In his book A Working Model for Contingent Faculty, Robert Samuels presents multiple ideas for helping contingent faculty organize to gain equity on campus: in their careers, working conditions, and pay. Samuels critiques current prominent, negative discourse on contingent faculty, offering instead ways to emphasize contingent faculty’s diverse and positive experiences and opportunities. I offer additional insights spurred from Samuels’s ideas, including connecting with student government and finding ways to make writing center work and research more public and apparent to institutional stakeholders (e.g., students, faculty, donors, administrators, boards/trustees).

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

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

Tiffany Diana Ball is a lecturer at the University of Michigan. She has held academic positions at Kalamazoo College and Tsinghua University where she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Tsinghua Society of Fellows. She published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion.Sheila T. Cavanagh is professor of English at Emory University and director of the World Shakespeare Project. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, she has also written many articles on early modern literature and pedagogy, among other topics. She is currently writing a monograph entitled “Multisensory Shakespeare for Specialized Communities.”Aaron Colton is an associate teaching professor and the director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University. His current research examines the critical and pedagogical dimensions of writer's block in post-1945 US fiction. His scholarship has appeared previously in Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and Postmodern Culture.Matthew Dischinger is a program advisor for the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University.Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of comparative literature and African studies at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses on modern African literatures, postcolonial theory, and world literature. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut and the University of Edinburgh. He is particularly concerned with designing courses and curricula that introduce students to the powerful conceptual and theoretical work that is carried out by literary forms from the global south.Amy Kahrmann Huseby is an associate teaching professor, media director, and online literature program coordinator in the English Department, affiliated faculty in gender and women's studies, and honors college fellow at Florida International University. Huseby's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Women's Writing, South Atlantic Review, and several edited collections. Her own poetry has been published and anthologized by the Atlanta Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Pearl, among others. Together with Heather Bozant Witcher (Auburn University), she is coeditor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020). She also serves as editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Anna Ioanes is assistant professor of English at the University of St. Francis (Illinois). A scholar of post-1945 American literature and culture, her research interests include affect studies, aesthetics, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her scholarship appears in American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, the minnesota review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and ASAP/J, where she is also a contributing editor.Heather McAlpine is an associate professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature.Lauren Silber is the assistant director of academic writing and an assistant professor of the practice at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in English and American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her scholarship emerges at the intersection of migration studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and affect theory, with interests in narrativity and storytelling.Jennifer Stewart is an associate professor of English and director of composition at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, including teaching college writing, workplace literacies and project management, and the rhetoric of popular culture heroines. Much of her scholarship draws from her work in the writing program and in the classroom. Recent projects discuss incorporating diversity-themed common readers and multimodal composition into writing programs as well as the use of institutional ethnographic methods to investigate standard writing program practices.Doreen Thierauf is assistant professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in composition and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on pedagogy, sexuality, and gender-based violence has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women's Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. With Erin Spampinato and Michael Dango, she is preparing an edited collection for SUNY Press entitled New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions, slated for publication in 2024. She also serves as Reviews editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Theresa Tinkle pursues a broad range of interests in the humanities. She holds a BS in elementary education from Oregon College of Education, an MA in English literature from Arizona State University, and a PhD in English literature (medieval) from UCLA. Since 1989, when she joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has researched and taught in the fields of medieval literature and drama, manuscript and textual studies, writing studies, writing placement, and disability studies. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. In this capacity, she leads collaborative research in writing placement, writing in the disciplines, and community college transfer. She has published in a number of journals, including ELH, JEGP, Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, and Assessing Writing.

This quasi-experimental study examines responses to surveys distributed to writing center tutors administered after training interventions on the topic of transfer. Tutors could opt into two short training modules, the first on tutoring for transfer and the second on using transfer in sessions specific to legal briefs. After each training module was phased out, an assessment was distributed to the entire population to measure the efficacy of the interventions. This study found that after completing a training module on tutoring for transfer, tutors tended to more readily articulate explicit transfer talk for helping writers connect a writing task to past experiences. The genre-specific intervention was found to help tutors articulate explicit transfer talk strategies for helping writers connect a writing task to future writing situations. In both assessments, tutors tended to report using questions to facilitate writers’ transfer of past knowledge to a present writing task; conversely, tutors tended to report using explanation, praise, and advice for facilitating transfer of knowledge from a current task to future tasks. The study also raises questions about how tutors themselves transfer tutoring knowledge from tutor training as well as past academic experiences to new tutoring situations.

Language is powerful because it gives individuals the privilege to access a wide range of opportunities. We must acknowledge that it is problematic and harmful to uphold certain language policies, which are often standardized, as expectations. In writing centers, where the goal is to guide writers to articulate language onto paper, tutors must be conscientious of their attitudes toward language. This article examines the history, specifically the inclusivity and exclusivity, of Standard Written/American English and how it affects marginalized groups. This article also encourages reflection on terminology that is often associated with anti-racist practices. Lastly, this article aims to offer ways to reflect as it encourages intentional actions from writing tutors to engage in anti-racist strategies as they work to create more linguistically inclusive spaces for writers. Keywords : Standard Written English, Standard English, Dialect, Linguistics, Linguistic Diversity, Inclusivity, Praxis, Pedagogy, Positionality, Accountability, Anti-racism, Reflective Practice

Writing centers are a common service to support students in their writing at most colleges and universities in the United States and, within recent years, have become increasingly popular abroad given the global trend to internationalize educational institutions. But what are writing centers like in countries outside the United States? In this article, I review literature on writing centers in Japan to better understand how one EFL context adopts—and adapts —the U.S. writing center model. The findings of this literature review explore obstacles and opportunities that may occur in tutor-tutee interactions and writing center administration. This knowledge is key for personnel in EFL contexts seeking to create and implement writing centers based on those in the American context. Keywords : writing center, Japan, English as a foreign language (EFL) When someone walks into the writing center at a college or university in the United States, they are likely to find a common scene: Two students—one a tutor, the other a tutee—sit together at a table, or perhaps in a cubicle. The two read the tutee’s paper together as the tutor asks questions about structure, thesis, or word choice. It resembles more a conversation between classmates than a lecture from professor to student. But what about writing centers in other countries? Is this a common scene too? Within recent years, writing centers have become more prevalent at colleges and universities in countries where English is not commonly spoken, known as English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. Often supported by governmental grants, stakeholders in EFL contexts have sought to internationalize their educational institutions by creating programs conducted entirely in English, promoting increased matriculation of international students, and encouraging students and faculty to publish their works in English (LaClare & Franz, 2013; Okuda, 2019b). To support these goals, colleges and universities have turned to the writing center from their American counterparts as a model. One such country where colleges and universities are adopting the U.S. writing center model is Japan. Although the first reported writing center in Japan was founded on an American military base in Tokyo in the 1930s (McMillan, 1986, as cited in McKinley, 2011), it was not until 2004 that a Japanese college or university established a writing center to support students’ English writing (Johnston, Cornwell, & Yoshida, 2010). Since 2004, supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), numerous Japanese educational institutions have independently created their own writing centers. These writing centers organized across institutions for the first time at the Japan Writing Center Symposium in 2008 and then formed the Writing Centers Association of Japan in 2011 (Fujioka, 2011). According to the Writing Centers Association of Japan (2022), as of December 2022, there were a total of eighteen writing centers as members. Thus, the history of writing centers in Japan is relatively short, and research on them is limited (Fujioka, 2011; Nakatake, 2013). While there has begun more effort to research writing centers in Japan, there is still work to be done. The purpose of this literature review is to explore current research on writing centers at Japanese colleges and universities to better understand how one EFL context adopts—and adapts —the U.S. writing center model. The most recent literature review on this topic that I found is from approximately a decade ago (see Nakatake, 2013); therefore, this literature review seeks to expand previous research by including more recent scholarship into the discussion. By revealing both obstacles and opportunities in adopting the U.S. writing center model in Japan, the findings of this literature review have implications for writing center personnel who may seek to establish writing centers in other EFL contexts.

Neurodiverse students often find themselves at odds with educational institutions not necessarily designed for the way they think and process information. Universities are geared towards neurotypical students and, despite the services of accessibility offices, neurodiverse students who receive accommodations still struggle in their classes (Clouder et al., 2020). Neurotypical students are students “whose neurological development and state are typical, conforming to what most people would perceive as normal,” whereas neurodivergent students have “divergence in mental or neurological function from what is considered typical or normal” (Disabled World, 2022). Neurodivergent students may struggle with deadlines, multiple choice tests, etc. Writing centers can help neurodiverse students meet their course requirements by being aware of how centers approach supporting students and make consultations more accessible for all types of students. One way to accomplish this is to integrate elements of universal design into writing centers and consultations.

For many students, peer review can be muddled or frustrating. They can feel uncomfortable with the process if they do not feel confident with their own writing, and many believe poor past performances disqualify them from offering constructive feedback. Because writing center tutors are trained in sharing feedback in a kind and helpful manner, they are positioned to be excellent models for students inexperienced with or damaged by feedback. Learning how to participate in effective peer review can remove the emotional baggage attached to writing and create a respectful community of writers in the classroom. In this teaching tip, we explain how to embed writing center tutors in writing-intensive courses to improve peer review practices.

Ryan Baxter graduated from the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2017 with a BA in English language and literature. Following this, he completed a master of letters on the Gothic imagination at the University of Stirling in 2019. He is currently a master's student in English at Central Michigan University on the lookout for opportunities to gain teaching experience. His research interests include the Gothic from the late eighteenth century to the present, cinema and broadcast cultures in Britain and Ireland, theories of haunting and spectrality, epistemology, landscape studies, and spatial theory.Kelly L. Bezio is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where her research and teaching intersect with and inform the fields of cultural studies, biopolitical theory, American literature before 1900, critical race studies, literature and science, and health humanities. Her interdisciplinary scholarship foregrounds how insights from the past help us understand how to combat inequity in the present moment.Mark Brenden is a PhD candidate in writing studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he also teaches writing classes. His current research investigates the digital transformation of higher education, particularly as it relates to writing pedagogy.K. Narayana Chandran currently holds the Institution of Eminence Research Chair in English and Cultural Theory in the School of Humanities/English at the University of Hyderabad, India. An occasional translator and writer in Malayalam, he has been teaching a wide variety of courses and publishing papers in Anglo-American literatures, critical and reading theories, comparative and translation studies, and English in India—its history and pedagogy.Tyler Jean Dukes is a doctoral candidate and graduate instructor at Texas Christian University. She specializes in early British literature and the medical humanities. She is also a childbirth doula, a role that informs her scholarly pursuits as she investigates the connections between storytelling and healing. To attend one of her in-person or virtual narrative medicine workshops, please visit https://dfwnarrativemedicine.com/.Sandy Feinstein's scholarship ranges across early literature, most recently on Margaret Cavendish and Marie Meurdrac in Early Modern Women; and on Mark Twain and heritage management forthcoming from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. She has also published creative non-fiction on reading Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court during COVID-19. Cowritten articles with Bryan Shawn Wang appear in New Chaucer Society: Pedagogy and Profession, CEA: The Critic, and Angles: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World, among others.Ruth G. Garcia is an associate professor of English and Core Books at CUNY and cocoordinator at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her recent work includes “Fanny's Place in the Family: Useful Service and the Social Order in Mansfield Park” in Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory.An experienced teacher, scholar, and administrator, Sara M. Glasgow has served in higher education for over twenty years. She is currently dean of liberal arts at North Central Michigan College. Prior to coming to North Central, she was professor of political science at the University of Montana Western (UMW), where she was honored as the CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year for the state of Montana (2013). While at UMW, she taught core courses in American government, theory, international relations and strategy, and political economy, as well as basic and advanced courses in research methodology. She also offered depth learning opportunities in Norse history and culture as part of the university honors program, and majors’ courses in the history and politics of illness, her research focus. She holds a BA in international studies and Spanish from Virginia Tech; an MS in international affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology; an MA in English language and literature from Central Michigan University; and an MA and PhD in government and politics from the University of Maryland.Dana Gliserman-Kopans is professor in and chair of the Department of Literature, Communication, and Cultural Studies at SUNY Empire State College. Her research centers on the literature and culture of late eighteenth-century Britain, though the pandemic and eighteenth-century epistemologies have been a recent (and necessary) focus. Her teaching interests are far wider, spanning from Gothic literature to the medical humanities. She also serves as the associate editor of The Burney Journal.Eva Sage Gordon teaches writing at Baruch College, CUNY. She has book chapters forthcoming in Innovative Practices in Creative Writing Teaching, edited by Graeme Harper; and Authorship, Activism, and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature, edited by Ruth Scobie and Sandra Mayer.Jennifer Horwitz received her PhD in literature from Tufts University and is a lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her research focuses on representations of education in multi-ethnic US literature that help envision and enact the teaching needed in this time of climate crisis.William Kangas returned to college after twenty years as a journalist to complete his MA in English composition and communication at Central Michigan University, while working as a high school substitute teacher and consultant at CMU's Writing Center. He currently is an adjunct instructor candidate for a local community college and will be entering his second year of study for an MA in strategic communication from Michigan State University.Robert Kilgore is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB). He is currently the president of USCB's chapter of the American Association of University Professors.Kristopher M. Lotier is associate professor of writing studies and rhetoric at Hofstra University, where he teaches courses in first-year writing, professional communication, and digital rhetoric. He is the author of Postprocess Postmortem and has published articles in Pedagogy, Enculturation, and College Composition and Communication.Xiomara Trinidad Perez is a junior studying journalism at Hofstra University, with a minor in fine arts. She hopes to work in the publishing and news industry, as well as in any area that deals with visual media. She finds enjoyment in creative writing, curating visual media, and conducting research.Aidan Pierre was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a junior at Hofstra University, majoring in film and minoring in history. He has produced, written, and directed numerous short films and is a teaching assistant for an Introduction to Film Production course. He is a part of the Rabinowitz Honors College and has been on the provost's list for two semesters. Outside of class, he enjoys spending his time reading literature and baking bread.Timothy Ponce holds a PhD in English and a certificate in teaching technical writing from the University of North Texas. In addition to serving as an associate professor of instruction at the University of Texas Arlington (UTA), he also serves as the coordinator of internships and coordinator of technical writing and professional design in the Department of English.Elizabeth Porter is an assistant professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY. She is a scholar in the fields of eighteenth-century British literature, women's writing, and composition pedagogy. Her work has been published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Jody R. Rosen is an associate professor of English and OpenLab codirector at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her recent work includes the coauthored “Supporting Twenty-First-Century Students with an Across-the-Curriculum Approach to Undergraduate Research” (2020) in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Prameet V. Shah is a sophomore at Hofstra University. He is majoring in pre-medical studies and minoring in biochemistry.Christy Tidwell is associate professor of English and humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. She teaches a wide range of classes, including composition, STEM communication, science fiction, environmental ethics and STEM, and introduction to humanities; and her writing most often addresses intersections between speculative fiction, environmental humanities, and gender studies. She is coeditor of Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (2018), Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (2021), and a special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on creature features and the environment (2021).Bryan Shawn Wang is an associate teaching professor in biology at Penn State Berks. He has a background in protein engineering and synthetic biology. He has recently published on student choice and learning in Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments; on reviving ecologies in South Central Review; and, with Sandy Feinstein and Samantha Kavky, on interdisciplinarity and de-extinction in Comparative Media Arts Journal.Rachael Zeleny is assistant professor of English and integrated arts at the University of Baltimore. Her early research is dedicated to the multimodal rhetoric of the nineteenth-century actress. Her current research explores ways to gamify the classroom using virtual escape rooms and methods of incorporating experiential learning into virtual spaces. She conducts workshops on integrating these methods into the classroom.

The present study analyzes how role conflict, or distress or negative sentiments about tutoring work, are expressed in tutor post-session notes. Through corpus and linguistic analysis of session notes, researchers found that role conflict was not only present in many session notes–especially from tutors with more training and experience–but it often resulted from tutors’ feelings of powerlessness, time limitations, or other constraints around their work. In analyzing session notes’ linguistic features, we focused on hedging and boosting, or any words which reduce or amplify certainty in speech respectively (Lakoff, 1973). From this, we identified distinct “communication identities” among tutors wherein those who reported positive outcomes in tutoring work often using boosting language, and those who reported negative experiences used hedging language. Tutors overwhelmingly relied on hedging and non-constructive language to articulate role conflicts in their session notes, which suggests a discomfort with directly addressing work-related conflict. We found that tutors gravitate towards indirect politeness strategies (such as hedging) to discuss conflict in their work which paradoxically hinders their reflective processes and forestalls more meaningful engagement with conflict in professionalization contexts. This paper provides alternative and more generative ways to talk about role conflict, politeness strategies, and tutor work identities. Keywords : Writing Center, Session Notes, Politeness, Role Conflict, Linguistic Analysis

This study reviews the current underlying theories relevant to writing centers as well as the research methods being used in the early 21st century. The first section covers the theories used in writing center scholarship from the 1980s onward based on influential articles and texts. The second section covers published research both in the Writing Center Journal (WCJ) and other publications from 2010 onward and discusses the current state of research methods. Readers may not be aware of some of the fine divisions of theory; for example, the distinction between collaborative learning and social constructivism. Researchers may benefit from the overview of methods, which covers the most popular and current methods (survey and textual analysis) and promising but little-published research methods, such as ethnography. Keywords : collaborative learning, social constructivism, writing as a social process, Zone of Proximal Development, scaffolding, cognitivism, feminism, transfer of learning, threshold concepts, tutoring encounter, social and environmental justice, survey, mixed methods, textual analysis, descriptive studies, theoretical research, archival research, quasi-experiment, quantitative methods, narrative inquiry, grounded theory, case study, usability, ethnography

Writing center scholarship has focused extensively on how to consult with non-native English speakers but often fails to acknowledge the emotional dimensions of consulting with struggling English Language Learners (ELL). Writing center practitioners can more effectively assist ELL writers and support the emotional dimension of their writing experiences by allowing for more discussion of peer tutor techniques that foster a positive view of writing and support foreign language anxiety. Addressing the challenges faced by ELL students can help create more inclusive and comfortable learning spaces. A review of scholarship suggests future writing center scholarship should include more research on the appropriate and manageable peer tutor techniques for combating biases and encouraging ELL students to serve as writing center tutors. Keywords : English language learners, writing center, emotional states, foreign language anxiety, emotional labor, peer-tutor techniques

Writing center pedagogy requires that consultants use directive, nondirective, collaborative, and emotionally-aware methods to provide personalized writing assistance. Consultants are expected to be highly skilled in rapport and relationship building. Interestingly, few studies investigate how consultants’ personalities—including introverted and extroverted traits—may influence their experiences with consulting. Drawing from a diverse group of scholars, I use research from the field of psychology and studies on personality theory to interpret what characteristics define extroversion and introversion. From there, writing center scholarship is evaluated to examine whether the scholarship is biased towards introverted or extroverted traits. Although most research presented does not overlap to show how personality and pedagogy intersect, using personality theory to understand extroverts’ social inclination and introverts’ observational skills enables researchers and directors to explore what constitutes effective consultation strategies. Reevaluating these strategies may result in the abandonment of certain practices and, more than likely, specialized training may need to be added for consultants to comprehend and apply the pedagogy in a way that suits their skillsets. Keywords : introversion, extroversion, personality, directive, nondirective, empathy, consultant training, tutors, writing center

The incorporation of emotional intelligence skillsets in tutor training helps build empathy and communication skills that better prepare tutors to work with a diverse range of students. These skills are important for holding space for the voices of diverse authors and encouraging authenticity. In addition, writing centers must examine the racism inherent in Standardized English and encourage tutors to look closer at their internalized biases. Previous research by writing center scholars shows that training based in emotional intelligence and training based explicitly in activist rhetoric have similar outcomes: tutors become empathetic toward historically underrepresented voices and are often motivated to take an active role in social justice. This paper pieces together these different approaches to illustrate their efficacy and the opportunity writing center training has to push back against the systemic racism rooted in writing pedagogy. However, it is important that this education is based in challenging the internalized biases of privileged writers to avoid using historically underrepresented voices as a tool for our own enlightenment.

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Creating inclusive pedagogies that serve the whole student is a goal of many writing programs and writing centers, but it's difficult to find pathways to implement this goal. Employing responsive reflection to students' writerly identity work may offer instructors and writing center directors an accessible path to both encourage writerly identity development across contexts as well as reflect on pedagogical practice for inclusivity.

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

Hannah Armstrong graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2018.Anna Barattin teaches American literature, world literature, and undergraduate writing classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Both her teaching and her scholarship focus on geocentrism, spatial literacy, and language variation. She worked as an editing contributor for the literary journals Studies in Literary Imagination and The Eudora Welty Review.Barclay Barrios is professor of English and the associate dean of undergraduate studies for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. His work focuses on queer theory, writing program administration, pedagogy, and computers and composition. He is the author of the freshman composition textbooks Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers (2010), now in its fifth edition, and Intelligence (2021).Martin Bickman is professor of English and President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches courses in pedagogy and American literature. His book Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning (2003) won the Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association. He has also edited Approaches to Teaching Melville's Moby-Dick (1985) and Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education (1999) and authored American Romantic Psychology (1988) and Walden: Volatile Truths (1992). Next fall he will teach a course in the new Writing and Public Sphere minor, Writing for the Real World: Transforming Education.Mark Bracher is professor of English and director of the Neurocognitive Research Program for the Advancement of the Humanities at Kent State University.Ellen C. Carillo is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2014); A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading (2017); Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018); The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021); and the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy (2019). She is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks and collections. Ellen is cofounder of the Role of Reading in Composition Studies Special Interest Group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and has been awarded grants from the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), CCCC, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA).Owen Farney was an honors student at Central Michigan University (CMU) where he earned a BS in education with teaching credentials in English/history 6–12. During his time as an undergraduate, he worked as a CMU Writing Center consultant and served as president of the CMU affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English. As a CMU honors student, Owen completed a senior honors capstone project addressing the current state of queer young adult literature. Owen completed his student teaching at Allendale Middle School teaching 6th grade English.Kaylee Henderson is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses in the Department of English and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century literature, women writers, and transatlantic political movements. Her previous courses include The Victorian Novel: Crossing and Patrolling Borders with Linda K. Hughes and From Work to Werk: The Politics of Women's Writing. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Words of Mass Destruction: Verbal Militancy in Nineteenth-Century Women's Political Writing.”Andy Hines is associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He researches models of the university posed by Black writers and Black social movements. His book Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (2022), recounts how mid-twentieth-century Black writers defined literature and critical thought through and against the institutionalization of literary studies in predominantly white universities. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly (2020), Public Books (2018, 2015), Criticism (2017), Blind Field (2016) and other venues. Hannah Armstrong and Kassie Moore attended the University of Southern Indiana and assisted with the production of “On Being Brought In.”Sofia Prado Huggins, a PhD candidate in English literature at Texas Christian University, has taught courses such as Bestsellers and the Business of Books, Women's Writing, and a composition course, Adapting Austen, which she discusses in her essay, “Teaching POC Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice at a PWI in 2020,” in Persuasions OnLine. Sofia's research and teaching interests include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century global anglophone literatures, periodical studies, and the geohumanities. Her dissertation, “Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831–1833,” historizes the geographic and conceptual centering of whiteness in liberal progressivism in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antislavery archives. Sofia is the editor-in-chief of Teaching Transatlantacism and the transatlantic Digital Anthology.Jason Maxwell is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of The Two Cultures of English: Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric (2019) and coauthor, with Claire Colebrook, of Agamben (2016). His articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and Rhetorica.Kassie Moore graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2019. She currently teaches English in Evansville, Indiana.Clare Mullaney is assistant professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches courses on American literature, histories of editing, and disability theory. Her current book project, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text,” argues that acknowledging texts as made objects brings into focus how turn-of-the-century authors grapple with physical and mental impairments at the level of textual form. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, J19, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Atlantic.Jacob Stratman is in the middle of his twenty-third year as a teacher, at both the high school and university levels. He learned under a “teacher-centered” pedagogy, and he was trained, mostly, under a “student-centered” pedagogy. But it was on an airport shuttle in Pittsburgh at the beginning of his university teaching career, after a College English Association conference, where a fellow conference goer said that he learned long ago to resist those binaries and focus more on “truth-centered” pedagogy. Those insights during that fifteen minutes on the shuttle with that teacher, whose name Stratman never knew, haunt him each semester. Whether he's lecturing or conducting a class conversation, he asks how he is demonstrating virtues that lead all of us nearer to truth, instead of further away.Amish Trivedi is the author of three books of poetry, most recently FuturePanic (2021), as well as numerous chapbooks. His poems also appear in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, and other places. His critical work on poetry and music appear in the Iowa Review and The Rumpus. Trivedi has a PhD from Illinois State University and an MFA from Brown University.Angela J. Zito is teaching faculty with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Programs, where she currently serves as associate director of WAC and Madison Writing Assistance. She earned her PhD in English literary studies, which continues to inform her scholarship of teaching and learning. Her recent research has investigated the teaching and learning of close reading practices in composition courses and the design of writing assignments across disciplines to assess non-writing competencies.

This article introduces the theoretical concept of “writing center space-time” and reports on an empirical study which finds that offering a diverse range of tutoring modes increases access to writing center resources. We encourage our fellow writing center practitioners to consider this proposed space-time framework to gain a more inclusive, more equitable, and ultimately more productive perspective on accommodating a diverse student body. Our project, at its core, is about access and equity, and we share details and outline data from our preliminary study in the hopes that other writing centers may be inspired to take up similar inquiries and expand tutoring services and modalities in other regions, locales, and institutional settings.

Whenever students enter our Writing Center, they are overwhelmed by more than the writing process. Our student population includes individuals who experience a myriad of life circumstances, such as poverty, poor mental health, and transience, that impact their ability to perform within and without the classroom. Writing Center staff are considered campus liaisons because they provide support and connect students to resources in other departments. Throughout a writing tutor’s career, they may walk with clients across campus to the Military Student Center, The Office of Disability Services, Full Spectrum Learning Center, and Counseling Services. These clients often recognize problems, yet fear receiving assistance because of stigmas. By demonstrating that students are not alone and taking time to journey with them, tutors reinforce a collaborative mindset that reaches beyond the Writing Center’s walls. Our tutors are particularly adept at addressing students’ needs because we have experienced similar circumstances and can ultimately relate to our clients. Keywords : emotional labor; culture of care; collaboration; narrative inquiry

Community members in vulnerable spaces such as prisons and homeless shelters receive little writing support compared to neighboring community populations in public access spaces. In this reflective article, the authors consider the institutionalized barriers that limit collaborations between writing centers and hard-to-reach community populations. Drawing on personal community engagement experiences, the authors wonder what place writing center tutors and administrators have in developing a culture of writing support outside of academic boundaries. Ke yw ords : community writing, writing centers, sustainability, institutional politics

Writing Center scholarship has not paid enough attention to the commonplace administrative practices of recruiting, hiring, and training writing center consultants and how these practices are “reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (García, 2017, p. 32). This article begins to address the gap by sharing results from our ongoing examination of how to improve the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) of our recruiting, hiring, and training practices at a small midwestern liberal arts university. This article showcases a heuristic we developed that will assist writing center administrators to navigate similar interrogation processes. Drawing from Romeo García (2017) we began with listening. We listened to the existing literature, we listened to our colleagues at our university; and we listened to our colleagues within the writing center community. Our heuristic represents the recursive process of this interrogation. For each step in the process, we provide explanations, examples, and recommendations. We conclude by presenting three of our key findings from this ongoing process: 1) the Writing Center community needs to more critically question the equity, and potential exploitativeness, of three-credit hour tutor education courses, particularly when these courses are a requirement of employment; 2) if we want to create an inclusive, equitable environment where students with non-majority identities can feel like they too belong, then we need to integrate DEIB into all aspects of our work; 3) our interrogation of the equity and inclusion of recruiting, hiring, and training practices needs to be an ongoing, recursive, learning process. In short, we hope this article will serve as a call to action for other writing center administrators to interrogate and improve the equity of their recruiting, hiring, and training practices, as well as act as a catalyst for much needed research in this area. Keywords : recruiting and hiring practices, recruiting, hiring, training, tutor training, tutor education, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, DEIB, diverse and equitable hiring practices, SWOT analysis Periods of change and transition present challenges, but they also present opportunities to question our commonplace practices. Like many writing centers in this post-COVID world, our writing center is in a period of change and transition. In addition to the obvious transitions of figuring out what our “new normal” looks like, we are also facing two significant administrative changes, both of which began in the 2021-2022 academic year. First, we welcomed a new Writing Center Director (Megan Connor) in August 2021. Second, partway through the Fall 2021 semester, we learned that our university is putting the English Department Master’s program on hiatus and will no longer be accepting new students into the program. Currently, the English Department graduate assistants (GAs) provide 50% of the writing center’s consulting hours. Because our university is no longer admitting students into the English Master’s program, the writing center will lose these GA consulting hours at the beginning of the Spring 2023 semester. To address this imminent and extreme staffing shortage, we knew that we needed to critically examine and rethink our recruiting, hiring, and training practices. As we began this work, we quickly realized that our staff is disproportionately White and female. During the 2021-2022 academic year, our Writing Center staff consisted of 14 undergraduate consultants and eight GA consultants. Of our 22 staff members, 77.3% (17) identified as female and 90.9% (20) identified as White. For comparison (see Table 1), in the 2021-2022 academic year, only 47.7% of university students identified as female and 84.7% identified as White. Our center’s period of change and transition led to a kairotic moment to question the equity of our commonplace administrative practices of recruiting, hiring, and training writing center consultants. Our numbers told us that our staff lacked diverse representation. We knew, however, that simply approaching diversity as a numbers problem would not create an inclusive and equitable environment where students with non-majority identities could feel like they belonged (Del Russo et al., 2020; Haltiwanger Morrison & Nanton, 2019). As Romeo García (2017) explains, “Writing Centers function within a tapestry of social structures, reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (p. 32). In order to combat the equity issues within our recruiting, hiring, and training practices, we need to understand the tapestry of structures that is reproducing and generating systems of privilege. García (2017) argues that this process “begins with listening, both in the sense that Krista Ratcliffe (2005) discusses it—as a code for cross-cultural communication—and as I conceive of listening—as a form of actional and decolonial work” and calls on the writing center community to engage in transformative listening (p. 33). We echo Garcia’s call. Writing center scholarship has not paid enough attention to the commonplace administrative practices of recruiting, hiring, and training writing center consultants and how these practices are “reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (García, 2017, p. 32). In an effort to begin addressing this gap, we share our ongoing journey to critically examine and improve the equity of our recruiting, hiring, and training practices. As García (2017) suggests, we began with listening. We listened to the existing literature, we listened to our colleagues at our university; and we listened to our colleagues within the writing center community. As we listened, we reflected, made action plans, listened some more, adjusted, and improved the action plans. Like García (2017), we call on writing center community members, particularly writing center administrators, to engage in a similar examination and rethinking of their recruiting, hiring, and training practices. To that end, we have developed a heuristic that others can use to help navigate through this process. For each step of the heuristic, we provide explanations, examples, and recommendations. We conclude by sharing the lessons we’ve learned so far.

Writing centers, as communities of practice, often fail to question their own praxis since it is work reinforced by shared ways of knowing and being within a community. However, change cannot occur without examining and challenging assumptions and commonplaces individually and collectively. During a three-year action research study focused on training mostly monolingual tutors to engage in scaffolding and multidirectional learning with ELL, international student writers, commonplaces emerged related to contextual nature of writing, and the role of sentence-level language in tutoring and writing. Using the theoretical constructivist frameworks that inform writing center work, this article examines those commonplaces and connects them to existing interdisciplinary scholarship. While the work of examining and eliminating assumptions is an ongoing endeavor, the action research and consideration of commonplaces have led to tutor education aimed at equipping tutors to empower multilingual writers by encouraging discussions of objectives, options, outcomes, and ownership. Keywords : ELL writers, writing center, writing tutor, commonplaces Although writing centers exist in the overlap of literacy, learning, and language, we have yet to understand this positioning or resolve what it means to support learners who share this intersectional space. In fact, writing center history with ELL writers has been notably problematic. As a larger community, we have othered such writers through tutor education (Moussu, 2013; Nakumara, 2010; Thonus, 2014), non-directive pedagogies, policies restricting or refusing to assist with sentence-level language concerns, and policing of contextual language and literacy practices (García, 2017; Green, 2016; Greenfield, 2019). At the local level, as a writing center administrator, I have spent the better part of two decades fielding repeated tutor and faculty requests for more tutor training for working with ELL writers, as if the writers were the challenge rather than the systems they navigate. In 2019, as part of a doctoral program at Arizona State University, I completed an interdisciplinary three-year, cyclical action research study to improve the ways Brigham Young University’s mostly monolingual, native English-speaking tutors facilitated learning with ELL, international student writers in tutoring sessions. Initial rounds of this IRB-approved study revealed that the tutors felt comfortable instructing and motivating ELL writers, but scaffolding remained a space of uncertainty. This was notable, since scaffolding involves tailoring “the learning process to the individual needs and developmental level of the learner. Scaffolding provides the structure and support necessary to progressively build knowledge” (Kolb et al., 2014, p. 218).  Since scaffolding is central to the experiential, co-constructed learning that occurs in tutorials, I focused my study on a training intervention designed to help tutors improve scaffolding with ELL writers. As part of the training intervention, tutors participated in classroom instruction on the contextual nature of writing, scaffolding, and sentence-level language. Tutors also completed peer and administrator observations and post-observation reflective discussions. The effectiveness of the intervention and improvement with scaffolding was measured by tutor surveys, pre- and post-intervention tutor interviews, tutorial observations, and surveys and focus groups with ELL writers (Bell, 2019). Research results indicated that scaffolding and multidirectional learning and participation improved within tutorials; however, as the semesters and research cycles progressed, it became clear that the disconnect between the mostly monolingual tutors and ELL writers was less about scaffolding and more about unpacking systems and psyches. Scaffolding was a tool to facilitate multidirectional learning, but dismantling deficit thinking and systems of silos was the larger work. In communities of practice, such as writing centers, we often fail to question our own praxis since it is work reinforced by shared ways of knowing and being within a community. However, as Nancy Grimm (2009) noted in an address to the writing center community, “significant change in any workplace occurs when unconscious conceptual models are brought to the surface and replaced with conscious ones” (p. 16). The multiyear action research study resulted in a bound dissertation on a library shelf, but the work of addressing the disconnects between writing tutors and ELL writers continues because it is the work of rattling and revising our commonplaces. Although ELL writers’ and writing tutors’ questions, explanations, and asides were not measured alongside the effectiveness of the training intervention, the commonplaces they exposed revealed the need for ongoing cognitive and affective attention and sent me back to the scholarship where patterns and relationships continued to emerge and inform the work. While the focus of the initial IRB study was a training intervention within a specific writing center, this article focuses on the commonplaces and assumptions about tutors and ELL writers uncovered during the iterative, interdisciplinary research process, including how writing center work involves issues of identity and power dynamics, communities and systems, the contextual nature of writing, and the layers of sentence-level language. This examination of commonplaces offers no concrete solutions but reinforces the importance of objectives, options, outcomes, and ownership as tutors and ELL writers interact in tutoring and learning exchanges.

This article explores and describes the benefits for introverted individuals of entering writing centers as either tutors or tutees. It reinvestigates the writing center’s commonplaces, environment, and tutoring methods through the lens of distributive power structures, arguing that power-sharing can combat or mitigate anxieties experienced by introverts, such as those related to social engagement and communication. “Through the Eyes of an Introvert” positions the writing center as a space hospitable to introverts and as a community for those who don’t always feel comfortable or normal in social settings where extroverts thrive. Keywords : Introvert, writing center, commonplace, reinvestigation, power, collective “we” mentality, community of practice, thirdspaces, communication, collaboration, benefits

Viewed through an antiracist lens, the policies and rules that many Canadian writing centers place on their websites perpetuate commonplaces that can disempower staff and writers from raciolinguistic minorities [1] .The four authors of this article (a racialized student writer, two staff members—one racialized and one white-passing—and a racialized administrator) draw on our diverse positionalities and lived experiences to argue that seemingly “fair” and race-neutral policies (such as the limited number of appointments allowed to a client per week, or the discouraging of directive advice about grammar and usage) can disproportionately and negatively affect minoritized stakeholders. Using narrative to explicate how we have navigated writing center policies, and airing our discontents with the compulsion to make one-size-fits-all policy, we suggest that writing centers could become more inclusive if they carefully reviewed these everyday expressions of their ethos. We also propose that enduring changes will only emerge from a radical critique of the white academic habitus that provides the context for policy, rather than from tinkering with the details of specific policies: i.e., from a critique of the ethos itself as well as of its molecular expressions. Keywords : writing center, policy, rules, antiracism, commonplaces, positionalities, tutoring, oppression, white habitus The power of whiteness continues to shape contemporary forms of management and control of practices and writing center scholarship. –Romeo Garcia, “Unmaking Gringo Centers” Policy. The rules. The law. The last line of defense in unconsciously racist thinking, is a way to shift the blame for what’s right onto a document and thus deflect anger and judgment onto that supposedly immaterial arbiter of success. An unconscious justification through misdirection, as if one was saying, “look, it’s not my fault. I’m just following the rules.” –Bradley Smith, “I’m Just Following the Policy”

This article raises awareness of how “we” language in writing centers can be both helpful and oppressive. Specifically, I consider ways that “we” language has the potential to perpetuate oppression by excluding individuals from writing center “we” statements.Using Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s 2011 “Two-List Heuristic” as a theoretical framework for understanding and responding to oppressive language, I analyze research on the inclusive and exclusive linguistic characteristics of plural pronouns, including “we,” “our,” and “ourselves,” as they relate to writing center work. I then propose ways in which writing center members may construct responses to “we” language that challenges their values, beliefs, and experiences. This article intends to interrogate a common linguistic feature of writing center culture that can prevent its members from “talking back” to the center. Three semesters ago, I began my position as the Associate Director of a writing center in a mid-sized, religiously-affiliated university in the Midwestern region of the United States. Like many spaces in the Midwest, my university is characterized by politeness, whiteness, and football fanaticism—qualities that have been familiar to me since childhood. Although I am 500 miles from my hometown, I am comfortable in this environment where I easily blend in with the crowd: I am a white heterosexual cis-woman of European descent in my late thirties with a Ph.D. I share this information because my background, context, and positionality have certainly shaped the following analysis. On a cold and gloomy afternoon in mid-November of 2021, I held one-on-one meetings in my office with our new writing center tutors to discuss their research paper topics. Naya (pseudonym), a historically underserved undergraduate student tutor, sat across the table from me and began to share the framework of her research interests. She had prepared a proposal to improve our writing center’s tutor training module for working with multilingual students. As a multilingual student herself, Naya’s proposal was exciting and bold: she was interested in studying multilingual tutoring theories in order to create new pedagogical practices for our writing center. I understood Naya’s concern to stem from the myopic generalization of international students by writing center staff that she witnessed during her training. Yet when I asked her about the direction in which she wanted to take her research, her sentiments surprised me. She remarked, “I just don’t know who I am; am I the international student or the tutor? It’s really confusing.” As she went on to explain, her confusion was rooted in the “we” language used by experienced tutors during the tutor training module. When experienced tutors stood at the front of the classroom describing the ways “we work with international students,” Naya felt like she had to choose an identity. As a new tutor, she was supposed to identify with the tutoring “we”: those who work with international students. Yet, she was also the international student “we”: a group external to the tutors who were, at times, problematic for the tutoring “we.” After talking to Naya, I felt certain that although the language of “we” is supposed to create a sense of community and belonging in the writing center, this plural pronoun also has the power to exclude, confuse, and silence voices. As I began to reflect on this conversation, I realized that the language of “we,” “us,” and “our” is everywhere in writing center rhetoric. Our writing center’s mission statement, appointment confirmation notices, and first-time tutor meetings invariably include descriptions of how “we” do things in the writing center. Furthermore, the word “we” is ubiquitous in writing center discourse throughout the United States; language in daily emails on the [wcenter] listserv and publications in writing center journals demonstrate the prevalence of writing center “we” language. Yet this prevalence does not indicate a corresponding predominance of exclusionary plural pronoun use. Likewise, I am not suggesting the impossible or undesirable task of avoiding plural pronoun use. Rather, I want to argue that writing center “we” language is not always comfortable, inclusive, and welcoming. Naya’s confusion over writing center “we” language suggests that the plural pronoun “we” can function as a privileging and excluding language structure in the writing center environment. Thus, practitioners in the field need to be vigilant about examining and adjusting plural pronoun use, and this article will offer ways forward for becoming more vigilant. After Naya and I conversed, she began to pursue research on multilingual tutoring theories, and I began to listen closely for “we” language in our writing center’s discourse. My listening turned into writing when the call for this special issue was announced. The Peer Review editors of this special issue asked: “as writing centers embrace liberatory political stances, and as their users become more diverse and more aware of identity…do consultants, writers, and administrators with minoritized identities have opportunities to talk candidly back to the center?” (Natarajan et al., 2022, para. 5). Naya had taken the step of “talk[ing] candidly back to the center” in proposing improvements to the pedagogy of our writing center’s training course, and she did so as an international student of color at a predominantly white institution (PWI). While talking back to the center requires time, support, a dialogue partner, and disciplinary knowledge, it also fundamentally requires language. It is this linguistic dimension that may provide an obstacle for historically underserved tutors, writers, and administrators to talk back to the center. If individuals with minoritized identities want to identify as the “we” of the writing center and also as the “we” that has been othered, what language is available to the author without making the problem sound self-focused? This analysis of “we” language may provide a window into why some writing center members feel prohibited from talking back to the center. This is not the first time “we” and “them” language has been problematized in writing center scholarship. Denny (2010) describes the pervasive tendency for writing center discussions to use “we” language to subtly dehumanize groups of people by sorting individuals into subjects and objects. He writes that writing center “talks, presentations, and keynotes index Others as objects for whom practical and instrumental learning applies, not figures for whom learning is necessarily transactional and collaborative (“we” can learn from “them,” “they” from “us”)” (p. 5). When “we” language is used to describe the subjective experience of writing center members in contrast with an objective “them,” the “them” group implicitly seems lesser than the “we” group because they are not afforded the same subjectivity of the “we.” For example, if tutors present a training module on working with international students and the tutors say, “we work with them,” this language implies a power dynamic where knowledge is held by tutors and less knowledge is held by international students. However, if the tutors say, “we work together,” the power dynamic shifts to one of equal knowledge or benefit. The “we” language in the latter example does not imply a lesser-than dynamic because the subjectivity of the “we” is afforded to both tutors and international students. Yet the tendency to use “we” and “them” language is more common than shared “we” language, both in speech and in writing. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown (2011) reflect on this phenomenon in the instructional context, where students use exclusive pronouns in papers and class discussions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown note that students often assume “readers will be from ‘their culture’ when they use pronouns like ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘our’” (p. 26). Such assumptions occur in writing because they are part of thought and speech patterns conditioned by social and cultural interactions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown remark that breaking these problematic plural pronoun habits is difficult. One of the ways to make it less difficult is to understand the difference between problematic and helpful pronoun use. The use of plural pronoun language in the writing center context is not surprising given the widely discussed adaptation of “we” language to corporate and business settings over the past few decades. This phenomenon has been reviewed and discussed in articles by Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company. Because many writing centers share characteristics in common with the business world, analyses of plural pronoun language from business management and leadership resources have value in the writing center context. For example, scholars such as Kacewicz et al. (2014) have argued that using “we” language in a collaborative working environment demonstrates an outward focus and concern for others. This research suggests that individuals whose language reflects a group-oriented rather than self-focused tendency are more likely to attain leadership roles in the group and direct their group toward successful outcomes. Further, according to a study by Anchimbe (2016), a leader who has established rapport with other members of the group can use “we” language to “encourage or reprimand … [to help] members reassert their identity, solidarity, and prowess, restate their mission and determination to achieve it, and also bemoan and caution against [an] unfortunate predicament” (p. 516). Thus, “we” language can create group uplift and positive momentum towards pre-established goals and values. In the writing center, an example of “we” language as a leadership tool would be when a tutor suggests to their peers before the start of a shift: “let’s keep our earbuds out. That way, we can make sure to welcome tutees when they walk in.” Such “we” language directs tutors toward shared values of attention and hospitality. The tutor using the “we” language demonstrates an outward-focused attitude, showing concern for the values of their writing center and for the well-being of tutees who walk in the door. Hence, “we” language can act as a communication tool for group perspective-taking in the writing center. Yet corporate and business literature also warns against the potentially coercive nature of “we” language. For example, in his critique of the Harvard Business Review’s push for “we” language, Walpole (2018) argues that “we” language is used to “manipulate reality” (Improving Communication and Community section, para. 2). Its most offensive manipulation, according to Walpole, is that “we” language creates a false sense of team. Suggesting that “we” landed a deal or “we” gave a fantastic presentation when only one person acted sets up a disingenuous sense of team where no interpersonal bonding is expected. Likewise, “we” language allows a group to take credit when the credit is really due to an individual. Such behavior hearkens back to harrowed days of group work in high school when one person completed the brunt of the work on behalf of the rest of the group. Walpole argues, “did *you* really have much to do with landing the deal? If not, trying to share in the credit isn’t so noble” (Saying “We” is a Poor Substitute section, para. 6). In the business setting, this misuse of “we” language can be used to inflate a leader’s accomplishments while diminishing the success of those under the leader’s purview. When a leader shares collective credit for the success of an individual’s work under the guise of “we” language, the leader becomes a gatekeeper for the growth and promotion of their direct reports. Similarly, in the writing center, an administrative team needs to be discerning about its use of “we” language in creating a sense of team and in acknowledging individual accomplishments. I have briefly shared the surface-level arguments about the benefits and drawbacks of “we” language in the writing center. In the rest of the article, I consider ways that “we” language has the potential to perpetuate oppression by excluding individuals from writing center “we” statements. At stake in this article’s examination of “we” language is an understanding of the potential impact of plural pronoun use on tutoring pedagogy in two sets of relationships: administrators → tutors, and tutors → tutees. The theoretical framework I use for analyzing plural pronoun language in the writing center is guided by four principles from Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s (2011) “Two-List Heuristic for Addressing Everyday Language of Oppression” (p. 22). While “we” language is not necessarily always oppressive, Suhr-Sytsma and Brown contend that “an individual’s uses of oppressive language are often both unintentional and inseparable from broader discourses that reinforce oppression” (p. 14). As I discovered in conversation with Naya, the “we” language used during our writing center’s training module was unintentionally oppressive and nearly invisible because it was so ingrained in the regular discourse of the writing center. In light of this focus on commonplace discourse, I find four of the eighteen items in Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s two-list heuristic particularly relevant for analyzing “we” language. To assist in clarity during analysis, I have added (a) and (b) notations after the original numbers in the two lists so that when the heuristic numbers are indicated later in this article, it will be easier to remember from which list the item came. Thus, this article will examine “we” language in relation to the following elements of the heuristic:

This article explores my experience as an emerging writing center director of color. I reflect on how I navigate the power and its influence on my new position as well as the different ways I had to learn and grapple with discussions of race, language, and writing. Using a composite counterstorytelling approach, I consider how these types of counterstories personalize conversations of race and power, particularly how writing centers, and those who occupy these spaces, are often complicit in upholding standardized English. Keywords : Writing Centers, counterstory, antiracism, language discrimination, social justice

This article explores an incident of microaggression experienced by an Asian American female professional writing tutor working in a predominantly white institution (PWI). Using the genre of counterstory, the author hopes to show a racial Other’s processing of emotional trauma and its larger implications for anti-racist pedagogies in writing center work. Keywords : Counterstory, Imposter Syndrome, racial Other, anti-racist pedagogies I felt validated when the Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association (RMWCA) chose to read Counterstories from the Writing Center edited by Wonderful Faison and Frankie Condon for its Summer 2022 Book Club. I had voted for it in RMWCA’s online survey because I believed it would serve as a timely reflection of where the field of writing center is heading in the future. As a feminist of color and a professional writing tutor working in higher education, I am especially interested in exploring the genre of counterstory and its rhetorical purposes in combating institutional racism on all levels. Aja Y. Martinez incorporates this concept and method of counterstory from critical race theory (CRT) to center the “lived and embodied experiences of people of color” (p. 33). Although people of color must confront interlocking systems of oppression on a daily basis, the stories of our struggles are hardly ever heard in a white supremacist society that tends to dismiss such lived experiences, leading to “the everyday erasures, exclusions and repression of narratives…that trouble, challenge, [disrupt] and destabilize ‘meaning in the service of power,’ its frames, its style, or rhetoric” (Faison & Condon, 2022, p.7).  Therefore, Faison and Condon claim that telling counterstories is enacting anti-racist praxis for the following reason: Counterstory insists on the legibility and intelligibility of that which has been treated as illegible and unintelligible under the aegis of white supremacist discourse: the racial Other, her lived experience, her resistance, refusal, survival, her brilliance–and the languages, discourses, genres in which she speaks her being. (p.7) After I re-read this statement word for word, over and over again, it seemed like Faison and Condon were calling out to me to tell my very own counterstory.  In her article “Asians Are at the Writing Center,” Jasmine K. Tang (2022) invites “fellow Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center… [to join] in a conversation we can have together about the multiplicity of our experiences at writing centers” (p. 11).  Although I cannot claim to work in a place called “a writing center,” I hope to use my personal experience to contribute to this critical dialogue, thus continuing Tang’s work. Similar to Martinez’s counterstory that explores Alejandra’s fit in the academy (Martinez, 2014), I explore how well I, as an Asian American woman, fit in my role as a professional writing tutor at a small, private predominantly white institution (PWI).  The conclusion I have reached through exploring my experience of microaggression is that certain historically marginalized bodies do not fit well in the academy, at least not in prescribed roles of authority. Thus, their uncommon presence is manifested through imposter syndrome. What follows is my account of how this incident of microaggression has profoundly transformed me. In Spring 2022, the coordinator at my college’s academic support and tutoring center distributed copies of the manual How Tutoring Works: Six Steps to Grow Motivation & Accelerate Student Learning, for tutors and teachers (Frey et al., 2022) to all the professional math and writing tutors. We were supposed to read the manual in our down time, when we were not working with students, to enhance our tutoring skills. Later in the semester, we would have a staff development meeting to discuss the manual. However, for whatever reason(s), that meeting was never scheduled. Moreover, during the Summer 2022 break, the coordinator informed the tutors through email of his abrupt departure from the center because he had decided to accept another (better) position within the college. As a result, I was left “hanging,” having read the manual but not having had the opportunity to discuss my criticisms of it with the coordinator and my fellow tutors, with whom I had hardly any (in-person) contact since the disruption caused by the COVID 19 pandemic. Although I found that the manual did offer some useful, objective strategies for tutoring in general, I observed that the master narrative embedded in the manual did not address critical factors such as how tutors’ and tutees’ embodied subjectivities could dynamically affect the outcome of a tutoring session. For example, in Chapter One “Effective Tutoring Begins with Relationships and Credibility,” the authors claim that the teacher/tutor’s credibility greatly affects student learning outcomes, and that it is consequently imperative to establish mutual trust between the tutor and tutee.  The authors define teacher/tutor credibility as “a measure of the student’s belief that you are trustworthy, competent, dynamic and approachable” (Frey et al., 2022, p. 20). Furthermore, they elaborate that students are the ones who determine a teacher/tutor’s credibility: “We don’t get to decide if we’re credible. It is perceptual, on the part of the learner. They decide if we are credible” (emphasis in original, p. 20). Finally, the authors offer some cogent suggestions to teachers/tutors to show them how they can effectively try to boost their credibility in their students’ eyes. However, what happens when a student walks into the center with preconceived notions of who is trustworthy and competent based on his own implicit (unexamined) biases? In such a challenging scenario, what can the tutor really do to effectively and efficiently gain the student’s trust when the student is suspicious of the tutor’s competency from the start of the session? As an Asian American woman working as a professional writing tutor at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college, I found myself in such a thorny situation with a young white, male student several years ago. I recall that after I had briefly introduced myself as the writing tutor he would be working with for that hour, the student immediately asked me, “Do you even know what you are doing?” Within the cultural context of the Chinese immigrant community I was raised in, it would be considered extremely rude and inappropriate for a student to question the teacher’s authority.  Therefore, I was very surprised when I was confronted with the doubtful tone in his awkward question.  I was particularly disturbed by the connotation of the adverb “even,” which according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary may be “used as an intensive to stress an extreme or highly unlikely condition or instance,” which implied in that case he did not believe I was even knowledgeable enough to assist him with his written assignment. However, I confidently reassured him of the fine quality of the services offered by the center. (The center has a very strict policy of only hiring professional writing tutors with advanced degrees, although this policy does not extend to math and other subject area tutoring, where there are both professional and peer tutors.) Despite my elaborate explanation, the student still did not seem too convinced of my expertise because he kept repeating the same nagging question throughout our session: “Do you even know what you are doing?” Since the writing consultation was supposed to be a collaborative process, I had to figure out how I should navigate the rest of the session with a student who was stubbornly unwilling to work with me in the first place. After that session was finally over, I had to craft a meticulous note in my client report form on WC Online stating that the writer seemed very reluctant to work with me, harboring serious reservations even after I had explained to him that I was indeed an experienced professional writing tutor with expertise in composition. The client report form would serve as my best and only real defense in case the student ever did file a formal complaint against me, claiming that I was incompetent, or that I failed to address his needs during the session. Since the center, as a designated student support service, is supposed to be student-centered, its most important policy is that the tutor must always strive to reasonably accommodate all the student/client’s needs first and foremost. Simply put, we, the tutors, exist to serve the students who visit the center. At the beginning of every academic year when we complete our hiring paperwork, all tutors must sign the tutor’s responsibilities agreement to acknowledge that we would comply with all of the center’s policies as a condition of employment. As a result, that client report form might be used as written evidence, a record of accountability that would document what occurred during the session, which I could use to support my claims in case of any disputes.

Multilingual learners whose dominant language is not English are often disadvantaged when their writing proficiency is judged against the Eurocentric standard English norm. Such deficiency models and deficit thinking devalue racially minoritized learners’ languages, leading to linguistic racism. A liberatory anti-racist, anti-oppressive, culturally responsive writing pedagogy was implemented at the Center for Teaching and Learning at a major university in Ontario, Canada. Eleven learners were analyzed in this one-month study. A mixed-method approach was used to analyze the impact of the implemented pedagogy based on several data sources, including learners’ reflective journal entries, transactional posts, and instructor feedback. The study shows the benefits of the writing pedagogy in helping learners improve their writing skills, agency, autonomy, voice, and critical thinking skills, as well as empowering them for emancipation and transformation. The study also reinforces the importance of practitioners’ shift from the provision of prescriptive and remedial feedback to personalized, learner-centered support by regarding learners’ languages and cultures as resources. Furthermore, de-emphasizing grammar while prioritizing critical thinking contributes toward dismantling the dominant monolith norm of standard English. Internationalization, immigration, and massification have increased cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity of learners in higher education. Learners are disadvantaged if their dominant languages are not English and if they are culturally unfamiliar with the knowledge system valued in higher education that privileges Eurocentric, White, middle-class habitus (Sinclair, 2018). These learners are oppressed by a system that values standard English; their low proficiency in English positions them at a cognitive, affective, and sociocultural distance that is far from the White racial habitus. The prevalent thinking about learners from diverse backgrounds views their challenges to be the result of endogenous deficits in the learners because of who they are when the learners enter higher education. The burden of supporting these learners has been borne by writing centers. This paper advocates that educators start to recognize that supporting our diverse learner body necessitates a collective awareness of how the pervasiveness of deficit thinking about learners from diverse backgrounds is intertwined with racism. This racism is “so deeply and invisibly enmeshed into thinking, interactions, systems, practices, and institutions, that disparities between Whites and people of colour are assumed part of a natural and inevitable order” (Anya, 2021, p. 1056). Acknowledging the seeming invisibility of the enmeshed racism in higher education, it is important to establish a risk-free, friendly, collaborative, cooperative, and inclusive space for racially minoritized learners to experience equal learning opportunities in higher education. This article advocates increasing writing center’s support with a proactive liberatory pedagogy that enables learners to expand their English linguistic repertoire. This latter support enables learners to develop competence and confidence in communicating ideas in the ways that allow them to be their authentic selves.  Hence, they are in better positions cognitively, affectively, and socioculturally to work on their assignments. This article presents how adding culturally responsive pedagogy as a nuanced overlay on the liberatory learner-driven and instructor-facilitated pedagogy supported learners with extremely low English language proficiency in developing their writing skills during a one-month timeframe.

Writing centres are the middle grounds of academia, where students can discuss their assignments, learn about writing expectations, and in many cases, talk about their learning strategies. When students with backgrounds other than those of the dominant cultural groups attend post-secondary education, they have to acquire certain norms and practices to succeed academically. Over several decades and centuries, certain discourses have gained dominance in post-secondary education. Writing centres are the middle ground between students and instructors. These centres support students’ writing, communication, and learning skills to help them advance in their academic endeavours. Many of these centres support students in peer-style and learner-centred ways; however, these centres constantly communicate with the instructors and other departments within the institutions. This middle-ground positionality places writing centres in a unique situation: they need to empower students in learning academic norms and, at the same time, help them find their unique voices in writing. While some student-support practices might favour students’ acculturation, acculturation of students in academic norms is at the service of colonial practices and inherently contradictory to the mandates or promises of educational institutes to train critical thinkers that advance our understanding of the world and how we operate within it. Enculturation, however, is a concept in language socialization that explains how people within a culture acquire the necessary cultural norms and practices while they engage in various tasks and activities. The attainment of such standards and procedures will deliver competent individuals in that culture. While enculturation helps students become competent cultural practitioners within an institution, it does not mandate acculturation. Therefore, it can serve as a tool to empower students belonging to social groups other than the dominant culture to succeed academically. At the same time, it does not require them to abandon their cultural practices. In that sense, enculturation can serve inclusive education practices.  In this paper, I will argue that writing centres, and mainly tutors in writing centres, can employ enculturation to help student writers successfully learn the necessary cultural norms of the institution to function well. Keywords : Enculturation, Writing Centres, Language Socialization, Discourse, Tutors

Writing is central to the academic and professional success of STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) students, yet there is little writing center scholarship examining how STEMM students use and perceive writing centers. This article presents quantitative findings from a mix-methods survey study examining STEMM undergraduate students’ usage of university writing centers. The study was conducted at a mid-sized, public health sciences research university in the Southeast. Findings from the survey suggest that STEMM students are likely to visit writing centers, but their visits overwhelmingly focus on coursework in the core curriculum rather than coursework within their majors. These students tend to view disciplinary writing as formulaic and content-driven, which affects writing center usage. They also express concerns about the ability of writing center staff to assist with scientific and technical genres. Throughout the presentation of results, the authors offer insight into practices they plan to implement to provide better outreach and support to STEMM students at their university. While study results are not generalizable to other institutions, they still provide insight into usage behaviors of STEMM students that can be useful to a variety of institutions as they work to support STEMM writers.

In a writing center, we often hear about the relief a student feels following their session. However, there is little empirical data to support this claim. To address this gap, we conducted a survey in the Brigham Young University Family, Home, and Social Sciences Writing Lab (BYU FHSS Writing Lab). The survey was completed by undergraduate students who brought their writing to our writing center, both before and after a writing center tutoring session to measure the effects of writing tutoring on the highly applicable and relatable emotion that college students experience: stress. More specifically, we wanted to better understand perceived stress in conjunction with other variables, such as year in school, familiarity with the assigned citation style, whether the student had a plan for their paper, and whether they had visited the BYU FHSS Writing Lab in the past. We wanted to see how each of these variables were affected by a visit to the writing lab and particularly how students’ perceived stress levels were affected in turn. We discovered that visiting the BYU FHSS Writing Lab did significantly reduce perceived stress levels, and that many other factors play into this such as a student having a plan after their writing session or what year the student was in school. This research is important to writing labs across the country because by implementing our findings, writing centers may be able to maximize the help they provide to students and contribute to their stress relief.

Writing center scholars and tutor-training manuals historically emphasize the importance of tutors and writers collaboratively negotiating consultation agendas to maintain writers’ ownership over their writing. However, when tutors encounter advanced student writers, writers from unfamiliar fields, or writers with complex linguistic repertoires, they may struggle to read student writing, identify writing issues, and negotiate effective, mutual agendas. One tool for navigating these challenges is the “read-ahead method”—in which tutors read student writing in advance and prepare for consultations (Scrocco 10). While this method offers potential advantages, a brief survey reveals that some writing center administrators worry that tutors who read student writing in advance may hijack consultation agendas. This exploratory mixed-methods study examines thirteen tutor-supervisor planning conversations and subsequent consultations to assess the correspondence between tutors’ plans and consultations and to consider what factors may support or undermine writers’ agendas. Results suggest that tutors who use the read/plan-ahead method do not fervently push their planned agendas over writers’ agendas. However, very detailed or particularly vague pre-consultation planning may set tutors up for sessions that fail to negotiate and carry out cohesive, well-prioritized shared agendas. The most collaborative, coherent consultations in this study balance tutor and writer agendas. They begin with writers’ submitted concerns, identify high-priority global writing issues, engage in substantive agenda-setting with writers, explicitly link tutors’ plans with writers’ agendas, and abandon tutors’ plans when needed. The read/plan-ahead model works best when tutors remember to place writers at the heart of building, revising, and enacting consultation agendas.

In this article, we discuss how participating in a writing group during  and after the COVID-19 pandemic helped us reimagine what  scholarly productivity means for us as writing center professionals  (WCPs). Drawing on our experiences in an online writing group for  almost three years with WCPs from four different institutions, we  identify three themes that emerged across our experiences: (1)  writing center work as scholarly and intellectual; (2)  professionalization and mentoring; and (3) social support.  Identifying these themes made visible for us a broader notion of  scholarly productivity. It also helped us think more strategically  about the complex and layered work we do as WCPs as we  consistently juggle competing work demands. We hope this article  can help WCPs not only re-conceive what it means to be productive  as writing center scholars but also to integrate a broad range of  scholarly work more fully into what they are already doing.

I interviewed four current writing center tutors who self- identified as antiracist to answer the questions of: How do self-identified antiracist writing tutors at a university writing center define and practice antiracism? What factors limit these practices? After collection, I analyzed the data in three rounds, once inductively, and twice deductively, using a critical whiteness conceptual framework. Tutors suggested education on linguistic justice and code-switching, centering student voice, and disrupting power dynamics as key orientations in their self-identified antiracist practice. However, it was also found that tutors employed a White Educational Discourse throughout the interviews, often avoiding words and letting others off the hook, limiting the effectiveness of these orientations. Further, it was found that tutors often located antiracist practices in areas of the writing center ecosystem that were outside of their control, such as the purpose of the writing center. This study does not seek to criticize writing center tutors, but rather to provide insight into the effectiveness, opportunities, and limitations of antiracist praxis at writing centers. To conclude, I offer questions implicated in this study and directions for further research.

What do tutors think they teach in a given writing center session? What do the writers they work with claim they learned? This IRB-approved study looks at responses from 74 pairs of surveys completed by tutors and writers about what they taught and learned in particular writing center tutorials. Drawing on the distinctions variation theory makes between intended and lived objects of learning, this study analyzes the general response trends evident across these surveys by coordinating tutors’ and writers’ separate perceptions. The results suggest that writers identify learning as having taken place much more frequently and across a wider range of writing-related topics than tutors claim to have taught. While short-answer responses reveal occasional overlap between writer’s perceived learning and tutor’s intended teaching, the marked discrepancy between the two suggests that a teaching/learning causality does not accurately represent much of the instructive effort and outcome occurring through writing center tutorials. Knowing that writers claim to be learning even when the tutors they meet with don’t think they are teaching informs how tutors can perceive their effectiveness and how writing centers  can position themselves as alternative educational spaces.

Motivation interconnects with many aspects of a student’s higher education journey; a student’s goals, self-efficacy, interests, and prior experiences affect their level of motivation and engagement in a writing center session. This primer discusses the multidimensional nature of motivation and its relation to identity. Through an exploration of the literature, the author designed a heuristic called the Writing Motivational Assessment Pathway (MAP). This tool focuses on understanding students’ motivations, engaging students more in their writing process, and encouraging their development as writers. The five components of the Writing MAP—identity, beliefs, perceptions, context, and interactions—work toward understanding a student’s motivational profile and pairing strategies that connect with each student. This article discusses how to identify students’ motivational habits through the Writing MAP to help students establish effective writing habits and foster self-regulation. This heuristic continues to be refined at the community college level.

We write about a cultural rhetorics approach to writing center assessment at two different institutions where we think about assessment as everyday practice that enables us to tell multiple stories about our centers. We share how we create assessment committees within the center and collaboratively develop and revise assessment approaches and instruments, particularly with consultant input. Then, we discuss the various communities that inform and benefit from our assessments, including consultants, a broad range of writing center stakeholders, and writing center administrators. Assessment as everyday practice means that we are better informed and prepared when these constituents ask questions, make requests, or operate from (false) assumptions. We hope this view of assessment leads readers to build relationships with the individuals in their centers and universities in order to create assessments that matter in particular times and spaces as well as assessments that morph and change as the readers’ cultural communities change.