In The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, Nicole Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson explore the implications of writing center directors’ hybrid day-to-day labor and ...

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While resilience often defines writing center survival strategies, resistance offers a familiar stance in relation to dominant classroom and institutional practices. However, both resilience and resistance are indexed to a perceived “normal,” and violations of normativity have consequences not always imagined in individual tutoring sessions or theoretical discussions.

This article demonstrates the important role that student researchers play in developing two-year college writing center assessment. As part of a tutoring practicum assignment, students from Bristol Community College co-designed a survey that assessed the perceptions of students who do and do not utilize a writing center at their mid-sized community college. Students collected 865 responses between 2014 and 2015. This article provides a road map to developing student-led RAD research through a two-year college writing center and its attendant course; it also shares positive pedagogical and programmatic outcomes from the project.

Though enrollment of learning-disability (LD) students is on the rise in higher education, instructors are often underprepared to effectively support them. The composition pedagogy community needs more discussion of strategies to help LD students in the writing classroom. Scholarship on writing tutoring suggests that one such strategy is to exhibit active and intentional empathy. Tutoring pedagogy has long advocated approaching students with compassion through strategies such as empathic listening and interrogative, coparticipatory dialogue. To best serve all of our students, particularly those with learning disabilities or attention deficit disorders or who are on the autism spectrum, composition instructors should look to tutoring pedagogy’s model of a nonhierarchical, interrogatory, listening-based approach to working with students. These strategies begin with empathy for our students.