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

This article offers a critical reading of writing center workplace space. Weaving together counterstorying with semiotic, geographic, and rhetorical analysis of space, the author provides an alternative way of understanding the connections between our physical and metaphorical workspaces. Precarity and contingency, the article posits, are made more palpable through connection to physical space because writing center labor (and workers) are often identified mostly through their space and availability. Ultimately, this article argues for a new way forward that decouples writing center workers and labor from inhabited workplace space. Arguing that these spaces are gendered, classed, and raced (among other things), we need to reimagine our workplace identities as separate from the spaces in which labor takes place.

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.

This research note focuses on how corpus analysis tools can help researchers make sense of the data writing centers collect. Writing centers function, in many ways, like large data repositories; however, this data is under-analyzed. One example of data collected by writing centers is session notes, often collected after each consultation. The four institutions featured in this noteâ€"Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, Texas A&M University, and The Ohio State Universityâ€"have analyzed a subset of their session notes, over 44,000 session notes comprising around 2,000,000 words. By analyzing the session notes using tools such as Voyant, a web-based application for performing text analysis, writing center researchers can begin to explore critically their large data repositories to understand and establish evidence-based practice, as well as to shape external messaging about writing center laborâ€"separate from and in addition to impact on student writersâ€"to institutional administrators, state legislators, and other stakeholders.