In our peer writing tutor/consultant alumni research project, participants indicate that writing center work is primarily focused on negotiating relationships. We identify two primary orientations participants had to negotiating relationships: “removing roadblocks” and “building bridges.” We discuss the potential for the bridge-building orientation to promote an inclusive culture of writing across campus.

I propose spatial affordances as a tool for assessing pedagogical writing spaces such as writing centers. I outline a heuristic I used to evaluate the opportunities and limitations of two spaces and emphasize its adaptability to other learning spaces. Spatial affordances are useful because they underscore how place/space/location structures and facilitates writing practice.

This paper tells the story of theedubba, the Mesopotamian scribal school. First, theedubba’s pedagogy demonstrates that the first formalized center for teaching writing was more akin to the modern writing center than to the composition classroom. Second, unlike many modern writing centers, theedubbawas multilingual. It is easy to look at the past and congratulate ourselves on how much better we’ve made the future, but theedubbahas something to teach us beyond the fact that it preceded the composition classroom. A circle has no beginning, and both the writing center and the writing classroom are part of one circle—equally important to the students they serve.

In this article, we argue for a coalitional orientation for writing programs and centers to advance language justice and make good on the promises delineated over fifty years ago in the Conference of College Composition and Communication’s publication of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Specifically, we argue that writing centers are ripe sites of teaching and learning—not merely auxiliary support for the composition classroom. Indeed, as we demonstrate, many writing centers actively push for language justice by, for example, publishing language diversity/inclusion statements and championing concrete, pedagogically just practices. Accordingly, we urge the discipline of composition and writing centers to work together as coalitional partners to advance language justice across the discipline and, ultimately, beyond.

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Abstract An English major chronicles a “day in the life” of a college student during the 2020–21 school year—the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The narrative begins with stress-related dreams, continues with daily activities (walking through seemingly deserted halls and attending Hyflex classes, facilitating remote writing center sessions and leading campus meetings), and ends with the author settling down for the night, settling being an ironic and apt term to describe the author's sense of his academic year.