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

Published on 01/01/10

Her current research interests are in the areas of the effectiveness of writing center rhetoric and the implications of individualized instruction as a defining writing center principle.

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

Published on 01/01/10

Reviewed are: Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life Edited by Sean P. Murphy, Reviewed by Lois Birky Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being by Deborah Dean, Reviewed by Meredith DeCosta Ideas That Work in College Teaching, Edited by Robert L. Badger, Reviewed by Raymond Bergeron Inside the Community College Writing Center: Ten Guiding Principles by Ellen G. Mohr, Reviewed by Deborah Bertsch Essential Literary Terms: A Brief Norton Guide with Exercises by Sharon Hamilton, Reviewed by John Benson

In this microanalysis, a university writing center conference with an experienced tutor and a student he has never met before is analyzed for the tutor’s use of direct instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding. Along with verbal expressions of scaffolding, this analysis also considers the tutor’s hand gestures—topic gestures, which operationalize instruction and cognitive scaffolding, and interactive gestures, which operationalize motivational scaffolding. As defined in this analysis, instruction is the most directive of the three strategies and includes telling. Also directive, cognitive scaffolding leads and supports the student in making correct and useful responses, while motivational scaffolding provides feedback and helps maintain focus on the task and motivation. The microanalysis points to the importance of the student’s cognitive and motivational readiness to learn and the need for the student to control the agenda throughout the conference. It also contextualizes admonitions against tutor directiveness.

Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls “the democratic paradox” and insists is the essence of a “well-functioning democracy” that supports pluralistic goals. The following article argues that a similar logic shapes writing center work and, therefore, any attempt to promote change must likewise embrace the democratic paradox as it manifests itself in the writing center: “the writing center paradox.”

The Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) is a deeply integrated model for writing programs, bringing together the writing center, first-year writing, basic writing, professional development activities, graduate coursework, and research activities to re-imagine and support twenty-first-century literacies. What is unique about CLiC is not merely the extent of this integration but the non-traditional populations from which research and best practices emerge: The vast majority of our undergraduates are first-generation college students.This webtext discusses the need for programs like this one as well as the specific steps we have taken to develop CLiC (and why). It includes video, audio, web, and text-based media elements.

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

Published on 01/01/09

We cannot remake the world through schooling , but we can instantiate a vision through pedagogy that creates in microcosm a transformed set of relationships and possibilities for social futures , a vision that is lived in schools.

in technology and other influences may necessitate re-evaluation of writing center theories and pedagogies.She lives in Muncie, Indiana with her husband, two little boys, and feisty cat.At the turn of the century, John Trimbur predicted that writing centers would become "Multiliteracy Centers," drawing on the terminology of the New London Group (30).These re -envisioned centers, he suggested, would provide help for students working on a variety of projects: essays, reports, PowerPoint presentations, web pages, and posters.His prediction has proved true to some degreemost notably in the state of Michigan.The University of Michigan's Sweetland Writing Center opened a Multiliteracy Center in 2000

important to you." Tiffany nods agreement."I couldn 't have a friend that wasn V loyal to me-and Id

research interests include disability rhetoric and the role of exigency in the teaching of writing. Her dissertation explores how information about students' beliefs

Published on 01/01/09

Writing faculty, tutors, and librarians at West Virginia University took a team-approach to teaching research, reading, and writing as intertwined processes. This collaborative project encouraged each member of the team to re-examine professional and disciplinary boundaries, and resulted in new assignments and activities that successfully engage students in researched writing.

This analysis of the Writing Across the Curriculum section of the TYCA national survey of writing programs covers Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines programs and initiatives, as well as writing centers and the overall satisfaction with two-year institutions’ integration of Writing Across the Curriculum.

The attempt of writing center consultants to discourage faculty from requiring classes to visit the writing center led to research that calls this longstanding practice into question.

Originally published in a 1984 issue of College English, Stephen North’s article “The Idea of a Writing Center” has over the years been much cited in writing center scholarship. Even so, this scholarship as a whole did not proceed to gain much presence in CE and other broadly-oriented composition journals. Reconsidering North’s piece, the authors argue for greater attention now to writing centers as sites for potentially valuable scholarly inquiry.

The books under review here envision models of professional development not as episodes of developing skills or training faculty to conform to changing laws, rules, and pet projects of administrators, but rather as collaborative processes of education and reflection that encourage faculty to rethink their practices. They draw on research in composition theory and pedagogy, suggesting that more effective learning takes place when teachers trust learners to consider their own need for knowledge, invite learners to devise variations and applications of received knowledge, and resist keeping things simple to be sure they are correct. Applying different focuses, these books consider how to put teacher-learners at the center of the process of their own professional development. Jeffrey Jablonski argues that the expertise developed in composition studies needs to be recognized and respected in initiatives to implement Cross-Curricular Literacy programs. The writers of The Everyday Writing Center consider how, in the midst of increased professionalization, to maintain the serendipitous—even carnivalesque, at times—learning and teaching that the intimate and nonhierarchical space of a writing center can foster. And the collective wisdom in The Writing Center Director's Resource Book surveys the current state of writing center theory and practice, providing a reflective guide for developing the expertise of writing center administrators, who are (or could be) leaders in campus faculty development efforts.

Able to link tutors across distance while closely approximating the tenor of face-to-face tutoring (f2f), synchronous audio-video-textual conferencing (AVT) is a semiotically rich medium that sustains critical “social cues” and enhances interaction and exchange. The authors theorize and demonstrate the potential of synchronous digital exchange, including functions that surpass the affordances of paper-based f2f tutorials—such as real-time modeling and web-based referencing.

This paper describes how one group of Euro-American, middle-class two-year-olds living in the southern US learned to form and enact locally appropriate textual intentions and literate identities as they participated in writing events. Data were collected during a nine-month ethnographic study of two-year-olds’ and adults’ interactions at a preschool writing table.

Review of Sine Cera: A Diverse City Writing Series Anthology: Two Old Guys From Brooklyn by the Salt Lake City, SLCC Community Writing Centre.

In this article, an English education professor, a university writing center administrator, and a recent graduate of an undergraduate English education program discuss the role peer tutoring might play in enhancing the education of preservice teachers of writing. The authors argue that by providing additional, authentic field experiences which reflect constructivist, student-centered philosophies often adhered to in English education programs, university peer tutoring can provide undergraduate students with authentic experience in learning collaboratively, developing rapport with students, and conducting student-centered, one-to-one writing conferences.

Who doesn't love a good story?A tale of triumph or woe, of frustration or longawaited success.Such classic narratives are familiar to us all, and versions of them occur in the writing center with relative frequency.These stories we tell -whether of current successes or challenges, passed from veteran tutors to newbies, from directors to faculty and back again -teach us about our work, helping us to reflect on it and improve it.These stories are filled with compelling characters and recurring plots: the frustrated first-year student; the instructor's cryptic comments; the first scientific paper written for a major professor; the challenging task of figuring out the genre of the dissertation.These stock scenarios are familiar to us because they have all taken place in the relatively patterned institutions that host our writing centers, and these persistent patterns represent a script of sorts, one we can easily follow, whether we're the actors themselves or the audience listening to someone else's writing center stories.Patterns, of course, do get disrupted.In many ways, writing centers are in the business of disrupting patterns, working with writers to develop new approaches to writing tasks and changed relationships to their academic work.Those of us who work in writing centers must also be prepared to have our patterns disrupted, to hear how writers are really engaging with their texts: the English Language Learner who is not asking for proofreading assistance but who instead wants to know whether the evidence she presents in her argument is convincing; the chemistry student who comes in with a laboratory report, a genre often associated with arcane language and fill-in-the-blank templates, and turns the conversation quickly to her excitement over the research she is doing and the ways she might convey the essence of that research to a general reader; the returning student enrolled in an

Writing center directors have often valued narratives, using them to understand students in rich ways, to train tutors effectively, and to build knowledge about writing center practice and theory (

Published on 01/01/08

This "From the Editors" segment, positioned in the text as a foreword, is in many ways a coda, concluding six years of our work together, twelve issues of this publication culled from 191 submissions from the field's many talented, dedicated teachers and scholars.In our initial "From the Editors" contribution (23.1), we quite literally looked forward -to a new look for the journal, to the authors and articles awaiting us, and to all we would learn about the field of writing centers, working on the inside of its knowledge-making process.True to our writing center roots and historical interests, however, we quickly looked back.Way back.By our second issue (23.2), we offered highlights from 100 years of writing center history, sampling from the work of Fred Newton Scott, E. L. Holcomb, Mickey Harris

Published on 01/01/08

Many engineering undergraduates receive their first and perhaps most intensive exposure to engineering communication through writing lab reports in lab courses taught by graduate teaching assistants (TAs). Most of the TAs' teaching of writing happens through their comments on students' lab reports. Technical writing faculty need to be aware of TAs' response practices so they can build on or counteract that instruction as needed. This study examines the response practices of two TAs and the ways the practices shifted after the TAs began using a grading rubric. The analysis reveals distinct patterns in focus and mode, some reflecting best practices and some not. It also indicates encouraging changes after the TAs started using the grading rubric. The TAs' marginalia became more content focused and specific and, perhaps most important, less authoritative and more likely to reflect a coaching mode. The article concludes with implications for technical writing courses.

What does it mean for a community writing assistance program to bridge the gap between the university and the community? What makes for a successful alliance between these two worlds usually considered distinct? Our paper addresses these questions by reflecting on the factors that have contributed to the growing success of our CWA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Taking into account the varied alliances forged through our work — between the funding organization, instructors, community leaders, and writers themselves — we hope to offer a multi-faceted picture of local literacy outreach and partnership.

Like many writing centers, ours trained us to respond to writers whose papers might involve plagiarism; we learned to show students

Published on 01/01/07

The last twenty five years have witnessed a number of profound changes in the landscape of higher education, changes that have been collectively described as a shift towards the "managed university." Although other terms have also been proposed to name this shift, there is wide agreement about some of the basic characteristics of the trend.1 The power of corporate interests to shape higher education funding and policy has grown, and many colleges and universities have themselves adopted overtly business-oriented models of management. Institutions are making aggressive efforts to cut costs and maximize revenues in the face of diminished state subsidies. Among the many results of such changes has been the emergence of a new kind of "academic capitalism" (Rhoades and Slaughter) that shifts resources away from a wide range of traditional, but economically marginal, university activities, and redirects them to activities that generate revenues and enhance the competitive position of US corporations in the global economy.

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