Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

Designing an online course that focuses on multimodality and community building—where community encompasses the online space and the larger society and can be uniquely fostered by metacognitive engagements—can promote student success as literate citizens within and beyond academia. Metacognitive reflection, in our case linked to the canon of Memory, can guide students to reconsider how elements of the course can affect their learning and their work in their future careers.

Tutoring represents a necessary service for students enrolled in open-admission institutions such as our regional campus which serves a diverse group of students, many of them in developmental writing courses. As the COVID-19 pandemic caused many universities to transition to fully remote instruction in March 2020, academic services were also asked to find innovative ways to assist these students remotely. For two English tutors, this meant improving the existing OWL, while also implementing a remote synchronous option to help students with their writing. The article reports on the two tutors’ efforts as they prepared for fall 2020 and on the multiple challenges they faced throughout the fall 2020 and spring 2021 semesters. As their end-of-semester reflections show, the campus took a while to respond to the new remote Learning Center offerings, and some offerings were more popular than others. The two tutors attempted to establish a new remote normal while also trying to balance their personal and professional lives. Working from home, however, left them feeling drained as technology limited them during synchronous sessions, and their Learning Center duties began to take precedence over their education and personal lives, impacting their mental well-being. The only positive aspect of the experience came from their collaboration, as the bond they had built from sharing the Learning Center space for years provided them with the strength needed to fulfill their duties. As the campus contemplates the move back to in-person instruction, the two tutors must now consider what their duties will be in fall 2021. Keywords : COVID-19 pandemic, remote synchronous tutoring, work-life balance, burnout

As a component of the Community of Inquiry Framework, social presence is typically defined as students “feeling real” enough to interact with and learn from peers online. This article complicates social presence for an online writing instruction (OWI) context, differentiating between social presence, social comfort, attitudes about online learning, and social learning. The study was initially designed to examine graduate students’ perceptions of social presence as an element of online teaching and learning in two sections of an Online Composition Pedagogy course offered in Spring 2020 and Summer 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the project, since students were now learning about hybrid and online pedagogy against the backdrop of their own experiences as emergency remote students and teachers. Analysis of 21 students’ reflections written during the courses indicates that distinguishing between social presence per se and social comfort, attitudes, and learning helps to account for the individual and social contexts of course participants. Ultimately, this article argues that simply inviting students to “feel real” or positioning yourself as a “real” instructor is not sufficient for establishing the types of social interactions that composition studies values.

Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the critical theory minor at Boise State University, where he teaches theoretical psychoanalysis, postcoloniality and globalization studies, and literature of the British Empire. His books include Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (2015), Lacan and the Nonhuman (coedited, 2018), Postcolonial Lack (2020), and Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII (coedited, 2020).Saradindu Bhattacharya teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications have been in the domains of trauma studies, young adult literature, and the pedagogy of English. He has been teaching cultural studies, Renaissance literature, and new literatures in English at the postgraduate level. Additionally, he has also taught elective courses on nation, media, and popular culture and on children's literature. He particularly enjoys teaching English poetry and reading dystopian fiction.Jolie Braun is curator of modern literature and manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she oversees the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include women publishers and booksellers, zines, and self-publishing. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, American Periodicals, and Textual Cultures: Texts, Contents, and Interpretation.Craig Carey is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, book history, media theory, and game studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Arizona Quarterly, among others. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the relationship between authors, archives, and invention in the age of realism.Moira A. Connelly is associate professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, TN. She has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Her research interests include equity in collaborative writing, writing transfer, writing about writing, responding to the writing of multilingual students, community college teaching, and applying ideas from the academy to activist spaces.Jathan Day is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research explores how writing instructors’ organizational and design decisions in the Canvas LMS affect the ways their students write and learn.Cassandra Falke is professor of English literature at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she teaches an introduction to literature, literary theory, romanticism, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) and Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013) as well as articles and book chapters on literary theory, phenomenology, romanticism, working-class writing, and liberal arts education. She has edited or coedited five collections and special issues.Paul Feigenbaum is associate professor in the Department of English at Florida International University and coeditor of the Community Literacy Journal. His research, teaching, and engagement interests include community literacy, public rhetoric, and the intersections between rhetoric and psychology. His scholarship has appeared in journals including College English, Reflections, and Composition Forum. His first book, Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education, was published in 2015.Dustin Friedman is associate professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC. His fields of research and teaching are Victorian literature and culture, aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century writing. He is the author of Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (2019). His writings have appeared in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2019), the Journal of Modern Literature (2015), ELH (2013), Literature Compass (2010), and Studies in Romanticism (2009).Helena Gurfinkel is professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches primarily critical theory and Victorian literature and culture. She is the author of Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (2014; paperback 2017) and is currently writing a book on the Soviet television and film adaptations of the works of Oscar Wilde. She has published extensively in pedagogy, literary and film studies, gender studies, and critical theory. She is editor of PLL: Papers on Language and Literature.Sarah Hughes is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, where she also teaches in the English Department Writing Program. Her research explores how women use multimodal discourse—grammatically, narratively, and visually—to navigate online gaming ecologies.Andrew Moos is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on how writing instructors can and are using antiracist assessment and feedback practices in writing classrooms to empower students.Julie Sievers is founding director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Southwestern University, where she also teaches. At the time of this research, she was teaching literature and writing courses at St. Edward's University, where she also directed the Center for Teaching Excellence. Previously, she taught English and composition on the tenure-track at Denison University and in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published on literature, pedagogy, and faculty development in the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Literature, the New England Quarterly, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, and the Journal of Faculty Development. She is currently studying annotation pedagogy in the context of first-year seminar courses.Danielle Sutton is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University. She works at the intersections of life writing, children's literature, and memory studies and is especially interested in comics and verse memoirs of childhood. She lives in Normal, IL.Kathryn Van Zanen is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on ethical negotiation in writing and writing instruction, particularly among raised-evangelicals writing back to their home communities on social media.Crystal Zanders is a poet, educator, activist, and public speaker from Tennessee. As a Rackham Merit Fellow in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, her research focuses on Black teachers’ use of African American English in pre-integration classrooms in the South.

Readers can explore 13 teaching innovations presented at the 2020 Association for Business Communication (ABC) annual international conference hosted online. Typically held in a large hotel ballroom, this year’s My Favorite Assignment sessions were adapted to an asynchronous virtual conference. These assignments are designed to teach managing complex communication, enhance cross-cultural communication, and building essential technical skills. This article is the second in a two-part series. The first appeared in the June 2021 issue. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the ABC website: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments .

In this multimodal video dialogue, three writing center directors at small, regional, public colleges and universities discuss their experiences with remote tutoring amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Each speaker came into new writing center administrative positions during the pandemic. Speakers each discuss their recent experiences with the technological shifts they, their tutors, and their institutions have developed, and how those changes impact perceptions of collaboration and equity. In so doing, they hope to highlight the ways in which writing center administrators are thinking about technology’s influence on tutoring, instruction, and students’ daily lives, as well as highlight the challenges and opportunities this pandemic has provided them. Keywords : writing centers, peer tutoring, technology, online learning, critical pedagogy, higher education administration Click here for link to the audio/video recording for this transcript . Russell Mayo : Hello! We are three new writing center directors working at regional and local colleges and universities across the US, and we’re having a conversation together about navigating and adapting writing centers through a pandemic and justifying our work in new contexts. We’re going to introduce ourselves and talk a little bit and have a brief conversation around this work and the experiences we’ve had this semester. My name is Russell Mayo. I am an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University Northwest (PNW) in Hammond, Indiana. I’m also the Writing Center Director there. This is my first year at PNW. My teaching and research focus is on writing, pedagogy, and environmental humanities. Currently I’m teaching First Year Writing (FYW) courses, but I will also be teaching English Education and Writing/Rhetorical Studies courses in the coming semesters. Eric Camarillo : Hi everyone. My name is Eric Camarillo. I am Director of the Learning Commons at Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC). It’s a role I started in August 2020. I oversee testing, tutoring, the library, and user support services—and of course the Writing Center is contained within the Tutoring Center there. My research focuses really on asynchronous tutoring at the moment, but in the past I’ve discussed things like anti-racism in writing centers, as well as “neutrality” in writing centers and trying to break some “best practices” there. Elise Dixon : Hi, I’m Elise Dixon. I am the Writing Center Director and an Assistant Professor of English at University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP). I started that position in August. Currently I’m teaching FYW, Writing Center training courses, and currently I’m slated to teach a graduate course on activist rhetorics in the summer. My research focus is generally on queer and cultural rhetorics, and those intersections with activists making, and of course writing center studies. Russell Mayo : We are all former TPR contributors. We were all featured in the 2018 Special Issue 2.1 on Cultural Rhetorics (Choffel, Garcia, & Goodman, 2018). Eric and Elise, you have contributed to other issues as well, right? Elise Dixon : Yes. Russell Mayo : And so part of this conversation again is just to talk about our experiences in this unique semester, and especially being new administrators. So I’m going to start by talking a little bit about what I’ve been struck with in my work with FYW students and writing tutors this semester, which is this sudden shift to technologically-mediated education, and the pandemic has thrust this upon us whether we wanted it or not. And in thinking about this shift, I am reminded of the 1998 talk by cultural critic Neil Postman (2014) entitled “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.” I read this first with some of my students in a FYW class a few years ago where we focused on the social impacts of technology. I think it’s really great, and I think you should check it out. It might be really useful for yourself or for your tutors as well thinking about these questions. Postman (2014) asserts the five critical points on technology and change. While it’s quite old, I still think it speaks to our current lives in schools today. I’d like to quickly summarize Postman’s (2014) five main points, and then I’ll talk through a couple of them and how they relate to tutoring at the moment. These are the five Postman (2014) says: I want to talk about the first three. So the first one, “all technological change is a trade-off.” For this, Neil Postman (2014) is pushing us to think dialectically about how moving to something like remote learning has offered many benefits but also drawbacks for writers and tutors. So I have a lot of experiences and anecdotes to share for this; I’m sure you all do. I’m thinking about how, in a positive way, how nimbley and quickly so much of our peer tutoring work was able to shift online—especially in comparison to the struggles of K-12 education, FYW classes, or many other university functions. Rhetorically speaking, that’s because writing centers operate around a logic of one-to-one dialogue, an ethos of peer-to-peer learning, and we also harness the kairotic moments of learning (Bruffee, 1984; Kail, 1984; Harris, 1992; Wood, 2017). This is all instead of the top-down curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, happening at pre-set times and determined places that are common to other schooling arrangements. Part of what peer tutoring offers, I think, can remain in an online format, and we’ve seen that this semester, successfully (Yergeau, et al., 2008; Bell, 2006). But I think a lot is lost in the move online as well, as we want to make sure not to forget about those. I think in particular for the tutors, there’s a sense of a loss of mutuality and a shared sense of a space and a place where the tutors work together and interact together. Not during the session necessarily but before and after—those in-between times. We haven’t found a way to replicate that in any digital space. The camaraderie between tutors is not necessarily as strong. And I also think that potentially leads to some burn-out or some sense of dislocation: an unmooring for tutors. For some of them, the real joy was that in-between space of tutoring, and that also pushed them to be better, to ask questions of each other (Geller et al, 2007; Boquet, 2002). And the connections of an administrator certainly, and as somebody who teaches tutors really—a lot is lost when I don’t see them on a given day. So we’re really struggling to figure out how to train new tutors for next semester which we didn’t do this fall, given the lack of face-to-face interactions or the ability to overhear something in the writing center that you don’t quite do online. The second point that Postman made is about “the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies,” and the unevenness of that. Another way to say that is that COVID-19 has affected everyone, but not everyone is affected equally by COVID-19. This semester seems to have exacerbated the socioeconomic gap for tutors and for writers overall. The ‘haves’ seem to be doing fine. Many of them with the time, the space, the technology, the strong internet may even be thriving in an environment like this [1] . There’s wider availability of recorded lectures and teacher notes, and that level of accessibility really wasn’t a part of higher education before this point. But, on the other hand, I’m meeting with far too many tutors and writers who are taking a full load of classes and working full time. They’re calling into my class while at work. Many don’t have a reliable computer or internet access, or a quiet place to sit and learn and study, and they’re not able to do that in the way they used to on campus. This is true for the large number of our First-Gen students we have at PNW. I see a lot of people who are overworked and exhausted and just kind of going through the motions. They’re not experiencing any intellectual joy or connection that we have with in-person learning. What’s lost for them is due to no fault of their own. Many of them are going into debt for an education that is unfulfilling and unresponsive to their needs at the moment, and I think that’s something for us to think a lot about. The last point, and then I’ll end here, is that “embedded in every technology there is a powerful [but potentially hidden] idea.” I don’t really know what that is for Zoom. Is it that learning is done by lecture and presentation—a virtual TED Talk? Does Zoom reduce teaching to talking and learning to listening, what Paulo Freire (1970/2000) would call “banking education”? If so, has the pandemic-induced, video-mediated learning environment degraded the central closeness and connection we have sitting at a table together, listening to each other, looking together on a screen, and sharing and negotiation through speaking and listening in a common space that we once did and are not currently doing? These are just some of the questions that I think Postman’s (2014) work helps us to think about—as teachers, scholars, writing center administrators, and tutors—and keep me thinking about as I move forward. Eric Camarillo : Great, thank you. I think that kind of aligns with some of my own research with asynchronous writing center consultations. So I first became interested in asynchronous tutoring in Fall 2019 as part of one of my Ph.D. classes, when I realized there really was this gap in the knowledge of how we understand (1) how online tutoring works, and (2) asynchronous online tutoring and how that works. At my former institution, they had a really long track record of asynchronous tutoring. It was really part of their services, part of their suite of things they were doing. And so I never thought much about it, I just assumed others also understood how to do asynchronous writing center consultations. That turned out to not always be the case. At some places before the pandemic, they weren’t really doing any online tutoring: they didn’t have the platform, didn’t have the infrastructure. So for my own research, I draw a bit from a few different areas—really from Kathryn Denton’s (2017) “Beyond the Lore: The Case of Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research.” One of the points that she makes early on in the text, and kind of throughout, is this idea of asynchronous tutoring as being some kind of subpar alternative “step-child” of writing centers, where people don’t really want to do it. They will do it sometimes if they have to, if there’s a demand or if administration is like, “You should really be doing this.” They’ll do it if they really have to but there’s not always a lot of interest in it. By far, most centers are more interested in that face-to-face, traditional consultation, which is understandable. It’s a very rich, powerful form of tutorial, and steeped in history. It’s really where we’re getting a lot of our research and data from. There’s just decades of research—and probably more, if you want to go really, really old to tutoring generally (Van Horne, 2012; Neaderhiser & Wolfe, 2009; Breuch, 2005; Rosalia, 2013; Wolfe, & Griffin, 2012; Palmquist, 2003; Lerner, 1998; Casal & Lee, 2014). Certainly, with modern writing centers, decades of research on face-to-face consultation. The problem, I think, that many writing center administrators have with trying to implement asynchronous tutoring is that they’re trying to apply traditional writing center best practices to this model. I’ve argued elsewhere (Camarillo, 2020; 2020), where trying to just overlay best practices from a synchronous model to an asynchronous one is just not appropriate; it’s just not going to work. Because the key tenet in the best practices is this idea of “being there” with the student (Riley-Mukavetz, 2014). So a lot of that collaboration requires being there in real time with the student, especially when it comes to asking leading questions or Socratic questions, which don’t really make sense if you’re leaving feedback on a document in an asynchronous way. Because then your questions are acontextual; you have to do a lot more explaining in order to make them work. So coming from my background at University of Houston-Victoria (UHV), where they had a long history of asynchronous writing tutoring, to my current institution HACC, they had only really done drop-in tutoring for years. That was really their primary mode of tutoring. In early 2020, they started a pilot for online Zoom tutoring, and then of course by March that was all they were doing. And so it was very interesting comparing UHV’s experience to HACC’s. Because at HACC, when the pandemic started, pivoting to online appointments was really simple. We were using Upswing, which is a third-party product to help host all of our appointments and host all of our actual sessions. And so really it was just a matter of listing every tutor as an “Online” tutor. Very simple. HACC’s experience was a little bit different. Suddenly, you had to deal with Zoom links, making sure the Zoom room works, and making sure that everything was password secured, or that there was a waiting room because you didn’t want to get “Zoom Bombed,” things like that. I’m in this really interesting position of comparing, of trying to draw on one experience and comparing it to another. We’ve begun our HACC’s Online Writing Lab, which means students can submit essays to us electronically through email—but carefully tracked and assessed. To me, it’s just really exciting to be in this kind of position where everything is really new and everyone’s really open to new ideas. I’m able to bring some of my experience and my research that I’ve been advocating for about a year now, that we should really be doing more of. And so thinking about technology and asynchronous tutoring, and about how this will shift the way HACC, and probably other institutions, work in the future is also really exciting. How does that change tutoring for us? We’ve opened this door, right, and there’s probably no going back to just drop-in tutoring. I think students will always want the flexibility of doing something on Zoom so they don’t have to come to campus. Being able to submit things to an email account so they can go to work, and then in the evening, or the next day, they can come back and their essay’s there and then they can then apply that feedback. I’m at a community college, I’m working with students who work, and we’re trying to make sure that they’re able to access the services that we offer when they need to access those services. Elise Dixon: Okay, wow. You both brought up so many great points and I think I want to touch on a couple of things from what you both said. First, when I’m thinking about Postman’s “Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change,” I’m thinking about the fourth idea, actually, that “technological change is not additive, it’s ecological.” This to me really harkens back to cultural rhetorics, ideologies of understanding that our lives are made up of these layers of interactions with each other and the stories that we’re telling each other over time (Powell et al., 2014; Bratta & Powell, 2016). And I see that quite clearly at my institution right now, in terms of what we’re doing in the writing center but also what our students are responding to to the primarily technological education that they’re getting right now over Zoom. They key point that I wanted to talk about today was: I think, for me, at my institution, the writing center now has a lot of evidence—a lot more evidence than usual—of the big gap between student understanding of what’s going on in the course and teacher understanding of what’s going on in the course. I see that evidence popping up in writing and in the way that teachers are evaluating. It’s no longer just a hand-written note, but it’s something that is on Zoom, WebEx, or Canvas, that the student can then just send right over to me as the Writing Center Director. So the metacognitive capabilities of talking about the moves that writers are supposed to make, those are difficult skills for faculty members to learn. And it takes a lot of time, and it’s especially hard if you don’t have a rhetoric and composition or English background. I see those gaps in understanding all the time. The additional complication of that is that there’s now the metacognitive conversation about the moves we’re supposed to be making technologically over Zoom, or over an online course. One example I wanted to bring up was this: for some background, my campus is very racially diverse and very unique. We’re the most racially diverse campus in the Southeast. What I’ve seen is that there’s a big gap in what our faculty members say to primarily the students of color who come into the Writing Center. One example that I can think of is: one day, I received a phone call from a student who was desperate. And she said, I have gotten a note from my professor that says that I have “markup” on my paper, and that any further papers that I turn in with “markup” will be immediately given a zero. And she said, “I don’t know what ‘markup’ is, and I said, “I don’t know what ‘markup’ is either! I’m not sure what your professor means.” And she indicated to me that she felt a little bit unsure of asking this professor because not only was there a gap in understanding, but there was a gap in proximity. She’d never met this man in person. She did not know how to interact with him, and all of her interactions had been either over Zoom or via email. So I volunteered to give him a call or to send him an email to ask what this meant. I think she was hoping that the Writing Center Director could tell her like, “Oh, well, this is the overarching definition of ‘markup,'” but there isn’t one. So I emailed this professor and he got right back to me and said, “Her ‘track changes’ are on in her document, and I can see all the changes that she has made. But, I don’t want a document like that.” And so really it had nothing to do with her writing. But he was giving her zeros for not turning off her track changes. Technically, the problem was that she didn’t know to accept all of her changes before she turned her paper in. Because as we might know, from our own personal experience, you can hide the “markup,” but that doesn’t mean it goes away. So when I emailed the student back and told her, she informed me that he had given her zeros on five papers because of this, and that she had not even turned in one of the papers because she knew that he was going to give her a zero, even though she had no idea what it was. The gap in communication there was just one tiny explanation that could have been fixed if there was a better system for having a conversation, if there was an understanding of how much of writing is about the correct or adequate utilization of the technology that we’re given. How do we communicate those needs to our students in a way that gives them the space to make mistakes and still learn? It taught me a lot, I hope that it taught the professor something too because I emailed him back and said that, “Your student was just confused, and I told her what to do. And I hope that you give her points on this and the other papers you gave zeroes to.” For me, in those moments, it was a realization that technology has become a part of UNCP’s ecology. And it has become a part of how students and teachers interact or don’t interact with each other, and how students can feel supported or not supported. I was not blind to the fact that this professor was a white man and that this student was a Black woman. And I was very sensitive to the understanding of all the power dynamics that exist in that situation. Especially on a campus that is very racially diverse, I think it’s really important for instructors to understand that we can’t just expect our professors to have these metacognitive understandings of the kinds of moves that we need our students to be making in writing but also the kinds of moves that they need to be making with technology. We have to be able to know how to explain it well. And the Writing Center can’t necessarily always do that explaining when we’re not really sure what something like “markup” is. So I think I’ll stop there, and then we can kind of have a conversation from there. Russell Mayo : Awesome. Yeah, let’s kind of unpack these and talk a little bit more. And we just met really today. So we’ve also been sharing a lot about our campuses and our roles and kind of what we’re learning in the process of this pandemic semester as well. So, yeah, where should we start? Eric Camarillo: Well, I’m really intrigued by this idea of technological prowess, Elise, about the instructor using one set of vocabulary, and that just not translating at all to what the student is capable of doing or, you know, connecting with the student. And I think it’s one way that we assume a lot of knowledge on the part of students, both in terms of what they’re able to do maybe with writing or what we expect them to do with writing, but also in terms of what we expect them to be able to do with technology. So often, I mean, we call our younger students especially “digital natives,” but really, it depends on the context, right? Like, we know that they’re very comfortable with TikTok or Twitter or Instagram, right? Snapchat. So they’re very savvy with mobile applications. But the more professional suite of services, or a professional suite of applications, is something that’s really foreign to them. So they may or may not know how to navigate Word, right? I’ve met plenty of students who really have no idea they’re even in track changes. They have no idea that they’ve even turned them on. They just think it looks like that. Or when they need to print out a paper, they don’t know how to leave them on there so they can show their instructor what they did. And these are all things that they need training on. We can’t just assume that they know these things, but increasingly that’s become part of things we just expect them to know or to already have knowledge of. Elise Dixon: Yes, I think something that that experience showed me too was that the Writing Center is often treated by both faculty and students as a go between of what students should know how to talk about and what faculty should know how to talk about. And in that case, I was a go-between. And really, the truth was that it wasn’t just a gap in student understanding, but also a gap, in fact, of this faculty member’s understanding of how to talk about how to use the technology. And we know, I think, as writing center administrators, we’ve seen an assignment sheet that a student brings into a session that don’t make no sense. And then realizing that the faculty member might not really fully know how to express in writing their own expectations of what writing looks like. When we have now this big gap in interpersonal experience, we can’t sit in a room with someone and say, “What do you mean by ‘markup?'” or whatever, we don’t get that chance to do the back and forth. One thing that I wanted to say in my little chunk of time, Eric was, we also are doing a lot of asynchronous tutoring this year. And it’s going very well. But I’m finding that, again, the work for me is finding ways to articulate how to access the technology, in such a way—through the technology—I have to teach people how to access the technology through the use of the technology and find ways to verbalize it, or put it in writing in a way that is most useful to students, and that it just feels sometimes like that gap in understanding is really more like a cavern, you know. It’s very, very tough. Russell Mayo: If I can just jump in and add on to that, too. We’ve been working with asynchronous tutoring, which there was a little bit of that before [at PNW]. So similar to what Eric was saying, that is sort of new to the students and to the tutors. And, like you’re saying, Elise, communicating that through the technology rather than face-to-face, somebody just saying “I want an appointment, where do I even begin?” Normally, people would say, “go to the second floor, and go to that particular space.” And now they’re just emailing into the web and hoping that somebody can help them from there. But it reminds me, I think there are some really good points here about how, essentially, these are two different forms of communication—the face-to-face and the digital asynchronous—and how they require different levels of trust, and detail, and explanation, and back and forth, and all of these things that is really new to students, and also to us and faculty or administrators too. There’s a lot of learning going on, and learning is messy and frustrating and takes us, you know, one step forward and two steps back sometimes. I like this idea that you brought up, Eric, about how the Socratic questions and the “being there” nature of face to face tutoring is both something that we always talk about as being really essential. And, I talked about that a little bit in my talk as well, but also that sort of rhetoric allows us to overlook some of the potential benefits of asynchronous tutoring, like you said, for the student who needs to drop off the paper before work, who can’t just go to a tutoring session at noon. And you know, for our campus, we have two different campus locations across [Midwestern state] that merged in 2016. We have two different writing centers, one very small at the Westville campus, and one that’s a bit larger at the Hammond campus. This semester, we were able to pool those tutors together into our writing center online platform and to offer both online and asynchronous tutoring for people across the campus. So in a way, we are more accessible, we’re more versatile, and we’re more connected than we ever have been before. There’s something about being there, which is both a benefit but also potentially a drawback. Because if you’re not there, then you can’t take advantage of being there. But the tutors are really learning a lot about what it means to communicate, like you said. One of the ways we’ve been doing it is—and this is actually something that we did in my former university as a grad student at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is that they adapted that I think it was just brilliant—is utilizing the communication technology between the tutor and the writer. So rather than writing up the client report form as being something for us or internal or potentially something that you email to a professor, we started to formulate it as a letter to the writer. So at the end of each session, the writer gets a letter summarizing what they did, encouraging them to keep going, talking about next steps and making sure that they feel welcome to come back. And so creating those forms as a student-facing document, as the audience for those. If your professor wants proof you came, you can forward that on to them, but that’s something that you can have that agency to do. I think just sometimes changing some of these communication techniques can be really powerful in a lot of ways. And that’s something that I’ve been reminded of that is new to what we’re doing this semester, and I think has been really, really beneficial. There’s a lot more than tutor back and forth between the writer and the tutor after that session is over. Normally, it’s just sort of sealed, but now there’s a lot more of that back and forth happening because that letter is forward-facing and generative too. Eric Camarillo : Yeah, I think when it comes to, you know, face-to-face, or online or asynchronous, to me, it’s not really about, you know, “is one better than the other?” It’s that they’re different and they serve different students differently. Being able to drive half an hour to campus for an hour-long appointment, and then drive half an hour back is a privilege. Not all students can do it, especially working students who just don’t have time. And so being able to offer a variety of supports in a number of different ways, I think is a way to maximize that kind of accessibility. And I liked what you said, Russ, about a forward-facing document. UHV has something very similar, where they were essentially asked to do a couple of different things: they would leave feedback on the paper, they would write an email back to the students, and then they would write a form, just like a short note taking thing that was internal. And so the email was something that we spent a lot of time with training folks on how to do right, because one of the things made clear to me when I first came on board was the asynchronicity there where it’s the last thing that you’re writing, but it’s the first thing that the student is reading. So you have to take that into account as you’re generating it. And I think, Elise, to touch a little bit on your point too about how technology mediates this experience for students now and how we’re using writing to talk about writing. If students have to now read to understand, right, you can’t just verbalize it. So they already have to have, or try sometimes a little harder depending on who the student is, to understand what’s been written, so when working asynchronously, the student may not have as strong of a writing ability, but perhaps their reading ability could also be strengthened, right? And so there needs to be a bit more explanation, a bit more breaking down of things in that process. Which is why I wish there was more research on asynchronous tutoring practices, to be able to know what other institutions do and how they approach this kind of work. There are a variety of ways. One thing HACC is doing that I love that I never thought to do at UHV is that you as a student can submit a paper for feedback. And then they can request a Zoom follow up session about that paper, which I think is so cool. Because then you have a student and they’ve gotten this feedback and they want maybe more. They have other questions, they want to get that additional feedback. And now they can. They can just request a Zoom session through TutorTrac or sometimes a drop-in one if one is available, depending on the tutor’s availability. But I think this is one way, at least, I’m trying to maximize that flexibility that we currently have. What is for most people, a very stressful time to be anywhere but I think especially to be a student. Elise Dixon : That makes me think of, you know, when I read through various writing center scholarship about online writing centers, quite frequently in my own research, especially up until 2010, a lot of the research was about how do we replicate a face-to-face collaborative session, right (Yergeau et al., 2008; Reno, 2010)? We’ve all been there. And this pandemic has really forced us into—maybe not forced but have given us some opportunities—to think through what you were saying, Russ, about what opportunities there are in new technologies or in using technologies in a different way that look, perhaps on the surface as not collaborative, which is what we always want, to have a collaborative writing center space. And when I first came to UNCP, I had never done an asynchronous tutoring program of any kind. And we already had one going partially because of a money situation, we were using Tutor.com. And the administration had found out that our students were using Tutor.com—the writing portion of Tutor.com—and it was costing them $28 an hour, I think, to provide that service, when the writing center was already readily available and had open spots. And so our previous interim writing center director had a talk with our dean of the University College, and they both decided that it would probably be a best idea to just create an asynchronous tutoring opportunity through the writing center. So often in my meetings this semester, even though I had some reticence over how do I make this a “collaborative” experience, I was also sort of being pressured: “Are you having a lot of asynchronous appointments? We want to make sure that you’re having a lot of asynchronous appointments because it’s all about, you know, the bottom line.” But over time, what I realized is that my students were very organically doing what you both were talking about in terms of the front-facing documentation. Because writing center tutors are trained or shown through our own work that we’re peers, that we want people to progress, and want them to learn how to be good writers on their own through our guidance. My tutors started organically having those conversations with students over email and making sure that their feedback was really explicit and gave step-by-step: “Maybe you should do this? How about this? These are three options for what you might do.” We tend to have this idea, and I think sometimes it stems from really our oldest most original writing center scholarship, like Jeff Brooks’ (1991) “Minimalist Tutoring,” that tells us that in order to be collaborative, we have to be hands off, and in order to be hands off we can’t touch the paper. And it’s very hard to be hands off when you are doing an asynchronous session. But we’re never not collaborating, even if it’s asynchronous. And, gosh, if there’s anything the pandemic has taught us it’s that we’re never not collaborating when we’re online with each other because people have continued to get things done—albeit, in weird and exhausting ways. But we have continued to get things done over the internet in many different ways. Russell Mayo : To build on that point, Elise, I think it’s really good to point out to the people who are in charge of budgets, or who ask questions about things like Tutor.com or other services: There’s something the writing center offers that goes beyond the bottom line, too, right, which is that it is a professionalizing space for the students who become tutors, and it’s a learning space. They learn so much about writing and rhetoric that our courses can’t teach them through that hands-on learning. And they move in a “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) kind of way away from the periphery and more toward the center of what it really means to do academic writing and collaborative learning. And so it’s such an invaluable resource for the people who are tutors as well that an outsourced kind of website may be cheaper—although, as you’re saying, it’s not actually—it doesn’t offer those other benefits to the university community and the community of writers that I think we can develop at a center. Eric Camarillo : Yeah, we’re in “competition” with SmartThinking, our third-party service that we use. HACC had it when we were initially in that five-campus model that I mentioned before. Now we’re in a one-college model. In that five campus model there was—and there still is a virtual learning department, and they used SmartThinking, and it was initially only for their students. So the virtual students were students taking courses asynchronously, so they were the only ones really—I don’t want to say allowed to use it, anyone could’ve used it, but it was really for them, that’s why we subscribed to them or bought them whatever you want to call it. And now, with HACC’s Online Writing Lab, that’s one of the reasons I think we have the follow-up Zoom sessions, finding ways to differentiate us from SmartThinking tutors, not to mention the other feedback that we provide. For me, I’m also a big believer in the peer tutoring model or at least the context-oriented model, right, people who know and understand the institution. Not to discredit other types of tutors who work for these companies—they know the content, but not the context. They do not know who the instructor is, they do not know what their expectations are, and sometimes you have to know in order to give that kind of—I call it actionable feedback in my research. So this kind of, “I know this professor prefers it broken down in this way,” or “They may not think of the thesis in this one way, perhaps you can revise it to this other way.” And one point I also kind of wanted to jump on is how asynchronous tutoring really breaks from the traditional face-to-face model. So with minimalist tutoring—really great example. How do you give feedback without touching the document, you know? Without “writing” on it, you know what I mean? It’s impossible. I mean, there are other places that try and do it, and maybe they do like, just a letter and the letter will give feedback about the document, and it’ll give tips here pointing to particular sections but nothing in the paper itself. But, we know that Beth Hewett (2015) posits in her various research on online writing instruction that sometimes, and I don’t usually advocate for this, but sometimes writing within the text itself is what you should be doing, especially if you’re trying to model what a sentence could look like or what the various options are, right? So, while I’m very oriented toward just leaving the comments, there are others that definitely advocate for more what is definitely not minimalist tutoring, right? Or perhaps what it means is that you have to think about minimalism and collaboration differently in an online context. So, what does it mean to be minimalist when you’re leaving feedback? Maybe it means just leaving ten comments or something and being very selective about what that means. I think there are definitely ways to translate some of the best practices to an asynchronous paradigm, but there definitely needs to be a translation happening. Like, there won’t be a one-to-one, direct layover—or overlay—of those practices. Russell Mayo: Okay, so to wrap up, maybe each of us could go around and share out a little bit about looking forward, looking forward to next semester, next year, of continuing our work in our new institutions, in our new roles. What are we excited about? What are we concerned about? Future challenges or plans in your centers. I guess I’ll leave it open there and either one of you can jump in. Eric Camarillo: Yeah, I can start. What I’m really excited about is what new practices emerge as we better understand asynchronous tutoring. So, how do we better understand racism or antiracism, right? So, these issues that we’ve grappled with for so long with the traditional model, what does it mean now to grapple with them in the asynchronous space? So how do we achieve equity or racial justice, how do we embrace multiple languages, other types of discourses in an asynchronous context? I’m really looking forward to how writing centers continue having those conversations and what research develops. And I’m looking forward to hopefully also being able to contribute to those discussions. Those are things that are definitely interesting to me, right, learning more about how do we deal with both students who are hurting because of a pandemic that is maybe biologically related and students who are hurting from a pandemic that is more culturally related, right? Many things happened in 2020, but those two things stick out to me. A pandemic of both a virus and racism and a great reckoning of and working through—achieving antiracism. So that’s one thing I’m looking forward to, definitely, with asynchronous practices at least. And I guess my concern, really, is trying to adapt what we’re doing now in one way to, ultimately, perhaps a hybrid way, or when we go back to campus, which I believe will happen eventually. So, worrying a little bit about how we adapt our practices that have—you know, my institution has adapted really well to this context; we did a really tremendous job. What does it mean when we return to our five separate campuses? How do we divvy up resources? How do we divvy up the work? In what ways can we continue on with our online tutoring? Who will be assigned that kind of work? Elise Dixon: Eric, those are such great concerns and excitements, and they seemed to be interconnected, which I think always happens. I think similarly. I just finished teaching my tutor training course, which happens every fall, and my tutor training courses are always very social justice oriented and we had lots and lots and lots of conversations about race and racism this semester, more than ever before for obvious reasons, I’m sure you can guess why. And what I think I’m most excited about is that—in my previous work, some of which is in The Peer Review (Dixon 2017, 2019), I tend to focus on wanting us to think through the everyday moments of our writing center, and especially the uncomfortable everyday moments of our writing center that we tend to gloss over. And what I saw in a virtual form was that one story I told you today about this markup situation. It was an uncomfortable everyday moment of the new “pandemical” research—or new “pandemical” writing center. And I was pleased to see that I and my tutors were able to notice, in those uncomfortable everyday moments, issues of power and equity and inequality (Denny, 2010; Greenfield & Rowan, 2011; Greenfield, 2019; McKinney, 2013). So, for instance, as I said, the conversation between this student and her professor was raced because we all are raced, and because of that there were power issues that existed, and I was pleased to see that it wasn’t just me that noticed those things but that my tutors noticed those things even in their asynchronous sessions. And I think I look forward to finding ways to continue to have conversations about equity and equality and how we can foster that work in our writing center to create a more social justice oriented, activist writing center, and I look forward to knowing that it can be done online, asynchronously, in person, face-to-face, we can do it all. And I think that is also the great challenge that will be the great challenge of, I think, my writing center career, is finding ways to train tutors to holistically understand issues of equity so that when they are thrust into a new situation like they were this year that they have various tools to enact the activism that they can through whatever medium they have to. So, yeah, that’s my challenge and my excitement. Russell Mayo : Wonderful. I want to echo what you both mentioned, and I think it was fantastic. I, too, am looking forward to bringing in critical questions about the work we do in schools and how with that, as scholars (Grimm, 1999) said, in spite of our “best intentions,” that we can do harm unintentionally in our work and, therefore, we need to be anti-oppressive and it’s not going to happen by happenstance. It has to be deliberate, and it’s not something you do once and then it’s over. So I look forward to having these conversations with tutors and with faculty about ableism and racism and all the other aspects that are wrapped up in the human work we’re doing, really. And I look forward to doing more with those conversations. One thing I’m really excited about, and that’s an exciting opportunity to be honest with you, I’m not—I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, I think it’s something that needs to happen and can happen more, and I think that it takes a long time for those conversations to really make a difference in a community, so I look forward to doing that. I also look forward to, so one of the ways of justification and justifying is something—one of the themes from the TPR, for this issue—one of the things that I did immediately was starting to have concerns and worry about justifying. What happens to those sessions that don’t get booked? Where we’re paying a tutor, but they don’t have a writer there? In a face-to-face or in an in-person writing center, there’s lots of work to be done in the space, but when tutors are working from home or not in the same room, what do we do with that time and how do we make it meaningful to the people who are paying their checks, really? So, we developed an ad hoc professional development research project, so the students could develop something. Some students are really taking over the social media—which they would’ve done if we’d been together—social media for the center. Some students are studying writing across the disciplines, interviewing engineering professors about what writing looks like in their courses, and some students are comparing different majors and looking at different pedagogies for engaging students and studying what it means to be a writing partner—you know, working with the same writer week after week for a whole semester, a very unique project or problem they’re engaged with. What I’m really excited about in the Spring is that our tutors are going to be presenting on those, so we’re going to have a monthly meeting, which we didn’t have this semester, to have presentations. So tutors are going to be presenting their work, their professional development, ongoing questions, and inquiry projects. And then we’re just going to have some social time together because that’s something the tutors really, really missed. So just giving them that time to connect and bring in the new tutors that we’ll be training to connect with the tutors as well, to bring in more of a social sense of space that we didn’t have before because we lacked a place together, or we’re without that place for the temporary moment. So, really looking forward to those conversations and bringing those projects to bear and to learn from the tutors and with them as well. So, I guess we should wrap up there. It’s so good to talk to you both and meet you finally, virtually. And thank you, thank you for doing this. Elise Dixon : This was very invigorating. I don’t know how you all feel—I’m very excited. Eric Camarillo : I am, yes. Russell Mayo : Thanks!

The writing center (WC) is simultaneously an educational space and a specific place co-created by the consultants and students using it. Dedicated as it is to writing, the center offers an academic location physically distinct from home and the classroom. The COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered this separation of spaces and places, collapsing many (or all) of them into the virtual realm, all to be accessed from (often) one place: home. This paper considers the theoretical discussion surrounding notions of home in the WC and recontextualizes said discussion in the wake of the WC gone virtual during a pandemic. Reflections on the authors’ experiences in this new space and the resulting sense of place are included, resulting in a framework that considers the nature of online synchronous WC work being undertaken in our home and a call for WCs to not simply seek to return to a supposed normal when our institutions call us back to campus. Keywords : space, place, virtual asynchronous tutoring, online writing centers As writing consultants working during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become very familiar with the feeling of brewing tea in the kitchen between appointments, shushing loud housemates, and angling our computers’ cameras to frame ourselves against the one clean(er) corner of our rooms. We have long since decamped from the physical writing center (WCs), a workspace for writing consultants, for an altogether different place: home. Space is open and undifferentiated; place is known and associated (Tuan, 1977). And WCs are themselves designed to be welcoming places, to set students at ease, to evoke that which they cannot be—home (McKinney, 2005). What, then, are the impacts of moving the WC into the home? For all that they promise the capability for connections across vast distances, digital spaces are still inherently material. They are built on infrastructures of wires, cables, metals, and plastics; we connect to them through devices made of the same materials. The work that we do is mediated by the spaces and places in which we exist, something made all the more apparent by the pandemic. Digital spaces have allowed us to keep in contact with friends and family throughout the pandemic, valuable lifelines in deeply uncertain times. Such spaces have the capacity to foster new intimacies (Gallagher et al., 2020), but the prevalence of “Zoom fatigue” serves as a reminder that digital methods affect us differently. We take up the question of how a WC formed through the space of digital infrastructures, server rooms, and homes (or the various places we find ourselves and our clients videoconferencing in from) alters the sense of place that WCs evoke and the consequences of this alteration. To do so, this work pulls from a theoretical framework to inform later personal reflections on our experiences as writing consultants gone online during a pandemic. We find this to be a kairotic moment for WCs to reconsider and reform our thinking on and understanding of place, a moment wherein consultants and administration alike can and should reconsider what the space of a WC can/should aspire to be. Space and place are frequent subjects of debate—partially because of their inherent resistance to concrete definition, partially because of the terms’ prevalence in understandings of the world. Space, broadly speaking, is open, potential, abstract; place is known, (more) defined, (more) concrete (Tuan, 1977). Further, “space is unstable, uncertain because of the possibilities it contains for occupation. Space is yet-to-be written” (Dobrin, 2011, p. 41). “Home,” for example, is a place that has become so through occupation of and association with space. In Arendt’s (1958) words, “[to] live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it” (p. 52); Tuan (1977) argued that the presence of any other human beings (even just one) “has the effect of curtailing space and its threat of openness” (p. 59). Any discussion of solitude and openness is now (doubly) grimly ironic in light of the ongoing mental and physical effects of prolonged separation and isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Tuan (1977) invited his readers to consider “the sense of an “inside” and an “outside,” of intimacy and exposure, of private life and public space” (p. 107). The home is (generally) understood to be the place in which we live our private lives, while outside in other spaces (and places) we live our public lives, occluding—even masking—elements of ourselves. The distinction between public and private life is inherently a problematic one because there is no neat separation (Arendt, 1958, p. 72). Elements of both intrude on each other in ways both tangible and intangible, but there was previously a semblance of spatial separation that allowed for the maintenance of veneers, however fragile, unreal, occluding, and deeply problematic they could be. Yet, home is not mere association with that space (i.e., the space we occupy for housing), but associated with various place-based ideals beyond faulty notions of privacy. These place-based ideals are essential to forming the notion of home. As bell hooks (2009) established, “A true home is the place—any place—where growth is nurtured, where there is constancy. As much as change is always happening whether we want it or not, there is still a need we have for constancy” (p. 203). The association of constancy with home that hooks established here is troubled further when considering the idea of being at home during a pandemic. Assuming an individual even has the necessary means and ability to conduct education and consulting work from where they live, the notion that they are taking appointments from the comfort of their own home ignores the way that bringing the many spheres of life into their lodgings disrupts the constancy that they wish for when occupying their home. Further, the physical and mental stressors of trying to do much of anything during a pandemic seep into and destabilize our sense of home. Our conceptualization of constancy often hinges on the sensory experiences that come to define our perceptions of home. Jenny Odell (2020) has written about the importance of attentiveness to one’s time, space, and place, advocating for deliberate use of the five senses. She approached this through a multi-scalar lens and a deep concern for the impact(s) of social media and the attention economy, which thrive on constant intrusion, constant interaction, and superficial engagement. These methods manifest as a constant fracturing of attention and energy; equally problematic in both public and private – although it is important to note that Odell is not uniformly negative in her view of social media. In keeping with her overall argument, she argues that it can be a positive force, but should be used and engaged with deliberately. These issues of deliberate intent, attention, and focus are also very much at play in WCs. The places in which we write and consult have become increasingly of interest to WC scholars and practitioners in recent years; however, many of these discussions focus on the practical aspects of the objects that make up a space. Despite the work that has been done by WC scholars who have taken up this mantle through their research on digital studies and multiliteracy centers (e.g. Fitzgerald and Ianetta, 2015; Del Russo et al., 2019; Balester et al., 2012; Dunn and Dunn de Mers, 2002; Hamel, 2002; Hitt, 2012; Naydan, 2013; Sheridan and Inman, 2010; Trimbur, 2016), there remains a need for WC practitioners to recognize and consider WC spaces as something we both experience and create as opposed to something we simply take in visually. Hadfield et al. (2003) explained that “the environment where interaction between and among people occurs is crucial as it affects the way people feel and, therefore, the way people interact. A well-designed writing center has an identity that speaks implicitly to its patrons” (p. 175). Echoing this idea and building upon it further in her call for a more critical examination of WC spaces, McKinney (2005) specified that “In terms of the writing center, critical geographies would not merely state what objects occupy the space. In addition, the focus would include the human experience in use of space and objects” (pp. 10-11). This need to think critically about how our WC spaces are experienced becomes all the more urgent as we pause to consider various ways that spaces shape our experiences as complex and dynamic individuals. This phenomenon is often intensified in academic spaces, especially when they are utilized for the vulnerable act of sharing one’s writing. For example, Lockett (2019) argued location “must be considered as one of the major factors that obscures the relationship between race and how students are socialized to understand graduate writing conventions.” She continued, contending that, for graduate students, learning how to write “depends on moving through clandestine places like faculty offices, selective reading groups, and brief cubicle chats among peers, as well as publicly sanctioned intimate spaces like coffee shops where graduate students may be meeting with their mentors and colleagues.” This audience awareness that Lockett spoke to extends to the question of how WCs construct a sense of place in the midst of a pandemic. Further, it points to the need to recognize that those logging into our virtual WCs may not have access to the assumed space of their living space. Factors like race, class, and residency status can greatly impact whether that is indeed possible. These are variables that need to be structurally addressed, but what can WCs do? Boquet (1999) asked whether the WC is “primarily a space , a “laundry” where work is dropped off and picked up, where students are brushed off and cleaned up? Or is it primarily a temporality, an interaction between people over time, in which the nature of the interaction is determined not by site but by method?” (p. 464, emphasis in original). Lockett (2019) argued that it is both, following her academic ghetto metaphor; “[the] kind of place a writing center is perceived to be—by its tutors, clients, director, and administrative assistants—affects what will happen there”. We agree with this assessment, with the added valences that have arisen due to the pandemic and the move to wholly online consultations. At least one of us has been managing laundry timing around scheduled appointments, and the question of time’s “realness” continues to haunt conversations, calendars, and affects as we continue to cope with the dissolution of, and attempts to reimpose, flimsy and inflexible external structures. As a result, these issues of space, when compounded with the additional variables of race, class, residency status, sexual orientation, and ability, culminate to become inextricably linked to issues of labor in the WC, a correlation that has become painfully real for many of us consulting and writing during the COVID-19 pandemic. That space relates to labor concerns is well established in considering how the planning of space can subconsciously reinforce the exploitation of laborers (Harvey, 2010). Although discussions of labor have been taking place for quite some time among WC practitioners and scholars, the COVID-19 pandemic has made these all the more salient and unignorable. Labor is a complex concept in WCs as it takes many forms—emotional, mental, and even sometimes physical (moving to a new space, rearranging furniture, cleaning at the end of the day, etc.). This labor, especially the emotional and mental labor that is so often exerted by WC consultants and administrators, is often invisible and thankless, and although the labor itself is often unseen, the symptoms of an over-exertion of labor are often all too real and visible. As Giaimo (2020) pointed out, “Labor and wellness are inextricably bound. In an ideal situation, our work would be Meaningful, Engaging, Stable, Safe, Ethical, Fairly compensated.” However, even in the most ideal WC, operating with full funding and without the chaos of a pandemic, labor is never all of these at once, and this can have substantial impacts on those of us working as consultants. Giaimo (2020) clarified that labor concerns are wellness concerns, as the precariousness of one’s labor conditions can lead to physiological problems and different manifestations of human suffering. Further, Giamo was explicit in making the connection between precarious labor and “minorities and minimum wage workers.” One of the primary casualties of the pandemic has been so-called “third spaces.” These are not instances of Soja’s notion of thirdspace (e.g., 1996, 1999), but rather a division of spaces into spheres (e.g., Sloterdijk, 2011, 2014, 2016), with home as primary, work as secondary, and then third as elsewhere, such as in coffee shops or libraries. Indeed, for a not insignificant portion of the population—including many students—the pandemic effectively collapsed many (or all) of these spaces into one physical place: home. As people distanced from each other, their senses of space and place (sometimes simultaneously) contracted, expanded, and fragmented. Digital spaces, especially virtual meeting software and social media, experienced massive surges in engagement and numbers of active users as many aspects of life shifted to be mostly online. The nature of—and divide between—social relations via digital modalities vs. physical ones is frequently presented in generational terms, with Millennials and younger generations stereotypically preferring everything digital, while older generations favor the “real” world. Regardless of the actual truthfulness of this presentation, people from all generations have had to navigate the complexities of virtual platforms, even as others have had to contend with the necessities and present dangers of being “essential” workers. Quarantine entails a curtailing and control of movement and mobility, especially as empirical reality and embodied experience. It is a (re)definition of many spaces—particularly public or communal—as hostile/dangerous. Russell (2020) has proposed envisioning this shift as a sphere eversion, a rather complex topological concept that has interesting implications for notions of exposure. Eversion is the process of turning something inside out, in this case squishing and folding a sphere. Spheres are inherently boundaries, things capable of being seen by external observers, while observers of everted spheres must, by definition, “take up a position on it” (p. 276). Within this framework, she pondered hands and elbows as “touched touchers;” hands are more likely to touch the world than elbows, but both are part(s) of the body, covered in the same skin, exposed to the same air (p. 276). We can wash our hands diligently, but what about the rest of the body, or clothing, or the air introduced to an enclosed structure or common area through doors or windows? The core idea of the commons is that of a shared public space which can become a public place through interaction and association. Since the commons is shared, it remains inherently open, able to be engaged with and left alone easily. In much the same way, digital places are inherently permeable due to the configuration of digital space. For the user, this is simultaneously a strength and a weakness, especially with the heavily increased use of video chat platforms by businesses, schools, friends, and families. Interaction through a screen is not the same as in-person interaction, even from a safe distance. It can feel awkward and impersonal at times as physical distance creates emotional distance, making it difficult to read and interpret body language. However, despite these limitations, screen-to-screen interaction has offered important opportunities for (re)connection. Indeed, digital means’ capacities for connection, what Gallagher et al. (2020) have called “new intimacies,” allow people to interact, link, and communicate across counties, states, and countries. These connections can also be extremely beneficial for students for whom the normalized physical classroom environment is difficult, including students with anxiety, disabilities, or off-campus jobs. Of course, as with any technology, digital spaces carry the capacity to reproduce some existing inequalities and introduce others. Users become dependent on connection speed and stability, compression algorithms, and server/software uptime (Burroughs and Rugg 2014). Digital access takes place over (fractions of) milliseconds, accelerating time and decoupling it from physical concerns (Barlow and Drew 2020; Chan 2020). Care and intent are key. Through our dependence and constant use of these digital spaces, the issue of Zoom fatigue has become a commonplace point of discussion in day-to-day life for the authors. Our days feel full of Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings, WC Online appointments, and emails. Our homeplaces become saturated not only with work concerns, but also the digital platforms that convey them. To return to hooks’ (2009) discussion of home as constancy, labor in the home breaks up that constancy that informs our homeplaces. In a sense, it breaks into the ambient sense of calm and security that we strive for our home to be, instead saturating it with workplace concerns. This discussion of saturation connects well to Sidney Dobrin’s (2011) discussion of saturation as it “suggests a sense of overwhelming (as in saturation bombing)” (p. 183). The ambience of our homeplaces has been, essentially, saturation bombed with a different place context, thereby disrupting and recontextualizing our living rooms and bedrooms into a space of workplace activity. As mentioned in the introduction, we consider this to be a kairotic moment for reflecting on understandings of space and place in WCs. Particularly as many of us begin to transition back to hybrid (or wholly in-person) modalities, we should be deliberate and careful in just how we effect that return. To that end we offer these individual discussions both as reflections on our own experiences and as considerations of place and community in remote and hybrid WCs. For the first two months of lockdown, my scheduled writing consultations were one of the primary things I relied on to keep myself going (those, and my weekly movie nights with my roommate). I joined our WC partway through the fall 2019 semester and immediately received training in using WCOnline for consultations. I primarily consulted in-person, but I was already used to a hybrid modality so the switch to fully online was, for me at least, not a huge practical shift. It was just that it felt like everything around me shifted too; I was probably in a constant state of mild shock for the first couple weeks. In the Before Times, all of my work with clients, face to face and online, took place within the physical place of the WC. Its building was (and is) not adjacent to my department, so even if I was already on campus, I had to budget a few minutes to walk there if I was already on campus, or about 30 minutes if I was walking from home. Once I retreated into my home and lost all of that interstitial time, I fully realized how much I’d been relying on it to help physically and mentally organize my day. I was fortunate enough to live with roommates who I generally got along with, but being thrown into a situation where they were the only people I felt comfortable physically being around was a major adjustment, as was realizing the true thinness of the house’s walls and doors (accidentally dueling phone and Zoom call speaking volumes were a weekly occurrence). The time I’d spend walking was one of the primary ways I’d move myself into and out of my consulting (or more generally academic) headspace and back into a “home” mentality – one in which I was more agreeable to working with and around my roommates. I have since slowly (and, I will admit, grumpily) adjusted to this “new” situation. This has partially been a mundanely practical matter, since the pandemic is still a long way from being resolved, but it was primarily a matter of replacing old mental habits and spatial pathways with new(er), (more) specific, (intensely) local habits and pathways. I have a browser that I use almost exclusively for consultations, so that opening it signifies in some small way that I am going into “consultant mode.” I will usually make a cup of tea before my first appointment so that I have something to keep my hands occupied, which also gives me a ready-made excuse to stand up from my chair and walk to the kitchen after each appointment to make more tea and unplug for the brief window of time between consultations. And while I certainly miss the opportunity to hang out with my colleagues in the break room in between appointments, I feel that we’ve still been able to maintain a semblance of community through our weekly colloquium. It was very difficult at the beginning; I felt like I was consoling clients as much as they consoled me. In some ways it’s still difficult, just in different ways. Realistically, I barely made it to the end of the spring semester, and still don’t know how I finished papers and tests. Somehow, I did, and I kept consulting through it all. For better and for worse this fall semester seemed like an improvement, which I’ll attribute mostly to the fact that I could prepare (to a certain extent) for a fully online modality and the mental weight of the pandemic before it even started, as opposed to having to adjust in the middle of everything. The current spring semester has been overall better for me, perhaps because I’ve adjusted to conducting classes fully online – an alarming thought – and perhaps because I’ve finally started feeling the slightest bit optimistic about vaccination rates. But I’m still exhausted, still worried, just doing my best to muddle through. My fellow consultants have been integral to my persevering, as they’ve variously offered advice, support, commiseration, and openness to frank discussion. For me, the online space has felt simultaneously too lonely and too crowded. Thankfully, my graduate program had always been hybrid, allowing the flexibility for students to meet in-person and online in the same place by incorporating Zoom as a fundamental component of the course. However, I was someone who had never consulted synchronously online before, so when the COVID-19 pandemic halted life as we knew it, I was thrown into the (new to me) online place of WCOnline. And like many writing consultants (and people around the world in general) as quickly as I settled into a new rhythm of working and learning online from home, I became acutely aware of challenges posed by the online space. For one, the notion of working from a “homeplace” had become a little complicated for me. My partner had been unlucky enough to finish his graduate degree the spring semester that COVID-19 rearranged the world. After struggling with unemployment, we were forced to move days before the beginning of the fall semester to a new city with a better job market to stay afloat. This move was a culture shock to me as I had always been a small-town gal. Additionally, the pandemic made it challenging for me to get out and participate in my new community. Ultimately, I was cooped up in an unfamiliar apartment in an unfamiliar city, feeling isolated as I tried to conduct writing consultations through an unfamiliar modality in a home that did not feel like home. As I did my best to adapt to a new consulting modality, feeling a bit lonely in my new home, a feeling familiar to many these days began to creep in: Zoom fatigue. Although video conferencing had become the primary way for me to relieve my feelings of isolation by connecting with clients and colleagues, I began to feel isolated and socially overloaded at the same time. I felt I was expending much more emotional labor than I had when consulting face-to-face, checking in with students and doing my best to encourage and support them during these trying times. This became problematic for me, however, as I began expending emotional energy that I did not have. Unfortunately, at the end of the previous spring semester, the semester that everything got rearranged, life as I knew it was rocked by my mother’s death. I had finished that the spring semester and begun the subsequent fall semester in the midst of enormous grief. Consequently, I would lie down after even just one online writing consultation, emotionally exhausted. Before COVID-19, I did not consider myself as someone who was that affected by space and place. Although I was consciously aware that our spaces and places indeed have a great influence on us, I was lacking the context to really discover how these affected me personally. The pandemic made this all too clear for me. Place has immense power to shape feelings, attitudes, and even behaviors. This is true for us as students, colleagues, and writing consultants. Knowing this, WC practitioners should take care to create space for these influences, especially as we continue to contend with a pandemic. Losing the connection with clients and colleagues that many consultants experience from face-to-face consulting, we must be mindful to acknowledge and embrace feelings of isolation and burnout. Our goal as WC practitioners must not be for things to return to normal, but to normalize the oftentimes taboo yet all too familiar feelings of emotional exhaustion that academia has become increasingly hostile to. Right before lockdown began, my partner and I signed a lease in Lubbock, Texas. The plan was for me to move onsite for my doctoral program (Technical Communication & Rhetoric) that I’d be entering my second year of. While I had enjoyed being a distance student my first year of said program, I hoped that moving onsite would allow me to reduce my workload (I was working full-time as a lecturer and WC coordinator at Texas State University), increase my class load (I was taking two courses a semester, instead of three), and give me more time for projects. The reality of course was that, while my class load certainly increased, the Graduate Part-time Instructor (GPTI) and Graduate Writing Center (GWC) work I took on felt not all that different in time commitment when navigating teaching and consulting in a virtual environment. In Spring 2020, the potential of a lockdown led to me and the directors of the Texas State University Writing Center building out what the WC would look like when gone virtual. We did not have WCOnline in the WC for scheduling or synchronous online appointments, though we had started piloting Zoom for our limited synchronous appointments (that were, prior to this, held with the consultant in the WC). This experience coupled with my own use of Zoom in my doctoral studies resulted in our building the center’s plans around a common Zoom link with a main area (the virtual front desk) that could check writers in before moving them to their appointments (using the breakout rooms function). That it was all under one Zoom meeting link created a sense that we were still part of the center, even though we were video conferencing in from our home offices, bedrooms, living rooms, and backyards. That I had a small part to play in forming this system made the transition to online WC administration work smooth for me. This is not to suggest that there was not a shock to the system for me, as academia’s demand for continued productivity left me feeling even more frustrated with the world around me. I would say that it took me a while to shake it off and return to a sense of normalcy, but that would suggest that I ever have fully shook it off. Then, I started at Texas Tech University as a GWC consultant. The system was different (WC Online). There was no clicking over to someone’s breakout room when they weren’t in an appointment. We do have a weekly colloquium over Zoom which has helped get a sense of my fellow consultants, but in WC Online there is no sense of the space of the WC; there is only the sense of WC Online, the video feed of me with my mess of a kitchen behind me and the video feed of the client’s surroundings. As for those clients, those writers seeking to bounce ideas and strategies off me? I often find myself rushing through appointments, distracted by the need to later attend to household labor demands that surround me and are even at times clearly reflected in my video feed. Likewise, writers once willing to sit through the entirety of an appointment to discuss and strategize are seemingly also distracted as they have to deal with internet concerns and cooped up children. That’s assuming they can videoconference from their home, as I have had appointments where clients have been driven to whatever open space with decent internet connection they can access; cars, bars, and cafes are now normal backgrounds I spot in appointments. All of this is in the context of me feeling what some would call Zoom fatigue (let’s call it that, though it is a mix of videoconferencing platforms that I use daily). My partner and I moved to a new city in the middle of a pandemic. They still haven’t found work. We’re coming up on the deadline to renew our lease and we haven’t even seen the inside of our favorite local restaurants. Everything social we do is via videoconferencing. All my classes that I take are via videoconferencing. All my appointments are via videoconferencing. The conference I attended recently was via videoconferencing. Funerals are via videoconferencing. These are necessary precautions, but I am tired. And that tired is only heightened as academia pushes us to keep going on like this is all perfectly normal, to proverbially be the person jogging through a pandemic. In doing so, though, we are creating a damaging new normal where the homeplace can easily and readily be overtaken and replaced by the workplace. Although the three authors’ experiences discussed here are deeply personal, they reflect issues dealing with labor that many writing center workers have dealt with working from “home” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pressure to continue to perform within the various academic, WC, and personal communities in which each of us participates has felt unbearable and unreasonable for many. Oftentimes this pressure stems from a societal desire to keep on working as if nothing is wrong because acknowledging that, in fact, so much is wrong can be incredibly painful. Much of the messaging in academic spaces encourages us that if we just log onto the home computer and smile, then class, work, happy hour, funerals, etc. can continue as usual. However, we must accept the reality that these are highly unusual circumstances, and that ignoring the painful reality of this situation only serves to compound and invalidate the mental and emotional labor being extended by WC workers. Because of the collapsing of learning, working, social, and private spaces into the homeplace due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ideas of space and place in the WC have only become more complex. As we attempt to mediate professional and personal identities through our laptops and phones, framed against the clean(er) areas our rooms, we are reminded that “[labor] is shaped/motivated by complex and unique combinations of requirements, expectations, values, perceived strengths, interests and desires, identities, and knowledge” (Caswell et al., 2016, p. 10). COVID-19 has made it impossible to ignore the way that our spaces shape and are shaped by our experiences, and we must acknowledge and address these issues in our WCs, whether in-person, online, or somewhere in between. While WC consultants and administrators struggle with increased workloads and personal stress, oftentimes in isolation, we must take steps to create WC places that are not just safer physically, but emotionally and mentally as well. As Degner et al. (2015) found years before the COVID-19 pandemic ever began, the fact is that “mental health concerns and illnesses are indeed affecting our centers… 56% of respondents said their symptoms affected their tutoring abilities (either slightly, moderately, or significantly).” The creation of safer places in the WC must involve resisting the urge for life and work to go back to “normal;” instead, it must involve normalizing and embracing the feelings that make our consultants, administrators, and clients human—in an echo of Illich’s (1973) conviviality. Simply trying to make our spaces feel like home will prove all the more problematic as many of us begin to transition back to our distinct physical spaces and have the residual exhaustion of our homeplaces being saturated by workplace activities. Giaimo (2020) has established solid moves we can make—lean on the larger WC community through online resources and organizational supports; be more flexible with technology alternatives and time off; share resources on wellness, mental health, and labor; and advocate for consultants. That said, this must be a learning opportunity for the WC community, one in which we can and should ensure that the different spheres that inform our lives as consultants and WC administrators are better protected from the threat of our workplaces saturating our homeplaces. There is certainly a need for further method-driven work to ascertain sustainable and equitable approaches toward this, work that needs much more room than the size of this piece allows. That said, we hope this will serve as a call for such work to find what is sustainable in writing centers of all types and sizes. As Claire speaks to above, our goal must not be to simply return to a supposed normal. We must work to transform our WCs to better value the placeness of our spaces and ensure that the various stakeholders of WCs (e.g., consultants, clients, and administrators) are valued as not just productive laborers and ready consumers, but also as whole people deserving of emotional, physical, and mental wellbeing.

<b>Introduction:</b> The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges to universities when instruction had to shift entirely online. Universities were quick to survey their students about those challenges, and education researchers are now focused on building more effective online experiences based on student feedback. <b>About the case:</b> The loss of in-person instruction was difficult for engineering students in practice-based courses as they lost the courses' hands-on aspect, which is essential for reinforcing theoretical concepts. They also lost the support provided through daily interactions with their peers and instructors. <b>Situating the case:</b> Students in a required four-course practice-based mechanical engineering sequence shared their perspectives via reflective portfolio essays on how shifting to online instruction affected their ability to participate in their learning communities and negotiate meaningful learning experiences. <b>Methods/approach:</b> Through thematic analysis of the reflective essays, we applied the lens of communities of practice to put the students' responses into context. <b>Results/discussion:</b> The students' concerns varied depending on their position in the course sequence and the course; however, most students felt that the loss of in-person interaction was most detrimental and disruptive in the transition to online instruction and yielded communication and teaming issues. <b>Implications and conclusions:</b> Five implications arose from the results of this study, including recognizing the unique challenges of online learning in practice-based courses, instructing students in virtual communication tools, exercising empathy, being mindful of cognitive load, and researching self-directed learners in online environments. In addition, faculty should consider the importance of students' communities of practice and build opportunities to maintain and strengthen the bonds of those communities within their courses, both online and face to face. They should also add more opportunities for virtual interaction early in the curriculum to build digital communication skills, which will undoubtedly be required in their careers.

Introduction: Online learning and work are commonplace in both engineering and professional communication. To be effective online, even experienced face-to-face teachers require new skills. About the case: This case reports on the design and delivery of faculty training on teaching online at a Norwegian university during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two questions are examined: 1. What topics and training designs are suitable for beginning online teachers with little time to implement the results of the training? 2. In this emergency context, how do local conditions impact the design and delivery of such training? The training focused on building interactive online courses, providing formative feedback for students, and choosing between synchronous and asynchronous teaching. Situating the case: The literature suggests that teachers often undergo a shift in their teaching philosophies and methods when transitioning to online environments. Methods/approach: Pretraining and post-training reflection were used as informal data sources to develop the training sessions and to holistically discuss the themes that emerged from the training. Results/discussion: Two online and one face-to-face 2-hour training sessions were delivered to three groups of faculty. Three main themes emerged from the training: active learning, synchronous/asynchronous teaching, and providing formative feedback to students. Conclusions: Challenges included convincing participants to shift from the lecture as the main method of instruction to more interactive and active techniques, as well as reconciling the standardized course study plans with individual teachers' instructional needs. Larger studies of training programs and more formal methods of data analysis are suggested.

Preamble The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) represents teachers and scholars of writing and speaking whose work in and beyond colleges and universities regularly extends to sites for online learning, professional workplaces, and both near and far-flung communities. This statement provides guidelines for understanding, assessing, and valuing the community-engaged work colleagues may undertake across career stages, ranks, and roles. As such, it underscores the worth community-engaged work can have for individual participants, participating campuses, and disciplines associated with CCCC. As a resource for both faculty and administrators, this statement, we hope, will serve to credit teachers, researchers, and programs appropriately for their contributions to university-community partnerships that are anchored in rigorous scholarship and designed to enhance community capacity. This statement echoes others in related fields, which offer similar frameworks for valuing and evaluating academic community engagement.

This ethnographic case-study examines the impact of asynchronous written feedback comments on the peer feedback process within one doctorate writing group. The doctorate students were interviewed retrospectively about their perceptions of effective feedback comments. Affective components (e.g. hedging devices) and effective components (e.g. revision comments) within the reviewers’ feedback comments, and external components (e.g. reviewer competency) that influence the peer feedback process were induced from the interview transcripts using a grounded theory approach. Further evidence that these identified components impact the feedback process appreciably was triangulated from the analysis of two other datasets; the participants’ asynchronous written feedback comments and revision plans. The results show that the participants used much affect in their written feedback exchanges, and this affect had a strong impact on the effect of their feedback process. Thus, written affective language can play a significant role in how an author interprets and implements feedback comments. This suggests that affect can play a prominent role in helping to develop more effective feedback practices within writing groups. Helping writing communities develop a better understanding of affect within asynchronous written feedback comments can only help them to develop more useful feedback practices.

While online learning and community engagement are not necessarily adversarial, this article explores the tensions between the two and how an online rhetoric course adapted place-based pedagogy to explore the idea of belonging. The assignment described here leverages online learning while sponsoring community engagement. The assignment invites students to learn about and participate in social justice action that, while accomplished virtually by way of Web 2.0 technologies and spaces, still connects students to the places that are significant to them. Such an approach is inherently invested in place-based pedagogy that frames social justice as abstract and complex issues that not only affect nation-states, but that also have tangible implications for privileged and marginalized groups in local communities (Flynn et al., 2010).

This article describes an interdisciplinary, partially online honors course entitled Video Game Theory and Design. The article reviews the literature surrounding video games and technical communication and then outlines the learning objectives for the course. The authors describe individual and team-produced assignments and suggest game design techniques for motivating students. We explain how we assess different projects, including oral game pitches and the complex technical Game Design Documents that are students’ final deliverables. Finally, we discuss how game design techniques provide new perspectives on writing and generate new possibilities for technical communication assignments. We close by proposing three tactics that are useful for teaching technical communication students in hybrid and fully online courses: (a) nonlinear association for creative thinking; (b) team-based assignments for writing and editing using game-based tools; and (c) iterative prototyping and playtesting for multimodal production. Each tactic is contextualized using examples drawn from the field.

In increasingly online higher education environments, instructors must develop positive and community-oriented learning environments, equivalent to, if different from, face-to-face learning experiences. Connectivism and communities of inquiry are complementary theories that facilitate the design and development of online learning and enable online learners to connect with peers. This article discusses two pedagogical interventions that encourage connectivism and foster communities of inquiry in online technical communication programs: (a) a face-to-face orientation workshop at the beginning of an online program and (b) a peer-review activity in a research methods graduate course. The article explains the development, deployment, and evaluation of the activities.

Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

This webtext presents video recordings of writing conferences with two students in a lower-division online research writing course, analyzed in light of online writing instruction and writing center scholarship on synchronous conferencing—specifically considering the extent to which students in the conference practice or acquire digital literacy skills, benefit from the immediacy of the interaction, and experience an asymmetrical power dynamic.

This article discusses our work examining asynchronous eTutoring comments and how we determined whether tutor comments on papers submitted to our writing center were effective. Drawing from the fields of writing center theory, education, and rhetoric and composition, we define effectiveness as a combination of revision and improvement factors (Faigley and Witte; Stay; Bowden). Data collected consisted of initial and subsequent drafts of student papers submitted for eTutoring sessions, including the comments a tutor made on each paper. We categorized the comments and corresponding revisions to answer the following questions: which types of comments result in the greatest number of revision changes? And, do those comments, according to our definition, align with the types of comments we find to be the most effective? We found that frequency and effectiveness were not the only factors in determining a comment’s importance. We emphasize the necessity of instruction and scaffolding in tutor comments to potentially increase their effectiveness and student understanding.

Student retention and persistence is increasingly prioritized by state and local policies as well as national scorecards and rankings—however, the policies that politicians and administrators undertake to improve university metrics tend to ignore the realities faced by students at the heart of our institutions. Drawing on a survey/interview project involving 67 students repeating first-year writing classes at a diverse institution in the Southwestern US, this article takes a student-centered approach to understand the reasons they drop first-year writing, such as health concerns, lack of engagement with the curriculum, and their incompatibility with online learning or poorly taught online classes. In making recommendations to address the challenges students face, the author calls on writing teachers and administrators to take a more activist stance in their roles, by engaging in actions such as pushing back against exploitative working conditions, recognizing the racism inherent in strict attendance policies, drawing on work from directed self-placement to better guide students when considering online writing classes, and advocating for readings and curricular choices that take into account the diversity of students in writing programs.

After the pandemic necessitated a move to online learning and brought forth a multitude of traumas for students and faculty, faculty teaching in the graduate Composition program at San Francisco State University came together to redesign our graduate courses. This program profile describes a process by which the redesign efforts were organized, which included establishing a framework for online teaching and learning before reassessing course outcomes, reading lists, and assignments. The process also included deep meditations on inclusive pedagogical practices and trauma-informed teaching and learning. Ultimately, our process helped us articulate our shared values as graduate faculty, gaining new understandings of our practices to better serve students in the graduate Composition program.

Research problem: The role that physical, temporal, and cultural distances play in global software development projects has been well researched. Culturally diverse teams separated by physical distances across multiple time zones face significant challenges in collaborating effectively with each other. This article examines a fourth dimension-cognitive distance-that relates to the problem-solving style of teams that can also have an impact on their ability to collaborate successfully. Research questions: 1. Does cognitive distance affect communication among global software development teams collaborating with each other? 2. How does cognitive distance affect the sentiment/emotion of global software development teams collaborating with each other? Literature review: Prior research shows that collaboration among teams on global software development projects is impacted by practices to manage collaboration; appropriate use of collaboration technologies; collaboration readiness that relates to individual characteristics such as personality traits, motivation, and trust; and shared understanding in group problem-solving. While shared understanding has looked at the effectiveness of the use of common language and knowledge sharing, it has not examined how differences in problem-solving styles of geographically dispersed teams impact their ability to collaborate successfully. Methodology: We examined project artifacts and email communication among geographically dispersed teams within a global software development project. From the project artifacts, we examined tasks allocated to different teams. From the emails, we established the communication network and volume of communication, and performed a sentiment analysis on email content. This analysis allowed us to observe not only the quality of communication among the teams but also the sentiment/emotion that reflected how well they were working together. Results and discussion: Managing teams that vastly differ in problem-solving styles and tasks requires that project managers be aware of these differences and introduce liaisons that reach across the teams to help bridge the cognitive divide.

This article argues the importance of viewing asynchronous screen-capture tutor feedback as a kairotic space that subverts normative views of time, writing process, and accepted tutoring practices such as a preference for non-directivity over directive feedback. The author argues that viewing asynchronous online feedback as “kairotic” enables writing center tutors to develop practices and pedagogies rooted in disability theory. The development of tutoring mindsets that embrace difference helps to support students with disabilities via asynchronous videos that mesh multimodal affordances with Universal Design principles. Keywords : Disability, neurodiversity, autism, Writing Centers, asynchronous online feedback, Universal Design, kairotic space

The Saint Louis University (SLU) Prison Program has made higher education accessible for incarcerated residents and prison staff. However, due to geographical and technological limitations, the incarcerated students are excluded from much-needed academic support. This situation led SLU’s writing center administrators to develop a partnership with the SLU Prison Program to better serve incarcerated students by providing access to asynchronous writing center services. In this article, we share the logistics of how we developed our partnership with the SLU Prison Program and our initial approaches for training our consultants. Using prison classroom pedagogy as a foundation and taking into consideration the nature and limitations of traditional consultation strategies, we developed a consulting approach specifically designed to meet the unique needs of this student population. We then discuss how the partnership worked in three different classes. We end by discussing some of the obstacles we faced when putting the partnership and our practices in action as well as possibilities for the future, both for SLU and for other writing centers who may hope to create similar partnerships of their own. In doing so, we hope that readers will join us in striving to redefine the academic commonplace for incarcerated students and in exploring ways that we can promote justice and accessibility in writing center work. Keywords : consultant training, prison education, prison pedagogy, writing centers, writing center pedagogy

Writing an argumentation about a controversial issue from contradictory sources is a challenging task. It involves understanding, managing, and generating arguments and counterarguments from different sources to support a final position, conveyed in a formal structure. Despite its difficulty, argumentative writing is not often taught in higher education in Spain. Furthermore, online interventions regarding this type of task are scarce. For this reason, we designed and evaluated virtual training aimed at writing integrative and well-structured arguments in a distance learning university. Sixty-eight undergraduates participated in this pre-post with a control group design. The training included explicit instruction through video lectures and practice exercises with immediate feedback using open online resources (e.g., Moodle). The results show that after the instruction the participants' written products improved both in their structure, the number of arguments for the against-position, and the degree of integration of the two perspectives. However, those products that presented medium or maximum integration were still limited. These results illustrate how online instruction of argumentative writing can be implemented in higher education with positive results. However, students still need more support to expand their skills for generating integrative synthesis. Considering these results, we propose further improvements in the designed training.

At a multinational company, daily written communication between staff, supervisors, customers, and suppliers is frequently conducted using digital tools (e.g., emails, smartphones, and texting applications) often across multiple nationally, linguistically, and conceptually defined borders. Determining digital tools’ impact on intercultural encounters in professional environments like these is difficult but important given the sheer volume of digital contact in technical and professional environments and the ongoing global struggle to broker peace and productivity amid communities’ many perceived differences. Using examples drawn from a case study of binational manufacturing sister companies, I build on recent work in professional, networked written communication to analyze two WhatsApp exchanges, one between a central study participant and his customer, another between the participant and an employee. This study shows how asynchronous digital communication tools created complex “silences” in writing between participants. In these silences (e.g., a lack of or delayed response to a text) individuals try to explain others’ actions for themselves. Drawing on a combination of third-generation activity theory and Latourian actor-network theory, I show that while explaining others’ actions in writing with whatever cultural shorthand is available may remain a common part of everyday life and research, it can be a poor guide for explaining others’ actions, especially in digital writing. My study shows how research of, and instruction in, digital tool use in intercultural writing contexts requires attention to the material conditions and objectives potentially shaping one’s own as well as others’ composition choices.

This program profile describes the process the Writing Program at the University of Arizona took to create a pathway to course completion for students during the pandemic-induced remote transition in Spring 2020. While the majority of students continued to have access to the hardware and software necessary to complete the term online, some students did not have these critical access requirements. We designed an independent study style correspondence packet that harkens back to traditional distance education offerings. Recognizing that students might not have access to the web or library for research, instructional materials, or printers, the packets allowed students to use the resources to which they had access and mail in their materials to complete their courses. Designing and implementing this course packet allowed us to continue our mission of inclusion in a moment of crisis by meeting our students where they were as they were displaced from the institutional spaces they had been relying upon to finish their coursework. This work has given us language to use in helping our instructors continue to support their students in crisis.

This webtext considers how educational technology platforms challenge student authorship and ownership, focusing on three platforms: Turnitin, Twitter, and Canvas. These platforms represent a range of platform types—a plagiarism detection system, a social media platform, and a learning management system—and support an assortment of composing practices and platform-based interactions that give rise to tensions in authorship.

To help prepare students for the rigors of an online master’s degree in technical and professional communication, I created a course-embedded online student orientation (OSO) structured by the community of inquiry theory of online learning. The study researched the effect of the OSO on student satisfaction, student perceptions of online learning, and students’ program retention. The OSO was effective in helping students to reflect on their learning and demonstrated students’ interest in peer collaboration.

Background: Knowledge workers have become “technologically-tethered,” increasingly using mobile and communication technologies to engage in work during nonwork or “after-hours” personal time. Literature review: Research has identified several individual- and organizational-level predictors of this after-hours technology-enabled work behavior and its primarily negative consequences. However, little is known regarding the behavior's potential benefits or the ways in which it is affected by technology characteristics. Research questions: 1. How do technology characteristics affect after-hours work connectivity? 2. How does after-hours technology use affect work-life balance? Methodology: We test our hypotheses with a survey-based research design involving 312 knowledge workers, and analyze our data with covariance-based structural equation modeling. Results: After-hours work connectivity increases when the technology affords lower levels of immediacy and greater levels of concurrency, rehearsability, and reprocessability. A post-hoc analysis reveals that workers who might be expected to have low levels of after-hours work connectivity-such as those who have children at home or whose employers have a high segmentation norm-have higher levels of after-hours connectivity than their counterparts when the technology has high concurrency. We also find support for a curvilinear (inverted-U shaped) relationship between after-hours technology use and work-life balance. Conclusion: Individuals are amenable to interweaving technology-enabled work with nonwork tasks when the technology facilitates asynchronous and user-controlled interactions. Furthermore, this interweaving has a positive impact on work-life balance, up to a point. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.

This experience report shares the story of course redesign for cultivating technological and code literacy. This redesign came about as a result of listening to advisory board members as well as responding to recent scholarship calling for more specifics on the teaching of component content management and content strategy. We begin with discussion of code literacy differentiation between code-as-language, code-as-tool, and code-as-structure. We then share detail about our advisory board engagement and the resulting advanced-level technical communication course in which, framed by technological literacy narratives, students produce a static HTML site for a client, develop a repository for this work (GitHub), use XML and the DITA standard for dynamic document delivery, and create a digital experience element to accompany the site. We document and analyze student narratives and online course discussions. We emphasize a more holistic approach to code literacy and that course redesign should be a collaborative endeavor with advisory board members and industry experts. Through these experiences, students gain requisite knowledge and practice so as to enter the technical communication community of practice.

Introduction: With the growing need for intensive and online course formats, it has become increasingly difficult to determine what combinations of knowledge and skills that are important for both academia and industry can best provide students with the grounding for exploring the questions of global technical communication (TC) during their programs. About the case: The 7.5-week online global TC course at Arizona State University is divided into six theme-based units and a unit that focuses on a research/revision project. Situating the case: While over the last 20 years, excellent practical materials for teaching global TC have been published, there is a need for comprehensive course descriptions, particularly for courses in online and intensive formats. Methods/approach: The course was based on an extensive literature review of academic and trade publications. The course's effectiveness was analyzed based on final reflective discussion assignments and anonymous student course evaluations. Results/discussion: The literature review revealed six major themes that define global TC: culture and communication, the frameworks of culture, verbal communication, global content and technology, visual communication, and cross-cultural collaboration and audience work. Each unit addressed one of these themes. The course was well-received, and students started posing critical questions to explore in future courses. Conclusions: In our program, having a dedicated global TC course was very beneficial because it introduced students to concepts that they could further explore in other 7.5-week online courses. In addition, I present recommendations for adopting/adapting the course, as well as its limitations and suggestions for future research.

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3–4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing collaboratively. This article explores leadership and how it interacts with team knowledge making and the collaborative writing process. Guidelines are outlined for instructors interested in adopting collaborative, cloud-based assignments, and the tension between providing clear instructional guidance for student teams and allowing teams to embrace the ambiguity and messiness of virtual collaboration are discussed.

Online learning modes can provide convenience and flexibility to students. But communicating the value of online education in technical and professional communication should not end there. Program directors should rearticulate the narrative about the value of online graduate education beyond flexibility and convenience by reevaluating the ways that program assessment is designed and implemented. This pilot study suggests that a community of inquiry framework can help to communicate the value of the online learning environment to a variety of stakeholders, including prospective and current students, administrators, instructors, and potential employers.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) programs rely on contingent faculty to achieve their curricular mission. However, contingent faculty lack professional development opportunities. In this article, the author reports survey results (N = 91) and three cases studies that provide information on contingent faculty and their preparation for online teaching and then provides a three-step approach for TPC program administrators and faculty to follow so that programs can create sustainable professional development opportunities for contingent faculty to teach online.

Online course material development requires much writing, often catching faculty by surprise because of either the sheer volume or the specialized role and function of writing in an online only and multimodal environment. technical and professional communication (TPC) faculty are uniquely suited to coach faculty in producing readable writing for online courses. This article explores the professional development strategies and coaching skills necessary for TPC instructors and/or practitioners to serve in this role in online course development training.