In creative nonfiction, the genre of the braided essay is common. This creative art of braiding different strands and outside voices might also be liberating for academic writers as an expansion of academic writing that allows hidden meaning to shine through. This teaching practice paper shares how this genre was used for writing about teaching practice at EATAW 2021. It introduces the genre of the braided essay and uses the steps of the EATAW workshop as an example of how to teach it.

This paper gives insights into research conducted within the Writing Centre Exchange Project (WCEP), a research collaboration among three university writing centres in Sweden, Germany and Ireland, which focuses on organisational perspectives on writing centre work. WCEP rests on the theoretical framework of institutional work. Previous research, conducted in US writing centres, developed a model of institutional work in writing centres that includes specific Strategic Action Fields (SAFs) and collaborative learning as a means to interact with stakeholders. By using this model, WCEP has targeted ongoing institutional work intended to establish and sustain missions, goals and activities in and around writing centres. Drawing on participatory action research, WCEP explores the extent to which the institutional work at the three European writing centres correlates with the model. The main findings show that indeed the same strategic action fields are relevant, but furthermore, different subcategories emerge depending on the local context. This paper explores some of the subcategories that differ and draws conclusions for the institutional work of writing centre directors.

Writing center directors have to face complex leadership tasks, but often do not have a background in management or administration studies. This study asks how they accomplish this demanding effort. Following a grounded theory approach, 16 writing centers in the USA were visited and expert interviews with the center directors were carried out. In bringing together the emerging concepts of the empirical work with the theoretical framework of the study of institutional work, this article shows that writing center directors transfer the pedagogy of writing centers to their leadership tasks. They use a stance of collaborative learning to deal with the challenges in their everyday work and to institutionalize their writing centers.

Research-based learning is an approach that lets students conduct research to develop content knowledge. This article gives insights into a seminar that followed this approach. It was a collaboration between the writing center and the linguistics department at European University Viadrina in Germany with the aim to explore new ways of combining the learning of content knowledge and writing. In accordance with the stance of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL), this collaboration was meant to be a pilot to generate experiences and knowledge about this approach and its potential for combining discipline-specific learning and writing.

Peer tutoring non-native writers seems to pose particular challenges to tutors with regard to the overall goals and principles of peer tutoring that have been expressed in the literature. Principles such as non-directivity and long-term emphasis on the process quality of writing are often assumed to be in conflict with non-native writers’ desire to be actively and directly guided in their process of learning to write in a foreign language. Peer tutoring’s appropriateness therefore remains rather controversial within this particular context. In this article we outline the results of an empirical study focusing on the potential, as well as the limitations, of peer tutoring with regard to non-native writers in a German writing center. Using the method of qualitative content analysis designed to achieve a healthy balance between deductive and inductive aspects of empirical research, we ask the open question: ‘How do peer tutors deal with non-native writers?’ Results show that the limitations of rigid peer tutoring principles become obvious more quickly with non-native writers. However, peer tutoring with non-native writers reveals larger potential, too, and can offer recommendations for peer tutoring in general.

This article claims that working with peer tutors in a writing center can be very valuable for the center’s development, if the director and tutors work together according to crucial principles in writing center pedagogy. Based on the example of the writing center at European University Viadrina, this article shows how the ideas of autonomy and collaboration for both writing support and writing center leadership led to the writing center’s growth.