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.

What do writers do with the feedback they receive? While the answer will vary depending on the writer’s experience and the rhetorical situation, understanding what writers do can provide important information for course redesign and professional development of tutors and instructors. In this first of two manuscripts, the authors examine how first-semester, first-year writing students use responses provided via asynchronous online tutoring (AOT) in revising their assignments. Our primary research question was: What was happening in—and after—those tutorials? We addressed this question by a process of narrowing and refining of data analysis toward increasingly precise inferences as we progressed from automated to coded analysis, which culminated in examining the drafts submitted for tutoring, tutor feedback, and the subsequent assignments submitted for evaluation in the students’ FYW courses. In parallel, we describe the writing analytics–informed methods used to do so in hopes that others will be compelled to replicate or extend this work in their own contexts. We found that students made corresponding revisions at both macro and microstructural levels when provided with directive or declarative feedback, and they made few revisions when tutors provided open-ended questions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Social justice movements, especially Black Lives Matter, inspired many writing center administrators to reflect on their commitments to antiracism and engage with antiracist professional development with their staff. However, there is continued need to study the impact antiracist professional development has on writing center consultants’ ability to practice antiracism in sessions. This article presents a predominantly white institution (PWI) writing center’s attempt to do this work, with a particular emphasis on how antiracist professional development complicates portrayals of consultant agency within the writing center. The study analyzes qualitative data collected from consultants’ reflective writing, survey, and interview responses. Results illustrate that, in the context of enacting antiracism in and beyond the writing center, consultants showed messy, partial, and incomplete forms of agency with the professional development curriculum impacting consultants of color and white consultants differently. These findings suggest writing center studies must embrace an understanding of antiracist professional development that is reflective, fragmented, and iterative, and identify more concrete practices of antiracist consulting.

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.

By addressing how writing centers can work to help computer science students be ready for professional challenges related to writing in computer science fields, this study of computer science professionals and students illustrates how findings were applied to train a team of writing tutors. Drawing upon self-reports about writing in computer science jobs and writing in computer science classes, the authors identify both professionals' workplace writing challenges and students' perceptions of these challenges. Implications for writing center practitioners and researchers are discussed, including how writing centers can collaborate with computer science faculty to acquire resources, access the discourse of computer science assignments, and implement a similar training program in their centers.

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.

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