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.

What can consultants do to move students to return to the writing center? To identify strategies that accomplish this end, two undergraduate researchers and an advisor surveyed students who had repeatedly visited a single consultant. We then analyzed the data, coding consultant strategies and noting repeated occurrences. We also recorded appointments of consultants with high rates of returning clients, collecting transcripts detailing the strategies they use in first-time visits. Our research contributes to our field’s understanding of why some students return to the writing center and what students want from their consultant, intersecting with current conversations that acknowledge student writers as co-creators of writing centers and recognize peer tutors’ emotional labor. The consultation that we document and analyze may find use in consultants’ professional development.

The Northeast Ohio Medical (NEOMED) University Writing Center was founded in the winter of 2022 to support its medical, pharmacy, and graduate students. Through trial, error, and creativity, the Writing Center Specialists developed a successful writing center offering collaborative synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Often, graduate education needs a different type of support than undergraduate students do: in-house editing combined with traditional theory. This initiative highlights the importance of writing and editing support in medical education, addressing diverse needs across NEOMED’s colleges and promoting effective writing practices. On February 21, 2022, in a small meeting space between two offices, Brian sat at a large, wooden, boardroom table staring out the large window into the Aneal Mohan Kohli Academic & Information Technology Center, the official name of the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) Library, waiting for the first students to appear for in-person writing tutoring. One week prior, Brian had signed a part-time (20 hours a week) contract to lead a writing center pilot project that ended on June 30, 2024. Brian was the Writing Center Specialist and was tasked with creating a writing center to support the more than 1,000 medical, pharmacy, and graduate students at NEOMED and had less than 30-months to do it. NEOMED is a stand-alone medical university in the rural community of Rootstown in Northeast, Ohio. It is not connected via physical space to any hospital system. NEOMED does not confer any undergraduate degrees but does offer several master’s and PhD programs for its students within its College of Graduate Studies. There are over 600 medical students, 300 pharmacy students, and more than 100 graduate students attending NEOMED. The school is within 50 miles of several teaching hospitals that partner with the NEOMED students in Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown areas. The closest clinical location is a 20-mile drive from NEOMED’s campus. Brian’s background was in English Composition and Rhetoric, having taught at several universities since 2010. He worked in a Writing Center as a graduate student and followed writing center theory closely. Now, he was creating a writing center, carte blanche. He was given a common room and two offices. He had a small budget for paper products, a laptop, a bulletin board, and access to various means of communication. He met with the leaders of the three different colleges and asked the same questions: how can a writing center help your students? The answers were all different and began to mold the theoretical approach. NEOMED was founded in 1973 to meet Northeast Ohio’s critical need for primary care physicians. Much of the writing support for the College of Medicine (COM) was provided by the Assistant Director of Student Affairs and the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs. In the College of Pharmacy (COP), the Assistant Dean of Student Success worked with students as they navigated writing assignments. In the College of Graduate Studies (COGS), individual professors were tasked with this writing support. While the individual colleges attempted to support their students in their writing, typically, only the high-stakes professional writing—resumes, curriculum vitae (CVs), personal statements, and letters of intent—were given priority. As an example, the Assistant Director of Student Affairs for the COM reviewed 150-160 CVs and personal statements between May and July each year. The group of third-year medical students submitted their applications for residency programs through the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS), the system used by medical graduates to apply for specialized training positions in hospitals. COGS, in which Brian had been an adjunct professor since 2018, needed academic writing support for its students. Many of the nine graduate programs had writing assignments throughout the semester. Some of the program’s students wrote master’s theses and others wrote doctoral dissertations. Many of these students utilized the Writing Center for support. Professors in COGS also asked Brian to create several writing specific videos which covered topics on grammar, punctuation, research writing, and formatting. COP had one goal in mind for the Writing Center, and that was supporting their second language learning (SLL) students. The SLL students struggled with plagiarism, understanding prompts, taking notes, research writing, and reaching out for help. In August 2023, 18 months after Brian was hired, funding was allocated to hire an SLL specialist, and Brook was hired to support the SLL students, specifically those in pharmacy. COM had a detailed list of needs for the Writing Center, much of which was high stakes writing. The number one need of the COM was to support the 600+ medical students as they create their professional CVs. Then, the Writing Center was asked to collaborate with the students as they create personal statements for residency applications and research opportunities. Medical students also created oral and poster presentations, journal articles, and many other writing projects. The University provided its students with 20 hours of writing support. Yet, after a week of being open, students did not come for the support they needed. Brian sent emails to cohorts. Announcements were made. It was clear that sitting at a table facing the window to the library and waiting for students to start coming in for in-person tutoring sessions was not happening. The typical, in-person consultation consisted of reading the paper out loud in the undergraduate writing center world that Brian was accustomed to. Undergraduate writing theory was not what the NEOMED students needed. Instead, it took trial and error, a lot of support, a little bit of money, and some creativity to establish the NEOMED Writing Center as a fully funded center of the University. Ultimately, the NEOMED Writing Center pilot program is a story that all graduate schools can use to create their own writing center. By promoting asynchronous sessions, screenshares, and collaboration, a graduate school writing center became successful.

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

This paper explores the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on writing center instructions and presents a professional development workshop designed for writing center tutors to help them discover the affordances and the constraints of using AI in tutoring. Since AI became increasingly integrated in the academic environment, writing center tutors face new challenges and opportunities in supporting the students’ writing. The paper highlights key strategies for tutors to integrate AI awareness into their teaching practices, ensuring they remain effective in guiding students through the writing process while fostering academic integrity. Through a combination of theoretical insights and practical exercises, this professional development initiative promotes a balanced approach, emphasizing both the potential and limitations of AI in the writing center context. The goal is to prepare tutors for the evolving landscape of academic writing and enhance their ability to support students in a technology-driven educational environment. Keywords : AI policy, writing center practices, workshop, AI assisted writing, tutor training In the fall of 2022, a writer visited the Kathleen Jones Writing Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) to schedule a writing tutorial. Their main objective for the session was to ensure that their piece sounded more humane. During the session, the writer disclosed that their paper had been generated by ChatGPT and sought assistance to avoid detection by their professors. Although there was no existing policy on AI at the time, the tutor politely informed the writer that the center only worked with human-authored pieces. Following this incident, the director of the IUP Writing Center established an AI task force, with its first mission being the creation of an official AI policy for the center. As PhD candidates in Composition and Applied Linguistics, the task force members knew their AI policy should not violate the objectives of first-year Composition classes. As a result, the policy recognizes AI as “not reflective of a student’s own understanding and effort and, thus, is not acceptable, unless authorized specifically by the instructor/administrator.” The Kathleen Jones White Writing Center at IUP supports student success and engages in creating AI policies for the departments to implement in their classrooms. While concerns about AI’s potential to reduce students’ engagement with writing are valid, writing center tutors as well as students have also explored its potential benefits. For instance, ChatGPT could serve as a writing coach or a source of inspiration (Kleiman, 2022), or it might “support bottom-up writing skills, freeing up time, space, and energy for more advanced aspects of composition” (Daniel et al., 2023, p. 37). Mollick and Mollick (2023) provide a list of ways students can engage with AI as a partner in their work. For instance, AI can assist students in writing by offering real-time feedback, suggesting improvements in grammar and style, and providing creative prompts, allowing them to refine their work while enhancing their writing skills. Moreover, AI has the potential not only to enhance writing processes, but to transform or even redefine them—much like Google Docs redefined collaborative writing by enabling real-time, location-independent co-authoring (Puentedura, 2013). As a result of this growing body of literature that emphasizes the potential benefits of AI, the writing center held a tutor training about AI to help tutors direct their writers who use AI in the writing session. One of the ways to make writing center tutors aware of students’ challenges and concerns and help them overcome those challenges is to conduct a professional development workshop, which we did at Kathleen Jones White Writing Center. This workshop was designed and led in February 2024 and aimed to highlight the importance of creating a united AI policy to help tutors work with students who use AI tools to write their papers. It also aimed to help tutors discuss possible challenging situations around AI that they might expect in the writing center. One more goal of that workshop was to compare the feedback given by writing center tutors with AI feedback provided by ChatGPT to learn specific features of AI writing and to recognize its rhetorical moves. This workshop was titled Overview of AI Technology and its Relevance to Writing Center Support and consisted of four main parts: (a) discussion of different challenging issues concerning AI technology; (b) lecture and discussion, which focused on the introduction of AI and open discussion about its use; (c) an activity part that focused on proving different types of feedback and comparing human and AI feedback; (d) and creating a brief draft of a united AI policy that would help tutors work with students who use AI to write their papers.

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

In this reflective essay, I consider how to build a more intentional community in order to foster confidence among undergraduate writing consultants. After 18 months of remote work and minimal community-building success, our staff seems hesitant to embrace the potentials afforded to the job of writing tutor. As I plan for a return to campus and look ahead to my eighth year as a center director, I’m reimagining our writing center community as a “critical community” (Bettez & Hytten, 2013) in which undergraduate consultants participate in ongoing self-reflection and critical dialoguing across and amidst difference. In such a community, the “critical embrace” can manifest both sides of its claim: a loving, honest, analytic challenge provided to a member of a community so that they might learn and grow; a critical perspective provided between people who care for one another and for their larger community (Gramlich, 2019). I hope to generate community building that leads to bold, brave, confident consultants, especially when it comes to supporting a writer beyond their basic requests and engaging in conversations about identity, race, and writing. Keywords : Community, community-building, tutor training, social justice, antiracism, critical writing center work, critical embrace As with so many writing center administrators around the country and the world, I spent 2020 and much of 2021 attempting to maintain some semblance of community among our program staff: creatively arranging office hours, testing various staff discussion board options, rolling out new mentoring formats, and desperately trying to figure out how to play games with 30 people on Zoom. In this strangest of times, I’m sure we’ve all been reflecting on community and what community both means and looks like in our centers. Our rural, R-1 university in the Pacific Northwest has been fully online and remote since March 2020; as I write this (spring 2021), we’re entering month 18 of remote education, and we’re not heading back to campus until fall semester. I know this isn’t the experience of all writing center tutors or administrators, but I’m certain that, regardless of the amount of time spent away from our physical locations and from one another in-person, we’re all imagining how our communities might change and evolve as we continue to persevere through the pandemic. As I scan my professional memories, I see how a strong community supports and emboldens writing consultants. In one of our program’s ‘eras,’ the undergraduate consultants crafted a statement of antiracist commitment, our local response to a similar declaration at one of our fellow Washington state schools. The cohort of consultants leading that effort were deeply connected with one another and with our program’s mission, and they boldly embraced a most challenging endeavor of critiquing our institutional position and our practices to establish an antiracist agenda we still hold central today. The last year and a half exist in stark contrast to that moment in our program’s history. We’ve been isolated, insulated, cut off from one another. Our gatherings over Zoom were mostly just painful silences and awkward interactions. The sense of community in our program is lagging, and it shows in the collective confidence of the staff. There’s one consequence that weighs particularly heavy on my mind: our ability, as a program and as individual writing consultants, to engage in important and challenging conversations during sessions, particularly around power, privilege, race, and language. Since 2015, tutor training and professional development have prioritized studying white supremacy and racism in education and imagining what a writing center generally and writing consultants individually can do to disrupt and dismantle systems of oppression within education and writing instruction. We’ve had ebbs and flows in terms of our progress toward our mission and goals, but the last year and a half has felt like a particularly noticeable ebb. As a result of some targeted reflective activities and conversations, I’ve found myself wondering how membership in an intentional community develops tutors who are ready, confident, and eager to challenge white supremacy and to engage with race and racism in their sessions. In this essay, I will reflect on my experiences directing a writing center and my recent deep dive into the intersections of community, writing tutoring, tutor training, and antiracism. I’ll share my exploration of community building in writing center scholarship and my process toward new consultant training that, I hope, might foster more confidence among undergraduate staff to push the boundaries of “writing tutor” and imagine new opportunities for engaging and collaborating with writers.

This article describes our writing center’s professional development curriculum for our more than 100-person staff, geared toward disrupting linguistic oppression. In developing and rolling out our recently codified language statement, we join a long line of research advocating for language justice across academe and, in particular, within writing centers and writing classrooms. After situating language justice as a historical issue, we outline the curricular arc of our center’s professional development designed around understanding and, ultimately, advancing language justice through our staff’s roles as writing consultants and as instructors and students themselves. Specifically, for our staff to better understand the socio-cultural functions of language and its material consequences, our curriculum foregrounded how white supremacy shapes standard language ideology—the ways individuals are socialized to value white normative language practices and devalue all others. We end by offering reflections based on our experience designing and facilitating our center’s professional development curriculum and mapping future routes for language justice for our center, which we encourage other writing center practitioners to translate and apply to their respective roles and institutional contexts. Keywords : staff education, professional development, linguistic justice, language subordination, linguistic racism, social justice

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

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

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

As my nearly four-year term as a graduate co-editor with The Peer Review ( TPR ) is coming to an end, I considered it an opportunity to assess the journal’s contribution to the field in some way. Through brainstorming ideas with the rest of the editorial team, I decided to identify and track key themes addressed in TPR articles, exploring main topics of conversation that we have published during this time; in essence tracing the themes that I helped give voice to through my role. Given the significance of timely review of scholarship to take stock of the field, in this article, I present a brief content analysis of selective scholarship published in TPR journal in an approximately two-and-a-half-year period ranging from Winter 2023 to Fall 2025. This content analysis is meant to highlight popular thematic trends. I identified a total of 14 themes in 27 articles published in four regular issues. From this small data set, tutor professional development emerged as the predominant theme. More than half of other themes—such as institutional assessment, oral histories, and African American writers, among others—appeared just once. Given that the journal places a concerted effort to welcome and support emerging voices in the field, these findings not only shine a light on what is worthwhile to this group but also points to where the field is likely headed (presuming these authors continue to grow and publish). I hope both new and established scholars will turn to this analysis when writing new articles or designing new studies. Journal editors may also find this analysis relevant to understand broad publishing trends.