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.

As online writing tutorials become increasingly widespread, writing center scholars continue to debate the pedagogical differences between face-to-face and online tutoring However, empirical research has lagged behind technological advancement, with only one study (Wolfe & Griffin, 2012) comparing face-to-face and media-rich online writing center tutorials. This article builds on such scholarship by sharing results from a comparative study of face-to-face and synchronous audio-video online tutorials that collected data from writing tutorials, writers' postsession surveys, and interviews with writers. Using primarily linguistic analysis of the hundreds of interactions in each of the 24 transcribed writing tutorials, we determined that audio-video online and face-to-face sessions share similarities in tutoring strategies, discourse phases, tutor-writer interaction, and student satisfaction. However, significant differences were found

Tengo un recuerdo. Over the weekend, I'd observe my to work on cars. He'd pop the hood, turn the vehicle on, and listen. He'd step back and look at me and say, "Listen mi'jo to the car." He'd lean back in and work to locate the problem. My to taught me about the capacious work involved in listening, the type of listening that centers the corporeal body as sensuous within and between the physical, temporal, and symbolic. Learning to listen as such situated me in space, place, and time. My ethos and politics of being, seeing, and doing emerged from these points of references.

These researchers examine how questions function in a corpus of eleven writing center conferences conducted by experienced tutors. They analyze the 690 questions generated in these conferences: 81% (562) from tutors and 19% (128) from students. Using a coding scheme developed from prior research on questions in math, science, and other kinds of quantitative tutoring, they categorized tutors’ and students’ questions. The researchers found that questions in writing center conferences serve a number of instructional and conversational functions. Questions allow tutors and students to fill in their knowledge deficits and check each other’s understanding. They also allow tutors (and occasionally students) to facilitate the dialogue of writing center conferences and attend to students’ engagement. In addition, tutors use questions to help students clarify what they want to say, identify problems with what they have written, and brainstorm. Based on this analysis, the authors make some recommendations for tutor training. 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 37 3/10/14 2:52 PM Thompson & Mackiewicz | Questioning in Writing Center Conferences 38 Introduction To resist the role of teacher-surrogate in favor of the role of helpful peer or collaborator, to get students to do the talking, and generally to achieve a student-centered focus, tutors have been advised to use questions as primary tutoring strategies in writing center conferences (Brooks; Harris). In other words, tutors are supposed to use questions to indirectly guide students to improving their writing. In these oftenidealistic conceptions of writing center conferences, questions are “real,” genuinely reflecting an interest in who the students are and what they want to say rather than leading students to a particular point of view. Moreover, students’ satisfaction with writing center conferences has been connected to their perceptions of having their questions answered (Thompson, Whyte, Shannon, Muse, Miller, Chappell, & Whigham; Thonus, “Tutor and Student Assessments”). Tutors are supposed to encourage students to ask questions freely, and it is assumed that students will ask more questions in writing center conferences than in the classroom (Harris). However, beyond encouraging students to talk and beyond directing tutors toward students’ areas of confusion, questions are important prompts for learning and for maintaining students’ engagement in writing center conferences. Research about question asking and answering in the classroom has typically focused on how teachers can pose questions to enhance critical thinking for students. This research has shown that the dialogic Socratic method, with its back-and-forth questions and answers, is a more effective teaching strategy than didactic teacher talk (Rose, Bhembe, Siler, Srivastava, & VanLehn; see also Kintsch; Tienken, Goldberg, & DiRocco). Today questioning is one of the most frequently used classroom teaching techniques, with elementary and high school teachers asking as many as 300 to 400 questions per day (Tienken, Goldberg, & DiRocco). Research suggests that if used effectively either in the classroom or in one-to-one tutorials, questions can enhance students’ learning in at least three ways. First, as shown in Socrates’s questioning of his student about the concept of justice, questions can direct students in their efforts to “construct and reconstruct knowledge and understanding” (Smith & Higgins 486). By discussing what they are thinking with a more expert tutor or teacher, students engage in self-explanation, a process shown to deepen their understanding (Chi; Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser; Chi, De Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher; Rose, Bhembe, Siler, Srivastava, & VanLehn). Second, questions can enhance students’ motivation, stimulate curiosity, and encourage active participation in learning (Lustick; Smith & Higgins). 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 38 3/10/14 2:52 PM The Writing Center Journal 33.2 | Fall/Winter 2014 39 Third, teachers’ and tutors’ questions may become models for selfquestioning, important for students in regulating their own learning processes. Further, in both the classroom and in tutorials such as writing center conferences, learning typically occurs within a conversational context, and along with stimulating understanding, questions are vital linguistic components of an educational conversation. Besides helping tutors identify what students do not know, questions allow tutors to understand students’ goals for coming to the writing center and to politely facilitate the flow of the tutorial conversation. We will consider all of these types of questions in this article. We examined how questions function in a corpus of eleven writing center conferences conducted by experienced tutors. In these eleven conferences, we found a total of 690 questions, mostly asked by tutors but some asked by students as well. Incorporating research about questions in classroom teaching, we adapted a scheme for analyzing questions in tutorials that was developed by the psychologist and linguist Arthur C. Graesser and his associates. This scheme has been used to analyze questions in math, science, and other kinds of quantitative tutoring, with a range of students from elementary school to college (Golding, Graesser, & Millis; Graesser, Baggett, & Williams; Graesser, Bowers, Hacker, & Person; Graesser & Franklin; Graesser & McMahen; Graesser & Olde; Graesser & Person; Graesser, Person, & Huber; Graesser, Person, & Magliano; Graesser, Roberts, & Hackett-Renner; Person, Graesser, Magliano, & Kreuz). Through our analysis, we show how questions can function in writing center conferences so that we and our tutors can understand the potential impact of questions on students’ learning and, subsequently, pose questions more consciously. Previous research about questions in writing center conferences has focused on what questions reveal about tutors’ roles and control over conferences. For example, Kevin M. Davis, Nancy Hayward, Kathleen R. Hunter, & David Wallace analyzed four types of “conversational moves” (47) teachers use in classroom discourse—structuring the interaction, soliciting responses, responding, and reacting—to determine the extent to which tutors took on teacher roles. According to Davis, Hayward, Hunter, & Wallace, tutors are usually in control of conferences, but sometimes they do assume less teacher-like and more conversant-like roles (see also Willa Wolcott’s “Talking It Over: A Qualitative Study of Writing Center Conferencing”). Susan R. Blau, John Hall, & Tracy Strauss considered the nature of the collaboration that occurs in writing center conferences by analyzing “three recurring rhetorical strategies” (22) relating to tutors’ directiveness—questioning, echoing, and using qualifiers. They found that in conferences considered satisfactory, tutors 85891-Writing Center-text.indd 39 3/10/14 2:52 PM Thompson & Mackiewicz | Questioning in Writing Center Conferences 40 demonstrated “informed flexibility” (38) in the strategies they used. Other studies have evaluated tutors’ use of mitigated and unmitigated interrogatives (Thonus, “Dominance in Academic Writing Tutorials”), “question–answer interrogation sequences” (Thonus, “What Are the Differences” 231), and leading versus open questions (Severino). A few studies have included questions in analyzing tutors’ politeness strategies (Bell & Youmans) and self-presentation (Murphy). These studies of writing center conferences tend to analyze questions as signals of assumed role and that role’s concomitant right to control the discourse as opposed to examining all the ways questions can function—including but not restricted to the ways they help construct role and maintain control. We analyzed questions to determine the extent to which experienced tutors ask questions that push students’ thinking, check their understanding, facilitate conversation, and model the types of questions students should ask of themselves in order to assess and develop their own writing. Simultaneously, we speculated on the relationships between questioning and students’ and tutors’ roles. After delineating the question types we found, we examined question-answer patterns according to initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) instructional dialogue (Mehan), a classroom discourse pattern largely unexamined in writing center research (for an exception, see Porter). We examined writing center variations on the IRE pattern, showing how experienced tutors used different types of leading and scaffolding questions in tandem with common-ground questions in a cycle of promoting students’ thinking and engagement and of checking students’ comprehension.

Because writing centers have long been viewed as fix-it shops, mentioning the word "grammar" can spark a heated debate over the writing center's role. Stephen North faulted the English department for perpetuating this misconception. Richard Leahy blamed the writing center's history and "peculiar status" for confusing faculty and students alike (43). Elizabeth Boquet explored tensions caused by shifts between the writing center's identity as both method and space (465). All are valid points, but there is a greater issue affecting both academic writing and the writing center-grammar

research, he has interests in writing pedagogy with a focus on technology's fundamental role in cultivating ethos and precipitating varied revision processes. This is a story of a failed study. In 2007, we set out to demonstrate that Kurzweil 3000, an adaptive text-to-speech software program, would help any student revise with its read-aloud function and numerous writing tools. During the course of the study, we confronted our misconceptions about students' technology use and realized

Our heritage] stretches back... to Athens, where in a bus y marketplace a tutor called Socrates set up the same kind of shop: open to all comers , no fees charged , offering, on whatever subject a visitor might propose, a continuous dialectic that is, finally, its own end. -Stephen North, "The Idea of a Writing Center" Recent explorations of writing center research encapsulate the often -conflicting professional demands we face as administrators. On the one hand, we acknowledge the need for research to improve our understanding of the past narratives, present effects and future possibilities of writing center work. On the other hand, our individual identifications and disciplinary ethos often rely on the notion of a writing center director whose priorities include, as Harvey Kail writes, "teaching, service, service, service, and then research-on our service" (28). Added to this already-overburdened schedule is the privileging of place in writing center studies; if each center is uniquely shaped by its context, as the common argument goes, what kinds of research can speak across these myriad locations, moving beyond what Jeanette Harris has termed the "this -is -what -we -do -at -my-writing-center" genre? ("Review" 663). In other words, both our individual professional lives and the scholarship of our field are marked by our attempts to reconcile our identification as a highly communal professional group with our allegiance to the primacy of individual context.

Over the past ten years or so, much has been written about whether writing center tutors should be generalists or specialists: when tutors help clients from other disciplines, is it an asset for the tutors to be familiar with discipline-specific discourse conventions? Scholarship attempting to answer this question has been bi-polar: either tutors should be generalists, or they should be specialists. On the specialist side, some scholars argue that tutors’ knowledge of discipline-specific discourse conventions is important to the success of tutoring sessions, since the tutoring should revolve around the rhetoric of the discipline (Kiedaisch and Dinitz; Tinberg and Cupples: Shamoon and Burns). Judith Powers and Jane Nelson, for example, argue that

Although tutors are usually excellent students, they seldom have previous tutoring experience.For this reason, tutor training is an important aspect of any writing center program.A general training program -which includes two to three hours of orientation focusing on procedures, tutoring roles, responsibilities, and policies -is usually required of all new tutors.During their first semester of employment, additional training in study skills, communications, critical thinking skills, and interpersonal skills may also be required.In addition to this general training, tutors also need specific training in the tutoring of writing.Most tutors learned to write using the product method -a formal, grammatical approach with instruction beginning at the sentence level, moving to the paragraph, and finally culminating