Writing Centers & Racial Justice seeks to answer the question many writing center directors seeking to enact antiracism have: “But how do we DO it?” This edited collection is not a how-to guide but offers strategies, suggestions, and even curriculum for writing center administration. It is broken down into five parts, each tackling a different component of writing center work, such as hiring and retention practices as well as tutor education. It calls on readers to look outside the writing center and begin to expand this work through their institutions and communities, as well as directly calling out professional organizations such as IWCA for their failure to adequately prioritize racial justice. This book is a must-read for any director seeking to move beyond antiracist theory and into antiracist action.

In his book A Working Model for Contingent Faculty, Robert Samuels presents multiple ideas for helping contingent faculty organize to gain equity on campus: in their careers, working conditions, and pay. Samuels critiques current prominent, negative discourse on contingent faculty, offering instead ways to emphasize contingent faculty’s diverse and positive experiences and opportunities. I offer additional insights spurred from Samuels’s ideas, including connecting with student government and finding ways to make writing center work and research more public and apparent to institutional stakeholders (e.g., students, faculty, donors, administrators, boards/trustees).

Reflecting on a few everyday situations, this “provocation” considers the question of consent at the writing center.

This study sought to determine the impact writing center consultations have on student writing self-efficacy and to illuminate effective consultant strategies for fostering student writing confidence. As part of a multimethods study, a survey was administered for students to reflect upon and to assess their feelings of writing self-efficacy by describing experiences in writing center consultations. Selected respondents were asked to elaborate on the strategies used by their peer consultant(s) in an optional open-ended interview. Findings suggest that writing center consultations help increase writing self-efficacy. The effective consultant strategies described by study participants are synthesized into an overarching consultant framework of empathy-based tutoring, which includes four key consultant moves that work to foster writing self-efficacy: listening, translating, advising, and motivating. Results from this study have implications for further consultant training and/or professional development programs and reaffirm the value writing centers bring to student writing growth.

Many higher education institutions offer drop-in tutoring programs hosted by writing specialists to support struggling students while others may also/alternatively embed tutors directly into courses. In this quasi-experimental study, we compared survey results from 100 students in basic/developmental courses that featured embedded peer tutors with 78 students who experienced tutoring via a walk-in writing center. Variables explored included writing efficacy and course/tutor perception survey items. While students generally found both embedded and walk-in tutoring to be helpful, the ratings for embedding tutoring tended to be statistically stronger for most variables we investigated, suggesting that students responded more positively to embedded tutoring.

Language expresses our values and identities, but in educational spaces, multidialectical and multilingual students’ voices are often silenced in favor of Standard English (Lockett, 2019). As writing tutors and future language arts educators, we have developed a research-based inclusive grammar curriculum and classroom-based resources to expand the conversation surrounding linguistic inclusion. Guided by the principle that all students should be offered the opportunity to learn the conventions of Standard English, we advocate for inclusive teaching of Standard English grammar in K–12 classrooms and writing centers (Godley et al, 2015). Using previous research on multilingual students, linguistic inclusivity, and dialectical diversity, we created a website for K–12 classroom teachers that provides easily accessible, developmentally appropriate resources to normalize the idea that there is no single way to correctly write or speak English. These resources better prepare K–12 students to utilize writing center services, as both writers and tutors, once they reach higher education. Our lesson plans, worksheets, resource guides, and supplemental materials are designed to provide teachers with resources to have a conversation with students about the power and complexity of language and to anticipate the values of writing center work to support every writer to confidently use their own voice.

In the field of writing center research there is a paucity of information regarding tutoring students with dyslexia. This comes as no surprise considering it is only in the last 50 years that there has been a conscious effort to include those who have exceptionalities in all areas of education. In addition to a lack of research and training there is another issue that arises with disclosing exceptionalities. Those studying dyslexia have found that students are hesitant to disclose their learning disability because of the stigma and feelings of differentiation from their peers (Brizee et al., 2012). The question then becomes how we prepare tutors so they may approach a diverse group of learners and feel they have the skills to work with any student without disclosing their disability. Part of implementing the Universal Design for Learning approach is preparing tutors to accommodate a range of learning disabilities, exceptionalities, and cultures. It is important for tutors to understand common characteristics of dyslexic writers and strategies for working with them. Effective strategies include repeating explicit instruction, emphasizing phonetics, and mind mapping/chunking information. This project is focused on helping secondary writing center tutors and faculty to feel they have enough knowledge about dyslexia to help students who choose not to disclose their disability and offer strategies that they may utilize when working with dyslexic students. Furthermore, this project affirms the importance of creating an equitable learning environment for all students who seek the support of a writing center.

“Story Culture Live: Black American Story Spaces as Actionable Antiracism Work,“ was a keynote given at the Northeast Writing Centers Association Conference at the University of New Hampshire in spring 2023. The keynote details the genesis of my podcast, Story Culture Live, which reimagines storytelling as actionable activism in antiracist work and explores concepts such as Black teller agency, kinship, and collective responses to tensions through storytelling that can inform and build new stories in writing centers.

It is crucial for writing center professionals who discuss community to ask ourselves what we mean by the term as applied to writing centers. In this keynote, I explore various notions of community that are influenced by writing center growth, expansion, and complexity, especially in relation to Iowa’s writing center. After relating a personal story about our new tutors’ traditional notion of community and an account of our own center’s expansion and growing complexity over the decades, which challenges their traditional notion, I discuss other obstacles to community, bringing in the critiques of writing center scholars. Finally, I synthesize what I consider to be the most important bases on which to build writing center community today, focusing on the special I-Thou relationships writing center tutors form with students.

Despite their history of marginalization, writing centers need to be spaces where consultants, writers, and administrators act with agency. This requires both knowing when and how to act, as well as deciding when to yield. In challenging policies of seeming neutrality, I argue in this manuscript that writing center practitioners can center the needs and knowledge of consultants and writers alike. Finally, I call for more research about writer experiences with writing centers, which can (and should) meaningfully shape our administrative practices.

This article is adapted from a keynote address at the July 2022 European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) conference, sponsored by the University of Graz in Austria, whose theme focused on writing centers as spaces of empowerment. Designed for peer tutors as well as writing center faculty, this talk first celebrates some examples of writing centers empowering student writers and tutors. It then attempts to articulate what scientific spectacles allow us to see when we look deeper into these examples of empowerment: some of the big ideas, the abstract principles, the constellation of expertise and commitments that underlie our contemporary writing center work. That expertise and those commitments range from what’s familiar in our field (writing expertise, care for writers and tutors, multilingualism, dialogic interaction) to what’s less familiar (the power of interdisciplinary teams and generalists, connectivism). The talk concludes by urging writing centers to use their expertise and commitments to forge partnerships and engage in some activism—in order to empower more writers, make centers and writing more inclusive, and influence teaching and learning at their schools and universities more broadly.

This essay explores writing center theories and collaborative praxis from the perspective of an individual who has experienced long-term isolation and incarceration. This writer reflects on how participation in his college-in- prison community, including his service as a writing tutor and teaching fellow, has led to his immersion in prosocial healing behaviors that come with liberative and collaborative pedagogical processes.

A reflective, ethnographic study of a grassroots, antiracist educational workshop (The Conversation Workshops, TCW) reveals that writing center (WC) pedagogy and feminist invitational rhetoric’s (FIR) influence on TCW enables participants to recognize their own and their partners’ expertise, meaningful experiences, valuable perspectives, and their need to be listened to, accounted for, and understood. In an invitational model, particularly one based on a one-with- one, interpersonal dynamic, participants are more like collaborators than audiences, an approach that can be applied in diverse educational settings, and which reflects the WC’s model of one-with- one pedagogy. This dynamic also reveals one of TCW’s major limitations; the invitational model demands significant emotional and interpersonal labor, especially on the part of the initiator, which is only appropriate and productive in certain contexts. When combined with self-reflection, articulated positionality, and study of systems of oppression, writing centers can help facilitate antiracist community building by deploying their one-with- one pedagogical practices to call in accomplices beyond the writing center.

Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) is a growing field of study that provides for holistic understandings of written texts, spoken discourse, rhetorical strategies, and the people who use them. Organized as a discussion of the topics, methods, and their potential applications for writing center research, this essay reviews three edited collections, Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review by Charlotte Taylor and Anne Marchi (Routledge, 2018); The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis by Eric Friginal and Jack A. Hardy (Routledge, 2020); and Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis by Camilla Vásquez (Bloomsbury, 2022). Each introduces a range of practices, insights, and concerns for combining corpus and discourse analysis, which can be useful for developing writing center research, consultant training, and administrative outcomes.

Introduction to WCJ 41.1, which is a special issue on contingency in writing centers.

In this hybrid essay, I engage creatively with the illusory nature of contingent work, presenting three episodes from my personal experiences as a contingent writing program administrator (WPA) during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, I interrogate these experiences by building on past critiques of “comfortable” writing centers, applying Sara Ahmed’s work on the affectiveness of (dis)comfort in order to examine comfort and its uneasy relationship with labor. For whom is the writing center expected to labor to provide comfort? Whose comfort, and moreover whose safety, is jeopardized or made invisible in the process? In answering these questions, this essay proposes that writing center work during the pandemic offers three valuable insights into contingency: first, how contingency is a state that generates semantic shifts around its workers, such as the slippery meaning of “comfort”; second, how contingency reproduces itself aesthetically in “comfortable” writing center spaces; and finally, how writing center professionals might work to resist the exhaustive demands of contingency within writing center work.

Using a sprinkle of Queer Theory, their on-the-job experiences, and writing center scholarship that challenges disciplinary orthodoxies, two intersectionally queer and contingent writing center researcher-administrators examine the constraints of contingency; discuss the underlife of queer labor; and point to queer labor nuances and possibilities alongside contingent writing center work.

This article explores the scholarly endeavors upon which writing center directors and coordinators must embark to effectively run their centers. Additionally, the authors explore ways to use their contingent statuses as leverage for either tenure or promotion by linking their scholarly work to departmental and university tenure/promotion requirements.

This article offers a critical reading of writing center workplace space. Weaving together counterstorying with semiotic, geographic, and rhetorical analysis of space, the author provides an alternative way of understanding the connections between our physical and metaphorical workspaces. Precarity and contingency, the article posits, are made more palpable through connection to physical space because writing center labor (and workers) are often identified mostly through their space and availability. Ultimately, this article argues for a new way forward that decouples writing center workers and labor from inhabited workplace space. Arguing that these spaces are gendered, classed, and raced (among other things), we need to reimagine our workplace identities as separate from the spaces in which labor takes place.

Based on the concept of transformative listening by García (2017) that views listening as a form of decolonial work that must take place in writing centers, the article examines colonial thinking and contingency as toxic preexisting conditions of writing center ecology that hinder our ability to listen to marginalized multilingual voices. Recognizing the commonality between multilingualism and contingency, both as ignored marginalized intersecting identities in the hierarchy of the racialized and corporatized university system, the article describes the complexity of engaging contingent workers in decolonial work and listening. Further, it argues that contingency creates significant barriers to the type of antiracist and decolonial work that García calls for that cultivates transformative listening. The article proposes specific types of collaborative training and partnerships that writing centers should invest in to foster decolonial listening and work while addressing the material constraints faced by contingent faculty and staff.

Despite comprising the majority of labor in higher education in general and writing centers more specifically, contingent workers’ voices and experiences have often been overlooked. The contingent voices that have been represented have predominantly been those in director or administrative positions, not the professional tutors who engage in centers’ day-to-day consulting. This lack of representation in the literature perpetuates institutional inequities and belies a larger paradox: that contingent workers attempting to ameliorate the precarity of their situation may jeopardize their livelihood. Because contingent workers’ identities and roles have historically been ignored and marginalized, few research and publication options are available to them. For this reason, this research used autoethnography, one of the only methodologies available to the contingent professional tutor authors that allowed us agency to share our lived experiences and identities as contingent workers. Three themes emerged from our autoethnographies: vital to but not valued by the institution, working to live but destroying the body, and the illusion of choice. After discussing themes, we call for a continuation of what this work begins, particularly that the field of writing center studies should aim for wider representation of contingent and multi-identitied voices in its literature, conferences, and leadership organizations.

This essay aims to build upon the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP), designed by Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail (2010), which focuses on what tutors learn about themselves as writers and students. However, the PWTARP survey, like much of writing center scholarship, focuses on student workers attending PWIs (Predominately White Institutions). To help fill the diversity gap in the existing literature, the current study uses the PWTARP survey as a frame of reference to investigate what tutors learned about themselves as writers and students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). Based on feedback from a team of current and former tutors, we added questions that addressed demographics, multilingualism, and worker conditions. We conducted a mixed methods case study and collected data via surveys and focus group interviews with tutor alumni before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2022). Our findings connect with many results of the original PWTARP and other responses about economic vulnerability and the emotional labor of tutoring. Also, our survey produced many useful findings about issues related to being a contingent worker, including economic pressures, emotional labor, and professional development.

We expand the field’s focus on contingent labor to include part-time student employees’ experiences in addition to the experiences of part-time and contingent faculty. This article uses autoethnography and diary studies as frameworks for understanding the experiences of undergraduate tutor labor, particularly as it involves undergraduate research. Further, we show how a faculty mentor and writing center director’s view of a student tutor’s contingency can lead to revised approaches in writing center administration.

In this exploratory study, we took as our point of departure Lori Salem’s (2016) call to investigate the factors that affect students’ decisions to visit the writing center. Rather than exploring student decision-making through a sociological lens, as Salem does, we drew on insights from social psychology to understand students’ motivations. We explored two self-theories drawn from social psychology that are associated with students’ academic achievement and with students’ help-seeking: (1) implicit beliefs about intelligence or “mindsets”; and (2) sense of belonging. Using questions from previously validated scales, we measured first-year students’ mindsets and sense of belonging and tested the relationships between these self-theories and students’ visits to the writing center. We found correlations between students’ mindsets and their willingness to seek support, but the relationships differed between minoritized students and comparison students. Although the numbers are modest, we noted a difference in the relationship between sense of belonging and writing center visits for minoritized students. Our study suggests areas for future research, which has the potential to change the way that writing centers conduct outreach to students and has possible implications both for our marketing efforts and tutor training.

Since its inception in 2003, the IWCA Summer Institute (SI) has been understood within the writing center field to be an important professional development opportunity for new and experienced writing center professionals (WCPs). Publications on the SI to date have focused on anecdotal perceptions of the benefits to leaders and participants or on a single outcome, such as research output. Thus, the writing center field knows little about how and in what ways participants perceive the SI’s benefits across cohorts and across a variety of professional areas. By gathering quantitative and qualitative data from every SI cohort from 2003 to 2019, the goal of this study was to identify and define the benefits of the SI, focusing in particular on how participants themselves understand them. The survey received 161 responses, a response rate of approximately 27%; all 17 years of the SI were represented. The study found that, despite the field’s shifting priorities since 2003, the concerns and needs of WCPs have remained relatively constant over time, and that the SI serves the most pressing administrative needs of participants.

Over the past several decades, writing center scholarship has evolved to include multiple theories and pedagogies that led to widely used best practices. As is the case in many disciplines, often writing centers at large, research PWIs are most often cited and highlighted within the scholarship. While many of those readings do offer helpful strategies for working with students at all levels, often they do not account for the unique contexts and diverse student populations that make up many HBCUs. As a result, more research from a variety of writing centers is needed so practitioners see there are multiple ways to operate a successful center and facilitate effective sessions. These authors begin by describing their student population and the HBCU learning environment. They then articulate three specific strategies, many of which directly oppose current mainstream practices, implemented in their writing center that influenced their policies and procedures. Lastly, they explore larger implications for these findings, for they believe aspects of these practices, all with traditions deeply rooted in the often-undervalued affective components of literacy instruction at HBCUs, will advance ideas in the field and ultimately be helpful for staff and students in all writing center contexts.

Especially in the wake of the recent pandemic, asynchronous consulting has become increasingly central to writing center work. Yet writing center scholarship has little attended to the significant impact writer input can have on asynchronous writer-consultant exchanges. Drawing on asynchronous consultation data collected before and after our 2019 redesign of our writing center’s asynchronous system, this comparative study examines the specific effect of the writer appointment form on the nature of both writers’ requests for feedback (RFFs) and consultants’ resulting comments. Our findings suggest that differently designed appointments forms can scaffold significantly different kinds of asynchronous writer-consultant exchanges, especially visible in the different emphases writers and consultants put on issues of correctness, clarity, organization, and the writer’s rhetorical situation. We argue that, particularly in the case of asynchronous consulting—which can easily devolve to a “fix-it” model of consulting—it is important for writing center administrators to design asynchronous platforms that encourage both writers and consultants to more explicitly consider how the specific rhetorical features of a writing task can shape revising goals.

First-generation students (FGS) make up a significant percentage of college populations. However, they experience hardships that are less common for their continuing-generation peers. They struggle to understand the “rules” of college and lack the cultural capital that can help students succeed through generations of knowledge about how to navigate college. Writing centers attempt to lessen these burdens by providing outreach to marginalized student populations, including FGS. However, there has been a lack of cross-institutional research that examines exactly how writing centers support FGS. This article presents a mixed-methods study that begins to close that knowledge gap and demonstrate common patterns of FGS support across institution types in the United States. Results show that most FGS support is “accidental” and highly context-specific, which makes measuring success difficult. The results of this study also show that tutor staffing and training play a significant role in FGS support and should be further researched in writing center studies. The author argues that we need to do more assessment of our outreach and its outcomes for FGS, going beyond our narratives of what does or does not work for marginalized students.

Writing center scholars have long debated whether writers are best served by “generalist” tutors trained in writing center pedagogy or “specialist” tutors with insider knowledge about a course’s content or discipline-specific discourse conventions. A potential compromise that has emerged is training tutors in the purposes and features of specific genres. The writing center literature showcases many different approaches to genre training. However, little empirical research, if any, has explored how tutors’ genre knowledge affects session outcomes. The present study used a mixed-methods approach to compare session outcomes for students who worked with generalist and genre-trained tutors. We analyzed pre-consultation and revised literature review drafts to determine whether students who worked with tutors trained in the genre of literature reviews improved their drafts more or revised their drafts differently than students who worked with generalist tutors. Additionally, we performed a qualitative analysis of student reflections about their writing processes to explore how tutor training impacts students’ impressions of their consultations. Findings indicated that students who worked with genre-trained tutors revised their drafts more substantively than did students who worked with generalist tutors. Moreover, students who worked with genre-trained tutors left with notably better and richer impressions of their consultations.

In this paper, we explore the complicity of writing centers in the Global North in global neocolonialism despite its resounding rejection within Western writing center scholarship, in which Romeo García contends that writing tutors can be “decolonial agents.” We show that higher education is used by governments in the Global North as a neocolonial tool and situate international U.S. writing center initiatives within this context. Writing centers have remained complicit in global neocolonialism involving the commodification and exportation of American English as well as Western-style institutions, curricula, and pedagogies. This is most explicit in recent writing center initiatives undertaken by the U.S. Department of State in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Central and Southeast Asia. Our analysis of the IWCA and the global community of writing center organizations reveals that few institutions in the field are well positioned to address this important issue. Indeed, the IWCA has remained silent on the complicity of writing centers in the Global North in neocolonialism despite the resounding rejection of neocolonialism within the writing center community.

This article explores the emergence and development of writing centers in Brazil, using the author’s experience founding the Centro de Assessoria de Publicação Acadêmica (CAPA) at the Universidade Federal do Paraná as a case study. The author provides some historical context about Brazilian education and its traditional “banking model” of education (Paulo Freire) that did not value individual expression—including through writing. This model persisted even as composition studies evolved elsewhere. Academic literacy development in Brazil is thus a relatively recent phenomenon, and the effects of that paucity are felt among scholars in higher education settings. This motivated the author’s research into publication challenges faced by Brazilian faculty and graduate students, which revealed a need for more institutional support. This inspired the idea for CAPA, conceived as a space promoting dialogue around writing, not just language editing. In establishing CAPA, critical considerations were the use of a public call mechanism familiar to Brazilians (“o edital”) to make consultations part of the writing process, offering translation to draw more people from around campus, and conducting outreach that stressed writing over “English.” CAPA’s mission to foster academic identities and combat epistemicide makes it unique, but also gives it a very Brazilian flavor. Unlike some writing centers in other global contexts, CAPA was not an imported idea but emerged from local needs, fully integrated with Brazilian higher education culture, compatible with Brazilian understandings like critical pedagogy. CAPA represents a Brazilian innovation contributing original knowledge to international writing center conversations.

“Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond” blends narrative, mixed methods research, and rhetorical analysis to make a case for the possibilities inherent in homegrown wellness practices that are “communal, political, and rooted in defiance of white supremacy.”

Seeking to support graduate student writers, writing centers at research universities have developed highly successful dissertation camps over the past 15 years. Previous research from North American dissertation camps has demonstrated significant benefits from these camps, as dissertation writers developed new writing habits and increased their productivity. In this study, however, a closer look at initial and follow-up survey responses provided by participants from dissertation camps at two institutions—an Upper Midwestern university in the United States that has held camps for 11 years and an Eastern European university that held an online camp during the 2020 pandemic—suggests that focusing on the positive responses may obscure some telling tensions between dissertation camps’ benefits and limitations. Our research reveals tensions around four key parts of dissertation camp curricula—developing writing habits and schedules, sustaining a community of writers, focusing on the drafting stage, and emphasizing cross- disciplinary participation. Listening more deeply to these outlier responses sheds valuable light on the affordances and limitations of dissertation writing camps and on how the curricula of dissertation camps might be reimagined to better articulate and embrace those tensions.

This mixed methods study examines whether veteran–novice mentorship between tutors, as part of continuous in-service professional development, would have a positive effect on either party’s transferable skills (e.g., communication, collaboration, and professionalism). Quantitative findings from pre- and postsurveys about the veteran–novice mentorship suggest that tutors have significant gains in some transferable skills, such as oral/written communication skills, teamwork/collaboration skills, digital technology skills, and career management skills, after attending the continuous in-service professional development. Quantitative findings from the pre- and postsurveys further indicate that novice tutors improve more, compared to veteran tutors, in their self-perceived oral/written communication skill levels. Qualitative findings from postmentorship interviews explain findings suggested by quantitative analysis, with contextual factors. This research study has bifold significance: “a theoretical perspective” on writing center work and research-supported professional development strategies. The findings of this study provide more food for thought on the subjects of how to design veteran–novice mentorships, how to target some transferable skills for professional development in the future, and how to exemplify the transferable skills in the survey to make those abstract constructs more concrete.

The editors of the Writing Center Journal and Purdue University Press, publisher of WCJ, are retracting the following article: Hotson, Brian, and Bell, Stevie. (2022). "Writing Centers and Neocolonialism: How Writing Centers Are Being Commodified and Exported as U.S. Neocolonial Tools." Writing Center Journal, vol. 40, no. 2, article 4. https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1020. This article contains two significant factual errors that the authors have agreed to correct. The Writing Center Journal is committed to the highest standards of publication ethics and has accepted the request of Dr. Ron Martinez and colleagues from the Universidade Federal do Paraná and the article’s authors to retract the piece until a revision can be posted. The journal will also create a space for published rebuttal.

This article presents findings from an IRB-approved study about writing center social media use and nonuse using survey data keyed to five factors: reasons for nonuse; purposes for use; platforms used; approaches to use that consider platforms and target audiences; and recommendations to other writing centers to use or not use social media. While the 91 writing centers not using social media commonly cited a lack of time, lack of staff, and lack of experience as reasons, the majority of writing centers in this study maintained a social media presence. These 153 writing centers tended to use multiple platforms, commonly to promote the center and reach other writing centers, and often perceived students and faculty as their target audiences. A majority of the 244 respondents recommend social media use to other writing centers regardless of their own center’s usage or non-usage. The study not only aimed to provide more and more in-depth data about writing center social media use and nonuse; it also considered conversations about writing center purpose as presented to a diverse audience that included administrators outside of writing centers and underscores the potential for writing centers to produce multimodal writing on such platforms.

Writing centers seek to expand their services beyond tutoring and develop evidence-based practices. Continuing and expanding the existing practices, the authors have adopted graduate writing groups (GWGs) to support graduate writers, especially those working on independent writing projects like a dissertation or article for publication. This article provides an effective model on how to develop and assess virtual graduate writing groups (VGWGs). This replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research applied a mixed-methods design with pre- and postsurveys over the three semesters of running the VGWG. It found that the VGWG offered a full range of writing support that met graduate writers’ needs for time-based, skill-based, draft-based, and emotion-based support. Specifically, the VGWG significantly improved students’ approaches to writing in five key areas—goal setting, focusing on dissertation writing, generating plans for writing sessions, writing productivity, and writing progress. Therefore, this study contributes robust empirical validation of this model, suggesting that VGWG is an effective method to sup-port graduate writers and expand writing center services. Also, the authors provide a useful model on how writing centers can effectively assess through pre- and postsurveys in a straightforward manner, an assessment model that has both internal and external benefits.

Counterstories from the Writing Center is a book that centers the perspectives and experiences of peoples of color in writing centers as tutors, administrators, and students. The book aims to educate all readers, but specifically “white, straight, cisgendered women (WSCGW)” (p. 5), whose presence has permeated writing center scholarship and work, about how writing centers often engage in representational change or practice, applying Band-Aid solutions that fail to enact social justice and antiracist practices. The goal of the book is to get readers to exercise a certain level of humility, to reflect on and accept responsibility, in order to enact genuine and true change that begins to address and resolve issues of racism in writing centers.

Though the conversation about race and racism in individual writing centers has developed in the last 30 years (Coenen et al., 2019; Condon, 2007; Dees et al., 2007; Denny, 2010; Faison, 2018; García, 2017; Greenfield, 2019; Greenfield & Rowan, 2011; Grimm, 1999; Kern, 2019; Lockett, 2019), scholars rarely discuss the racial climate of writing center professional spaces. This article reports on the findings from the Racial Climate Survey of Writing Center Professional Gatherings. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected in spring 2019, when participants were asked about their experiences and perceptions of the racial climate of international, national, regional, and local writing center professional gatherings during the 2017–2018 academic year. Results show a statistically significant difference between White participants and BIPOC participants in relation to experiences of racial microaggressions, tensions/comfort in professional gatherings, and experiences in sessions about race/racism. Across multiple survey questions, the lack of diversity noted by participants was one of the most significant factors shaping their experiences of the racial climate of writing center professional gatherings. Based on the results, suggestions for how to improve the racial climate of writing center professional gatherings are provided.

This study investigates postgraduate (PGs) and faculty needs concerning academic writing (AW) tutors’ qualifications in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. Tutors are the core element of a writing center (WC) (Hays, 2010). These professionals listen to (Burns, 2014), advise, and exchange information (Reid, 1993, in Hays, 2010) collaboratively so students can resolve their writing issues (Hays, 2010). However, in EFL contexts, scant research exists about WCs, writing programs (Molina & López, 2019), and qualifications to recruit tutors (Özer, 2020). Thus, to plan a WC, 24 participants in chemistry were interviewed and surveyed. Findings reveal that EFL PGs expect specialized tutors in target fields, with high English proficiency, experience in teaching, and in writing scientific articles. However, recruitment is challenging as candidate tutors also need support in AW and to help their tutees as writers. Thus, the tutors can be scientists, teachers, or PG students with English, but must be trained in specialized and general English writing and tutoring approaches. The study contributes to knowledge concerning needs in WCs and tutors’ qualifications, and it offers possible suggestions to accommodate the PGs’ preferences in an EFL context. However, the small sample size and homogeneity of the participants make the results nongeneralizable.