Reviewed are: From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 David Fleming Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post–Civil Rights Era Steve Lamos Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave Pegeen Reichert Powell Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe

Peer feedback is often considered a critical component of self-regulated learning. The purpose of this mixed-method study was to understand the effects of how a unique form of peer feedback – an online system of co-construction – might both trigger and sustain self-regulation in academic writing. Participants were 21 Japanese undergraduate EFL writers, 10 of whom worked as peer advisors in an online writing center. Peer advisors self-reported significantly more strategies than the comparison group. In addition, textual analysis of the feedback that peer advisors provided to writers showed evidence of strategy internalization, whereas the comparison group lacked metacognitive awareness and provided feedback of a lesser quality. Within group analysis points to how specific characteristics of peer feedback developed over time and with experience. This study considers how educators can use online feedback-on-feedback as a method for eliciting verbalizations of self-regulation.

This article presents findings from a case study of an adult literacy program. The author conducted this IRB-approved study as part of a three-year, research-based, community-engagement project that partnered the literacy program with a writing center at a large public research university. The author argues that the participatory methods afforded by community-engagement research can allow researchers to achieve insight into particular programs while contributing to local literacy. The author also argues that understanding the characteristics of particular programs can contribute to knowledge of the field of adult literacy education and help collaborators develop engagement projects that support adult literacy.

Students often struggle with writing as they are unaware of the process of writing and of strategies and skills to help them write well. They often focus on the product of writing rather than engaging with the process of writing. However, it is in the process of writing, and in the discovery of that process, that learning happens (Murray 1973, Emig 1977, Berlin 1982). It is thought that the inductive, non-intrusive model of peer-tutoring practiced at the Regional Writing Centre at the University of Limerick, based on the model proposed by Ryan and Zimmerelli (2006), encourages students to engage with their own writing and learning in a non-threatening, approachable and positive manner. However, amidst the rising debate on what constitutes student engagement with learning, it is timely to investigate whether, and to what extent, the model used to train peer tutors in the Regional Writing Centre constitutes real and meaningful student engagement for those who peer tutor in the Centre and for the students they tutor.

The pivotal role of writing centers in improving the quality of academic writing has been well documented by research. Although writing centers are commonplace in many countries, it appears that none existed prior to 2008 between South Africa and the Sahara. This article reports on the writer's assignment to start one in Namibia. The expectations of the challenges in this task, centering on training staff and tutors and acquiring resources, did not resemble the realities experienced, involving infrastructure, matrix management, hierarchy, and bureaucracy. Various paradigms for deconstructing these experiences, such as post-colonialism, culture clash, and ‘contact zone’ theory, all only partially explain the challenges encountered. These experiences in Namibia provide a case study of the politics of collaboration involved in implementing a writing center, and a microcosm of the challenges one might face anywhere. This account is thus 'glocal'; that is, locally derived but with global applications. Eleven specific guidelines can assist anyone contemplating a similar administrative assignment.

Shivers-McNair and Inman analyze and reflect upon the dissolution of a partnership between their institution's basic writing program and writing center. In their network reading of the partnership, the authors argue that their efforts to combat institutional discourses about students and faculty in two marginalized programs were complicated by asymmetrical relations of power. The authors conclude with reflections on possibilities for partnerships and collaborations between marginalized programs.

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.

This article examines how the broader political-educational climat in the United States impacts the presence of writing centers on university campuses as well as the shape(s) those writing centers take Using a representative sample of nearly 400 accredited institutions, th researcher explores the relationship between individualized writin support offered on university campuses and stratification of education opportunities in the U.S. Through an examination of such variable of university structure as enrollment size, sector (public, private, or for-profit), institutional type, and location, the researcher correlates the structure of writing centers to the structure of their surroundin institutions. Ultimately, the essay suggests that universities' differen approaches to supporting student writing are reflective of the larger legislative environment in the U.S. as well as what the universit perceives its role to be in relation to its students.

This essay argues for a broad theoretical perspective in writing center work that simultaneously contextualizes tutoring practices and complements research agendas. Writing center scholarship shows considerable resistance to both empirical research agendas and theoretical perspectives. Confronting this, the author chooses to examine the issue of directive/nondirective tutoring to evaluate theory as a framework.

This article traces authorship and citation patterns in The Writing Center Journal ( WCJ) from 1980 to 2009, a data set that consists of 241 WCJ articles containing 4,095 total citations. What these data demonstrate is that WCJ has been dominated by single-authored articles that are citing sources that largely appear just once -except for Stephen North's "The Idea of a Writing Center," which appears in nearly every third article's list of works cited -and that the most frequent source for citations is WCJ itself. This inward gaze is an indication of a tight-knit genealogy, an unpromising present that does not quite seem healthy for the biodiversity of future generations, as well as a missed opportunity to oifer writing centers as sites of intellectual engagement to composition studies as whole.

2002b), Neal Lerner (2009),

55 resources, the authors report studying 54, and the bibliography identifies 62. It seems odd in such a meticulous study that the sources of the data are not exact.

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

Writing centers can be staffed wholly or partially by tutors with little training in science writing. This article suggests that an emphasis on scientific rhetoric, not content, may be most useful for training tutors and developing handouts and checklists to aid novice science writers in invention and revision. The article also suggests that a training program in science writing can be informed by local science faculty’s major concerns. However, these faculty discussions toward tutor training should be supplemented through WAC-WID and genre research to retain a training focus on the connection between scientific thought and scientific writing, science writings’ primary genre families, and the delivery of scientific writing to different audiences.

This profile presents Stetson University’s writing program at the moment of transition from a typical one-course writing requirement housed in the English Department to an embedded, cross-curricular, multi-course writing requirement. The first stage of this transition was triggered when a new conceptually-based, writing intensive General Education curriculum required the development of WI courses; the second stage, building upon the faculty development initiatives surrounding WI course implementation, saw a broader infusion of writing instruction throughout the Stetson curriculum and the rejuvenation of the University Writing Center with a multidisciplinary support philosophy. As a result of these core changes in Stetson’s writing instruction, the one-course writing requirement is obsolete; writing instruction at Stetson is incorporated both vertically and horizontally.

This program profile describes how a writing center embedded within a major school of business negotiates its unique positionality. Tracing both the successes and shortcomings of a writing initiative tasked with improving the school’s quality of writing, the profile offers a number of insights on both WAC and writing center work, including how to enact curricular change, encourage faculty to incorporate writing into their classes, maintain programmatic continuity with frequent turnover of graduate student administrators, and consult effectively with undergraduate students. Several sites of analysis are addressed, as the initiative seeks to remain committed to its mission while encountering various challenges.

Reviewed are: Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring by Harry C. Denny. Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan. I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric by Frankie Condon. Logan A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966, new ed. by Joseph Harris Language and Learning in the Digital Age by James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes Contemporary Literature: The Basics by Suman Gupta The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives edited by Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt

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This article reports on an action research study designed to stimulate the metacognitive awareness of the writing of assignments in English of a group of students from diverse language and educational backgrounds, studying health science education at masters level. In the study, students were required to give and receive feedback on a marked written assignment to a peer, and receive feedback from a consultant working at the Writing Lab. They were then required to submit a reflective report, which constitutes the key data source for this study. An analysis of the reflective reports revealed that the students claimed that they learnt about their writing habits, about good academic writing, and about the experience of giving and receiving feedback. The study suggests that although an intervention making extensive use of a variety of sources of feedback appears to be able to stimulate students’ metacognitive functioning in relation to their writing of assignments, a number of issues require concerted attention. These issues include: power relations and emotion, perceptions of legitimate authority, and the central role of the lecturer as disciplinary expert and guide. The article concludes with a recommendation for enhanced attention to intersubjective relations of power, language and identity in relation to feedback on writing, especially when peer feedback is involved.

Reviewed are: Composition’s Roots in English Education, by Patricia Lambert Stock, reviewed by Mark Blaauw-Hara Exploring More Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind, edited by Nancy L. Chick, Aeron Haynie, and Regan A. R. Gurung, Reviewed by Yvonne Bruce Before and After the Tutorial: Writing Centers and Institutional Relationships, edited by Nicholas Mauriello, William J. Macauley Jr., and Robert T. Koch, Reviewed by Kristen Welch

Writing centers have long been rich sites of critical inquiry into individualized instructional styles and methods. One of the great writing center debates involves directive versus nondirective tutoring styles and methods. While many writing center scholars have discussed the intricacies of directive or interventionist versus nondirective or minimalist pedagogical methods, few have examined the rhetorical implications of this important debate in relation to more classroom-based peer collaborations. This article rhetorically analyzes the literature on directive/nondirective methods and various approaches to tutoring writing, drawing pedagogical and rhetorical connections and implications useful for all teachers of writing and rhetoric.

Writing center tutors know that improving writing skills requires sustained effort over a long period of time. They also know that motivation - the drive to actively invest in sustained effort toward a goal- is essential for writing improvement. However, a tutor may not work with the same student more than once, so tutorials often need to focus on what can be done in a single 30- to 60-minute conference. Further, although tutors are likely to attempt to motivate students to invest time and effort in improving their writing, when writers leave the writing center, tutors' influence might end with the conference. Therefore, tutors must work to develop and maintain students' motivation to participate actively during the brief time they are collaborating in writing center conferences.

I showed up for work on my first day of work and they didn 't even have an office for me. The writing center was just an empty classroom filled with just dirt and boxes and ladybugs. Ladybugs, which is actually an omen of good fortune , which is kind of interesting. And so I sat down at a computer I found in the library and I started typing and I typed a philosophy

Published on 01/01/13

At three different institutions, public and private, in varying roles, I have found the very particular problem of how to inform micro-level classroom practices with macro-level disciplinary knowledge to be centrally important to our field’s development and our students’ learning—and singularly difficult to overcome. In this program profile, I outline how we have worked (and are still working) to overcome this problem at the University of Central Florida and describe some of our successes in reducing reliance on contingent labor and gaining support and resources for the elements of a vertical writing education (writing center, WAC program, minor, and certificate) beyond first-year composition.

Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, edited by Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan, Reviewed by Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Green, edited by Brooke Rollins and Lee Bauknight, Reviewed by Beverly Faxon, Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vols. 1 and 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Reviewed by Rebecca Powell, Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric, edited by David M. Sheridan and James A. Inman, Reviewed by Vincent D. Robles

This article explicates the benefits of linking writing center consultant training with first-year composition and provides readers with guidance for engaging in such a collaboration.

This article claims that working with peer tutors in a writing center can be very valuable for the center’s development, if the director and tutors work together according to crucial principles in writing center pedagogy. Based on the example of the writing center at European University Viadrina, this article shows how the ideas of autonomy and collaboration for both writing support and writing center leadership led to the writing center’s growth.

the University of Limerick, Ireland, and hosted by the Regional Writing Centre at the University of Limerick, took as its focus the role of the student experience in shaping academic writing development in higher education.The EATAW 2011 conference brought together 280 participants to contribute to discussion of how to enhance the student experience through writing development.Conference delegates included writing teachers and researchers, writing centre and writing programme administrators, staff developers, and professional and peer writing tutors.