We focus on a corpus of around 2 million words and four types of data visualization to make arguments about the larger field of writing center studies. We also address the value of cross-institutional work for writing center studies, particularly related to documents (e.g., sessions notes) that are often under-utilized at individual institutions.

This article reports on one university’s experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed “MonsterComp,” including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures, the main motivation behind this experiment was to enhance teacher training and support while still retaining the workshop environment and low student-to-instructor ratio of traditional composition sections. The course involves multiple stakeholders, including the WPA and graduate student program coordinators, graduate student instructors, and course-based coaches from our university's writing center. Assessment of student work, observations of the course, and surveys administered to stakeholders indicate that the course was successful in terms of teacher training and preserving student learning outcomes.

Although many college students are parents and postpartum depression (PPD) is common post-birth, there is a lack of writing center scholarship on supporting students with PPD. This article fills this gap by offering approaches to defining PPD for consultants and strategies for supporting writers with PPD in the writing center. It also makes visible the intersectional forms of emotional labor that are connected to PPD in the writing center and wider academy, contributing to emergent conversations about the emotional contours of writing center disciplinary labor. The authors take a narrative-based, auto-ethnographic approach in order to challenge stigmas associated with PPD and shed light on how it impacts college writing and working in writing centers. Their stories are grounded in scholarship from feminist theory, trauma studies, critical race theory, medicine, psychology, and neuroscience and build on existing writing center literature on emotionalism, wellness, dis/ability, and disciplinary labor.

This article is meant to serve as a practical guide for writing center practitioners and provide strategies to help make writing centers more accessible for all learners. These strategies specifically focus on ways to increase accessibility for dyslexic individuals , regardless of whether the writer has disclosed their disability or not.

The term resistance has been an evolving concept in literacy and composition studies. While much has been studied in terms of student resistance in high schools, first-year composition classrooms, and in university writing centers, little is known about how resistance occurs in afterschool tutoring programs between volunteer writing tutors and their tutees. Using an ethnographic case study approach, this paper examines how three adult volunteer writing tutors made sense of resistance in working with their adolescent tutees in an urban tutoring program. The findings showed that tutor attitudes, values, and reactions shaped their experience of resistance in a variety of ways including a) misreading tutee signals of engagement; b) masking expectations of cultural and linguistic compliance within a discourse of resistance; and c) embracing resistance as a bridge to tutor growth. The author uses these findings to inform current conceptions of student resistance and compliance and to provide implication for volunteer tutor training.

This interview is not the first in Reflections for Tom Deans, a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Connecticut. His first interview appeared in issue 1.1 of Reflections and focused on his work as chair of the recently created CCCC national service-learning committee dedicated to creating “disciplinary momentum” around service learning. He has a career-long interest in community-engaged writing and research, and served as both a Senior Editor and the Book Review Editor for Reflections over several years. In this interview, he reflects on the beginning of Reflections, the emergence of composition’s interest in service learning, and the growth of institutional support and recognition of community engagement. Overall, he finds that despite its early modest aspirations, the field’s trajectory has resulted in a large amount of exciting and important work, and provided a “real viable pathway” for educators who want to build a career around community engagement.

Multimodality is recognized as a useful pedagogical tool, but it is often difficult to apply in real-life curricula. Further, expectations on educators and various campus units are increasingly complex and require nimble and innovative partnerships. In this article, Christina, a first-year composition instructor, and Lucie, the university’s writing center (WC) director, share their different but parallel paths to “going multimodal” for the first time. They show how they joined forces to determine how best to teach and respond to students’ diverse multimodal projects. First, Christina explains how she taught herself and her students about multimodal rhetoric and genres with the help of two dedicated WC tutors. She also outlines how she created a rubric to respond to students’ projects throughout their composing processes. Then Lucie shares her initial hesitancy about going multimodal and how she ultimately prepared her tutors to respond to the projects that Christina’s students presented. The article concludes with Christina and Lucie discussing the exciting synergy they experienced while working together and with the tutors and the challenges they faced. For composition instructors, tutors, and WC directors interested in adopting multimodal assignments, this article provides ideas and suggestions for teaching, giving feedback, and mentoring.

Writing center studies has sought to move towards research methods that are replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) as a means to scholarly legitimacy. While a number of RAD research methods have been identified (surveys, qualitative analysis, observation, case studies, experimentation, discourse analysis, teacher research, action research, and ethnography), one important source of information has been largely overlooked: the scheduling metadata that writing centers routinely collect in the course of normal operations. The present research seeks to demonstrate the validity of metadata-driven research by interrogating an area of writing center scholarship that has been predominantly studied through theoretical or small group means: the impact of gender on writing consultations. It investigates whether the gender of the writing consultant significantly affects a student’s choice in scheduling appointments.

Review Article| January 01 2020 Why Johnny Can (and Should) Write Essays: A Case for an Essay-centric Writing Curriculum Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies. By Wallack, Nicole B.Utah State University Press, 2017. 230 pages. Jenny Spinner Jenny Spinner Jenny Spinner is associate professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where she teaches creative nonfiction and journalism and serves as director of the writing center. Her essays and essay criticism have appeared in Fourth Genre, Brevity, Writing on the Edge, Pedagogy, and Assay, and on NPR’s All Things Considered, among others. She is the author of Of Women and the Essay: An Anthology from 1655 to 2000 (2018) and coauthor, along with her twin sister Jackie Spinner, of Tell Them I Didn’t Cry (2006). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2020) 20 (1): 185–191. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879206 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jenny Spinner; Why Johnny Can (and Should) Write Essays: A Case for an Essay-centric Writing Curriculum. Pedagogy 1 January 2020; 20 (1): 185–191. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879206 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Review You do not currently have access to this content.

d/Deaf students face a unique set of problems in the education system. Most of these struggles stem from their use of Signed language systems, such as American Sign Language. However, the current education system is also Problematic, as it promotes an Audist-centric learning environment. Additionally, many educators do not understand That signed language systems are completely different from spoken or written English and thus do not treat their d/Deaf pupils as multilingual learners. College writing centers, while heavily influenced by the current education System, have an ability to be incredibly flexible with their methods when working with students. This flexibility that Writing centers allow can be used in tandem with the translingual theory of writing when working with d/Deaf Students to revolutionize the way d/Deaf writers and students are taught in the education system. Keywords : d/Deaf students, signed language systems, Writing Centers, Translingualism

This study explores the identity construction of an individual multilingual writing center tutor in tutoring sessions at an American university. Discourse analysis approach is applied to analyze this multilingual tutor’s language use when interacting with his tutees. The findings indicate that the participant tutor takes on multiple identities: a writing center tutor, a negotiator and collaborator, and a language ambassador. These identities are contingent, fluid, and multifaceted depending on the interactions between the tutor and his tutees. Furthermore, this participant tutor’s identities are co-constructed in the interactions with his tutees through the incorporation of his multilingual resources, and through language and linguistic features which are assigned social meanings by writing center communities. Keywords : multilingual tutor, identity construction, writing center, language indexicality

This research contributes to our knowledge about second-language writers and their writing center experiences. This study applies the cognitive and motivational scaffolding coding schema set forth in Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson’s Talk About Writing (2015/2018) to second-language writers—a student population that was excluded from their study. Drawing on data collected from observations and post-session semi-structured interviews with ten undergraduate Chinese international writers and experienced graduate tutors, this study sought to qualitatively analyze which scaffolding technique was most effective in supporting students’ language acquisition. Trends in the results indicate that second-language writers’ perceptions of tutoring techniques may be more important than tutors’ intentions. Furthermore, the results of this study indicate that second-language writers may perceive tutors’ use of sympathy and empathy to be inauthentic. Finally, students’ representations of their linguistic self-confidence should impact tutors’ choice of scaffolding strategy. The implications for writing center practitioners include utilizing the opening stages of the session to more strategically adapt both verbal and nonverbal scaffolding strategies to the needs of the writer.

This study investigated how English as a Second Language (ESL) writers perceive their use of Grammarly , an online grammar checker, in relation to face-to-face tutoring at the writing center. Forty-three (N= 43) international ESL writers studying at universities in the United States participated in an anonymous online survey. Mixed methods were employed to examine participants’ perceptions of Grammarly and face-to-face tutoring at the writing center respectively as well as their perceptions of Grammarly in relation to face-to-face tutoring. Results rendered from descriptive analysis of the data revealed: 1) participants perceived both services with advantages and limitations; 2) participants used Grammarly more frequently than visiting the writing center, while they used face-to-face tutoring for a wider variety of purposes compared to Grammarly ; 3) participants reported a both/and approach toward these two writing resources and used them to meet different needs in different contexts. Implications were offered for ESL writers, instructors, writing center tutors, and Grammarly program developers.

As more writing centers move to include synchronous chat as a writing center consultation option, writing center researchers and practitioners must continue examining the affordances and constraints of the medium. In this article, we analyze four synchronous online consultation transcripts from one writing center’s pilot program to evaluate consultation patterns and arcs, approaches to teaching and tutoring, and the role of digital language, or netspeak (Crystal 19), in tutors’ feedback. We use this preliminary analysis to argue that writing center tutors can effectively use synchronous tutoring to meet the needs of diverse student populations, but these consultations might be more effective if tutors thoughtfully utilize some of the best practices of face-to-face tutoring. One finding suggests that tutors might engage student writers in online consultations more effectively by employing soliciting and reacting techniques more often than unintentionally using directive structuring practices, which can serve to limit dialogue with student writers (Fanselow 21; Davis et al. 29). Additionally, although netspeak can potentially establish common linguistic ground with writers, tutors should be aware of the disadvantages of using an informal tone and non-academic language in chat consultations; in fact, student writers might benefit from reading tutors’ chat feedback in Edited Academic Discourse. By employing the positive elements of face-to-face consultations in chat sessions, this medium has the potential for effective tutoring in a space where many students feel most comfortable. Our analysis may serve as a heuristic for others to use in assessing chat consultations, developing tutor training, and initiating future research on this consultation option.

This article addresses some of the pitfalls associated with current methods of investigating the transfer of learning within writing centers and encourages the adoption of a dynamic definition of transfer, as well as a dynamic taxonomy of context. The need for a more multidimensional approach to transfer emerged during the course of a preliminary study of a small group of writing center peer tutors over the course of a semester. The study, described in the article, sought to better understand what prior knowledge tutors were drawing on to facilitate tutorials; from which contexts they were transferring this prior knowledge; and how this prior knowledge impacted their work as tutors. The data collected in the form of observations and audio-recorded tutorials, as well as from follow-up interviews with the peer tutors, illustrate the need for writing center studies to develop a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to understanding and studying transfer. By addressing this need, writing center studies can help shape discussions about the transfer of learning.

This article presents findings from a two-year mixed-methods study examining a partnership between a writing center and a community-building summer academic program for incoming students of color at a large Midwestern university that is a predominantly white institution (PWI). The study implemented surveys and follow-up interviews with students in the program to discover the benefits and drawbacks of requiring writing center visits for this student population. Building on extant research on required visits and how writing centers can contribute to social justice, this article uses frameworks from psychology and higher education scholarship on stereotype threat and validation theory respectively to explore how writing centers can provide academic and interpersonal validation to students of color who visit. Pairing stereotype threat and validation theory as lenses illuminates how writing centers can avoid othering students of color and instead affirm their senses of belonging within their institutions.

This article describes a semester-long study that used replicable, aggregable, data-supported (RAD) research methods to investigate embedded tutoring efficacy. The research occurred in three sections of an engineering course, one of which had a course-embedded writing tutor. Over the course of a semester, the researcher investigated changes in students' mindsets, namely their beliefs about the malleability of writing skills. Results suggested students who worked with the embedded tutor improved their mindsets significantly more than did nontutored students. Students in the course-embedded section became more growth-minded, seeing themselves as capable of improving. The researcher also blindly rated samples of students' writing and found tutored students improved their literature-review drafts more significantly than did nontutored students. Tutored students' revised literature reviews were significantly better in terms of organization, style, and mechanics. These findings suggest an embedded tutor can not only improve students' writing performance but also influence their mindsets, demonstrating the important role writing centers can play in promoting the growth mindset.

By addressing how writing centers can work to help computer science students be ready for professional challenges related to writing in computer science fields, this study of computer science professionals and students illustrates how findings were applied to train a team of writing tutors. Drawing upon self-reports about writing in computer science jobs and writing in computer science classes, the authors identify both professionals' workplace writing challenges and students' perceptions of these challenges. Implications for writing center practitioners and researchers are discussed, including how writing centers can collaborate with computer science faculty to acquire resources, access the discourse of computer science assignments, and implement a similar training program in their centers.

With the large numbers of international students on campuses across the United States seeking help from writing centers, more research is needed on how second language writing skills develop over time. Expanding our previous studies of second language writing, we wanted to learn more about what international students think about the development of their ability to write in English and the role of the writing center in it. To that end, we designed a survey that asked participants about different features of their writing and how these had changed since starting to write at the college level. The results reveal that participants perceived their overall English-writing development positively, and they reported their rhetorical and linguistic areas as almost equal in development. We also found that participants who used our writing center perceived both rhetorical and linguistic features to be more improved than did participants who had not used the writing center. The rhetorical features participants reported as the least improved involve communicating with readers, while the linguistic features they saw as the least developed include word

While writing center scholarship acknowledges tutoring is an emotional endeavor, there has been little attention given to how tutors respond to the stressful facets of their role. In this study, peer writing tutors were surveyed about their engagement in emotional labor and work-related stress in three areas: (a) perceived reasons for emotionally laborious sessions; (b) emotions felt; and (c) strategies employed for emotion regulation and coping with stress. Thematic analysis of responses indicated the perceived reasons included issues in (a) session expectations, (b) tutor-writer dynamics, and (c) emotion regulation. Tutors generally reported more negative emotions than positive ones. However, a majority of tutors reported engaging in adaptive active and internal coping strategies to manage their work-related stressors. A select few tutors reported engaging in maladaptive coping strategies alongside adaptive ones. While results reflect a positive outlook for tutors' abilities to manage their stress, results indicate engagement in emotional labor is a regular task for tutors. Writing centers may benefit from considering stress management as a part of their tutor-training programs to maintain and promote well-being. Practical implications and possible avenues for stress interventions are given.

This article explores beliefs writing center stakeholders and practitioners hold about online writing centers (OWCs) in terms of OWC services available at their current institutions and in terms of any prior experience tutoring online. Beliefs about OWCs can influence whether writing centers offer online services, whether tutors find their work in OWCs satisfying or disheartening, and how OWCs are created technologically and theoretically. These beliefs are explored through a convenience-sample survey of writing center stakeholders and practitioners. This survey finds that while practitioners and stakeholders have overall positive beliefs about the purpose of OWCs, experience influences both positive and negative beliefs, with less experienced respondents tending toward beliefs that OWCs must be synchronous to be effective, that it is difficult to communicate or build rapport with students in OWCs, and that OWCs are convenient. While scholarship on OWCs indicates there are many effective methods and means for implementing OWCs, each with its own limitations and opportunities, there is still work to do in addressing how OWC scholarship fits with the beliefs and experiences-or inexperience-of individual writing center stakeholders and practitioners.

As online writing tutorials become increasingly widespread, writing center scholars continue to debate the pedagogical differences between face-to-face and online tutoring However, empirical research has lagged behind technological advancement, with only one study (Wolfe & Griffin, 2012) comparing face-to-face and media-rich online writing center tutorials. This article builds on such scholarship by sharing results from a comparative study of face-to-face and synchronous audio-video online tutorials that collected data from writing tutorials, writers' postsession surveys, and interviews with writers. Using primarily linguistic analysis of the hundreds of interactions in each of the 24 transcribed writing tutorials, we determined that audio-video online and face-to-face sessions share similarities in tutoring strategies, discourse phases, tutor-writer interaction, and student satisfaction. However, significant differences were found

In the intimate spaces of writing centers, how do we advocate for students-as well as tutors and directors-who closet or guard private struggles, particularly when they feel less than safe revealing who they are amid larger public controversies? This is a central question

It makes sense that writing studies scholars, from their position on the frontlines of academic writing support, would be among the first to notice graduate student needs around writing. In the 1980s, scholars began pointing out why this population of writers deserves more attention. Fast forward to today, popular

Writing centers provide a crucial site for multilingual writers to experience generative and productive conversation about their writing projects and for their language and cultural experiences to be appreciated as sources for meaning-making. For this to be possible, tutors must understand the phenomenon and problems of standard language ideology (SLI) and should have opportunities to develop practices that reflect translingual perspectives on language and communication. This study examines peer tutors’ participation on a private staff blog to demonstrate how opportunities to reflect on translingual practices and experiences can shift tutors’ knowledge and attitudes about SLI and create conditions for more equitable, cosmopolitan experiences for multilingual writers.

This multimedia article shares five short video-recorded stories that highlight specific moments of struggling to practice antiracist and linguistic justice values within different disciplinary situations: giving feedback on student writing, training tutors in the writing center, working with pre-service teachers, debating learning objectives in department committees, and responding to prescriptivist attitudes from colleagues. This praxis-driven work responds to Inoue’s 2019 CCCC Chair’s Address and his calls to confront white language supremacy by providing vulnerable accounts of the intellectual, interpersonal, emotional and pedagogical labors and challenges involved in fighting for raciolinguistic justice. Teachers and administrators may find the video stories and accompanying reflections useful when developing pedagogical approaches, designing professional development workshops, or reimagining departmental policy-making and curriculum development.

In this interview, Rachel Riedner and Íde O’Sullivan discuss the context in Ireland that has motivated a shift to US process-based curricular and the emergence of Irish writing centers that incorporate both American-style WAC and WID elements. In doing so, Riedner and O’Sullivan make clear that such changes are the work and expertise of the dedicated faulty at the University of Limerick as well as a series of entangled, contemporaneous discourses: the desired qualifications for employment posted by private corporations; a nationally funded series of curricula reforms designed to improve the Irish economy, employment rate, and profile within the globalized economy; the students’ respective desires for employment after graduation; and a cultural expectation that a degree automatically prepares students for the job market.

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 ...

A common practice in writing centers is to record the events of a tutoring session after it has occurred. Commonly written by tutors, “session notes” can be a useful resource for the day-to-day support work in which tutors engage. Currently, however, little research exists on how session notes can be used to measure tutor development and change over time. Instead, research focuses predominantly how particular audiences interact with session notes, rather than the linguistic content therein. This study addresses the gap in research between the conceptual and practical uses of session notes. The researchers implemented semesterly training modules for tutors, and then conducted a longitudinal discourse analysis of 1,261 session notes that were collected over six semesters. Session notes were coded for 12 variables to include behavioral, semantic, and affective reflections on writing center work. From this analysis, we were able to conceptualize how, in completing these forms, tutors describe their tutoring practice and demonstrate their tutoring knowledge. Findings show that, for many aspects of note taking, a semester of experience has an effect on tutors, such that they start to conform on note taking practices; however, specific trainings can change the behavior of experienced tutors.

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