Answering recent calls for more scholarship on LGBTQIA+ experiences in the writing center, this article reflects upon the joys and emotional labor involved in queering our center’s programming by offering an LGBTQIA+ literature writing group.

This collaboratively composed paper recognizes the juxtaposition and resonance between two writing center workers’ experiences, writerly voices, and perspectives on the future of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the two-year writing center. It also takes into account our shared commitment to honesty with ourselves and each other about where we succeed and where we fail in our work as diversity practitioners.

This article examines two-year college peer writing tutors’ preparedness for the emotional labor of writing center work. Through stories, this multivocal piece shares the experiences of nine current and former peer tutors from a writing center at a large midwestern technical college and challenges the narrative of two-year colleges as remedial spaces.

In recent years, the college writing center at our community college began an embedded tutoring program in hopes of reaching more developmental English students. A combination of the pandemic and the temporary shift to online-only tutoring, pandemic funding opportunities, and changes in the college’s developmental education program led tutors to rethink how best to help developmental students succeed. Ultimately, this article shows that developing our embedded tutoring program facilitated a partnership between instructors, tutors, and students that resulted in higher academic performance, student and faculty engagement, and faculty buy-in.

The editors of this special issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College highlight the lack of scholarship on two-year college writing centers despite their widespread presence. Systemic barriers are in place at most two-year colleges, including heavy workloads, lack of institutional support for research, and limited incentives for two-year-college writing center staff to publish. The issue features new research showcasing the unique challenges and innovations in two-year college writing centers. The editors hope this issue sparks an ongoing conversation around the important and distinctive work happening in two-year college writing centers

This article contributes to the writing center scholarship in three ways. First, it revisits and further develops the discussion on course-embedded writing support programs; in particular, it builds on Kelly Webster and Jake Hansen’s “recursive reflection about course-embedded tutoring” and responds to Mary Tetreault et al.’s call for utilizing archival research as a resource for tutor education. Second, it takes a unique approach to tutor education by exploring how embedded tutors for first-year composition classes develop their expertise outside of the formal training sessions. Third, it applies the theoretical framework of rhizomatic learning that has not been previously utilized to investigate the diverse experiences embedded tutors undergo as they acquire and refine their tutoring skills. The qualitative data for this case study were obtained from the Coordinator of Composition Tutoring’s reflective journal as well as session logs and reflections completed by course-embedded peer tutors for composition courses at a four-year Northeastern institution over the period of four semesters. The analysis of the data reveals the rhizomatic character of embedded tutors’ learning, where elements of the learning processes are interconnected and ever-expanding (Deleuze and Guattari; Grellier). The discussion includes a set of questions designed to encourage tutors to reflect on their learning processes. Writing center administrators can use these questions to gather data on how tutors develop their skills within their specific contexts.

Reflecting on the experiences of two graduate students from speech-language pathology (SLP) who became generalist writing consultants, this article examines the intersections between the academic homes of generalist graduate consultants and their writing center education and work and analyzes what these intersections tell us about consultant education. We briefly introduce SLP and identify the specific ways that both fields address writing. We then explore how the disciplinary intersections enhance or hinder the work that graduate students do in either field. Based on this foundation, we propose a four-step process for educating graduate consultants that promotes an awareness of how similarities enhance work in either field, how differences can hinder the work, and how bidirectional transference between fields can benefit graduate students as both consultants and as academics in their home discipline. Ultimately, this paper highlights the untapped potential of the theory and pedagogy of consultants’ home disciplines for effective generalist consultant education.

Scholars in the field of writing center studies have previously, and continue to, criticize writing centers for upholding unjust systems, arguing for more practical, equitable, and inclusive anti-racist pedagogies–namely through means of linguistic justice. Within this is a call for more attention to the practices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) tutors and to Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). In this small, IRB-approved project, we interviewed three BIPOC tutors employed at an MSI and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), exploring how these tutors conceptualize linguistic justice and how they practice it within their work at their university writing center. By listening to the experiences of these three tutors, we gained insight into the nuanced and complex ways in which their lived experiences and histories influence how they conceptualize linguistic justice, both for themselves and in their work in the writing center. Our research revealed how the multiplicity, complexity, and nuance of identity—specifically self-identification and belonging, the use of multilingualism and code-switching, and the defining of one’s authentic voice—affect how a tutor understands and performs linguistic justice. We hope that sharing these tutors’ voices will highlight a need to recognize the intersections and multiplicity of language, discourse, and identity that shapes tutors’ experiences with linguistic justice work as well as acknowledge the labor they perform when engaging in that work in the writing center.

This article arose out of a need to better understand what happens in university writing center (WC) appointments that are incentivized or mandated by instructors. While the topic has received attention in WC literature, previous research focuses largely on student attitudes toward mandated WC appointments and only rarely addresses the interpersonal dynamics of these sessions. To address this gap, we conducted an IRB-approved, survey-based study investigating the impact of WC tutorial incentivization on writing tutors’ assessments of sessions’ effectiveness, comparing tutors’ scoring of different session types and conducting statistical queries on some of the larger categories. Our results challenge the widespread assumption that mandatory or incentivized writing center sessions are always an obvious tradeoff of “quality vs. quantity.” Specifically, we found that differences in tutor scores between voluntary and mandatory WC sessions were statistically insignificant and did not present a clear tutor preference for voluntary sessions over mandatory sessions; however, when types of incentivization were compared, tutors showed a subtle preference for sessions that were incentivized through a class-wide mandate over those that offered extra credit or involved individual referrals. In this study, we also discuss common metrics for gauging writing tutorials’ success, suggesting that WC practitioners may be placing an undue weight on “engagement.” We hope, most of all, to encourage further research that examines (and expands) institutional approaches to mandatory sessions and encourages a more welcoming stance toward the writers who visit WCs at the behest of their instructors.

Terms used to describe writing support workers in higher education, as well as the location of their employment have sparked a long history of debate in writing center studies but have led to only scattered empirical research. The author examines the history of this debate addressing connotations of various terms and then aims to verify actual naming practice. The present study investigates the impact such debates have had on writing center practice by assessing public web pages from 575 university writing centers to see what terms are generally employed. The study shows that “writing center” is the most popular name for the location of writing tutorial services and that “tutor” remains the most popular term. This finding suggests that “center” has won out over other terms, but the popularity of “tutor” is much less decisive. At institutions with higher enrollment, in R1 institutions, and in the case of graduate student employees, the use of the term “consultant” increases. The general prevalence of the “writing tutor” and the rise of the more recent “writing consultant” and other variants may suggest a lag between scholarly critique and writing center practice, but it could also derive from institutional context. Alternative tutor terms could be employed, but an empirical study of efficacy would be needed to move naming from the realm of lore and conjecture.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) writing tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) have emerged so quickly that their impact on writing centers is not well understood. This article presents data from two studies that were conducted in 2023 and 2024. One consisted of surveys of writing center administrators and related parties. The other was surveys and interviews of students. In 2023, administrators and related parties saw the new technology with suspicion and concern, while students embraced it. However, after a year, the narrative tended to merge. Administrators’ and related parties’ concerns diminished while students became less enamored. Both groups viewed GenAI writing tools as powerful but limited, requiring skill to use. Already some writing center directors are incorporating GenAI writing tools into their programs. This article argues writing centers can even go further, pioneering the use of the new technology.

Writing center scholars have long been interested in the configuration of administrative leadership, often focusing on the roles and designations of writing center administrators (WCAs), whether faculty or staff. This article builds on existing scholarship by examining the affordances—capabilities and limitations—of a mixed-designation administrative team composed of both faculty and staff. Using our writing center as a case study, we highlight the benefits and limitations of a leadership team composed of both faculty and staff. We outline our center’s transition to a mixed-designation leadership model and use affordance theory to delineate the potentials and constraints of such teams, exploring how this configuration impacts functionality, effectiveness, and reach. Capabilities of this model include institutional visibility and legitimacy, access to information and resources, institutional reach, tutor education and training, and mentorship. Limitations include time constraints and a split focus, communication challenges, role ambiguity, and potential reinforcement of hierarchical structures. We conclude with practical recommendations for WCAs seeking to enhance their team structure or add faculty or staff administrative roles. By exploring the unique potentials and limitations of mixed-designation teams, we aim to contribute to ongoing conversations about equity, inclusion, and effective leadership structures in writing center administration.

This article introduces affinity groups as a writing center professional development initiative in support of the inclusion of our LGBTQ+ employees. These groups invite employees with shared identities to form a supportive community and hold critical conversations about relevant topics. A writing center at a large university in the Southeastern United States engaged in queer worldmaking and launched two affinity groups in support of LGBTQ+ inclusion: the LGBTQ+ Alliance, and the LGBTQ+ Allies. In this article, the authors engage in storytelling to consider how participating in and leading affinity groups impacted their professionalization and their sense of welcome. They conclude with reflections on how writing center administrators can queer their approach to staff professional development with the goal of creating a more welcoming workplace for LGBTQ+ employees.

Emotions impact all aspects of tutoring work, including sessions with clients, tutor responsibilities, and tutoring philosophies. While emotions can make tutoring feel difficult, mindfulness strategies can be taught to tutors so they feel equipped to manage clients’ and their own emotions. While plenty of research on mindfulness theories exists, few studies integrate mindfulness into tutor education and examine the impact of mindfulness on tutoring. My study observes how teaching mindfulness strategies can support the emotional labor of tutoring and build emotional intelligence in tutors over time. I developed an emotional mindfulness training workshop for writing center tutors using mindfulness strategies proposed by scholars in writing center studies. I facilitated a training workshop with UNC Charlotte Writing Resources Center (WRC) tutors during the WRC tutor education course for new tutors and a WRC staff meeting for veteran tutors. Then, I followed the impact of this training on tutoring practices by collecting written journal responses from six tutors. In these journal responses, tutors wrote about client emotions, tutor emotions, and mindfulness strategies they used. Tutors use and evolve the mindfulness strategies outlined in the training to benefit both clients and themselves, while also using mindfulness strategies to reflect upon tutoring practices. As one of the first writing center studies that analyzes the impact of mindfulness training, my research offers a reference to writing center administrators and tutors on the positive effects of implementing mindfulness into regular tutoring practices.

This reflection came together over the course of a semester while the co-authors were working in their University Writing Center and at community partner sites. Only a handful of writing center scholarship has investigated how time as an agent plays into pedagogical performance (Geller, “Tick-Tock”; Geller et al., The Everyday Writing Center ; Terzano, “Short-Time Tutorials”). Yet, across writing centers we’re all negotiating these material and temporal realities as part of the daily structure of our work. And, as Powell and Hixson-Bowles point out, writing center studies often publishes about the writing self-efficacy of the students and clientele of center services but not tutor self-efficacy. We therefore use time as a lens with which to view and better understand our individualized tutoring efficacies. The co-authors’ stories demonstrate how time can be a valuable reflective lens for connecting theory to action within a session and for the development of one’s sense of self as a writing center professional (their tutor self-efficacy) across sessions and spaces. By so doing, exploring time as a pedagogical influence, tutors can carve out more confidence in themselves, authority in their self-efficacy, and find success in familiar and unfamiliar writing center terrains.

In the last decade, writing center studies has shifted to proposing more radical approaches to tutoring praxes in the hopes of more aggressively challenging the normativity and institutional hegemony of Standard American English (SAE). While well-intentioned and ostensibly conceptualized as “student-centered,” these approaches often fail to acknowledge how radical approaches to writing center (WC) praxes often contend with students’ reliance on directive and assimilationist tutoring, a dependence fostered by the pervasive, institutional hegemony of SAE. As such, drawing on personal experience and contemporary writing center theory, I argue that we should look back to scholarship from beyond the last 5-10 years to guide us as we move forward in the fight to challenge the linguistic hegemony of SAE and institutional linguistic oppression. To that end, this article also offers some suggestions for how we might proceed in a more nuanced pursuit of some of the field’s loftier social justice aims, based on concepts offered by authors like Esters, Geller et al., Diab et al., and others.

My intent in this qualitative study was to illustrate if and how inequalities in power and authority exist in interactions between tutors and multilingual (ML) tutees set in a university writing center in a predominantly White institution (PWI). Using Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a guide, I analyzed selected transcripts to uncover how “language shapes and positions” tutors and tutees (Fernsten 45). I propose that using CDA to examine writing center transcripts can be an effective training tool for tutors working with multilingual writers. By analyzing how their discourse choices may unintentionally bolster linguistic dominance and diminish ML students’ voices, tutors can adapt their approaches while also identifying discourse choices that lead to constructive, collaborative interactions.

Writing center antiracist and linguistic justice statements, like mission statements, articulate the values and beliefs of an organization, and can be powerful tools for social and institutional change. However, they can also be ineffectual or meaningless if their calls are not actualized or they do not have buy-in from writing center staff. This study explores the linguistic features of antiracist and linguistic justice statements posted on the websites of R1 university writing centers in the United States. Grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis, a theoretical and methodological approach which centers the political and powerful impacts of language, we analyzed the pronouns, verbs, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) language among these statements. This analysis revealed that such statements use we/our language referring to writing centers and they/them language referring to students/writers; use writing center-relevant action verbs, such as help , develop , and support ; and use modal verbs such as will, connoting future, and potentially present, actions. We also observed a discourse orientation towards DEI efforts rather than specifically centering racial justice. Taken together, these findings present a model of the linguistic choices of antiracist and linguistic justice statements which other writing center professionals could consider when writing their own statements; however, we also argue that writing center staff and researchers must be aware of the ways in which their well-intentioned language may inadvertently hedge their commitments to racial justice.

Trauma is ubiquitous, including in post-secondary settings, meaning that trauma-affected individuals are present in every classroom or service setting. While research has investigated the engagement of post-secondary instructors with student trauma disclosures, this work has not extended to cover the unique role of post-secondary writing center staff. Writing tutors may encounter trauma narratives through written assignments or verbal disclosures and often labour under a degree of precarity and lack control over curricular and assignment design, giving them little preparation before encountering emotionally challenging material. As a “helping profession,” writing tutors may be at risk of secondary trauma, re-traumatization based on personal trauma histories, or unsustainable levels of emotional labour. Employing a critical disability lens and an equity-centered trauma-informed framework, this project engaged eight university-based writing center staff in Ontario, Canada in semi-structured interviews to explore how they perceive and narrate their engagement with student trauma and how this may relate to trauma-informed pedagogical practices. Based on a Reflexive Thematic Analysis, several themes are explored, including the relationship between writing center structure/labour conditions and trauma-informed practices, types of emotionally challenging interactions, strategies tutors employ to engage with students during trauma-adjacent sessions, and gaps in ability to provide trauma-informed service. These themes provide insight into tutors’ experience with student trauma and imply recommendations to improve staff and student well-being through engaging with trauma-informed practices in the writing center.

In the pursuit of conveying their missions and services to a diverse audience, writing centers have long engaged in impression management (IM) strategies. This article presents a novel examination of how writing centers manage impressions, particularly in online contexts. Drawing from impression management theory (Jones and Pittman; Boz and Guan; Terrell and Kwok), this micro-study analyzes the intentional strategies employed by writing centers to shape perceptions among stakeholders. The research, conducted at the University of Central Arkansas, investigates the extent to which writing center staff set goals for managing external impressions, the predominant IM strategies utilized, and the level of audience engagement for each. The findings suggest that audiences respond favorably to IM tactics that enhance perceptions of attractiveness and competence. Through survey analysis and examination of social media platforms, the study reveals prominent IM tactics employed by writing centers, with a focus on ingratiation and organizational promotion. Results also highlight the limited use of intimidation and supplication tactics, suggesting a predominant focus on positive reinforcement and community engagement. Additionally, the study offers practical recommendations for writing centers to systematically assess and improve their impression management efforts, including conducting IM audits and developing action plans aligned with organizational goals. Overall, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how writing centers strategically navigate online impression management to effectively communicate their value and engage with stakeholders. It underscores the significance of intentional IM efforts in enhancing credibility, attracting new clients, and fostering positive relationships within the academic community.

Writing center consultant training must account for the multiple media and modes students use as they compose on new digital platforms. While most consultants come to writing center work already confident in traditional literacies, to advise on multimodal projects, they also need to understand how elements such as visual design, navigability, and accessibility play into the rhetorical situation. Starting in 2021, our writing center assigned an ePortfolio-focused professional development curriculum to our consultants, culminating with their creation of websites that integrated and showcased their knowledge, skills, and abilities. The authors studied the consultants’ responses over the first two years of implementation, collecting data from surveys, session observations, and interviews, which we analyzed through inductive and deductive coding. Our results indicate that consultants advanced their understanding of multimodality through their participation in the ePortfolio curriculum and applied their learning in consultations not only about ePortfolios, but also about other visually rich media and application materials. Other writing centers may consider incorporating ePortfolios into their tutor development programs.

Source-based writing skills, which include evaluating, synthesizing, and citing sources, are skills that students are expected to acquire as part of college-level writing. Unfortunately, many multilingual writers (MLWs), especially those in advanced degree programs, lack programmatic support and instruction. Thus, writing centers represent a critical site to offer MLWs tutorial-based support. Our study examined whether or not writing centers can help MLWs develop—and transfer—source-based writing skills in a sequence of three tutorials. We recruited five advanced student MLW participants from different cultural backgrounds who were uncomfortable with source use. Through pre-and postwriting samples, interviews, writing process recording videos, and a long-term follow-up, our findings indicate that our three-sequence tutorial significantly improved advanced MLWs’ source-based writing skills and transferred to the next semester. Improvements occurred in the areas of selecting, organizing, and connecting sources as well as in engaging in appropriate source use and avoiding plagiarism, although some areas showed stronger gains than others. This study contributes to the field’s development of replicable, aggregable, and data-supported best practices to explore the efficacy of tutoring for specific populations. We offer suggestions for writing centers to develop, test, and create tutoring-based MLW support programs.

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

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

In this article, we describe writing center clients’ “idea” of the writing center based on interviews with 26 writing center users and qualitative coding of interview transcripts. Participants’ constructs of the writing center provide a lens to better understand how they perceive writing as an activity, the “writing culture” of the institution, the role of the writing center in their writing processes, and, ultimately, if they see writing centers in the way we would expect them to. The tensions we derived from our data are (1) between who and what tutors are and offer: discipline-specific expertise (including the disciplines of writing) versus generalist expertise, and (2) between how tutoring should occur: tutors as collaborative partners in students’ writing processes versus tutors as “another set of eyes” to give relatively quick feedback. Additionally, we offer our findings in a 2 x 2 matrix, a common visualization tool to productively illuminate the nuances, tensions, perspectives, and points of view in ways that can further writing center theory and practice. Our findings suggest that writing centers might respond to these tensions by expanding their “ideas” about who they are and what they do within their institutions.

This article discusses findings from semi-structured interviews with writing consultants about their affective experiences working across three different consulting modalities: in person, asynchronous, and synchronous. This study offers affect as a lens for understanding consultants’ responses to and strategies for consulting in multiple modalities and argues that by attending to affect, emotion, and disposition in consulting we can better support our consultants when they’re consulting in different modalities.

In his award-winning book, Around the Texts of Writing Centers, R. Mark Hall (2017) asserts the importance of everyday writing center texts, claiming that these documents “both enact and forward writing center scholarship” (p. 3). It is Hall’s position that such “everyday” documents are essential to understanding the work of writing centers, but that their very ubiquity leads writing center scholars and administrators to ignore them or take their functions for granted. In this study, I take up Hall’s call for more scholarly attention to everyday writing center texts through a thematic rhetorical analysis of nine writing center employee handbooks. I identify three primary rhetorical functions of the genre: orienting (new) tutors to the center, orienting (new) tutors to the work, and establishing expectations. My analysis reveals that although these handbooks are locally specific, they perform several common and important purposes for writing centers and warrant further scholarly examination.

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

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

The position of writing center assistant director resides in the middle of the often blurry lines of hierarchy. While many writing centers advocate for team leadership, the fact remains that universities are steeped in bureaucratic tradition familiar to university leaders, students, and tutors. Assistant directors accomplish tasks that keep the day-to- day center functioning, yet these tasks equate to sometimes invisible work in the center and often invisible work in the university as a whole. Furthermore, research on assistant directors’ roles, labor, and identities is exceedingly limited. Thus, the purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study is to understand how hierarchies and team leadership impact the lived experiences of writing center assistant directors. We explore their roles and identities related to leadership, labor, and power dynamics. Eleven participants completed one-on- one, semi-structured interviews about their lived experiences as assistant directors. Key themes emerged during data analysis including power dynamics between directors and assistant directors, decision-making, and the space between hierarchy and team leadership. The findings from this study present a better understanding of the labor of writing center assistant directors and led to recommendations for both directors and assistant directors in terms of clarifying and honoring the often murky work of assistant directors.

English writing centers at Chinese universities present a fascinating paradox. On one hand, the number of universities with writing centers and the professional interest in writing centers in China have grown steadily over the past two decades. But on the other, the number of centers is still modest and only a few centers have had a significant influence on the culture of writing on their campuses, which is surprising given the vast number of universities in China and the documented need for strengthening and expanding writing instruction in English. This international research study explores the current state of English writing centers in China in a more comprehensive way than previous literature has done. Using data from new in-depth interviews with 17 professionals involved with English writing centers at 15 Chinese universities—professors, tutors, instructors, directors, administrators, and university leaders—as well as data from publicly available websites and WeChat accounts and published literature in Chinese and in English, this study identifies important needs that English writing centers can meet in Chinese universities, offers a typology and descriptions of existing centers, and identifies challenges that writing centers face and possible paths forward, or strategic action fields, for successfully institutionalizing writing centers in China. This study not only offers practical advice to support the promising future of writing centers in China but also introduces English writing centers in China to a larger international audience and reveals powerful insights into the ways models, principles, and practices of writing centers travel and change across continents and educational cultures.

This article explores hospitality as a theoretical framework for valuing emotional engagement and rhetorical listening in writing center consultations, challenging traditional views that prioritize rationality and detachment. Anchored in a university writing center, the study investigates how writing tutors engage with writers, adopting hospitality as a core principle. Semi-structured postconsultation interviews and a focus group allowed tutors to reflect collaboratively on their application of the hospitality framework. Thematic analysis with in vivo coding ensured participants’ voices remained central to the findings. By examining the lived experiences of tutors, the study highlights the dynamic relationship between emotional and rational responses in hospitable tutoring. The results demonstrate the transformative potential of hospitality-based pedagogy in fostering healthier writing relationships, improving writer retention, and enhancing tutors’ academic and emotional skills. The article advocates for the criticality of emotional validation and rhetorical listening as central tenets of effective and hospitable tutoring.

Guest editors' introduction for The Writing Center Journal 43:3 (2025).

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

This study examines what multilingual writers notice while they read their writing aloud, and whether reading aloud helps improve the accuracy of their writing during revision. It also investigates whether multilingual writers’ second language (L2) proficiency influences the extent to which reading aloud impacts revision. To address these questions, a counterbalanced, mixed design study was carried out with two experimental conditions: revising while reading aloud and revising while reading silently. Multilingual writers of higher and lower English proficiency at a large research university participated in a two-day sequence of composition and revision, two times, over the course of two weeks. Each student’s composition and revision process was screen-recorded and used in a stimulated recall interview at the end of the study procedure. Quantitative results from this study suggest that reading aloud may be more beneficial for multilingual writers at higher rather than lower English proficiencies, mostly because of lower proficiency multilingual writers’ difficulties in having to effectively allocate their attentional resources. Findings of the study help writing centers implement practices with a more nuanced, learner-specific approach to further enhance their ability to support diverse learners.

For English as an Additional Language (EAL) students, generative AI (GenAI) offers meaningful support for writing in English, while also introducing a new set of challenges. Supporting EAL students in developing AI literacy is crucial to their growth as confident, adaptable writers, and writing center tutors are uniquely positioned to facilitate this development. This case study explores the experiences of undergraduate Brazilian international students at a small liberal arts college who received writing feedback from both peer writing center tutors and ChatGPT. Findings indicate that students valued the human connection, contextual understanding, and rhetorical support offered by peer tutors, while turning to ChatGPT for immediate, nonjudgmental assistance, particularly in navigating multilingual challenges. The study offers insight into how peer writing tutors can thoughtfully leverage GenAI to support multilingual writers.

Writing center scholars have adopted Pratt’s (1991) “contact zone” metaphor to describe the diversity of consultants and students in writing centers, but this literature has largely overlooked the perspectives of multilingual students. Through surveys, interviews, and session data, we found that while multilingual students described rich linguistic identities, they also experienced tension and instability as language users. Students often framed their considerable language assets as deficiencies in academic writing contexts. They faced additional tension between instructor expectations and their own understanding of assignment goals. Students frequently sought native-like language competency from consultants and expected them to serve as informants about academic writing conventions—goals that often conflicted with writing center values and practices. This research suggests writing centers need to move from “clashing” to “collaboration” to understand and support multilingual students’ writing processes and goals within the context of U.S. higher education.

Extending prior work on present others, individuals who are not physically present in writing center sessions—such as advisors, colleagues, and peers—but who directly or indirectly impact what happens during consultations (Kranek & Carvajal Regidor, 2021), we argue that attending to present others is one way to more holistically support multilingual graduate writers. Based on data from session recordings, we contend that present others can be used as a framework to train consultants to better address the specific needs of this student population by acknowledging their socialization processes, feedback networks, language needs, and emotions. Then, we share two approaches to consultant training using present others that have worked at our respective writing centers. Ultimately, we demonstrate how attending to present others and providing explicit training for consultants can lead to more socially and linguistically just approaches to multilingual graduate writing support in the writing center.

This article argues for a shift in writing center pedagogy toward prioritizing transnational writing assets as the basis of our work with international multilingual writers specifically and every writer we encounter generally. While writing center scholarship has paid attention to the influences of language, cultural and rhetorical differences among native and non-native English speakers/ tutors in the writing center, much of this discussion has taken the “comparative” route rather than a “trans-d” (transnational) route with potentials to transform our engagements with scholars, students, and writers from other parts of the world. This IRB-approved research reveals that international multilingual writers possess unique knowledge of how writing works, influenced by their linguistic, cultural, and rhetorical competencies. These competencies function as transnational writing assets that participants willingly share with their writing consultants, providing an environment that encourages open dialogue about such transnational writing assets and that positions students as valuable contributors of knowledge about writing. The study concludes with recommendations that advance transnational writing dispositions as a transformative pedagogical approach in writing center work to enrich our interactions with writers from different parts of the world.

This piece explores the discussions surrounding multilingualism, internationalization, and queerness within writing center studies (WCS). As a branch of writing program administration (WPA), this piece situates above-disciplinary conversations in relation to second language studies (SLS) and broader language and literacy education scholarship to identify areas where disciplinary collaboration and attention are still needed, particularly around questions of professional development, administrative strategies, and pedagogies supporting multilingual writers in writing center spaces. This piece begins by reviewing the major trends, contributions, and key terms in existing literature centering on multilingual writers and SLS to identify ways and areas of collaboration and disciplinary efforts that still need attention within WPA, specifically WCS. Finally, the piece concludes with the author’s perspective, a gay multilingual writing center professional who grew up in a global Anglophone context, on positioning himself as an intersectional scholar ready to make an impact while showcasing his contributions to the ongoing conversation within current WPA and WCS research.

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

ABSTRACTWe asked 15 editors about their perceptions of five sentences using singular they in different contexts and about the style guides that inform their work. Editors appreciated the inclusivity of indefinite and definite singular they and recognized APA for its leading-edge stance. Our findings indicate the need for editors to develop a heuristic for determining when to deviate from style guide advice and to develop their own system for mitigating ambiguity in relation to they.KEYWORDS: Editingsocial justice / ethics Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. We explained to editors that, in each sentence, the capitalized pronoun referred to the capitalized noun phrase.2. When we refer to a "comprehensive style guide," we mean a manual that provides standards for writing, editing, and publishing texts. A comprehensive style guide may be written by a publisher or discourse community but adopted widely. For example, University of Chicago Press's Chicago Manual of Style is used by other publishers and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is used in disciplines outside of psychology.Companies may create their own style guides for internal use. Such guides may or may not be as detailed or complete as comprehensive style guides and may, in fact, be based on or direct users to a comprehensive style guide for any gaps in content. For example, ACES: The Society for Editing "Style Guide and Proofreading Checklist" (Filippini, Citation2021) is for ACES communications and based on the AP Stylebook.Some editors in this study referred to style sheets. A copyeditor creates and uses a style sheet to note a running list of grammar and usage that are specific to a manuscript and which may be different from house style or a comprehensive style guide (CMOS, Section 2.55).Despite attempting to define these terms, we recognize there are overlaps among the categories and across fields. For example, the Microsoft Writing Style Guide began as an in-house style guide and is now used by other software companies. Further, there exist other contexts of the terms "style guide" and "style sheet," such as brand style guides, programming style guides, and web design style sheets.3. Of the remaining two editors, one said that they would revise the sentence to avoid using singular they, and the other said that they would use the name Pat again instead of a pronoun.4. Only three editors (4%) said they would edit the sentence.5. The two remaining editors differed in their responses. One said that they would avoid using singular they by revising the sentence; the other said that they would change the pronoun to her.6. Ten editors said that they would edit this sentence.7. As of August 16, 2022, AP Stylebook Online advice under "accent marks" reads: "Use accent marks or other diacritical marks with names of people who request them or are widely known to use them, or if quoting directly in a language that uses them: An officer spotted him and asked a question: "Cómo estás?" How are you? Otherwise, do not use these marks in English-language stories. Note: Many AP customers' computer systems ingest via the ANPA standard and will not receive diacritical marks published by the AP."Additional informationNotes on contributorsJo MackiewiczJo Mackiewicz is a professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University. She studies the communication of pedagogical and workplace interactions. Her book, Welding Technical Communication: Teaching and Learning Embodied Knowledge was published by SUNY Press in 2022.Shaya KrautShaya Kraut is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program at Iowa State University, where she teaches first-year writing. She has also worked as an ESL teacher, a writing center tutor, and a teacher/tutor for adult basic education. Her research interests include composition pedagogy and critical literacy.Allison DurazziAllison Durazzi is a communication professional with experience in industry settings including law, the arts, and freelance editing. She is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University where she researches and teaches technical editing and teaches business, technical, and speech communication courses.

This study examines the session note taking practices of ~90 undergraduate peer tutors at Middlebury College–an undergraduate small liberal arts college –focusing specifically on reported anti-racism practices in the writing center. In analyzing session notes over six semesters, we observed a noticeable decline in tutor reported engagement with anti-racist themes (broadly conceived to include racial and linguistic justice, as well as emotional labor) from 2021 to 2023. We further found that peer tutors are engaging with academic discussions of race and the emotional elements of racial justice as they arise in tutoring sessions, more often than they are with linguistic justice. In a follow-up training in Fall 2023, we found that tutors report being reluctant to characterize their practices as intentionally anti-racist. From these findings, we believe that anti-racist work is not only cyclical, with some populations of tutors (such as the 2021 cohort, especially BIPOC and queer tutors) taking up the charge of doing this work, but, also that there remains confusion around what can be defined as anti-racist tutoring praxis (despite trainings, onboarding, conversations, and regular nudging). We conclude that anti-racist work, while a vital part of writing center praxis, needs more guidance and clarity around intentional practices as well as broader buy-in from the institution. At a time when DEI and anti-racist work is under threat across higher education, this buy-in might not be forthcoming. To that point, we conclude with a discussion about how institutional values and policies encourage or forestall anti-racist writing work.

This article describes one writing center’s creation and assessment of a graduate editing service, a service for advanced graduate students at the end of their thesis or dissertation writing. Through discussion of the training, features, and assessment of the graduate editing service as well as its role in our larger suite of graduate writing support, we offer a roadmap for how other writing centers can develop writer-focused graduate editing services that support a range of diverse learners and their needs. Our two-stage analysis of 20 student texts includes a robust analysis of 6933 edits made by 10 editors and offers an overview of the common edits and the number of accepted edits in our service. This article also provides operationalized definitions of three kinds of editing practices in our service, including instructional editing, copyediting, and hybrid, and a taxonomy of common instructional practices including guidance (offering direct edits with information and instruction), question asking, responding as a reader, and shifting responsibility to the writer. With the presentation of instructional editing and its features, our article offers clear implications for training and ongoing assessment of editing services in a variety of contexts and helps provide an ethical response to the role that writing centers may play in editing student work.

This article offers a narrative account of how we, graduate assistants at a private, Vincentian university writing center, confronted and addressed sexual harassment within our space. Beginning in the spring semester of 2022, we saw an increasing number of sexual harassment incidents in our writing center. Desperately searching for more effective practices to protect our consultants and clients alike from these experiences, we drew inspiration from Kovalik et al.’s (2021) concept of a community contract, developing a contract tailored to the specific needs and dynamics of our writing center environment. By recounting our experiences, this article highlights the challenges faced by the consultants we mentor when dealing with harassment in their workplace, as well as how we balance policy and agency when looking for a solution. There is little literature currently on sexual harassment in writing center scholarship, so it is our hope that our experiences will inspire future research as well as fill some existing gaps in the academic landscape. We conclude this essay by reflecting on the outcomes of our initiatives and the lessons learned in the process. We hope that this framework will prove valuable to other writing centers currently dealing with similar problems, and that by implementing a community contract, writing centers may preemptively avoid such situations. Keywords : student misconduct, sexual harassment, community contract, writing center policy We quickly learn as writing center consultants that one unanticipated comment can throw off an entire session with a student, no matter how well the session had been going before. This becomes even truer when it comes to unwarranted sexual advances, observations about one’s identity, or illicit, uncomfortable conversation topics. This was true for Maya, [1] a senior writing consultant at our center. The session began as most do, exchanging pleasantries, ensuring that the student-client is comfortable, and determining how the next 45 minutes will be best spent. It was not until a few minutes into the session that her client, a white, male peer, derailed the focus of the session with one comment: “Hey, you’re pretty for a brown girl.” In this moment Maya, taken aback, must take stock of her positionality, the student-client’s positionality, what is at risk, and her own emotions, and then determine how to move forward. Does she address the inappropriate nature of this comment? Does she smile and brush off the affirmation of colorism, moving the session forward? Does she find a graduate assistant or another leader in the writing center and escalate the matter higher? In mere seconds, Maya must navigate an unfair and unjust situation with the means available to her. Though there may be resources available and support surrounding her, at this moment it is very easy for her to feel alone, targeted, unsafe, and unsure. Unfortunately, situations like these are not uncommon. The Association of American Universities (2019) found that on college campuses, 59.2% of women experience some degree of sexual harassment during their time at the university (p. viii). While there is not enough definitive research to confidently assert that these staggering statistics are reflected in writing center spaces, it is clear to those working in these spaces that some level of harassment is making its way through the writing center’s doors from the campus at large. We have found this true in our own writing center especially, a writing center at a private Vincentian university, with the rates of student misconduct growing exponentially in the two semesters following the height of the Covid-19 pandemic (namely Spring 2022 and Fall 2022). From racialized comments like the one Maya endured to inappropriate gestures during consultations, from clients derailing writing conversations in order to ask for consultants’ phone numbers to severe incidents of stalking, our writing center has been the background for an array of concerning incidents. As we saw the number of weekly incidents rising, we questioned how to move forward and what the best practices were to keep our consultants safe while maintaining the “homey” and welcoming feel we, and many other writing center administrators, desire our writing center to emanate, for better or for worse (McKinney 2013). The way forward was a journey for us, a journey on which we hope many more writing centers will join, as the work is nowhere near its endpoint. With this goal in mind, in this paper, we will discuss our lived experiences in our writing center as graduate assistants through a narrative format and the way we handled the threat of sexual harassment in our space. We share our collaborative process of creating a community contract for our writing center and offer the final version as a foundation for others to build upon. We create a framework that balances student agency and autonomy with necessary, protective policy that can easily be adapted by other writing centers negotiating their way through the muddy waters of student misconduct in their space. We believe that our work bridges gaps in existing research by demanding an intellectual consideration of sexual harassment in writing centers as a focal issue within student misconduct, something that desperately needs recognition within this field. We both work at our writing center as graduate assistants, so we are invested in the day-to-day operations of our center as leaders. [2] We toggle between our identities as administrators, mentors, and students, and this gives us a complex and unique perspective from which we conduct our leadership. [3] We see what is going on from a higher level– we know what needs to happen from an administrative point of view, what kind of training needs to happen, and how to keep the center running smoothly. But we also see how the job affects our undergraduate consultants in a very real way as we are “in the weeds” with them. Our campus is diverse in race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, economic backgrounds, and more. With this diversity at the forefront, we want our center to be a place that celebrates it, that champions students’ voices, and that feels like a safe space. When we started to notice that some sessions were impacting the space in a negative manner – for both consultants and for clients – we responded as both peers and student-leaders. Because of our unique position as graduate assistants, in many cases, we either saw or heard the incidents that occurred in our space, or were notified shortly after. Additionally, because we share close relationships with both the writing center’s director and assistant director, we felt empowered to act on behalf of our staff while knowing we were fully supported from above. While there were an alarming number of incidents, we have chosen to highlight the three that, along with Maya’s story, exemplify the crux of the issue at hand: blatant entitlement. In the spring semester of 2022, our campus was slowly transitioning back to its pre-Covid status quo. Masks were no longer required, distancing was loosened, and students were opting, once again, for in-person classes. This also meant that the writing center experienced higher traffic than it had in over a year, bringing in new students every day. One of these students was Arthur, a nontraditional student who frequented the center daily. At first, consultants found him a bit creepy but had difficulty articulating why. He had a certain suspicious demeanor about him, and many interactions with him seemed off-putting. He would lurk about the center, even if he did not have appointments, and began to make certain consultants uncomfortable with his presence. He had the tendency to “sneak up” on consultants and startle them when he wanted to ask a question and had little to no awareness of personal space. He acted as if the writing center was his alone, to the point that many consultants acknowledged that they felt that they no longer had access to their own workspace. As his behavior began to worsen, consultants took note. Many refused to be in spaces near him, and others requested to not work with him. When he would make appointments, he refused to make them himself online (as is our center’s policy) but would wait by our front desk until a female staff member was working there and then insist that that staff member make an appointment for him. Similarly, he would consistently book sessions only with our women consultants and come unprepared with no clear goals, thereby putting extra work on our consultants to direct a session that had no inherent direction. Often, he would also demand that these consultants do tasks outside their responsibility, such as plugging in his laptop for him. In one specific instance, one of our strongest and boldest consultants attempted to terminate the session after he presented no assignment to work on; this resulted in his refusal to leave and an attempt to cause an angry scene, demanding to speak to our director (also a woman). After this incident, we asked Arthur to leave our space and deactivated his account on our scheduling platform. He attempted to return in the fall of 2022 and, once again, put up quite the fight with our director, but we were able to stand our ground to ensure the safety and comfort of our consultants. We hoped that this was a one-off incident, but we were sadly mistaken. Our situation with Arthur only seemed to begin an influx of these types of events, heightening our awareness as leaders. In the fall semester of 2022, incidents began to increase both in intensity and number. Lauren, a senior consultant, came to us to report unwelcoming and hostile incidents with a client who happened to be a co-worker in her other campus job as a resident assistant. This co-worker had crossed boundaries multiple times outside of the space, including an instance where he refused to leave her dorm room. This particular client began making appointments with Lauren and usually did not convey clear goals or a specific assignment to work on. Other times, he would neglect bringing in any kind of writing assignment at all; he made appointments simply to chat with Lauren as his consultant. The advances he made during these types of sessions were unwanted and unencouraged, and altogether made Lauren feel unsafe. To address these incidents, we began by simply moving his appointments to other consultants. The student became apoplectic at the thought of his appointments being moved and complained to both the director and assistant director of the writing center, both of whom kindly explained the policy behind their decision. He responded that working with Lauren was a “clear right” as he pays tuition money that funds the center, and by that logic, funds his access to Lauren’s person. The disturbing nature of his presumptuous ownership over Lauren, a black woman, was made further alarming by their racial identities: as a white man, this client’s rhetoric embodied the financial entitlement that has historically commodified black women’s bodies and their labor. His response to our administrators demonstrated the full extent of his assumed privilege to consultant access, time, and intimacy of the consultation space in the center, a notion that we found to be increasingly shared by a vast number of the student population that utilized writing center services. At the same time, the student began to show up in Lauren’s place of residence, unexpected and unannounced. Because of the nature of these advances, the matter had to be reported institutionally with the Title IX office. This student had access to both of Lauren’s places of work, one of which was also her home as an RA. The harassment cornered her in almost every aspect of her daily life, causing distress and questioning/jeopardizing her safety. We wondered if working with a specific consultant truly was a “right,” and if any codes of conduct existed that would suggest otherwise, but our search into this matter institutionally came up empty, prompting us to fill the gaps. During the evening hours at our writing center, a student came in with a creative short story he wanted to get an opinion on. Once again, Lauren was the consultant for this particular session, and by this time, had unfortunately become accustomed to working through difficult sessions. The session began normally, and the story seemed innocent at first. It followed a budding college romance in the residence halls, but the story took a dark turn when the plot morphed from romance to murder. The story specifically explained in detail how the main character kills his love interest, proceeds to rape her inside their residence hall, and later eats her. Reaching this point in the story, Lauren became increasingly uncomfortable and excused herself to alert one of us and asked how she should move forward. At our writing center, we, of course, encourage writings of all types and typically instruct our consultants to help clients even if they disagree with the viewpoints being articulated as it can be a good chance for education and for changing the rhetoric surrounding oppression (Suhr-Systma & Brown, 2011). It is also the responsibility of both the reader and writer to authentically respond (Elbow & Belanoff, 1999). However, with the explicit nature of this story and Lauren’s clear uneasiness, we made the decision to shut down the session. When we explained this to the client, he stated that “he had the right to bring in whatever he wanted ” and work with whomever he likes. We wondered how far is too far with writing, what consultants actually consent to as they enter a session, and how much we can actually protect our consultants from uncomfortable situations. We share these stories to paint a realistic picture of our writing center and to express the urgency we felt to “deal” with the problem. Stories have a unique way of drawing storyteller and listener together into a relationship, even if temporarily; the hardships faced by one will by proxy be felt by the other (Dixon 2017). With this in mind, we invite you into the weeds of our writing center and share with you our collaborative process for overcoming the sexual harassment we saw. With our consultants’ safety risk increasing simply by existing in our space and doing their job, we knew we had to find a new way forward as leaders. To begin, we borrowed Dixon’s (2017) framework of accepting the messy, everyday parts of writing center work as integral to what we do. Rather than looking at these incidents as something to overcome, move past, and forget for the sake of trying to create an idealistic – yet unattainable – space, we addressed the discomfort these incidents left behind. In her research on queering the everyday of writing centers, Dixon (2017) suggests that negotiating sexual harassment and other incidents comes from working through unsettling events and asking how they “complicate our understanding of what it means to make meaning in the center.” In our case, what do these new levels of harassment mean? Do they affect how consultants interact with each other and/or with clients? What kind of environment do we want to build, and how do we get there? Next, we collected whatever resources we could find on sexual harassment and similar occurrences in writing centers. While the scholarship on the subject was relatively limited, a handful of studies aided us in our journey. Harry Denny’s foundational work, Facing the Center, situates sex and gender dynamics in the writing center as a pivotal point of study. He writes that “our sex, our gender, and the politics attendant to them are ubiquitous in writing centers and to the people that circulate through them” (p. 87). To ignore the different power dynamics, privileges, and potentials for harm that accompany sex, gender, and its intersections across multiple identities is to ignore a key component of the work being done in a writing center space. Denny reminds us that though we cannot fight every battle, we must find strategic moments to fight the gender and sex oppressions we see in our centers (p. 111). This sentiment reinforces the importance of the work we are attempting to accomplish. Dixon and Robinson (2019), and Nadler (2019) pushed us to question the space of a writing center itself – we want our spaces to be welcoming, but what does that mean? And at what cost? Nader (2019) discusses online writing center spaces and what kinds of behaviors and attitudes are welcome there. Specifically, he addresses tutor consent– by entering online space what exactly are tutors consenting to? Is this consent clearly defined (typically, the answer is “no”)? Similarly, Dixon and Robinson (2019) tackle what “welcome” means inside an in-person writing center, especially when institutional positionality is considered. The university places rules and regulations on a writing center that directly impact what shape “welcome” takes and who exactly is welcome. They call us to redefine comfort, space, ideology, and practice in order to consider what “welcome” means in practice. This is a call we took seriously as we strived to address the incidents in our writing center because we did not want our space to welcome harm. As Dixon and Robinson (2019) express, writing centers are situated in the midst of institutions that, more often that not, have conflicting agendas concerning the handling of sexual harassment. This is an area that writing centers need to tread carefully, balancing institutional responsibility with the well-being of the students who inhabit the space. Prebel (2015) writes of the implicit harm in mandatory reporting. She argues that mandatory reporting in centers, and across the institution, in reality victimize those who have experienced sexual harassment. Meadows (2021) builds on this work, highlighting key ideas that she believes will spark conversations in writing centers and move us toward finding a solution to sexual harassment that does not leave victims isolated and defeated. She asserts that we must start these conversations with each other and push for some sort of institutional reform – two things we look to accomplish through our work here. Using Prebel (2015) and Meadows (2021) as a springboard, it seemed clear that we needed to tackle the problem of institutional policies versus internal, departmental policies. We had no internal policy in place to deal with sexual harassment or other forms of student misconduct at the time these incidents began to occur. In our center, we try to have as few hard-lined policies as possible because we believe that policies, no matter how good-intentioned, typically tend to fail to serve the entire population which they are intended to regulate and can easily become tools of oppression. Our greatest desire is for both our consultants and our student-clients to have agency in the sessions, and we find that the best way to ensure that is to lessen the authoritarian policies in place. We adopted this mentality from the work of Natarajan, Cardona, and Yang (2022), who write about the policies on writing center landing pages from an anti-racist lens. They argue that policies even as simple as “no proofreading” or appointment allotments can send subtle yet clear signals as to who is welcome or not welcome in a space. Sometimes, policies are created with implicitly biased rationales. While many policies seem neutral when taken for face-value, underneath they expose roots in racism and ableism, disproportionately affecting already marginalized student writers and tutors. To combat this potential marginalization, Natarajan et. al (2022) suggest focusing on the students themselves and how policies affect them, rather than focusing on the nitty gritty of the actual policy. They delineate the distinction by focusing on the who rather than the what : We wanted to adopt their ideology of people-focused versus policy-focused procedures in our space. While policies do help standardized practices so that every student at the writing center, both writer and tutor, has the same foundation, these policies can also affect the students in different ways. This is something that writing center administrators must be aware of while working with students and when creating the policies meant to protect them. We took this thinking to heart in our writing center, wanting to respect the diversity of our space by keeping rigid procedures to a minimum. We intended our space to allow allow creative expression and autonomy for both writers and tutors to set the boundaries of their consultations. Yet, in doing so, we found that when things get dicey in a session for a consultant, especially concerning sexual harassment, the lack of clear, available policy works toward our disadvantage. Until these incidents, we had almost been scared of power and authority as concepts; it was now our chance to remedy this stance and find a healthy balance between power and autonomy. In writing centers and related scholarship, there is more often than not an acute need to move away from any sort of hierarchy to ensure that work can be done. We know and live by the mantra “produce better writers, not better papers,” focusing on equipping writers with transferable writing skills rather than making sure they have an A+ paper ready to go by the end of a session (North 1984, 438). Similarly, we strive for our centers to be welcoming homes and not stuffy classrooms or remedial-only spaces. Carino (2003) reminds us that peership is elevated in writing center scholarship as the ultimate form of tutoring, a practice we actively promote in our own center. It represents “writing centers as the nonhierarchical and nonthreatening collaborative environments most aspire to be” (Carino, 2003, p. 96). We see consultants and their clients as two equals, two students, two friends . But should friendship truly be the goal of writing consultations? Of course, considering friendship is helpful for many consultations, especially when the clients come into their sessions eager and ready to dive into their writing. But more often than not, it can create an awkward dynamic between tutor and writer. Students do not always come into our writing center with the intention to learn and do so happily; many times, students come into our space with the intention of getting extra credit, having someone to write their papers for them, or, in extreme cases, crossing boundaries. If I only see my tutor as a friend, what is keeping me from crossing boundaries and making inappropriate advances? Friendship is a familiar relationship, one that suggests intimacy. Yes, there is inherent intimacy built into the work of consultation as sharing writing is extremely personal and often feels like sharing oneself. Yet, at the end of the day, writing consultation is a job with specific goals. We want clients to feel welcome, safe, and productive while doing their work with a tutor, yet this desire should never come at the cost of our student tutoring staff’s well-being, all for the sake of “friendship.” There must be some sort of balance between the two extremes of hard-lined policies and idealistic friendship. Tutors need to have agency in their sessions to direct their clients as needed and to add whatever personalization feels right to them, but clear boundaries also need to be established between tutor and client for a safe working relationship to exist. We cannot turn a blind-eye to the power dynamics at play in tutor-client relations for the sake of friendship; this becomes especially important when sessions become difficult. Acknowledging that there is some sort of power dynamic occurring in sessions can help consultants embrace their desired autonomy, not only when shutting down unwanted advances but also in the more predictable difficult sessions, such as when clients are on their phones or clearly have faulty expectations of what writing center consultants can do. Carino (2003) reminds us: While we do not want to cross the line into an authoritarian regime where administrators dictate exactly what can occur in a session and create rules for every little thing, some level of actual authority given to our consultants and policies in place to help guide sessions truly can be a healthy thing. In order to create policies that brought us closer to this healthy foundation, however, we had to navigate institutional systems and authority, which many times proves to be a much trickier task. When it comes to institutional responsibility for a sexual harassment or student misconduct case, the path to accountability and due process can often come with difficulty to alleviate a threatening situation. Institutions are responsible by Title IX to ensure that there is equal access to all University spaces and that such access is not hindered, for example, by another student’s threatening presence. However, institutional responsibility also includes ensuring compliance to reporting, evidence, and investigation standards, some of which have come under scrutiny for taking agency– and consent– away from the victim/survivor. When writing centers welcome individuals into sessions, they do so with the other person’s consent and right to self-determination, but this culture comes to a halt when mandatory reporting practices bind writing centers to situate the victim/survivor outside of their own autonomy. Holland et al. (2021) write that “lack of consent lies at the heart of both sexual assault and universal mandatory reporting” (p. 3).  Regaining this lost sense of autonomy and control is “essential to recovery and healing after individuals experience sexual trauma” (p. 2). However, when an individual– client or consultant– reports to their graduate assistant or directors at the writing center, they may then be subjected to a series of interrogation from one department to another. This may require them to reiterate their stories and endure trauma for the sake of attaining justice, as well as have their consent to privacy be undertaken by university surveillance, the police, attorneys, private investigators, and the perpetrator– all of which came from one nonconsensual report (Know Your Title IX 2021). The ramifications of mandatory reporting become even more pronounced when consultants occupy marginalized racial identities. In these instances, the consequences extend to issues of racialization, mistrust of authority, and the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes. As with the consultants in our story, the victim/survivor’s racial identity increases their susceptibility to harm from surveillance measures. As Holland (2021) reminds us, mandatory reporting can reinforce the mistrust persons of color already carry as a result of previous racialization, over policing, and personal experiences of police brutality. The fact that “providing safety and support has become synonymous with increasing police presence [and] surveillance” shows what little consideration mandatory reporting policies give to this mistrust (Méndez, 2020, p. 98). In this way, white supremacy becomes enmeshed in mandatory reporting and decreases a student of color’s likelihood of reporting. For Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC), specific gendered and racialized stereotypes can further inhibit them from reporting out of self preservation. Black women who report face being stereotyped as the “angry black woman” to minimize justified anger over sexual harassment (Morrison 2021). Furthermore, race-specific stereotypes that label Black and Brown women as overly promiscuous can lead institutional authority figures to orient their investigation towards the victim/survivor’s credibility (Buchanan 2002). Surveillance as a result of mandatory reporting then turns into a measure of scrutiny rather than safety for BIWOC victims/survivors. For writing centers, this dilemma of institutional responsibility and ethics of care is crucial to our commitment to social justice. In her work on mandatory reporting in writing centers, Bethany Meadows (2021) asks, “if we believe students have the right to their own language and voice, then why do we remove survivor agency with mandatory reporting?” If we acclaim students’ self-determination in consultations, then how can we implicate ourselves in processes that remove autonomy, forcibly re-traumatize, and subject survivors/victims to surveillance from institutions that systematically oppress the racial and gendered identities of those who come forward? For writing centers, these dilemmas of institutional responsibility and ethics of care are crucial to our commitment to social justice. Mandatory reporting removes students from a place where they “can experience some distance from institutional authority” to a space where “the center– and consultant– is more in consensus with the institution than in collaboration with the student” (Prebel 2015). In our cases of consultants facing harassment from clients, the balance between institutional cooperation and the culture of collaboration and care we shared for each other became complicated. As Méndez (2021) asks, “to what extent is having Title IX as the only option available to address sexual misconduct one of the preconditions for silencing a diverse range of survivors?” To be able to actualize the work of reducing institutional harm, writing centers must build “viable responses and healing options for the range of survivors who have been deemed systemically disposable” (Méndez 2021). At our writing center, we created our own code of conduct to give our consultants the option to resolve peer harassment without creating unwarranted surveillance or pressure on a student. Doing so, we hoped to enact an ethics of care for our consultants alongside the ethics of care we pursue for student-clients. Throughout the commentary on the newest revisions to Title IX regulations, there is much debate over the requirement that indirect disclosures, such as through an assignment, must be reported. Under these guidelines, “nearly all employees will be required to report when: they have information about conduct that could reasonably be understood to constitute sexual harassment and assault because they… learned about it ‘by any other means,’ including indirectly learning of conduct via flyers, posts on social media or online platforms, assignments, and class-based discussions” (Holland, n.d., p. 186). According to Prebel (2015), “disclosures of sexual assault made in student essays and reflective pieces like personal statements are considered reportable” and under these circumstances, “the mandate to report can thus be interpreted as a form of textual interventionism, a limit on how individual writers might ‘own’ their texts or develop agency through their writing” (p. 4-5). While Prebel references a client’s disclosure about being a victim/survivor, you will remember from Lauren’s story that our writing center was faced with a client’s fictional first-person narrative, whereas the narrator perpetrated sexual violence and murder, including rape, necrophilia, and cannibalism in a dorm setting. The client’s consultant, feeling physical and mental discomfort, removed herself from the session and a graduate assistant explained to the client that he would not be allowed to bring in writing that was harmful to the consultant’s psychological being. The student-writer lodged a counter complaint that they were denied their right to write about and seek consultancy on any subject matter. This is not a debate distant from writing center scholarship as many have reported the complications arising from “questions about whose it is to adopt or accommodate to whom and to what effect” when it comes to working with a client whose writing threatens respect and dignity for the existence of one or many fundamental identities of the consultant (Denny 2010). However, the social injustices that emerge from a passive or indifferent response to these works create a culture that de-prioritizes the consent and inclusivity of consultants and even other clients. The crux of the issue lies in how a writing center approaches inclusivity. As Dixon and Robinson (2019) write, “inclusivity becomes complicated when writing centers have clients who visit the center with racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, or otherwise oppressive papers.” Arguments to maximize inclusivity of these clients and their ideas often root in taking a writing-based approach that perhaps challenges sources and evidence, but not ethics. While this more objective angle does enhance the comfortability of the client, it does not serve social justice and through performance, indicates an indifference to the personhood of consultants or clients who share the identities being oppressed. Critical to this proposition is the radical social justice praxis set forth by Greenfield (2019) who addresses the issue of allowing writing consultants to help authors “be more effective in communicating their racism or misogyny” (p. 4). Considering the writing center’s positionality within the larger institution, “our privileging of writers over righteousness risks in both small and large ways our field’s complicity in enabling or even promoting systems of injustice many of us personally reject” (Greenfield, 2019, p. 5). When “the work of writing centers is implicated in these various systems of oppression,” then “we have an ethical responsibility to intervene purposefully” (Greenfield, 2019, p. 6). Others may argue that textual or even verbal intervention in violent writing contradicts the core writing center value of championing a client’s language and voice, but then one must also ask, whose voice and what message is upheld in that apathy? Moreover, where is the consultant’s consent to hear and handle writing directly opposing their existence? While consultations often defer control to student-clients in order to practice student-centered approaches, it does not mean that consultants also drop their subjectivity. The process of recognition and response is alive on both ends, and both clients and consultants work to balance the inherent power dynamics in their relationship.  However, when a client presumes entitlement to a consultant’s right to self-determine their boundaries in a session, including a consultant’s right to remove themselves from a space where their existence or autonomy no longer felt welcome, power is wielded to enact control and oppression. An ethics of care for clients grounds much of our considerations on what “comfortable” and “welcome” mean for a given space.  However, it is time that an ethics of care for consultants is also closely considered. It is in that deeper examination that we found the larger implications of student misconduct on our space. Primarily, student misconduct reveals gendered assumptions of consultant work and a client’s rights to the consultant’s mobility, time, intellectual resources, and emotional faculty. Writing center staff is typically female-dominated, perpetuating the stereotype of women as helpers. The notion that women should exist in remedial spaces and provide help to the men that need it and/or desire it, though the men (more often than not) are reluctant to accept such help, is a persistent problem. Denny (2010) writes of this issue: Thus, how we interact with gender in a healthy manner is of utmost importance for the safety of all students that inhabit our spaces, consultants and clients alike. Denny (2010) writes that “our gender and sex are among those political and historical variables that cut through the scene of tutoring. For some, the point of entrée into this conversation vis-à-àvis writing centers revolves around gendered notions of writing—that there are uniquely male, female, feminine or masculine ways of doing and learning it” (p. 89). Gendering in writing centers cannot be escaped– gender is such an outward-facing expression of our innate identities that it is difficult to hide or ignore, even if we wanted to. Similarly, as Morrison (2021) points out, consultants do not leave their race at the door of writing centers, and “racism itself is not dropped at the door of the writing center by anyone” either (p. 120). In and out of the writing center, “experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1243). At these intersections, the dual axis of marginality imposes extra layers of emotional taxation in addition to being stereotyped as nurturing “helpers.” For women of color, their racial identity presents an additional axis that increases the emotional labor placed on them. BIWOC consultants are placed “in a position of constant negotiation” of identity politics, having to perform what Morrison (2021) calls a “balancing act” of filtering responses to racialized hostility to maintain a hospitable work environment, especially if it’s lacking a conscious commitment to anti-racism practices (p. 124). The lack of a conscious commitment to anti-racism practices amplifies the challenges that women consultants of color face, perpetuating an environment where racialized sexual harassment can thrive. For example, while some instances of racialized sexual harassment may be more overt, such as “hey, you’re pretty for a brown girl,” other instances may be more covert, making it harder to validate feelings of racial targeting within sexual harassment. Such experiences “can be incredibly direct and personal for those who live them, while those who perpetrate the acts may deny them or fail to notice them and their exclusionary effect” (Morrison, 2021, p. 128). In the case of Lauren’s client, implying that access to Lauren was “paid for” by his tuition may have been just one final attempt to pre-approve his harassment; but for Lauren, these comments may invoke a scary reminder of the present manifestations of racial capitalism. The sexual harassment here was apparent. However, the racism Lauren felt may go unacknowledged for multiple factors: its covert presentation, the consultant’s need for self-preservation from gaslighting, and the racial consciousness of the writing center at hand. To cultivate an ethics of care for all consultants, it is essential for writing center culture to commit to addressing overt and subtle expressions of systemic racism and the emotional labor they require to overcome. Because writing center spaces offer a welcoming environment that encourages empathy and collaboration, they can often be misinterpreted as informal environments where anything goes. Regardless of gender, consultants have to engage in various forms of emotional labor as part of their daily work. It follows, then, that women consultants are already doing a great degree of this type of labor before adding in the gender bias that disproportionately affects them. Navigating gender bias itself takes a great degree of emotional labor, a labor that could easily weigh on a consultant long after the session concludes. This begs the question of what kind of emotional labor is required of students in writing centers, especially of consultants. Mannon (2021) asserts that emotional labor is typically something we simply expect of writing center consultants without training. It is something we believe is central to working in a writing center, yet we treat emotional labor as if it is something consultants should inherently understand and know how to navigate. It is not something trained or taught; rather, it is simply expected. However, when we ignore this type of work as a very real and very valid part of the writing center experience, we create a space “where the work of managing writers’ emotions is invisible, devalued, and disheartening” (Mannon, 2021, p. 145). Complicating further the consultant’s emotional burden is the neoliberal idea that students at a university are consumers whose needs must be met at any cost. As displayed in the three stories we shared, there is an overarching theme of entitlement– entitlement to the consultant herself, her time, to the writing center space, to have any sort of behavior accepted, etc. Universities do everything in their power to attract high performing (and high-paying) students, promising an array of services in return, ranging from state-of-the-art gyms to trendy residence halls and to, of course, writing center and tutoring services (Mintz, 2021, p. 88). In this kind of framework, the “customer is always right,” which leads consultants in writing centers to consistently navigate what the client expects of them– another emotional juggle that is not taught, and further, should not have to be. This becomes extremely problematic in writing centers where the front-facing consulting service is primarily conducted by women. The underlying notion of client-as-consumer tips the scale of the power dynamics between client and female consultant before the session even begins. When dealing with the emotional labor and trauma that accompany sexual harassment in sessions, the conjunction of neoliberal ideals and gendered expectations exacerbates the problems faced by our women consultants. By failing to create a space where emotional labor is validated as hard work as well as having limited policies in place that empower consultants in this emotional labor, both consultants and clients suffer. Nadler (2019) affirms this when writing about student consent for both student-consultants and student-clients. What do we consent to? What do we not consent to? How is this communicated? How does this change depending on the space we find ourselves in? He asks, “when consultants lose agency because of undesirable circumstances they have no choice in entering, how is that not the ultimate form of harassment?” (Nadler, 2019, pt. IV). We centered this question when attempting to find a way forward in our own sexual harassment situation and determined that lacking space for the acknowledgement of emotional labor and the protection of agency in our own center was becoming increasingly problematic. Protecting the consultant’s agency and giving them a clear route to achieve this became our top priority. Searching for a way forward proved difficult as we wanted to strike an appropriate balance between policy and agency. Denny (2010) raises the question of gender and sexuality in the writing center, asking, “whose burden it is to adapt or accommodate to whom and to what effect. Like the dynamics around sexuality, these moments of gender conflict are fraught with policy and political complications” (p. 93). How do we protect consultants? How do we have clear policies while steering clear of total authoritarian attitudes? We found a solid foundation in the work of Kovalik et al. (2021). Their work in community contracts for online spaces gave us a foundation for our own solution and ushered in a new way to handle policy in writing center spaces. Given the problem of emotional labor Mannon (2021) makes clear, the weight of responsibility writing tutors have when sessions go awry is clearly problematic, especially considering power structures, different identities, and different uses of language. The issue of harassment and misconduct in a writing center muddies the waters for tutors and can cause harm in a space that is supposed to be open and safe (Kovalic et al., 2021). Additionally, because students are typically not trained to handle misconduct (and we must ask – should they be? Is this their responsibility? In their pay grade?), the responsibility falls solely on the tutor experiencing the problem, isolating them and asking them to negotiate in the moment far more than a session agenda. Many tutors shrug “off their uncomfortable interactions, thinking they would never come into contact with the student again– so why bother?” (Kovalik et al., 2021, p. 2). Their idea to combat these inequitable dynamics was to create a community contract, specifically for their online sessions, to take the full responsibility off of their tutors and to share the responsibility equally across the tutor-client relationship. The contract stated what a session is, what its purpose is, what will happen in the session, and what is not to happen in a session. Everyone must sign the contract, ensuring that everyone understands what is expected. This study by Kovalik et al. (2021) became the bedrock of our own– it revealed to us an equitable way forward and promised a bright solution to the problem that had been darkening our center. In brainstorming sessions with upper administration, there were questions about what this contract posed theoretically for the power dynamics within writing center culture. Contracts, in a broad sense, are prescriptive agreements between two parties, a set of rules and regulations to abide by that are designed to protect individuals by limiting interpretation and scope. Given that writing center practice prioritizes anti-hierarchical and student-centered approaches to collaboration, contracts in the space can seem too authoritative on the consultant’s end, considering the power they inherently bring to the session. However, according to the collaborative theory of contracts (Markovits 2004), a shared sense of intention and obligations actually sustains cooperation and collaboration better than otherwise. Framed as a legal theory in this context, Markovits’ theory the sustainability of collaboration and community through contracts or promises holds profound implications for how writing centers can reassess the importance of establishing healthy, clear, and secure boundaries. This reconsideration can enhance the comfort of both clients and consultants, fostering a collaborative environment where they can work towards a common end-goal without apprehension of inappropriate motives. Having a community-contract certainly changes the relations among the clients and consultants who engage in them, but these changes can enhance opportunities for collaboration despite their formality. Markovits (2004) writes that promises “increas[e] the reliability of social coordination and promot[es] the efficient allocation of resources” (p. 1419).  This is because promises “establish a relation of recognition and respect– and indeed a kind of community– among those who participate in them” (Markovits 2004, p. 1420). Recognition and respect are the feedback loop which defines the bond between a consultant and a client. As Trachsel (1995) writes, “the intersubjective dynamic of recognition and response, the relational self in close connection with another self, is crucial to the successful enactment of a learning process centered around the student” (p. 38). Even more so, staying honest to a promise or contract “enable[s] persons to cease to be strangers by sharing in the ends of the promises” and fulfillment of their joint intentions (Markovits 2004, p.1447). When clients and consultants can each hold up their end on the promise to conduct themselves with respect for the other’s boundaries and self-determination, they “cease to be strangers and come to treat each other, affirmatively, as ends in themselves, by entering into what I call a collaborative community” (Markovits 2004, p. 1451). Within the nuances of this theory and its application on our own writing center community contract, one can see how what seemed authoritarian actually comes to be integral in sustaining a respectful community. With the spirit of collaboration and an ethics of care, our methodology for designing a contract included an all-staff meeting as well as an accessible brain-dump document where all consultants could anonymously pose suggestions for what boundaries would allow them to ensure safety and self-determination in a session. It was easy for us to invite the consultants into these conversations as non-hierarchical collaboration is modeled to us through our own position as graduate assistants, and because their voices are incredibly important to a document that directly affects their experience in their workplace. Consultants were eager to be a part, and were active participants throughout the process. Our writing center staff is committed to one another, as friends and as colleagues, so everyone took the drafting seriously in the hope it would strengthen the already existing bonds in our space. As we can see here, many of our consultants posed their concerns side-by-side in what textually feels like solidarity to protect each other and themselves. The root of many of these issues– such as phone distractions, expecting a consultant to “fix” papers, crossing personal boundaries– rested in the harmful assumption that a consultant’s time and intellectual resources could be disregarded and disrespected. In this document, the staff brought together what they believed defined the contractual obligations or promises of the relationship between consultants and clients from their personal experiences. Most of all, they emphasize a need for shared intention to be present and active with writing to work on in a session. Shared intentions, as per Markovits’ (2004) analysis, is the foundation to coordination. For example, one of our consultant’s suggestions, “must have intention to work on their own writing” better allows for both client and consultant to move forward with the session. When one party does not share this intention, then the consultation moves backwards in progress. These statements relate to our mission, to the expectations of a client so that a consultation can be collaborative, and to the non-negotiable behavior in a workplace. We wrote this first draft of the contract towards the end of the semester, when student misconduct and sexual harassment reports had lessened, but we still felt its impact across the space. Examining the language here, such as posing every statement with “I agree” and requiring initials, one can interpret how we feared losing the safety of the writing center space, alerting us of a need to be stricter with policy writing and interpretation. To the process of initialing and signing, we also added that these were “non-negotiable” rules for a client to “abide by.” While the language here emerges from the anxiety and need to protect interpretation so that another client could not bend our policies to justify their inappropriate behavior, it nonetheless exacerbated power dynamics in client-consultant relationships. It was focused on giving the power to dictate rules and control interpretation to the hands of writing center staff, rather than welcoming collaboration from our community– something we would later revisit and revise. Writing this draft, there was much concern about how certain terms would be interpreted and how we could best enforce a culture of accountability that served social justice. One critical method we implemented here was writing what would be considered a breach of this contract. As Markovits (2004) theorizes, “contracts enable persons who are not intimates nevertheless to cease to be strangers; and breaches do not just reinstate the persons’ prior status as strangers but instead leave them actively estranged” (p. 1463).  This means that a contractual relationship allows for community building (rather than remaining strangers post-consultation) when recognition and respect of intentions, goals, and obligations are met. However, when they are breached, the contract itself contains the codified authority that allows for a clear discontinuation of that relationship. Because we did not have a clear policy on student misconduct and what breached appropriate behavior in our writing center, clients often felt not only entitled to returning to the writing center but also entitled to working with the same consultant that they had harassed. By having a written document that clearly defined what constituted a breach of appropriate behavior and the consequences for such, consultants and clients could easily point to their right to remove themselves from a consultation and disengage in any unwanted future relationship. After we had returned from break, graduate assistants and upper administration sat down with our previous draft of the contract. Significant changes were made as we had returned to the community contract with our mission to practice care, collaboration, and non-hierarchical praxis in mind. We removed the initials and replaced “I agree” statements with language to indicate these terms as expectations rather than rules. Removing initials and signatures came from our desire to emphasize that this is a shared community document and to maintain a horizontal relationship with our clients and each other, rather than the traditional vertical hierarchy of promisee and promisor often found in more traditional contracts. By doing so, we also hoped to reiterate these guidelines as part and parcel of community-building in the writing center. We removed the term “non-negotiable” from the title as we began to realize that “writing centers become arenas where the support they provide and the cultural assumptions that go along with them present unfamiliar points of contact between people who might not otherwise be thrown together” (Denny 2010, p.100). As Denny questions in his article, we too considered how we might ensure the safety of our staff while still maintaining spaces that “embrace a diversity of bodies, identities, and practices?” To this point, we altered the language of this contract to match our embrace of restorative rather than punitive approaches toward clients who commit misconduct while still upholding the consultant’s autonomy and feelings as valid and deserving of a righteous response. Our final community contract and its terms represent a culmination of emotions, thought, scholarship, and advocacy we all experienced in the previous year. Outside of structuring the contract in a more welcoming and supportive tone, we also hoped that our specific terms would assist us in facing interpersonal as well as larger institutional issues we encountered. Our first item establishes our intentions and goals as consultants by pointing clients towards our mission statement. Items two and three as well as term five continue on the mission of creating available and clearly stated expectations to be shared between consultants and clients for greater cooperation. Item four is designed to lower instances where a consultant feels overburdened in the emotional labor they provide to a session. As Mannon (2021) writes, “affective engagements are central to writing center practice” (p.144). By asking clients to come to a consultation when they are ready to be actively engaged and indicating exactly what that labor of engagement involves, clients can hopefully better imagine this often-invisible emotional laboring on the client and consultant’s part. For consultants, “emotional labor might take less of a toll in environments that define it, value it, and establish conditions where it resonates positively” (Mannon 2021, p.161). Mindful of this, term seven also seeks to validate a consultant’s autonomy by authorizing their feelings as sufficient enough reason to end a consultation. Items six, seven, and eight are designed to protect consultants and clients psychologically and physically. Specifically, in term eight, we sought to clearly answer what Dixon (2019) asks writing centers to contemplate: “We perpetuate the idea of comfort to foster a setting for vulnerability, yet how do we know what is comfortable, what welcome means, for everyone who comes into our space? Who do we prioritize welcome for and how?” In term eight, we assert consultations as spaces with professional boundaries despite being peer-to-peer relationships. In both of these terms, we also hoped to “intervene purposefully” (Greenfield 2019) in the institutional taking of survivor/victim consent through mandatory reporting. By asserting the right of clients and consultants to end a session without having to report to others, we hope this contract can provide one template by which writing centers can “expand anonymous and voluntary reporting options that survivors can control” (Holland 2021, p.3). Following our student-centered model, this contract as a whole provided our writing center the status of a community with a heightened sense of empowerment and choice. Rather than enforcing the hierarchical practice of signing the contract, which demands a client’s acknowledgment toward the higher power of the staff’s voice against theirs, we decided to place the contract at the bottom of our homepage for clients to view and know before entering a session (see figure 4). While the client still retains the responsibility of knowing the terms of the contract, we do not necessarily present the contract in a way that might fashion hostility before the consultation even begins. At its end result, this contract shows how collaboration works best when boundaries are clearly drawn, rather than ambiguously assumed. This becomes increasingly important as the writing center at our university is a female-majority space where consultants’ identities are publicly visible via our scheduling platform. With high rates of sexual harassment on campuses, a female-majority space requires distinct protections necessary for collaboration to flourish. While there is a concern that boundary setting will enforce too much formality, thereby prohibiting consultants and/or clients from feeling comfortable in their sessions, it is important to note that these boundaries in actuality enhance the comfortability of both clients and consultants to work without fear of losing their agency or of tolerating inappropriate behavior (Carino 2003). With the contract in place, consultants and clients enter sessions with clear expectations of what comprises successful sessions, and they have a written and agreed upon exit strategy should a session go awry for any reason. It is our deepest desire that the steps that we took at our writing center will bring a tangible lasting change. As both of us are moving on from that university, our involvement in the day-to-day interactions with consultants will be at a minimum, so we lose a little of our ability to monitor the contract’s success. However, we left ways for the future graduate assistants in the space, as well as other administrators and consultants themselves, to keep track of the safety of our consultants. We employed, like Kovalik et al. (2021), a behavior log to keep track of student misconduct and the circumstances surrounding it. This will help our writing center keep track of incidents and potentially be able to predict them before they occur if we see patterns form. We will do this through the center’s scheduling platform, WCOnline. Typically, consultants create client report forms to send to the client as a recap of the session, but they can also be internal reports for the center itself. If there is any problem, discomfort, or misconduct in a session, we can make a report that stays in our system. This will be useful for any future research that will be done in the space and will be helpful for us as we monitor the appropriateness of sessions. Additionally, we suggest that the future graduate assistants do regular well-being checks with the staff at staff meetings, to see how things are going from their perspective, as well as work to educate new staff on the contract. Because we are a staff completely composed of students, there is much turnover, a problem any academic knows too well. While the student staff that helped create the contract knows the contract well and understands its importance, it is imperative to continually educate future hires of the contract as well, so that it does not lose its credibility or its place in our center. In the same vein, it is our hope that this contract will be a living document, constantly evolving to suit the needs of the writing center population. As new staff comes in and learns of the importance of these policies, we invite new conversations to be had and new iterations of the contract to be created. This is not a project to be sealed shut and packed away– active contributions will keep it alive and ensure that the spirit of the project remains. We share this process in the hopes that other writing centers across universities will be able to adopt and transform this framework in ways that accommodate their unique spaces and students. We also share the process with the keen desire that we see more scholarship addressing these issues as our work is in no way comprehensive. There is an array of different writing center environments and factors that could change the scope of this work and must be considered. We pose a few lingering questions for future researchers: what happens when misconduct occurs in a center that has evening hours when no administrators are around? What happens when the sexual harassment or misconduct occurs between members of the staff, rather than between a staff member and a client? Even more severe, how do we come alongside students that may feel harassed by their own administrators, beyond whatever institutional measures are already in place? And, lastly, while this work accounts for the sexual harassment of women, especially BIPOC women, how might we consider the other communities that may be at risk of this type of harassment, namely the LGBTQIA+ community? We also want to encourage the administrators who deal with student misconduct in their centers to remember that they are not alone. Because of our deep level of care for our center and for the students we interact with everyday, we experienced extreme fatigue while working towards a solution. We often speak of protecting the emotional labor of the writing consultants, but confronting and mitigating these incidents requires emotional labor on the part of the administrators as well. Unfortunately, as administrators, there is sometimes no higher authority who can offer the validation of having your needs and labor recognized. This further adds to the emotional labor taken upon by administrators. We experienced this in real-time, and we want to acknowledge how painful it is to juggle institutional expectations and personal commitments. It can sometimes feel fruitless, especially when the atmosphere of your space has changed, and you work desperately to get it back. It is hard but meaningful work. If you are feeling these things, give yourself some grace. Know that the work is worthwhile. All in all, we believe that the community contract is a helpful tool to writing centers to make concrete policy that protects student workers and student clients alike, all the while maintaining the collaborative, non-hierarchical feel that most centers desire to achieve. We are incredibly grateful to have been able to work with each other and with the undergraduate staff at the writing center to develop this community contract. After seeing the toll that these numerous accounts of student misconduct had on our undergraduate consultants, it feels good to know that we have something in place that will hopefully be able to help. Sexual harassment is an ongoing and under-researched problem in writing centers, something we would like to see change in the near future. We hope that these narratives along with our solution provide inspiration to other centers to begin to tackle the problems of sexual harassment head-on. The work is not over, and it will take all of us, writing center staff and students alike, to change the writing center landscape for the better. [1] Throughout this paper, all names will be changed, and stories anonymized to protect the identities of our student population [2] We would like to take a moment here to acknowledge and thank the third graduate assistant in our WC, Chris Ingram, who worked closely with us as a student-leader as these incidents were occurring. He was instrumental in helping us mitigate these issues in real-time, as well as helping us consider alternate strategies of addressing the misconduct, some of which can be found in Appendix B. [3] Our position is relatively undefined. We exist in a liminal space between the WC’s administrators, the director and assistant director, and the undergraduate staff. We work closely with the center’s assistant director and help him with any administrative tasks (such as scheduling and leading staff meetings) that need to be done. Our primary role, however, is still one of consulting and working with students one-on-one. Approximately 30% of our work is administrative. This makes our position as graduate assistants very fluid; no one day is the same. We often find ourselves liaisons between the administrators and the staff, simply because we are part of both “worlds.” Buchanan, N. T. P. D., & Ormerod, A. J. P. D. (2002). Racialized Sexual Harassment in the Lives of African American women. Women & Therapy , 25(3-4), 107–124. https://doi.org/10.1300/J015v25n03_08 Carino, P. (2003). Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring. In M. A. Pemberton & J. Kinkead (Eds.), The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship (pp. 96–113). University Press of Colorado. Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review , 43 (6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039 Denny, H. C. (2010). Facing Sex and Gender in the Writing Center. In Facing the Center (pp. 87–112). University Press of Colorado. Dixon, E. (2017). Uncomfortably queer: Everyday moments in the writing center. The Peer Review , 1(2). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/uncomfortably-queer-everyday-moments-in-the-writing-center/ Dixon, E., & Robinson, R (2019). Welcome for Whom: Introduction to the Special Issue. The Peer Review , 3(1). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/welcome-for-whom-introduction-to-the-special-issue/ Elbow, P. & Belanoff, P. (1999). Sharing and Responding (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill Humanities. Meadows, B., T. (2021). Cracks in the system: Ethics and tensions of mandatory reporting for writing center professionals. The Dangling Modifier. https://sites.psu.edu/thedanglingmodifier/cracks-in-the-system-ethics-and-tensions-of-mandatory-reporting-for-writing-center-professionals/ Greenfield, L. (2019). Introduction: Justice and Peace are Everyone’s Interest: Or, the Case for a New Paradigm. In Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement (pp. 3–28). University Press of Colorado. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvg5bszx.4 Holland, K., Hutchison, E., Ahrens, C., Goodman-Williams, R., Howard, R., & Cipriano, A. (n.d.). Academic Alliance for Survivor Choice in Reporting Policies (ASC) Letter on Proposed Title IX Regulations. https://psychology.unl.edu/sashlab/ASC%20Response%20Letter%20to%20Proposed%20Title%20IX%20Mandatory%20Reporting%20Regs.pdf Holland, K. J., Hutchison, E. Q., Ahrens, C. E., & Torres, M. G. (2021) Reporting is not supporting: Why the principle of mandatory supporting, not mandatory reporting, must guide sexual misconduct policies in higher education. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences , 118(52), 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2116515118 Know Your Title IX. (2021). The Cost of Reporting: Perpetrator Retaliation, Institutional Betrayal, and Student Survivor Pushout. Retrieved from https://www.knowyourix.org/wp- content/uploads/2021/03/Know-Your-IX-2021-Report-Final-Copy.pdf Kovalik, J., Haley, M., & DuBois, M. (2021). Confront student misconduct at the writing center. The Dangling Modifier , 27. Mannon, B. (2021). Centering the emotional labor of writing tutors. The Writing Center Journal , 39(1/2), 143–168. Markovits, D. (2004). Contract and collaboration. The Yale Law Journal , 113, 1419–1514. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/224_ah6tbit6.pdf Méndez, X. (2020). Beyond nassar: a transformative justice and decolonial feminist approach to campus sexual assault. Frontiers, 41(2), 82–104. Mintz, B. (2021), Neoliberalism and the crisis in higher education: The cost of ideology. Am. J. Econ. 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