Research has increasingly addressed first-generation (FG) students both in and outside the center (Baelemian & Feng, 2013; Bond, 2019; Denny et al., 2018; Ward et al., 2012), but there remains a need to address this unique student population from the perspective of critical theory. In a replication study of Bond’s 2019 “‘I Need Help on Many Things, Please’: A Case Study Analysis of First-Generation College Students’ Use of the Writing Center,” we examined the needs and perceptions of self-reported FG students in a writing center at a large, regional, public R2 university in the Midwest. We gathered preexisting digital data from WCOnline, consultants’ postsession notes, and our office of institutional research. Using thematic analysis, we coded, categorized, and compared FG college student and non-first- generation student data to better understand their unique needs. Thereafter, we corroborated our qualitative findings using quantitative analyses, specifically the Pearson chi-square test. Situated within the framework of cultural community wealth, our findings illustrate that FG students bring their own forms of cultural capital to the academy, challenging prior deficit-oriented narratives (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Yosso, 2005). Our study can be used to better address the academic needs of FG college students and to extend replicable, aggregable, and data-driven (RAD) writing center research (Driscoll & Wynn Perdue, 2012; Haswell, 2005) into conversations of justice, equity, and inclusion.

Reflecting on experiences with two Afghan students writing in response to events following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, this essay challenges traditional writing center practices in response to the evolving and urgent writing needs of diverse (international) student populations. Focusing on the intersectional identities of student writers and the geopolitical realities they face, we develop further the call to transform writing centers into “brave spaces.” Deploying this framework of bravery, we call for a reevaluation of the concept of “better writers,” of empathy constructed primarily through peerness, and of the current conceptualization of nationality in writing center scholarship. Writing centers as a discipline must reconceptualize these constructs of our theory and practice if they are to become brave(r) spaces that support students as they fight for social justice and survival.

Although traditional asynchronous tutoring is associated with text-based communication, writing centers are beginning to experiment with asynchronous multimodal tutoring with the assistance of accessible and interactive multimedia technologies and instructional platforms like VoiceThread. Using a mixed-methods approach of surveys and interviews of undergraduate students at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), this study explores the potential benefits of asynchronous multimodal tutoring beyond access and convenience: We examine why students choose to submit their papers for asynchronous multimodal feedback, and whether they perceive that the multimodal aspect of the feedback improves their understanding and enhances their connection with tutors.

This mixed-methods study sought to better understand how confidence in writing and race interact as factors within writing centers. Students utilizing our writing center were asked to provide data about racial identity and writing confidence both when registering with the writing center and when completing postsession surveys. From this data, we interviewed a racially representative pool of respondents to better understand their definitions of confidence and the identity factors that have shaped their confidence in writing. Our survey data showed that students’ confidence increased significantly as a result of a writing center session, replicating previous writing center research. Furthermore, we found that improvements in confidence were consistent across racial identities, with students from different racial backgrounds reporting comparable gains. Our qualitative interview results revealed how students struggle with both identity-and non-identity- based factors that lower their confidence in academic writing. Results offer a more nuanced picture of how student identity impacts writing confidence both within and outside the writing center.

In this essay, I suggest that we should embrace generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) writing tools, particularly chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude), because they can enable linguistic equity by leveling the academic playing field for English as an additional language students. As writing experts, we can find ways to use this technology to enhance learning, and, since we know both student and faculty positions, we can help develop policies so such tools can be used effectively and ethically. Alternatively, we can ignore them and risk becoming irrelevant.

While one-to- one writing tutoring is often viewed as a supportive space for student writers, it can also reproduce racialized linguistic hierarchies that exacerbate anxiety for multilingual students. This article examines second language (L2) anxiety as a structurally induced emotional response to native-speakerism— the ideology that privileges white, Anglophone, native English speakers as the standard for language competence. Drawing from L2 anxiety research in applied linguistics and writing center studies, the article explores how native-speakerism influences multilingual students’ self-perception, interaction, and performance in L2 during one-to- one tutoring. It discusses the sources and dimensions of L2 anxiety across all four language domains—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—and argues that this anxiety persists even at advanced proficiency levels due to internalized linguistic deficit ideologies. By reframing L2 anxiety as a structural equity issue, the article calls for a more justice-oriented tutoring ecology and offers concrete pedagogical strategies and recommendations to help writing tutors recognize and respond to the often-invisible emotional labor multilingual students carry.

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.

Drawing on the dual perspectives of a writing center administrator and a tutor, this paper explores how political symbolism—such as the Department of Education’s 2025 “Dear Colleague” letter—technological homogenization, and institutional consolidation are contributing to a resurgence of standard language ideology and attempting to erode linguistic diversity. We argue that writing center administrators and tutors must confront their own biases, reflect on their positionality, and adopt pedagogies that prioritize inclusion and agency over assimilation; and must refuse these pressures that seek to judge diversity as deficit and flatten difference into sameness.

This article offers articulation theory as a tool for listening and thinking about the culture in and around writing centers. After defining a method of articulation analysis that considers articulation, disarticulation, and rearticulation, as well as alignments, contradictions, and tensions within a context, the article performs an articulation analysis on contemporary writing center work. The analysis considers the writing center’s relationship to democracy, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, ethics, and social justice, as shaped by the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, and the 2008 financial crisis. The article concludes with a reflection on the results of the analysis and interventions that may open possibilities for systemic change, including approaches to communal justicing, modeling workplace culture, and training tutors in articulation analysis.

This article reflects on the creation of bilingual spaces, focusing on writing centers as facilitators of academic dialogue regarding academic writing and culture. The writing centers of Pontifical Javeriana University and Florida International University jointly explore how these centers can serve as bridges to promote effective communication and cultural exchange in educational environments where different languages coexist. The analysis addresses the significance of these spaces in fostering linguistic diversity and the impact on academic development. Este artículo reflexiona sobre la creación de espacios bilingües, centrándose en los Centros de Escritura como facilitadores del diálogo académico en torno a la escritura académica y la cultura. Los Centros de Escritura de la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana y de la Universidad Internacional de Florida exploran conjuntamente cómo estos centros pueden servir de puentes para promover la comunicación efectiva y el intercambio cultural en entornos educativos donde coexisten diferentes lenguas. El análisis aborda la importancia de estos espacios en el fomento de la diversidad lingüística y su impacto en el desarrollo académico.

This article examines connections among disability, colonization, university policies, and writing center work in North America. By positing that university policies have long mimicked medical and scientific processes for creating—and then discriminating against—perceived categories of disability, this article makes interventions into traditional writing center practices and pedagogies without dismissing the spirit with which these aspects of our field came to be. The article has several central claims: Disability has been constructed by nondisabled entities (including doctors, scientists, and institutions). Disability’s “drift” and myriad forms act as both specter and insidious insurance against progress or inclusive design. Writing center scholarship has consistently made claims toward equity yet still must reframe its points of engagement. Disability itself provides opportunities to reconstruct not only our relationships to one another but to our field and world. While these claims do situate writing centers (under the auspice of the institution itself ) as agents of colonization and control through their ableism and expectations for bodies, bodyminds, and identities, they also leave ample opportunity to imagine and build upon the values that shape our praxis. What can we imagine for one another, beyond accommodations and retrofits? What does a decolonized, disabled body have to offer? How can we find out?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Writing centers increasingly have been concerned with issues of race and racism in the center. However, most of the conversation around race has centered on student writers, with references to tutors of color given only in passing or in the context of larger discussions on race. This study uses interview data and a grounded theory methodology to examine the experiences of racism and anti-Blackness in writing centers for female Black undergraduate and graduate peer tutors, categorizing the experiences in three ways: attacks on character and identity, denials of credibility, and silencing. Connections are drawn with the experiences the tutors have outside the center, and the argument is made that the racial tension of their centers puts the women in a position of constant negotiation, performing a balancing act in which they must filter their responses to their racist encounters out of self-preservation. The results indicate that writing centers are not yet where the field and practitioners would like them to be and that much of the emotional labor of maintaining a tolerable work environment is falling to tutors of color. Writing center directors must do more to take back this responsibility and change the culture of their centers.

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.

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.

This study investigates and reports on the personal, professional, and programmatic benefits and risks associated with contingent writing center work. Interviews were conducted with 48 contingent writing centers workers, including directors, assistant directors, associate directors, graduate student workers, and tutors. Survey data of the interview participants showed contingent writing center workers are usually White women with advanced degrees. Most of this article focuses on interview data, analyzed using grounded theory. Interviews revealed participants’ understanding of what contingency means and revealed their struggles with instability, insecurity, and uncertainty even while they lauded the flexibility, freedom, and autonomy their contingency afforded them. The interview data also further revealed the ways in which these working conditions were created and maintained by the institution. These findings suggest the need for collective action across the composition and writing center fields—from professional organizations, tenure-line writing center workers, and contingent workers themselves. Through collective action, we can create equitable working conditions for all writing center workers.

This essay examines the learning processes of writing center professionals through the lens of “networks of enterprise” (Wallace & Gruber, 1989), which reflects on the dynamic processes through which creative people, like writing center professionals (WCPs), bring together the diverse and complex tasks undertaken in their everyday work into a cohesive and satisfying career. While there is substantial turnover in the profession, some WCPs stay in writing center positions for decades. Drawing on information gathered through surveys and interviews with ten long-term WCPs (with an average of 28 years of experience), as well as reflecting on his own career, the author attempts to discern what long-term learning WCPs take away from work. This piece shares participants’ responses to the following questions: (1) What do writing center professionals learn from the diversity of their duties and long-term exposure to the ideas of writers from a multitude of disciplines? (2) Are the lessons, processes, or theories, WCPs encounter in the center of use in their own scholarly, administrative, or creative pursuits? (3) To what degree does such learning make WCPs better at their jobs and motivate them to spend years or even an entire career in the writing center? Though not unanimous, the participants’ answers indicate that WCPs do indeed gain and apply to their work —including their own creative and academic writing projects — a deep, broad, and ever-growing network of knowledge gained from tutoring, training tutors, teaching, and performing the many practical, rhetorical, political, and administrative tasks required in these positions. Most, though not all participants, cited the building of such knowledge as a key motivation for spending their career in or around writing centers.

Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers takes us from narratives to research. I was interested in and looked forward to reading this book, as, over the summer, some graduate students and I read Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School (McKee & Delgado, 2020), and I wanted to see how the books complemented each other. While Degrees of Difference was more personal, more narrative-based, and more interdisciplinary, both books stressed the importance of mentoring. But I am especially excited to bring some of the ideas from Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers to my Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) campus. Our graduate population at The University of Texas Permian Basin is growing, and we need to offer it more support.

To our readers in 2020: we hope you are not experiencing inordinate loss. We write this introduction in the midst of multiple events resonant with historical import-and with the possibility for positive, lasting change: worldwide protests for racial justice, the U.S. Supreme Court decision against job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and significant attempts to save lives and jobs in the face of the ongoing pandemic. Amidst these events, of course, we are all engaged in conversations exploring how education will need to adapt.

This article presents findings from a two-year mixed-methods study examining a partnership between a writing center and a community-building summer academic program for incoming students of color at a large Midwestern university that is a predominantly white institution (PWI). The study implemented surveys and follow-up interviews with students in the program to discover the benefits and drawbacks of requiring writing center visits for this student population. Building on extant research on required visits and how writing centers can contribute to social justice, this article uses frameworks from psychology and higher education scholarship on stereotype threat and validation theory respectively to explore how writing centers can provide academic and interpersonal validation to students of color who visit. Pairing stereotype threat and validation theory as lenses illuminates how writing centers can avoid othering students of color and instead affirm their senses of belonging within their institutions.

Ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region comprises a vast area among three continents-Europe, Asia, and Africa. While there are no standardized lists of MENA countries, the following countries and terri-

Being an African American woman for almost 40 years, a secondary education teacher for three years, and a three-time college student, I am well versed in the micro aggressions that plague students in education, which is why I feel it's important to always be aware of new information meant to combat the systems of oppression found in learning environments. Through my research, I realize what is needed is a way to help individuals see and acknowledge discriminatory practices in the educational field, especially when it comes to writing and the writing process. Culture, nationality, beliefs, biases, and stereotypes are not like layers of clothing that one can check at the door and pick up later. We have all been exposed to the unfair dynamics that form the race relations in society, and we carry those understandings with us everywhere we go, even if we are not completely aware of them. However, awakening this awareness is prevalent to promote a beneficial learning environment for students both in the classroom and in the writing center.

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).

i n g o f r e f l e c t i o n e s s a y s f r o m three semesters of the tutor education course revealed four themes:

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

About the New Racism," Victor Villanueva issued an invitation and a challenge to writing center directors, scholars, and tutors. Villanueva urged us to examine and to address the ways in which race and racism shape writing center identity and practices; enable and constrain knowledge and knowledge production, teaching and learning; and are reproduced not only through the thought and action of individuals, but also and especially through

The Problem: The Divide Between Theory and Practice Like most writing center directors, we have always included in our tutor preparation an emphasis on differences students may bring to a session. Up until a few years ago, this approach mainly took the form of a unit on working with ESL writers and another on working with students who have learning disabilities. This approach to diversity was reinforced by the textbooks we chose for our tutor training seminar. The guides for tutors that we have assigned over the years (including Meyer and Smith's The Practical Tutor , Capossela's The Harcourt Brace Guide to Peer Tutoring, , McAndrew

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.

Each book is distinctive. The Allyn and Bacon Guide is a textbook for a tutor-training course, guiding students through several weeks of activities such as observing tutorials, being tutored themselves, conducting their first conferences, and analyzing transcripts of conferences. The St. Martins Sourcebook is a

The Second Coming " As a metaphor for wrting center work, carnival frames this work as , to borrow Susan Millers words , a " relation between high and low discourses , " in this case , between frequently marginalized wrting centers and the larger university or academic 'structures that contain-and depend on-these centers.

Two recent books deal directly with the challenges of global change and the increasing frequency of intercultural encounters in our institutions and in our daily lives. Listeningto the World zn Intercultural Competence address powerful changes occurring in the academic contexts we inhabit; these books can assist us as we teach, direct writing centers, and tutor an increasingly multicultural clientele. Both books intermingle theory with practice and address similar diversity issues; however, the writers' backgrounds and specialties as well as their audiences and primary purposes are dissimilar. These differences make the books nice companion pieces for training graduate and advanced undergraduate writing center tutors and, I would argue, required reading for writing center directors.

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.

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