Four Writing Fellows in their junior year at the University of Iowa describe the logistics of their writing center’s curriculum-based peer tutoring program and the development of their fellowing philosophies. They explain how exposure to writing pedagogy and writing center research literature helped them learn how to deal with challenges common to Writing Fellows and writing center programs. In particular, they learned to navigate the idea of creating welcoming spaces, managing imposter syndrome, balancing instructors’ expectations with students’ own goals, and approaching fellowing through the lenses of a generalist and a specialist.

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?

Large language models continue to evolve at a far faster pace than policies at colleges and universities. Writing instruction and peer-tutoring, in consequence, will have to change faster still. In six months of testing by the researchers, ChatGPT began to produce prose with ever greater clarity, analysis, and varied (if often formulaic) stylistic choices. At the same time, all AIs tested struggled with copyrighted materials, sometimes refusing to employ them or quoting sources while claiming not to have done so. The authors include preliminary suggestions for those who staff and direct writing centers, specifically methods for adopting generative AI rather than flatly opposing it. We draw from student responses to a campus survey administered in 2023 and 2024, plus one partnership between AI and sixteen first-year students. Such adaptation to AI may prove particularly useful for those helping writers otherwise marginalized by socioeconomic background, neurodiversity, or personal identity. Finally, we advocate getting ahead of any administrative efforts to dictate terms for use of AI that may lead to reduced status, or outright elimination, of human tutors.

The widespread adoption of GenAI tools has the potential to reproduce hegemonic and colonial discourse as the writing process is radically disrupted. As a writing center in an Indigenous-serving institution, we address GenAI’s reproduction of privileged discourses through framing writing as a conscious political act of survivance and work to re-establishing writers’ rhetorical sovereignty through place-based pedagogy. In this praxis-oriented piece, we demonstrate how writing centers can use their values as a foundation to develop strategies that empower GenAI users to re-enter the writing process and reclaim agency.

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

Language is powerful because it gives individuals the privilege to access a wide range of opportunities. We must acknowledge that it is problematic and harmful to uphold certain language policies, which are often standardized, as expectations. In writing centers, where the goal is to guide writers to articulate language onto paper, tutors must be conscientious of their attitudes toward language. This article examines the history, specifically the inclusivity and exclusivity, of Standard Written/American English and how it affects marginalized groups. This article also encourages reflection on terminology that is often associated with anti-racist practices. Lastly, this article aims to offer ways to reflect as it encourages intentional actions from writing tutors to engage in anti-racist strategies as they work to create more linguistically inclusive spaces for writers. Keywords : Standard Written English, Standard English, Dialect, Linguistics, Linguistic Diversity, Inclusivity, Praxis, Pedagogy, Positionality, Accountability, Anti-racism, Reflective Practice

Writing center pedagogy requires that consultants use directive, nondirective, collaborative, and emotionally-aware methods to provide personalized writing assistance. Consultants are expected to be highly skilled in rapport and relationship building. Interestingly, few studies investigate how consultants’ personalities—including introverted and extroverted traits—may influence their experiences with consulting. Drawing from a diverse group of scholars, I use research from the field of psychology and studies on personality theory to interpret what characteristics define extroversion and introversion. From there, writing center scholarship is evaluated to examine whether the scholarship is biased towards introverted or extroverted traits. Although most research presented does not overlap to show how personality and pedagogy intersect, using personality theory to understand extroverts’ social inclination and introverts’ observational skills enables researchers and directors to explore what constitutes effective consultation strategies. Reevaluating these strategies may result in the abandonment of certain practices and, more than likely, specialized training may need to be added for consultants to comprehend and apply the pedagogy in a way that suits their skillsets. Keywords : introversion, extroversion, personality, directive, nondirective, empathy, consultant training, tutors, writing center

The incorporation of emotional intelligence skillsets in tutor training helps build empathy and communication skills that better prepare tutors to work with a diverse range of students. These skills are important for holding space for the voices of diverse authors and encouraging authenticity. In addition, writing centers must examine the racism inherent in Standardized English and encourage tutors to look closer at their internalized biases. Previous research by writing center scholars shows that training based in emotional intelligence and training based explicitly in activist rhetoric have similar outcomes: tutors become empathetic toward historically underrepresented voices and are often motivated to take an active role in social justice. This paper pieces together these different approaches to illustrate their efficacy and the opportunity writing center training has to push back against the systemic racism rooted in writing pedagogy. However, it is important that this education is based in challenging the internalized biases of privileged writers to avoid using historically underrepresented voices as a tool for our own enlightenment.

This article raises awareness of how “we” language in writing centers can be both helpful and oppressive. Specifically, I consider ways that “we” language has the potential to perpetuate oppression by excluding individuals from writing center “we” statements.Using Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s 2011 “Two-List Heuristic” as a theoretical framework for understanding and responding to oppressive language, I analyze research on the inclusive and exclusive linguistic characteristics of plural pronouns, including “we,” “our,” and “ourselves,” as they relate to writing center work. I then propose ways in which writing center members may construct responses to “we” language that challenges their values, beliefs, and experiences. This article intends to interrogate a common linguistic feature of writing center culture that can prevent its members from “talking back” to the center. Three semesters ago, I began my position as the Associate Director of a writing center in a mid-sized, religiously-affiliated university in the Midwestern region of the United States. Like many spaces in the Midwest, my university is characterized by politeness, whiteness, and football fanaticism—qualities that have been familiar to me since childhood. Although I am 500 miles from my hometown, I am comfortable in this environment where I easily blend in with the crowd: I am a white heterosexual cis-woman of European descent in my late thirties with a Ph.D. I share this information because my background, context, and positionality have certainly shaped the following analysis. On a cold and gloomy afternoon in mid-November of 2021, I held one-on-one meetings in my office with our new writing center tutors to discuss their research paper topics. Naya (pseudonym), a historically underserved undergraduate student tutor, sat across the table from me and began to share the framework of her research interests. She had prepared a proposal to improve our writing center’s tutor training module for working with multilingual students. As a multilingual student herself, Naya’s proposal was exciting and bold: she was interested in studying multilingual tutoring theories in order to create new pedagogical practices for our writing center. I understood Naya’s concern to stem from the myopic generalization of international students by writing center staff that she witnessed during her training. Yet when I asked her about the direction in which she wanted to take her research, her sentiments surprised me. She remarked, “I just don’t know who I am; am I the international student or the tutor? It’s really confusing.” As she went on to explain, her confusion was rooted in the “we” language used by experienced tutors during the tutor training module. When experienced tutors stood at the front of the classroom describing the ways “we work with international students,” Naya felt like she had to choose an identity. As a new tutor, she was supposed to identify with the tutoring “we”: those who work with international students. Yet, she was also the international student “we”: a group external to the tutors who were, at times, problematic for the tutoring “we.” After talking to Naya, I felt certain that although the language of “we” is supposed to create a sense of community and belonging in the writing center, this plural pronoun also has the power to exclude, confuse, and silence voices. As I began to reflect on this conversation, I realized that the language of “we,” “us,” and “our” is everywhere in writing center rhetoric. Our writing center’s mission statement, appointment confirmation notices, and first-time tutor meetings invariably include descriptions of how “we” do things in the writing center. Furthermore, the word “we” is ubiquitous in writing center discourse throughout the United States; language in daily emails on the [wcenter] listserv and publications in writing center journals demonstrate the prevalence of writing center “we” language. Yet this prevalence does not indicate a corresponding predominance of exclusionary plural pronoun use. Likewise, I am not suggesting the impossible or undesirable task of avoiding plural pronoun use. Rather, I want to argue that writing center “we” language is not always comfortable, inclusive, and welcoming. Naya’s confusion over writing center “we” language suggests that the plural pronoun “we” can function as a privileging and excluding language structure in the writing center environment. Thus, practitioners in the field need to be vigilant about examining and adjusting plural pronoun use, and this article will offer ways forward for becoming more vigilant. After Naya and I conversed, she began to pursue research on multilingual tutoring theories, and I began to listen closely for “we” language in our writing center’s discourse. My listening turned into writing when the call for this special issue was announced. The Peer Review editors of this special issue asked: “as writing centers embrace liberatory political stances, and as their users become more diverse and more aware of identity…do consultants, writers, and administrators with minoritized identities have opportunities to talk candidly back to the center?” (Natarajan et al., 2022, para. 5). Naya had taken the step of “talk[ing] candidly back to the center” in proposing improvements to the pedagogy of our writing center’s training course, and she did so as an international student of color at a predominantly white institution (PWI). While talking back to the center requires time, support, a dialogue partner, and disciplinary knowledge, it also fundamentally requires language. It is this linguistic dimension that may provide an obstacle for historically underserved tutors, writers, and administrators to talk back to the center. If individuals with minoritized identities want to identify as the “we” of the writing center and also as the “we” that has been othered, what language is available to the author without making the problem sound self-focused? This analysis of “we” language may provide a window into why some writing center members feel prohibited from talking back to the center. This is not the first time “we” and “them” language has been problematized in writing center scholarship. Denny (2010) describes the pervasive tendency for writing center discussions to use “we” language to subtly dehumanize groups of people by sorting individuals into subjects and objects. He writes that writing center “talks, presentations, and keynotes index Others as objects for whom practical and instrumental learning applies, not figures for whom learning is necessarily transactional and collaborative (“we” can learn from “them,” “they” from “us”)” (p. 5). When “we” language is used to describe the subjective experience of writing center members in contrast with an objective “them,” the “them” group implicitly seems lesser than the “we” group because they are not afforded the same subjectivity of the “we.” For example, if tutors present a training module on working with international students and the tutors say, “we work with them,” this language implies a power dynamic where knowledge is held by tutors and less knowledge is held by international students. However, if the tutors say, “we work together,” the power dynamic shifts to one of equal knowledge or benefit. The “we” language in the latter example does not imply a lesser-than dynamic because the subjectivity of the “we” is afforded to both tutors and international students. Yet the tendency to use “we” and “them” language is more common than shared “we” language, both in speech and in writing. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown (2011) reflect on this phenomenon in the instructional context, where students use exclusive pronouns in papers and class discussions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown note that students often assume “readers will be from ‘their culture’ when they use pronouns like ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘our’” (p. 26). Such assumptions occur in writing because they are part of thought and speech patterns conditioned by social and cultural interactions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown remark that breaking these problematic plural pronoun habits is difficult. One of the ways to make it less difficult is to understand the difference between problematic and helpful pronoun use. The use of plural pronoun language in the writing center context is not surprising given the widely discussed adaptation of “we” language to corporate and business settings over the past few decades. This phenomenon has been reviewed and discussed in articles by Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company. Because many writing centers share characteristics in common with the business world, analyses of plural pronoun language from business management and leadership resources have value in the writing center context. For example, scholars such as Kacewicz et al. (2014) have argued that using “we” language in a collaborative working environment demonstrates an outward focus and concern for others. This research suggests that individuals whose language reflects a group-oriented rather than self-focused tendency are more likely to attain leadership roles in the group and direct their group toward successful outcomes. Further, according to a study by Anchimbe (2016), a leader who has established rapport with other members of the group can use “we” language to “encourage or reprimand … [to help] members reassert their identity, solidarity, and prowess, restate their mission and determination to achieve it, and also bemoan and caution against [an] unfortunate predicament” (p. 516). Thus, “we” language can create group uplift and positive momentum towards pre-established goals and values. In the writing center, an example of “we” language as a leadership tool would be when a tutor suggests to their peers before the start of a shift: “let’s keep our earbuds out. That way, we can make sure to welcome tutees when they walk in.” Such “we” language directs tutors toward shared values of attention and hospitality. The tutor using the “we” language demonstrates an outward-focused attitude, showing concern for the values of their writing center and for the well-being of tutees who walk in the door. Hence, “we” language can act as a communication tool for group perspective-taking in the writing center. Yet corporate and business literature also warns against the potentially coercive nature of “we” language. For example, in his critique of the Harvard Business Review’s push for “we” language, Walpole (2018) argues that “we” language is used to “manipulate reality” (Improving Communication and Community section, para. 2). Its most offensive manipulation, according to Walpole, is that “we” language creates a false sense of team. Suggesting that “we” landed a deal or “we” gave a fantastic presentation when only one person acted sets up a disingenuous sense of team where no interpersonal bonding is expected. Likewise, “we” language allows a group to take credit when the credit is really due to an individual. Such behavior hearkens back to harrowed days of group work in high school when one person completed the brunt of the work on behalf of the rest of the group. Walpole argues, “did *you* really have much to do with landing the deal? If not, trying to share in the credit isn’t so noble” (Saying “We” is a Poor Substitute section, para. 6). In the business setting, this misuse of “we” language can be used to inflate a leader’s accomplishments while diminishing the success of those under the leader’s purview. When a leader shares collective credit for the success of an individual’s work under the guise of “we” language, the leader becomes a gatekeeper for the growth and promotion of their direct reports. Similarly, in the writing center, an administrative team needs to be discerning about its use of “we” language in creating a sense of team and in acknowledging individual accomplishments. I have briefly shared the surface-level arguments about the benefits and drawbacks of “we” language in the writing center. In the rest of the article, I consider ways that “we” language has the potential to perpetuate oppression by excluding individuals from writing center “we” statements. At stake in this article’s examination of “we” language is an understanding of the potential impact of plural pronoun use on tutoring pedagogy in two sets of relationships: administrators → tutors, and tutors → tutees. The theoretical framework I use for analyzing plural pronoun language in the writing center is guided by four principles from Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s (2011) “Two-List Heuristic for Addressing Everyday Language of Oppression” (p. 22). While “we” language is not necessarily always oppressive, Suhr-Sytsma and Brown contend that “an individual’s uses of oppressive language are often both unintentional and inseparable from broader discourses that reinforce oppression” (p. 14). As I discovered in conversation with Naya, the “we” language used during our writing center’s training module was unintentionally oppressive and nearly invisible because it was so ingrained in the regular discourse of the writing center. In light of this focus on commonplace discourse, I find four of the eighteen items in Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s two-list heuristic particularly relevant for analyzing “we” language. To assist in clarity during analysis, I have added (a) and (b) notations after the original numbers in the two lists so that when the heuristic numbers are indicated later in this article, it will be easier to remember from which list the item came. Thus, this article will examine “we” language in relation to the following elements of the heuristic:

Multilingual learners whose dominant language is not English are often disadvantaged when their writing proficiency is judged against the Eurocentric standard English norm. Such deficiency models and deficit thinking devalue racially minoritized learners’ languages, leading to linguistic racism. A liberatory anti-racist, anti-oppressive, culturally responsive writing pedagogy was implemented at the Center for Teaching and Learning at a major university in Ontario, Canada. Eleven learners were analyzed in this one-month study. A mixed-method approach was used to analyze the impact of the implemented pedagogy based on several data sources, including learners’ reflective journal entries, transactional posts, and instructor feedback. The study shows the benefits of the writing pedagogy in helping learners improve their writing skills, agency, autonomy, voice, and critical thinking skills, as well as empowering them for emancipation and transformation. The study also reinforces the importance of practitioners’ shift from the provision of prescriptive and remedial feedback to personalized, learner-centered support by regarding learners’ languages and cultures as resources. Furthermore, de-emphasizing grammar while prioritizing critical thinking contributes toward dismantling the dominant monolith norm of standard English. Internationalization, immigration, and massification have increased cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity of learners in higher education. Learners are disadvantaged if their dominant languages are not English and if they are culturally unfamiliar with the knowledge system valued in higher education that privileges Eurocentric, White, middle-class habitus (Sinclair, 2018). These learners are oppressed by a system that values standard English; their low proficiency in English positions them at a cognitive, affective, and sociocultural distance that is far from the White racial habitus. The prevalent thinking about learners from diverse backgrounds views their challenges to be the result of endogenous deficits in the learners because of who they are when the learners enter higher education. The burden of supporting these learners has been borne by writing centers. This paper advocates that educators start to recognize that supporting our diverse learner body necessitates a collective awareness of how the pervasiveness of deficit thinking about learners from diverse backgrounds is intertwined with racism. This racism is “so deeply and invisibly enmeshed into thinking, interactions, systems, practices, and institutions, that disparities between Whites and people of colour are assumed part of a natural and inevitable order” (Anya, 2021, p. 1056). Acknowledging the seeming invisibility of the enmeshed racism in higher education, it is important to establish a risk-free, friendly, collaborative, cooperative, and inclusive space for racially minoritized learners to experience equal learning opportunities in higher education. This article advocates increasing writing center’s support with a proactive liberatory pedagogy that enables learners to expand their English linguistic repertoire. This latter support enables learners to develop competence and confidence in communicating ideas in the ways that allow them to be their authentic selves.  Hence, they are in better positions cognitively, affectively, and socioculturally to work on their assignments. This article presents how adding culturally responsive pedagogy as a nuanced overlay on the liberatory learner-driven and instructor-facilitated pedagogy supported learners with extremely low English language proficiency in developing their writing skills during a one-month timeframe.

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.

Tutoring represents a necessary service for students enrolled in open-admission institutions such as our regional campus which serves a diverse group of students, many of them in developmental writing courses. As the COVID-19 pandemic caused many universities to transition to fully remote instruction in March 2020, academic services were also asked to find innovative ways to assist these students remotely. For two English tutors, this meant improving the existing OWL, while also implementing a remote synchronous option to help students with their writing. The article reports on the two tutors’ efforts as they prepared for fall 2020 and on the multiple challenges they faced throughout the fall 2020 and spring 2021 semesters. As their end-of-semester reflections show, the campus took a while to respond to the new remote Learning Center offerings, and some offerings were more popular than others. The two tutors attempted to establish a new remote normal while also trying to balance their personal and professional lives. Working from home, however, left them feeling drained as technology limited them during synchronous sessions, and their Learning Center duties began to take precedence over their education and personal lives, impacting their mental well-being. The only positive aspect of the experience came from their collaboration, as the bond they had built from sharing the Learning Center space for years provided them with the strength needed to fulfill their duties. As the campus contemplates the move back to in-person instruction, the two tutors must now consider what their duties will be in fall 2021. Keywords : COVID-19 pandemic, remote synchronous tutoring, work-life balance, burnout

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

Neurodivergent students continue to face barriers to academic and personal fulfillment in postsecondary educational institutions that were not designed to support neurodiversity. However, the individualized tutoring model prioritized in writing center pedagogy holds the power to provide valuable, concrete support to neurodivergent clients and an accessible work environment for neurodivergent employees. In this Conversation Shaper, I draw on my own experiences as an autistic student and tutor to offer a bibliography of sources that provide insights about neurodiversity, disability justice, accessibility, and writing center pedagogy. This bibliography aims to offer sources that support awareness of neurodiversity and greater understanding of its role in writing center spaces. I contend that these sources collectively demonstrate why and how neurodiversity must be supported by writing center pedagogy—both in theory and in practice. Keywords : neurodiversity, writing centers, accessibility, disability 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.

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

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

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

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

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

This work is an examination of how tutoring can intersect with other disciplines, viewed primarily through the prism of improvised music and composition. Through analysis of both personal experience and the research of scholars such as Edward Santos Garza, The New London Group, and Elizabeth Boquet, Dalton observes how principles involved in music can extend to tutoring. These values include preparedness, experience and communication. Dalton’s examination also offers insights into the role of style in tutoring, as well as an application of multiliteracy theory to the work of tutors. This piece argues that integrating other facets of tutors’ identities can benefit and enrich their tutoring.

While writing center scholarship has explored useful methods for helping the university-level English language learner (ELL) as well as the high school writer, there is little scholarship examining how writing centers can serve the high school ELL population. While university students must succeed in their university classes, high school students in 42 states must succeed within the Common Core English Language Arts classroom. The differing requirements between the two make it important to focus on the specific needs of peer writing tutors working with high school English language learners. This article applies Stanford University’s Understanding Language Initiative’s “Six Key Principles for ELL Instruction” to the high school writing center as a means of facilitating peer tutors to help the ELL writer with Common Core-based writing assignments. Each principle is examined in turn to consider the ways each intersects with previous writing center scholarship to help the high school English language learner. Keywords : high school writing centers, Common Core, English language learners Writing center scholarship has explored fruitful practices for helping non-native English speaking students at the university level (Bell & Youmans, 2006; Blalock, 1997; Bruce & Rafoth, 2009; Chiu, 2011; Enders, 2013; Nakamaru, 2010; Nan, 2012; Powers, 1993; Vallejo, 2004; Weirick, Davis, & Lawson, 2017). A growing number of resources seeks to provide guidance for the high school writing center director (Ashley & Shafer, 2006; Childers, 1989; Fels & Wells, 2011; Tobin, 2010; Upton, 1990). However, no such examination has been made of best practices for helping English language learners (ELL) in their high school writing center. While existing scholarship on both university non-native English writers and the high school writer can be applied to the ELL high school writer, an added complication for high school ELLs exists in the form of the Common Core English Language Arts Standards. Rather than achieving university requirements, high school ELL students in 42 states (and in a growing number of English-medium secondary schools in other countries) must succeed within the Common Core classroom. The differences between university requirements and the requirements of the Common Core make relying on existing writing center scholarship inadequate. For example, with the narrow exception of remedial classes, many writing requirements at the university level assume students have mastered the kinds of writing skills students learn in high school. While Common Core writing skills are meant to prepare students for university, high school students command only emergent skills in these areas. English language learners contend with even greater challenges, as many do not possess the language skills that their university counterparts have had to prove through entrance exams like the TOEFL. Therefore, targeted, specific guidelines regarding the high school ELL tutoring session are needed to help this demographic make greater academic gains. Currently, only one article outlines the connection between the high school writing center and the Common Core English Language Arts Standards (Horan, 2015), and it does not address ELL students’ specific needs. With 4.6 million non-native English speakers in public schools across the United States (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017), not to mention the 40% increase in the last five years in the number of English-medium high schools across the globe, many of which are beginning to adopt a U.S. curriculum (Morrison, 2016), supporting ELLs with Common Core-based writing assignments is imperative. As the director of a writing center serving a population of 100% ELLs in an English-medium high school in Guangzhou, China, that adheres to the Common Core State Standards, I have asked myself how my tutors can best help their clients. To address this gap in knowledge within my own writing center, I applied research from Stanford University’s Understanding Language Initiative, synthesized in a document entitled “Six Key Principles for ELL Instruction” (Stanford Graduate School of Education, 2013). These six principles are guidelines that seek to help instructors plan their curriculum in a way that allows language learners to access Common Core-based content at the same time they build English language competency. Figure 1 below lists the six principles, and the article then continues with a consideration of several strategies that high school writing center peer tutors who serve ELL students—within the U.S. or abroad—can use to alleviate some of their biggest challenges as they implement the six principles in their sessions. Principles One and Two have proven to be the least challenging to implement in the writing center. Principle One indicates that classroom instruction ought to give ELLs the opportunity to talk about discipline-specific topics and concepts in English so as to build both understanding of the content area and understanding of the English language simultaneously. Principle Two advises instructors to use ELLs’ home language, culture, and background knowledge to build off of what students already know, thereby providing them with a firm foundation on which to construct new knowledge. The nature of writing center work has meant that in its simplest form, tutors help clients build both content and language knowledge by talking about an assignment in English. Likewise, because my tutors are Mandarin speakers, they can easily leverage clients’ home language by speaking Mandarin as necessary, a practice already shown to be effective in the writing center (Ronesi, 2009) and which U.S. directors can implement by recruiting multilingual writers from within their schools. I have found the principles that most challenge my tutors are Three through Six. Principle Three states that instruction should put scaffolds in place to help ELLs reach grade-level standards (Donato, 1994; van Lier & Walquí, 2012). In a 2014 article, John Nordlof notes that there are two fundamental types of scaffolding that occur during writing center sessions, those of cognitive scaffolding and those of motivational scaffolding. In cognitive scaffolding, the tutor helps the clients discover problems on their own. Examples of this kind of tutor talk are prompting students with open-ended questions, responding to essays as a reader, and demonstrating a concept, among others (Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2014, p. 68). In motivational scaffolding, the tutor helps to create a supportive learning space for clients. Examples of this kind of tutor talk include showing concern for the client, praising a client, showing sympathy or empathy, and reinforcing a client’s ownership of their essay (Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2014, p. 71). To help scaffold our own clients in the ways mentioned above and thereby implement the third principle, I train tutors to employ each of these methods during their sessions. The real challenge for our tutors’ ability to scaffold, however, comes in knowing which of these methods to use and when to use it. To help our students make these decisions, my co-director and I developed a flow chart (Figure 2) that we post in the writing center. Tutors can refer to it as their sessions unfold so that they can make appropriate scaffolding decisions. As tutors and clients then engage in conversations between real readers and writers, clients receive reinforcement when they do well and empathetic guidance where they fall short. In so doing, tutors can effectively implement the third principle to scaffold students to achieve the next level of competence toward full proficiency in the standards. While scaffolding students, whether through cognitive or motivational methods, can lead students to success, knowledge of students’ previous experiences are equally as important to aiding clients. In considering background knowledge, Principle Four is twofold: It states that instruction should “[move] ELLs forward by taking into account [both] their English language proficiency level(s) and prior schooling experience” (Stanford Graduate School of Education, 2013). Because I work in a Chinese writing center, where all students speak Mandarin but learn English, we have the advantage in that our tutors share the same home language as their clients. To meet the first injunction, then, that of taking the language ability of clients into account, I encourage the tutors to use Mandarin in their sessions as necessary, as mentioned under Principle Two (Ronesi, 2009). However, Principle Four helps tutors to be thoughtful and intentional about when to use Mandarin and when to use English with their clients. To help tutors make these kinds of decisions, I guide discussions during training to help tutors understand the purposes that they have for using each language. Many of our students, particularly those in grades seven through nine, do not have the language proficiency to show the depth of thought required for their assignments. While certainly a challenge for these students, it also presents a challenge for our tutors, whose job is to help them overcome these kinds of hurdles. When they are helping a client of a lower English ability, it may be more helpful for the client to converse in Mandarin so that their thoughts can flow freely, uninhibited by an unfamiliar medium of communication. However, when the client is capable of expressing themselves with relative ease in English, it can be more helpful to hold a session in English for the same reason, to encourage a freer flow of thought than is able to happen when energy is spent translating ideas back and forth between the two languages. Following Peter Carino’s (2003) advice to take a more directive approach with inexperienced writers, I have trained tutors to use Mandarin more with younger learners (grades seven through nine), and English with more advanced learners (grades 10 through 12). An additional guideline I have given tutors is that if a client of any grade level seems unwilling or unable to engage very deeply in a conversation in English, switch to Mandarin to ensure that language is not the main barrier in conversation. Using Mandarin and English strategically in this way helps to support our students with one of their toughest challenges as language learners (Ronesi, 2009). For high schools in the U.S., the implication of this principle is that directors may find it helpful to prioritize finding multilingual tutors from within their student body. In addition to knowing how and when to use English or Mandarin to address the language needs of clients, tutors must also take into account the client’s prior formal education. For example, there is a difference between the way our students have been taught to write an essay in their Chinese public schools and the way Western academic readers will expect to read an essay. Because our students attend the school in order to prepare themselves to succeed in a Western academic environment, we must train tutors to address these differences. A basic understanding of contrastive rhetorical theory can aid us in this endeavor (Quinn, 2012). We take a direct look at some of the differences in the expectations between Western academic essays and Chinese academic essays during training, allowing tutors to take on a more directive role as is appropriate for working with language learners and as tutors who have more knowledge in the subject area (Carino, 2003; Nan, 2012). In their sessions, they can then say to a client, for example: Pointing out these differences is a way our tutors can address students’ previous academic formation. Conversely, our clients’ previous education can also serve as a well-aligned foundation to their current learning. Tutors can show the similarities between what they have been required to do before and what they are required to do for their present assignments. For instance, Chinese writing education has traditionally taught students to use others’ writings as a model and a scaffold for learning to write well. The citation of those words is not considered necessary in student writing (Chou, 2010, p. 38). This can result in what the North American academy considers plagiarism. To help their clients learn citation rules, our tutors can take what our students already know—that using someone else’s words can be useful to one’s own writing—and add to it the idea that in the West, one must give credit to the original writer for the use of those words. This kind of tutor talk uses the client’s knowledge of essay writing for one particular audience to help him be a more flexible writer who can reach audiences across cultures (Ede & Lunsford, 1984). These two strategies of intentionally noting both the differences and similarities between clients’ previous education and their current education helps our tutors to make use of what the client already knows. Principle Four does not require that tutors speak the same native language as their clients, and for that reason, it is easier to implement in U.S. high school writing centers than Principle Three. Writing center directors simply need to introduce their tutors to basic contrastive rhetoric in order to give them the tools they need to successfully implement Principle Four. While taking background knowledge and scaffolding methods into consideration during sessions, writing center tutors must also remember that the purpose for those strategies is to help the clients make independent choices in their writing. Principle Five encourages educators to foster their students’ autonomy by giving them strategies to understand and use language for their needs (Stanford Graduate School of Education, 2013). Writing centers can implement this principle by training tutors to let clients maintain control of their autonomy during a session. During tutor training, I make a point of reminding tutors to let the client hold the pencil (with the one exception being during a brainstorming session when it may be helpful for the tutor to have the pencil and write down the client’s ideas as they are speaking) (Bruffee, 1984; Clark, 1990; Cogie, 2001; Shamoon & Burns, 1995). For many students in both domestic and international settings who have been accustomed to a teacher-centered classroom, this can feel awkward at first (Nan, 2012) and has proven to be a stumbling block for my tutors, who automatically pick up a pencil when their sessions start. This may be to help themselves feel more confident, assuming the role of the authority figure they sometimes feel they need to be. Indeed, clients do come in expecting that they will be told what to write and how to “fix” their papers. However, with explanations for the reasons to hand over the pencil to the client, a visual reminder on the flow chart posted in the center to let the client hold the pencil, as well as increased self-efficacy after several sessions, tutors gradually become more comfortable in the role of a peer. They remember to hand over the pencil to the client at the beginning of a session, a sign and a symbol of handing the power over to the client. Another option may be to simply remove pens or pencils from the writing center, forcing clients to get out a pen or a pencil themselves. When clients are the ones writing the most, it, in effect, puts them in charge of the session, fostering their autonomy (Brookes, 1991). Reminders, both verbal and visual, can help reinforce this practice in our tutors so that ELL students have full autonomy over their learning. Finally, although writing center tutors want their clients to have autonomy and independence in their learning, writing centers are always necessary for writers of all levels to receive formative feedback. Principle Six states that teachers should use formative assessment to measure a student’s content knowledge and language competence (Stanford Graduate School of Education, 2013). In their article “Formative Assessment and the Paradigms of Writing Center Practice,” Joe Law and Christina Murphy (1997) highlight the ways that formative assessment and writing center theory intertwine. They write, “The almost century-long history of writing centers attests to an inquiry-based, individualized pedagogy directed toward the primary aims of formative assessment in providing in-process commentary that offers direction, guidance, and analytical critique to emerging writers” (Law & Murphy, 1997, p. 106). We can train our tutors to serve as a step in this process by being real readers who ask real questions of their clients’ essays. What parts do they find confusing? Where do they feel more information might be helpful? Has the writer satisfied all the reader’s doubts about the topic at hand? What parts does the reader find interesting, insightful, surprising, or particularly well said? This, in effect, helps the writer see what they have done well, plus where they can continue to improve, and is common writing center practice. Our tutors, however, were hesitant to implement these strategies due to their lack of self-confidence. Coming from an educational environment in which the teacher has always been seen as the center of authority and knowledge, our tutors found it difficult to believe that they had anything to offer their fellow students. They feared that if they read a student’s paper and felt confused, it was an indication that they as tutors were not smart enough or competent enough. This is another area in which contrastive rhetorical theory can be useful, specifically to talk about the differences between a reader-centric and a writer-centric culture. In some cultures, if a reader is confused, it is often an indication that the reader must spend more time pondering the writer’s thoughts. However, in other cultures, the tendency is the opposite. If readers are confused, it is an indication that the writer should explain more clearly (Connor, 2002). While contrastive rhetoric is more complicated than such brief explanations can fully present, an introduction to the idea can help our tutors to know that if they are confused, it is worthwhile to bring this to a client’s attention as a way of focusing the client on places of possible improvement. Such instruction has helped to give our clients more confidence in their ability to provide feedback, especially before they have the opportunity to develop the self-efficacy experience can provide. Tutors both in the U.S. and abroad may find themselves lacking the confidence to provide feedback for a variety of reasons, and an exploration of reader-centric and writer-centric cultures can help give tutors the confidence they need to provide astute, honest feedback to clients that provides the formative assessment so necessary to ELL academic success. As Common Core standards create expectations for college readiness that are ever more rigorous, students who must learn both English and the objectives of their content classes face heavy obstacles to success. Support from many areas is necessary to provide them an effective learning environment. The Six Principles help guide instruction in and out of the classroom so that ELLs can reach proficiency in the standards, and writing centers can play a significant role in supporting the implementation of the Six Principles at a school-wide level. With tutor training that comports with the Six Principles and gives tutors strategies to overcome challenges to their implementation, high school writing centers can offer a strong locus of support for ELLs, equipping them to participate and succeed in a Westernized, North American academic playing field.

This case study examines how collaboration between a writing centre manager and an educational developer created new opportunities to advance writing pedagogy at a mid-sized Canadian university. Initially born from our university’s response to generative artificial intelligence, our effort both responds to perceived threats to the future of writing studies and attempts to preserve our work through new opportunities. Collaboration between writing centres and faculty development is under-represented in the literature, yet we have found the marginality of the third space to be a productive one from which to grow our campus’ writing community from “under the curriculum” (Hunt, 2006, p. 371). In this paper, we present three examples of collaborations between a writing centre manager and an educational developer—creating a community of practice, facilitating workshops for graduate students, and presenting to our university’s Senate. The outcomes of our reflections offer perspectives on AI and writing pedagogy, highlight the importance of cross-unit partnerships, and illustrate how third space professionals can offer critical writing-related perspectives to institutions where formal writing programs do not exist—ultimately helping make visible the often decentralized work of writing studies professionals in Canada.

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