to the people who are in charge of budgets, or who ask questions about things like Tutor.com or other services: There’s something the writing center offers that goes beyond the bottom line, too, right, which is that it is a professionalizing space for the students who become tutors, and it’s a learning space. They learn so much about writing and rhetoric that our courses can’t teach them through that hands-on learning. And they move in a “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) kind of way away from the periphery and more toward the center of what it really means to do academic writing and collaborative learning. And so it’s such an invaluable resource for the people who are tutors as well that an outsourced kind of website may be cheaper—although, as you’re saying, it’s not actually—it doesn’t offer those other benefits to the university community and the community of writers that I think we can develop at a center. Eric Camarillo : Yeah, we’re in “competition” with SmartThinking, our third-party service that we use. HACC had it when we were initially in that five-campus model that I mentioned before. Now we’re in a one-college model. In that five campus model there was—and there still is a virtual learning department, and they used SmartThinking, and it was initially only for their students. So the virtual students were students taking courses asynchronously, so they were the only ones really—I don’t want to say allowed to use it, anyone could’ve used it, but it was really for them, that’s why we subscribed to them or bought them whatever you want to call it. And now, with HACC’s Online Writing Lab, that’s one of the reasons I think we have the follow-up Zoom sessions, finding ways to differentiate us from SmartThinking tutors, not to mention the other feedback that we provide. For me, I’m also a big believer in the peer tutoring model or at least the context-oriented model, right, people who know and understand the institution. Not to discredit other types of tutors who work for these companies—they know the content, but not the context. They do not know who the instructor is, they do not know what their expectations are, and sometimes you have to know in order to give that kind of—I call it actionable feedback in my research. So this kind of, “I know this professor prefers it broken down in this way,” or “They may not think of the thesis in this one way, perhaps you can revise it to this other way.” And one point I also kind of wanted to jump on is how asynchronous tutoring really breaks from the traditional face-to-face model. So with minimalist tutoring—really great example. How do you give feedback without touching the document, you know? Without “writing” on it, you know what I mean? It’s impossible. I mean, there are other places that try and do it, and maybe they do like, just a letter and the letter will give feedback about the document, and it’ll give tips here pointing to particular sections but nothing in the paper itself. But, we know that Beth Hewett (2015) posits in her various research on online writing instruction that sometimes, and I don’t usually advocate for this, but sometimes writing within the text itself is what you should be doing, especially if you’re trying to model what a sentence could look like or what the various options are, right? So, while I’m very oriented toward just leaving the comments, there are others that definitely advocate for more what is definitely not minimalist tutoring, right? Or perhaps what it means is that you have to think about minimalism and collaboration differently in an online context. So, what does it mean to be minimalist when you’re leaving feedback? Maybe it means just leaving ten comments or something and being very selective about what that means. I think there are definitely ways to translate some of the best practices to an asynchronous paradigm, but there definitely needs to be a translation happening. Like, there won’t be a one-to-one, direct layover—or overlay—of those practices. Russell Mayo: Okay, so to wrap up, maybe each of us could go around and share out a little bit about looking forward, looking forward to next semester, next year, of continuing our work in our new institutions, in our new roles. What are we excited about? What are we concerned about? Future challenges or plans in your centers. I guess I’ll leave it open there and either one of you can jump in. Eric Camarillo: Yeah, I can start. What I’m really excited about is what new practices emerge as we better understand asynchronous tutoring. So, how do we better understand racism or antiracism, right? So, these issues that we’ve grappled with for so long with the traditional model, what does it mean now to grapple with them in the asynchronous space? So how do we achieve equity or racial justice, how do we embrace multiple languages, other types of discourses in an asynchronous context? I’m really looking forward to how writing centers continue having those conversations and what research develops. And I’m looking forward to hopefully also being able to contribute to those discussions. Those are things that are definitely interesting to me, right, learning more about how do we deal with both students who are hurting because of a pandemic that is maybe biologically related and students who are hurting from a pandemic that is more culturally related, right? Many things happened in 2020, but those two things stick out to me. A pandemic of both a virus and racism and a great reckoning of and working through—achieving antiracism. So that’s one thing I’m looking forward to, definitely, with asynchronous practices at least. And I guess my concern, really, is trying to adapt what we’re doing now in one way to, ultimately, perhaps a hybrid way, or when we go back to campus, which I believe will happen eventually. So, worrying a little bit about how we adapt our practices that have—you know, my institution has adapted really well to this context; we did a really tremendous job. What does it mean when we return to our five separate campuses? How do we divvy up resources? How do we divvy up the work? In what ways can we continue on with our online tutoring? Who will be assigned that kind of work? Elise Dixon: Eric, those are such great concerns and excitements, and they seemed to be interconnected, which I think always happens. I think similarly. I just finished teaching my tutor training course, which happens every fall, and my tutor training courses are always very social justice oriented and we had lots and lots and lots of conversations about race and racism this semester, more than ever before for obvious reasons, I’m sure you can guess why. And what I think I’m most excited about is that—in my previous work, some of which is in The Peer Review (Dixon 2017, 2019), I tend to focus on wanting us to think through the everyday moments of our writing center, and especially the uncomfortable everyday moments of our writing center that we tend to gloss over. And what I saw in a virtual form was that one story I told you today about this markup situation. It was an uncomfortable everyday moment of the new “pandemical” research—or new “pandemical” writing center. And I was pleased to see that I and my tutors were able to notice, in those uncomfortable everyday moments, issues of power and equity and inequality (Denny, 2010; Greenfield & Rowan, 2011; Greenfield, 2019; McKinney, 2013). So, for instance, as I said, the conversation between this student and her professor was raced because we all are raced, and because of that there were power issues that existed, and I was pleased to see that it wasn’t just me that noticed those things but that my tutors noticed those things even in their asynchronous sessions. And I think I look forward to finding ways to continue to have conversations about equity and equality and how we can foster that work in our writing center to create a more social justice oriented, activist writing center, and I look forward to knowing that it can be done online, asynchronously, in person, face-to-face, we can do it all. And I think that is also the great challenge that will be the great challenge of, I think, my writing center career, is finding ways to train tutors to holistically understand issues of equity so that when they are thrust into a new situation like they were this year that they have various tools to enact the activism that they can through whatever medium they have to. So, yeah, that’s my challenge and my excitement. Russell Mayo : Wonderful. I want to echo what you both mentioned, and I think it was fantastic. I, too, am looking forward to bringing in critical questions about the work we do in schools and how with that, as scholars (Grimm, 1999) said, in spite of our “best intentions,” that we can do harm unintentionally in our work and, therefore, we need to be anti-oppressive and it’s not going to happen by happenstance. It has to be deliberate, and it’s not something you do once and then it’s over. So I look forward to having these conversations with tutors and with faculty about ableism and racism and all the other aspects that are wrapped up in the human work we’re doing, really. And I look forward to doing more with those conversations. One thing I’m really excited about, and that’s an exciting opportunity to be honest with you, I’m not—I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, I think it’s something that needs to happen and can happen more, and I think that it takes a long time for those conversations to really make a difference in a community, so I look forward to doing that. I also look forward to, so one of the ways of justification and justifying is something—one of the themes from the TPR, for this issue—one of the things that I did immediately was starting to have concerns and worry about justifying. What happens to those sessions that don’t get booked? Where we’re paying a tutor, but they don’t have a writer there? In a face-to-face or in an in-person writing center, there’s lots of work to be done in the space, but when tutors are working from home or not in the same room, what do we do with that time and how do we make it meaningful to the people who are paying their checks, really? So, we developed an ad hoc professional development research project, so the students could develop something. Some students are really taking over the social media—which they would’ve done if we’d been together—social media for the center. Some students are studying writing across the disciplines, interviewing engineering professors about what writing looks like in their courses, and some students are comparing different majors and looking at different pedagogies for engaging students and studying what it means to be a writing partner—you know, working with the same writer week after week for a whole semester, a very unique project or problem they’re engaged with. What I’m really excited about in the Spring is that our tutors are going to be presenting on those, so we’re going to have a monthly meeting, which we didn’t have this semester, to have presentations. So tutors are going to be presenting their work, their professional development, ongoing questions, and inquiry projects. And then we’re just going to have some social time together because that’s something the tutors really, really missed. So just giving them that time to connect and bring in the new tutors that we’ll be training to connect with the tutors as well, to bring in more of a social sense of space that we didn’t have before because we lacked a place together, or we’re without that place for the temporary moment. So, really looking forward to those conversations and bringing those projects to bear and to learn from the tutors and with them as well. So, I guess we should wrap up there. It’s so good to talk to you both and meet you finally, virtually. And thank you, thank you for doing this. Elise Dixon : This was very invigorating. I don’t know how you all feel—I’m very excited. Eric Camarillo : I am, yes. Russell Mayo : Thanks!

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

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

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

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