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.

Four texts are reviewed that exemplify an important strand of writing center scholarship focused on power dynamics and identity politics in literacy teaching and learning, particularly but not exclusively within college writing centers. Each text takes up the entrenched problem of oppression and injustice toward students identified as being minority by institutional standards; each addresses possibilities for more productive, humane, and inclusive practice. Considered alongside scholarship by authors participating in this January's symposium issue and others concerned with disrupting monolingual, monocultural ideologies and institutionalized oppression, these texts add significantly to the conversation on theory and practice of critical literacy teaching and learning.