For English as an Additional Language (EAL) students, generative AI (GenAI) offers meaningful support for writing in English, while also introducing a new set of challenges. Supporting EAL students in developing AI literacy is crucial to their growth as confident, adaptable writers, and writing center tutors are uniquely positioned to facilitate this development. This case study explores the experiences of undergraduate Brazilian international students at a small liberal arts college who received writing feedback from both peer writing center tutors and ChatGPT. Findings indicate that students valued the human connection, contextual understanding, and rhetorical support offered by peer tutors, while turning to ChatGPT for immediate, nonjudgmental assistance, particularly in navigating multilingual challenges. The study offers insight into how peer writing tutors can thoughtfully leverage GenAI to support multilingual writers.

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 study analyzes the experiences of undergraduate peer-tutors in a heritage language writing center (HLWC) located at a large public university in the United States. As former heritage language (HL) students themselves, tutors have to navigate the complexities of being bilingual advocates for their tutees while promoting the linguistic ideals of the academic community, where literacy expectations can be more rigid. In order to delve into their experiences at the center, this qualitative investigation examines the end-of- term reflections of 19 Spanish HL tutors working at a Spanish HLWC, addressing the following questions: (1) How do tutors perceive their role as language advocates and arbiters? (2) How can these beliefs be supported or addressed by the HL program? Ideal tutors occupy a middle ground between being a peer-student and an expert-student, whose role is to scaffold the mentee’s process. However, we find that HL tutors struggle with competing linguistic expectations between the heritage and the academic community. Finally, we discuss three areas of tension that are important to address in HL tutor training and program design: ambivalent notions about students’ proficiency and preparedness, their role in the instructional team, and their relationship to expertise.

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.

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.

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.

African Americans and their contributions to our field’s first pedagogical models and operational structures are absent from writing center histories. This archival research invokes their presence by recounting the stories of five African American innovators—Bess Bolden “B. B.” Walcott, Coragreene Johnstone, Anne Cooke, Hugh Gloster, and Percival Bertrand “Bert” Phillips—spanning four decades at three historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Their stories invite an expansive understanding of writing center work, moving beyond a focus on traditional tutoring and strictly alphabetic literacies and into “strategic literacies”—the survival skills needed to stand up for oneself and one’s community in the face of dangerous times and violently racist places. The writing center leaders described here saw writing as a tool to be used in concert with embodied performances for expression and survival to advance struggles for labor equity, legal justice, and civil rights. This conception of writing center work springs from sites of research such as HBCU archives and popular Black press archives that are less often examined by dominant disciplinary histories. From those sites, a timeline of African American writing center administrators emerges that spurs further research of these under-studied figures, who together constitute a remarkable legacy.

This article argues that religious and secularist identities complement and intersect in political ways with race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality and that they inform writing center practice because belief exists along a spectrum that involves all writing center inhabitants and affects all writing-centered conversations. We suggest that this spectrum of faith is evocative of the spectrums that theorists of race, gender, and sexuality in particular have discussed, yet often faith has been overlooked in discussions of identity in writing center work (Denny, 2010). We propose that theories of race, gender, sexuality and other identities that have served as springboards for professional development in writing centers can help to facilitate the development of a greater literacy of faith and secularism as complicated and nuanced identities. Specifically, we believe theories involving intersectional social justice work and hybridity can help to facilitate self-reflective and productive interfaith dialogue or dialogue about faith and secularism. Thus, such theories can help writing center professionals dismantle stereotypes about believers and secularists and problematic notions of what faith, or a conversation about faith, is or should be.

Reading and writing are widely understood as connected practices, but writing center studies has been slow to join the larger conversation in composition studies about writing's relationship to reading. Despite the field's neglect of reading in its research and scholarship, writing center professionals regularly work with reading because most college writing assignments are accompanied by or draw on reading in some way. Be-

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

All of us involved in writing centers (indeed, all of us in education) must recognize that the educational community of the 1990s will continue to grow more diverse culturally, linguistically, scholastically.Given this diversity, students, teachers, and tutors will become more, not less, interdependent.The ready, predictable answers and assumptions that existed once in a monocultural classroom or university don't exist anymore."Success" will not be meted out by one authoritative figure, but will be measured by the mutual nature of the success, hinging on the degree to which all members of this threesome of tutor, student, and teacher can become what Paulo Freire calls the "subjects" of their own learning process.Our hopes for these redefined social relationships in the writing center carry with them hopes for a redefined sense of academic literacy as well.Multicultural student populations will not only change social relationships but challenge monolithic conceptions of academic literacy.We will need to seek out views of student literacy that will emphasize interdependence, such as the ones articulated in David Bleich's The Double Perspective , Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman's

In Plato's famous critique of writing in the Phaedrus , Socrates declared writing a deficient form of communication next to speech, for any piece of writing, should it fall into the hands of an unintended reader, is susceptible to misinterpretation. He likened texts to orphans, who, upon separation from their authorial progenitors, wander about as message -bearing waifs. Obligated to stay on script, they can but parrot their parents' words, having no recourse to gloss, emendation, or retort.1 One of the virtues of writing centers is that they compensate for the alienation of writing. If the canonical literate encounter is one where writer and reader, separated in time and space, meet only through the medium of the text, then the writing center consultation restores immediacy to written communication. In its traditional form, the tutorial brings

Aer they are admitted, many students find actually joining the university to be disorienting and even daunting, especially those whose socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or educational worlds differ markedly from the academic world they encounter in college. We know that writing centers play a key role in helping students make this transition, serving as crucial conduits of adjustment for otherwise marginalized students. But exactly how we help tutors to help these students is less familiar ground. Tutors are not usually considered when composition scholars characterize the ways in which writing professionals help students belong. Nevertheless, tutors as well as teachers are party to a process seen variously as assimilation, accommodation, separatism, acculturation, translation, or repositioning (Severino; Bruffee-, Lu, ''Writing as Repositioning"), and the students tutors work with must undergo a process that can be positively characterized as "going native" (Bizzell, "Cognition" 386), quizzically understood as invention (Bartholomae), or negatively viewed as conversion 0-Harris io3; Lu, "Conflict") or initiation (T. Fox). Clearly, there is no consensus among these many "camps"; rather, what we have is provocative, useful discussion on the pedagogical processes of belonging. But many a tutor who finds herself on the frontlines with a lost student will not have the benefit of knowing this discussion. As a writing center administrator who has worked in two urban institutions with ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations, I have struggled to formulate tutor training that urges tutors to consider the complexities of belonging. I believe the tutor needs to understand the paradoxical ways in which writing and academic literacy more generally are instruments of belonging that can constrain as well as liberate.

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.

most people associated with writing centers have devoted most, if not all, of their time and energy to keeping their programs alive and healthy. But in the future we predict that writing centers will assume a more prominent role in researching not only writing and writers but also more general undergraduate research issues, such as retention and assessment. It is our hope that writing centers will also increasingly be viewed and valued as sites for research. We sincerely believe that writing centers are poised to assume a more prominent role in the institutions and communities in which they exist. Increasingly, writing centers are no longer seen as supplementary but as programs that are central to the mission of the school and essential to its being competitive in terms of attracting and retaining students. Opportunities for fund-raising, grants, and community involvement frequently accrue to writing centers. Some writing centers have begun literacy projects that might, with concerted effort, lead to a network similar to the National Writing Project. Thus, in the future, writing centers could have a synergistic effect on literacy nationwide. Clearly, our vision of the future of writing centers is optimistic, but we believe it can be a reality. The years of existing in the margins, struggling to survive, may not be completely over for every writing center, but certainly most writing centers are now enjoying the fruits of those early years of labor. Writing Center Work: An Ongoing Challenge

myth was well established in our minds and embedded in our job descriptions. Then, with typical irony, we punched our own ticket by using hard won, added on research to validate our service role. Let me put it another (only slightly exaggerated) way: as Writing Center Director my priorities are teaching, service, service, service, and then research—on our service. One step to develop the potential for systematic research in writing centers, as distinct from occasional research about writing centers, is to attempt to renegotiate the writing center statement of purpose, rewrite its myth of origins, so that research is a featured character, not a walk-on part. That might make for an interesting situation. It might mean, for instance, that research output, not the number of students served, would be the primary justification for writing center viability. It might mean that writing center directors would carry research appointments, and research budgets to go along with them, and job descriptions that have high expectations for publication in exchange for job security and promotion. It might mean that writing center training and procedures and environment would all change to meet the needs of research and publication. Is such a “renegotiation” desirable or even possible? Another way to get at this same issue is to ask, are we, the readers of The Writing Center Journal and The Writing Lab Newsletter, the research community to which we want to remain a viable contributor? Or is the research community that we seek to influence larger, more diverse, and less interested?

It may have started for me that day in 1989, at the drugstore counter in Austin, Texas. I was there with my one-year-old sons and my three-year-old daughter. The twins were fussing and squirming in their stroller -one of them had an ear infection, and so we were at the drugstore picking up an antibiotic which I hoped would bring more restful nights to all of us. My daughter, her attention drawn to every colorful display near the counter where we stood, was struggling to free her hand from my grasp. One-handed, I attempted to fill out the insurance form that accompanied the prescription. The pharmacist, observing my difficulty, sympathetically offered to help me with what I had learned to consider the "literacy task" of filling out the form. She took the pen and began reading the questions to me. Name? Address? Home phone number? Work number? At this last question she stopped to survey the four of us. I was pushing the stroller back and forth in a rocking motion, attempting to calm the twins whose wails were beginning to attract the notice of strangers. The pharmacist smiled at me in a knowing and sympathetic way. "I guess that's kind of a silly question, isn't it? With all those children, surely you don't have time to work too!" But in fact I was "working." What the pharmacist didn't realize was that mothering was only, as Arlie Hochschild would say, the "second shift" of my work day.

All of us involved in writing ccnters (indeed, all of us in education) must recognize that the educational community of the 1 990s will continue to grow more diverse culturally, linguistically, scholastically. Given this diversity, students, teachers, and tutors will become more, not less, interdependent. The ready, predictable answers and assumptions that existed once in a monocultural classroom or university don't exist anymore. "Success" will not be meted out by one authoritative figure, but will be measured by the mutual nature of the success, hinging on the degree to which all members of this threesome of tutor, student, and teacher can become what Paulo Freire calls the "subjects" of their own learning process. Our hopes for these redefined social relationships in the writing center carry with them hopes for a redefined sense of academic literacy as well. Multi-cultural student populations will not only change social relationships but challenge monolithic conceptions of academic literacy. We will need to seek out views of student literacy that will emphasize interdependence, such as the ones articulated in David Blcich's The Double Perspective , Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman's Writing as Social Action^ and Deborah Brandt's Literacy as Involvement. By situating literacy in social relationships and communal action, these studies have begun, as the title of a recent article by Bleich makes

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.

Our advanced degrees in English did not train us for all these roles, and many of us enroll in courses and seminars in everything from grant writing to computer literacy in an attempt to make up for what we have missed.But there is one important