In this article, we describe writing center clients’ “idea” of the writing center based on interviews with 26 writing center users and qualitative coding of interview transcripts. Participants’ constructs of the writing center provide a lens to better understand how they perceive writing as an activity, the “writing culture” of the institution, the role of the writing center in their writing processes, and, ultimately, if they see writing centers in the way we would expect them to. The tensions we derived from our data are (1) between who and what tutors are and offer: discipline-specific expertise (including the disciplines of writing) versus generalist expertise, and (2) between how tutoring should occur: tutors as collaborative partners in students’ writing processes versus tutors as “another set of eyes” to give relatively quick feedback. Additionally, we offer our findings in a 2 x 2 matrix, a common visualization tool to productively illuminate the nuances, tensions, perspectives, and points of view in ways that can further writing center theory and practice. Our findings suggest that writing centers might respond to these tensions by expanding their “ideas” about who they are and what they do within their institutions.

Writing center scholars have adopted Pratt’s (1991) “contact zone” metaphor to describe the diversity of consultants and students in writing centers, but this literature has largely overlooked the perspectives of multilingual students. Through surveys, interviews, and session data, we found that while multilingual students described rich linguistic identities, they also experienced tension and instability as language users. Students often framed their considerable language assets as deficiencies in academic writing contexts. They faced additional tension between instructor expectations and their own understanding of assignment goals. Students frequently sought native-like language competency from consultants and expected them to serve as informants about academic writing conventions—goals that often conflicted with writing center values and practices. This research suggests writing centers need to move from “clashing” to “collaboration” to understand and support multilingual students’ writing processes and goals within the context of U.S. higher education.

This piece explores the discussions surrounding multilingualism, internationalization, and queerness within writing center studies (WCS). As a branch of writing program administration (WPA), this piece situates above-disciplinary conversations in relation to second language studies (SLS) and broader language and literacy education scholarship to identify areas where disciplinary collaboration and attention are still needed, particularly around questions of professional development, administrative strategies, and pedagogies supporting multilingual writers in writing center spaces. This piece begins by reviewing the major trends, contributions, and key terms in existing literature centering on multilingual writers and SLS to identify ways and areas of collaboration and disciplinary efforts that still need attention within WPA, specifically WCS. Finally, the piece concludes with the author’s perspective, a gay multilingual writing center professional who grew up in a global Anglophone context, on positioning himself as an intersectional scholar ready to make an impact while showcasing his contributions to the ongoing conversation within current WPA and WCS research.

This work examines articles published in the Writing Center Journal between 2001 and 2020 in order to understand more about the publishing, scholarship, and research practices of the field of writing center studies. Through analyzing articles published in the Writing Center Journal between 2001 and 2020, this work makes three contributions to the field. The first contribution of this work is an overview of the shift from scholarship to research in the field of writing center studies. The second contribution of this work is to highlight the growth of collaborative scholarship and research during this time. As is demonstrated in the article, co-authoring is increasingly the norm in the field; there are also many benefits of collaboration and co-authoring in scholarship and research. The third contribution is to show the benefits of multivalent research—research that includes participants at multiple institutions—as well as the growth of multivalent research between 2001 and 2020. Multivalent research can make arguments about the field that research conducted at individual institutions cannot. This work challenges the way research is thought of in the field and provides avenues for strengthening research in the field of writing center studies in the future.

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.

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.

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 prefix trans-surfaces frequently in the recent scholarship from the related fields of composition studies, applied linguistics, and writing center theory. With its emphasis on moving across/beyond, trans-evokes spatiality, liminality, collaboration, negotiation, flux, and destabilization. These concepts have become familiar in the scholarship on US writing centers that supports a transition from monolingual to multilingual paradigm and translingual approaches. Multiple meanings of traversing embedded in trans-acquire a new significance in the experience of founding and functioning in a transatlantic writing center in which all forms of communication occur in more than one language and cut across different cultures. This article draws attention to this less explored territory. I consider the transcultural disposition of a transatlantic writing center to facilitate translingual approaches that expose and transform power dynamics in ways that emphasize collaboration and negotiation. To this end, I analyze bilingual literacy practices in a Moscow writing center in its foundational stage.

This article describes how an unexpected observation by researchers studying writing support for nonnative speakers of English at German and Australian universities became the central insight of the work and resulted in the development of new literacy support measures. Only when the German researchers encountered Australian models of student literacy support did they realize that the German model of a writing center relied heavily on a US heritage while Australian models of student literacy support could be traced back to language and literacy support models from the United Kingdom. The central difference lay in the role that language was considered to have: while language skills were subsumed under writing in one model, writing skills were subsumed under the umbrella of academic language in another. Applying cultural anthropological approaches to the recognition of these two different perspectives allowed the German writing center

Within a framework of democratization policies, universities in Argentina are confronted with the challenge of offering educational support to all students, traditional and nontraditional, to help them enculturate in chosen disciplines and graduate from college. In this collaboratively authored article, we describe some of the conditions and processes that led higher education institutions to acknowledge the strategic role that teaching reading, writing, and oral communication play, to foster not only the students' learning process, but also inclusion and quality for the democratization of higher education. We also describe initiatives carried out by five Argentinean universities to address the development of academic literacies in Spanish-medium curricula, including the establishment of writing programs and/or writing centers on our campuses. We refer to tutoring practices, culturally specific genres and pedagogies, teaching and research initiatives, power dynamics within the different organizational and institutional contexts, and the paramount role of collaboration in shaping future initiatives. Finally, we identify similarities and differences between the five institutional experiences.

Writing consultants regularly perform emotional labor. They suppress or express emotions to welcome clients and invoke enthusiasm to cultivate writers’ confidence. Because emotional labor performs these crucial functions, it merits focused attention in writing center studies. However, while research has considered the emotional needs that writers bring, scholars have not yet sufficiently examined the affective engagements that consultations require of writing consultants. The first section of this article presents a case for treating affective dimensions of tutoring as labor. The second section analyzes five tutor-training manuals using the Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF) to identify references to emotion and affect in the texts. This analysis shows that these tutor training manuals offer limited or indirect discussions of emotional labor and neglect the fact that relational work is just as much a practiced skill as cognitive work. The final section offers implications and proposes ways these manuals could start more robust discussions of emotional labor to further writing center goals of creating supportive, collaborative environments. By teaching and valuing the emotional labor of tutors, writing centers can become more inclusive places and mitigate factors that lead to burnout.

This article describes the year-long collaborative composing process of a rural writing center seeking to develop an anti-racism and social justice statement. The author reflects on the way in which rural perspectives are often dismissed, often seen as provincial and hostile towards ideas that might be included in an anti-racism and social justice statement. The piece also connects theories of composing, fluidity, and identity to the writing of the statement and provides a detailed analysis of the lengthy, often challenging composing process used. The author finds that the collaborative composing process, more than the resulting statement, was significant to the ongoing dismantling of racist practices in the writing center and in training writing center consultants.

Heeding previous scholars' calls for a critical investigation of the role of reflection in the professional development of tutors, this article examines reflections written by tutors in the context of conference records. More specifically, the authors investigate the consequences of incorporating a prompt to reflect on tutoring strategies into our online conference-records database. The authors first present the results of their opening coding of nearly 300 conference records, offering a taxonomy of specific types of reflections found in the conference records. The authors then identify three shifts in the content of conference records written after the introduction of the reflection prompt. Finally, the authors draw on analysis of tutor interviews to illuminate how the positive influence of the reflection prompt is inextricably linked to a larger culture of reflection that is often collaborative and leads to transfer of learning within and beyond the writing center.

This article examines the unique perspectives of nine writing center practitioners reflecting on the experience of conducting a collaborative and multi-tiered research project in their center. The focus of their work is on the process of conducting research rather than the product; therefore, much of the work is on how research is conducted and how it functions as an avenue for professional development, creating community, and benefitting the center. The article includes narratives from all of the researchers: undergraduate students, graduate students, and administrators/ faculty members. Each narrative presents positive experiences, insights, and obstacles encountered for each group of researchers. The article concludes with recommendations that could benefit others conducting multi-tiered research.

Working in writing centers is a great gig. We get to lead units committed to making collaborative learning happen in a host of ways: students gaining access to or refining disciplinary literacies, faculty and administration discovering more effective ways for writing to demonstrate learning and transfer, and tutors becoming conscious of their voices as mentors of communities of practice, both disciplinary and sociocultural. Many of us "graduate" from being students who have been tutored in writing centers to serving as writing tutors ourselves; some of us inspired by all of that labor decide to pursue graduate education in and become directors of these amazing units, charged with sustaining and growing these amazing units and all those who teach and learn within While our field has plenty of resources for educating tutors, for coaching faculty across the disciplines on using writing for teaching

In this participatory article (with suggested activities, check-ins with the body, and freewriting), we use collaborative narrative inquiry to unpack considerations that underlie the planning, facilitation, and processing of a series of movement-based workshops. Critiquing liberal multiculturalist approaches in writing centers, we argue against the all-too-common flattening of differences and think through how embodiment helps us "work the hyphens" (Fine, 1998) or find "third ways" In contrast to role-playing scenarios that characterize many tutor education practices, we suggest that centering the body through movement allows for an alternative and more generative way to interrogate and restructure racial power. In total, we argue for attention to the body and embodied practice to engage tutors (and all writing center staff, directors included) in developing critical praxis for racial justice. For us, praxis comes in the form we call "critical tutor education," which is essential for writing centers committed to more equitable relations and practices, as we continue to strive for the "ought to be" (Horton as cited in Branch, 2007).

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.

e p r o v e d t r u e . D i s c i p l i n a r y e x p e r t i s e d i d r e s u l t in increased tutor directiveness, but this directiveness was used to facilitate rather than hinder effective collaboration.

Tiffany Rousculp's Rhetoric of Respect: Recogniz ing Change at a Community Writing Center (2014) is an important book for writing center studies.Not only does Rousculp draw our attention to widely-growing though seldom-recognized community writing centers, but she also helps us see the positioning involved in making these centers sites of social change.This positioning she calls a "rhetoric of respect," or "a different type of relationship, one that is grounded in perception of worth, in esteem for another-as well as for the self" (pp.24-25).Using ecocomposition theory to recognize change, Rousculp contributes to a deeper understanding of micro-changes that emerge and are sustained over time through conditions of flexibility, self-awareness, uncertainty, failure, collaboration, and relationship.These conditions characterize many campus and community writing centers and can be cultivated to greater degrees .when we recognize their purposeful impact for our everyday, local work.Through metaphors of ecocompositionorganism, environment, relationship, place, web-Rousculp identifies and shows the importance of attending to moments of transformation for

In my experience as a writing consultant, the writing center atmosphere Denny describes, and the collaboration it cultivates, results in a close community of consultants, staff, and students.Within this community, consultants and students alike collaborate and share their diverse knowledge, personalities, and words with each other, yet each individual student is looking for something a little different when she comes to us, and each has a different way of learning.This belief in the power of individuals and one-on-one learning suggests the importance of flexibility within collaboration.With a student re-organizing her paper, I might have her draw me a flow chart to visualize her ideas, or I might demonstrate how to do a reverse outline.During brainstorming sessions, I might write down the student's stream of consciousness responses to my questions, or we might search for Youtube videos related to her topic.We can read aloud, or I can watch as a student writes.The strategies are endless,

all the organizing committee for inviting Lisa and me to participate in the 2010 IWCA-NCPTW Conference here in Baltimore.Lisa was, unfortunately, unable to be with us today, but this talk is very much a collaborative effort, one that grows out of a larger project which we have just completed.

In her essay "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center," Andrea Lunsford offers a much-needed critique of the traditional "garret" and "storehouse" models for writing center instruction, and she argues for a collaborative model in which students work together in groups to discuss, question, write, and revise.In contrast to the storehouse and garret models that reinscribe rigidly authoritarian or naively libertarian beliefs about language use, this collaborative model dramatizes the "triangulation" or "dialogism" that theorists such as Donald Davidson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ann Berthoff place at the heart of composing: as students seek to join in a conversation that precedes and takes place around them, as they seek to understand, complicate, and communicate their perceptions with and through others.In the collaborative writing center, Lunsford writes, students learn how knowledge and reality are "mediated by or constructed through language in social use . . . the product of collaboration" (4).Through collaboration, Kenneth Bruffee writes, students come to internalize those social conversations; they develop "reflective thought" and learn to play "silently, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation" as they write and reflect (5).While these aims of collaborative learning are ones I enthusiastically support, I find myself resisting jumping on the "collaboration bandwagon" (Lunsford 4) if by collaboration we mean only and always peer-group writing and response or conversation with another person.Peer groups can produce discussion, negotiation,

Writing centers are sites around which folklore circulates.Staff meetings, classrooms, newsletters, and journals are filled with tales of individual and collective actualization, celebrating one-to-one teaching as deeply social, collaborative, and empowering.Legends from the writing center also speak to the tensions inherent in the spaces, reflecting divisions of tutoring as prescriptive versus directive, banking versus dialogic, and peer-driven versus expertowned.Following their review of writing center theory, history, and practice, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner advise, "What is most important is to understand where our practices come from and to unravel the various influences on those practices" (154).Knowing these conditions of possibility makes for more effective tutoring, and this awareness also speaks to a politics about learning and the production of writers.Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills -building and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-50).For each domain, the tutorial and the social actors in and surrounding it are implicated in a certain identity politics.In the storehouse writing center, skill-building and knowledge transmission posit the writer as a vessel in need of filling, and identity becomes conferred as a sort of membership card or rite of passage.In the generative writing center, the writer emerges from social interaction, and identity becomes a negotiation of assimilation, separation, and subversion.In the critical/activist writing center, consciousness-raising produces writers aware of the constellation

Joanna Wolfe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville where she teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, human-computer interaction, and research methods. She is author of the forthcoming textbook Team Writing from Bedford-St. Martin's, a guide to writing collaboratively and working on a team. Her previous scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Written Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

Hillary democ miss is Tutors is no c At the ing, bu directo much o dents -both in the classroom and without. We attended class at the CUNY Graduate Center on 42 nd Street, and many of us were living in an NYU dorm across from Washington Square Park

Substantive expertise of a subject is often equated with the ability to teach it.

A Short Course in Writing provides a good occasion to ask what makes a textbook in rhetoric and composition a classic. The fact that Bruffee's book is among the first to appear in the Longman Classics in Rhetoric and Composition series cannot be attributed, after all, to its commercial success. In his review of the original manuscript of A Short Course , Richard Beai, the most prominent English editor at the time, told Paul O'Connell, who published the first edition at Winthrop in 1972, that Bruffee could either alter the book and sell a lot of copies or publish the book as is and make history.1 What Beai predicted has indeed come to pass. As A Short Course appeared in subsequent editions (the 2nd from Winthrop in 1980; the 3rd from Little Brown in 1985; and the 4th from HarperCollins in 1993), it has influenced, far out of proportion to its sales, the actual practices of writing instruction and, more broadly, of educational reform in U.S. college composition.

It has been over a decade since Irene Clark argued in

Nicolases book, Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom , I am still marveling at the impressive array of writing-group contexts represented by the articles included in this edited volume. As a writing center director whose program has made several fledgling (mostly failed) attempts at facilitating group work, I began the book eagerly, expecting an authoritative prescription for structuring meaningful writing-group experiences. When no such prescription emerged in the reading, however, I quickly adjusted my expectations. At times frustrated and at others enchanted by the scrumptious complexity, I savored the book as a meal, one layered with flavors that enrich my appreciation of writing groups in all their manifestations.

Writing centers are sites around which folklore circulates. Staff meetings, classrooms, newsletters, and journals are filled with tales of individual and collective actualization, celebrating one-to-one teaching as deeply social, collaborative, and empowering. Legends from the writing center also speak to the tensions inherent in the spaces, reflecting divisions of tutoring as prescriptive versus directive, banking versus dialogic, and peer-driven versus expert-owned. Following their review of writing center theory, history, and practice, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner advise, "What is most important is to understand where our practices come from and to unravel the various influences on those practices" (154). Knowing these conditions of possibility makes for more effective tutoring, and this awareness also speaks to a politics about learning and the production of writers. Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills -building and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problempose institutional and social discursive practices (147-150). For each domain, the tutorial and the social actors in and surrounding it are implicated in a certain identity politics. In the storehouse writing center, skill -building and knowledge transmission posit the writer as a vessel in need of filling, and identity becomes conferred as a sort of membership card or rite of passage. In the generative writing center, the writer emerges from social interaction, and identity becomes a negotiation of assimilation,

Two scenes emerge as I revisit this piece: first, the excitement of the early-eighties Montana State University WAC/WC/FYC collaborations, and, second, the array of WC/WAC configurations that now enrich our campuses. This piece grew out of a "How can we do all that with these paltiy resources?" moment in Bozeman, Montana, a moment that John Bean, John Ramage, and Jack Folsom seized and renamed "an opportunity for conceptual blockbusting." They made us believe, and out of some wonderfully nave questions about writers, texts, instructors, and pedagogies came a revamped FYC program, a WAG program, and a writing center that functioned as the hub for campus writing. This pivotal activity remains for me a model of thoughtful, collaborative risk taking, one that I hope continues to inform the ways we in writing centers work with our present theoretical, political, and pedagogical possibilities.

As pink-bewigged Mrs

I use this term [contact zones] to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. (Pratt 34) When Maiy Louise Pratt applied her thorny idea of the contact zone to literacy communities, she raised a complicated challenge for writing centers to move beyond the usual paradigm. Certainly writing center pedagogy is radical, envisioning ( la Bruffee) peers meeting to share writing in process, thus replacing hierarchy with collaborative learning.

When most writing centers in the United States were being founded and developed, colleges and universities had very few entities they labeled “centers.” Today, however, centers are cropping up with increasing regularity. At our own institutions, we have (between us) Centers for Humanities, Centers for Advanced Materials Research, Centers for Cognitive Studies, Centers for the Study of First Americans— even a Center for Epigraphy. It seems worth pausing to consider this phenomenon: Where are all these centers coming from, and why are they proliferating so rapidly? One strong possibility: Centers create spaces for the kind of work that needs to be done in higher education, work that is difficult or impossible to do within traditional disciplinary frameworks. In almost every case, for example, the previously mentioned centers allow for interor cross-disciplinary research and scholarship, and at their best they encourage highly productive forms of collaboration. Furthermore, they often initiate projects designed to bring college and community closer together. In short, these new centers seem to us one of the major signs of stress on old ways of taxonomizing and creating knowledge. Their growing popularity signals, we think, one institutional response to changing educational demands, populations, budgets, and technologies. We are well aware that these are difficult times at most community colleges, colleges, and universities, and that faculty and staff in many writing centers must spend an inordinate amount of time struggling to provide basic services. Nevertheless we wish to emphasize those opportunities that we believe are available to writing centers, even those that are in various ways marginalized on their campuses. The opportunities that we will discuss involve four potentials that we see for institutional refiguration: the refiguration of institutional space, of concepts of knowlWork Cited

In writing centers, technological progress requires collaboration among stakeholders who have varying degrees of expertise with pedagogical applications of instructional technologies. In “Cyberspace and Sofas: Dialogic Spaces and the Making of an Online Writing Lab,” Eric Miraglia and Joel Norris share an impressive list of individuals who collaborated to create and implement Washington State University’s OWL: Bill Condon, Writing Programs Director; Gary Brown, Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning; Lisa Johnson-Shull, Director of the Writing Lab; Norris, Assistant Director of the Writing Lab; Miraglia, Learning Technologies Specialist for the Student Advising and Learning Center; Toby Taylor, an undergraduate student with expertise in graphic design; and Pete Cihak, an undergraduate who focused on North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English 46 (1984): 433-46.

Writing centers, in the most general terms, provide tutoring to help students develop and organize writing assignments. Certainly, a writing center also encompasses other roles and responsibilities. Students mostly see it as a "safe place," a positive, supportive, and collaborative environment where tutors encourage and work with students on a one-onone basis (see also Murphy; Harris; Fitzgerald). Most writing centers also make sure that tutors don't judge student work and don't put a grade on the paper. While policies differ from center to center, students, in most cases, are also promised that their visits are confidential, and that generally instructors do not have access to the information collected in the writing center.

Recent scholarship wrestles with the issue of creating a setting within centers that encourages genuine collaboration between those who seek advice (or input) and those who give it. Some scholarship suggests that too often the people who fund, administer, and use centers see the facilities as primarily remedial. Among problems, this attitude promotes the us-and-them mentality that Richard Leahy cautions against (45) • Lex Runciman, too, blames misconceptions about the meaning of tutor and tutoring for assumptions made by students, administrators, and tutors themselves that writing centers serve only bad (Defining 28) and are little more than emergency rooms for critically ill grammar. Both scholars urge us to create an environment which everyone is free to develop his or her own best processes (Leahy 45), where good writers go order to make enlightened decisions about context, organization, idea development, tone, and the (Runciman, Defining 33). To create such a place, Leahy urges us to foster a community of people who love and like to share their with each other (45). As a logical first step, Runciman suggests we abandon terms that carry remedial connotations (e.g. tutor a.nd tutoring and adopt terms that more accurately describe who we are and what we do. Although I agree that we need to encourage an enlightened, collaborative environment in centers, I believe we can achieve this goal (whether or not we rename ourselves and our work) through the intelligent and humane use of humor.

In her essay "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center," Andrea Lunsford offers a much-needed critique of the traditional "garret" and "storehouse" models for writing-center instruction, and she argues for a collaborative model in which students work together in groups to discuss, question, write, and revise. In contrast to the storehouse and garret models that reinscribe rigidly authoritarian or naively libertarian beliefs about language use, this collaborative model dramatizes the "triangulation" or "dialogism" that theorists such as Donald Davidson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ann Berthoff place at the heart of composing: as students seek to join in a conversation that precedes and takes place around them, as they seek to understand, complicate, and communicate their perceptions with and through others. In the collaborative writing center, Lunsford writes, students learn how knowledge and reality are "mediated by or constructed through language in social use . . . the product of collaboration" (4). Through collaboration, Kenneth Bruffee writes, students come to internalize those social conversations; they develop "reflective thought" and learn to play "silently, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation" as they write and reflect (5).

Talk is central to what we do as writers and as humans. It is the collaborative activity that underlies most, if not all, individual acts of composing. Because of this, the work tutors do every day-talking about writing with writers-is valuable in uncountable ways. Writers compose through inner speech while walking, by speaking aloud at the word processor, when discussing a work-in-progress and drinking coffee with friends, or as they share ideas during conferences in writing centers and classrooms. But this talk is often suppressed, forgotten, or left out of the dominant story of learning. I plan to offer a

In our teaching and research in writing centers and classrooms, we need to identify and rhetorically analyze "collaboration" in its multiple forms. When we overuse this catch-all term to mean any kind of mutual help or working together, we not only demonstrate what Frederick Erickson calls our current "crush on collaboration" (43 1 ), but we also confuse people inside and outside the profession. When "collaboration" is bantered about in education, business, and politics, it is unabashedly unmodified, unclassified, demonstrating by its nakedness that it serves too many purposes and has too many referents, not to mention the historical ones such as Benedict Arnold and Vidkun Quisling who "collaborated" with the enemy. As Andrea Lunsford notes, ". . . collaboration is hardly a monolith. Instead, it comes in a dizzying variety of modes about which we know almost nothing" (7).

The triple focus of my title reflects some problems I've been concentrating on ás I thought about and prepared for the opportunity to speak last week at the Midwest Writing Centers Association meeting in St. Cloud, and here at the Pacific Coast/Inland Northwest Writing Centers meeting in Le Grande.Til try as I go along to illuminate -or at least to complicate -each of these foci, and I'll conclude by sketching in what I see as a particularly compelling idea of a writing center, one informed by collaboration and, I hope, attuned to diversity.

Any writing center coordinator soon finds that a good portion of her job involves efforts to build, maintain, and increase the number of writers using the center's services. Nevertheless, articles on writing centers rarely focus on promoting services and referral issues. Jim Bell's analysis of The Writing Lab Newsletter for a four year period, for instance, shows a dominant interest in tutoring methods (65 articles) with far fewer articles concerned with administrative issues (37 articles), and only 1 1 of those 37 articles focus on promoting the lab (2-3). To find a sound discussion of this issue, I turned to a 1984 survey by Gary Olson, which illustrates just how important an instructor's referral can be in developing a student's attitude toward writing center visits. Olson reminds us that the instructor who threatens students with a referral can devastate a writer who already has a poor self-image ["Johnny, if you don't show some improvement, I'm just going to have to send you to the writing center" ( Further, such demeaning oral referrals in front of a classroom of reluctant students enforces the myth that ". . . the writing center is merely for remediation" (Olson 160). Additionally, in his article "Collaborative Learning in Context: The Problem with Peer Tutoring," Harvey Kail explains why normally well intentioned colleagues might work against their own best classroom interests. Kail reminds us that writing centers threaten the traditional roles of English department members since, through their discussions with students, tutors and coordinators gain clear insights into the workings of an instructor's classroom. Instructors who are threatened by such a possibility may be those who believe the center should perform by what Kail calls the

Collaboration between student writers appears in various guises: small groups discuss each writer's paper in turn; a pair of classmates exchange papers to read and critique; a whole class evaluates a few students* papers based on an established set of criteria; a student shares her paper with a peer tutor at a writing center. All of these situations attempt to capture and build on the energy and shared learning that occur when students work together. And yet, while both the writing center and the classroom aim for collaborative learning, each context places the students in a different relationship. In the classroom, the students work together as peers under the teacher's guidance; in the writing center, students must work to overcome the disparity of authority inherent in their given roles of tutor and tutee. The difficulty for writing tutors lies in balancing their more powerful position as tutor with the goals of peer collaboration. Thus, collaboration in writing takes different forms and requires different skills in the contexts of classroom and writing center. This paper will use a study of a high school writing center program to illustrate and explain these differences. We hope that this discussion will provide insight into how writing tutors perceive and cope with their roles in a writing center and how the collaboration that occurs in a writing center affects students as writers and as people. Kenneth Bruffee's definition of collaborative learning provides a framework for understanding the difference between classroom and writing center collaboration. In his article, "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind,1 " Kenneth Bruffee explains that " Collaborative learning provides a social context in which normal discourse occurs: a community of knowledgeable peers" (644). Adapting Thomas Kuhn' s theories about the scientific community, Bruffee emphasizes that a group of people together determine the accepted knowledge, the "normal discourse"

The empowering of writers touches close to interests common to writing centers -no one associated with one-to-one conversation can ignore the benefits of collaboration, the reality and effects of interpretive communities, and the intellectual respect and consideration owed to students by teachers. Yet empowering writers should mean more than simply acknowledging social backgrounds and encouraging self-disclosing discussion and listening (though both activities are of course vital). It should also create opportunities and methods for students to speak powerfully in discourse appropriate to the academy.