This study sought to determine the impact writing center consultations have on student writing self-efficacy and to illuminate effective consultant strategies for fostering student writing confidence. As part of a multimethods study, a survey was administered for students to reflect upon and to assess their feelings of writing self-efficacy by describing experiences in writing center consultations. Selected respondents were asked to elaborate on the strategies used by their peer consultant(s) in an optional open-ended interview. Findings suggest that writing center consultations help increase writing self-efficacy. The effective consultant strategies described by study participants are synthesized into an overarching consultant framework of empathy-based tutoring, which includes four key consultant moves that work to foster writing self-efficacy: listening, translating, advising, and motivating. Results from this study have implications for further consultant training and/or professional development programs and reaffirm the value writing centers bring to student writing growth.

This article examines writing center administrators (WCAs) in relationship to conditions that influence their institutional status and scholarly identity. Drawing upon survey and interview data, we elaborate on four themes that shape WCAs' experiences: 1. education and training; 2. position and institutional oversight; 3. financial resources; and 4. sponsorship. While these factors do not impact all WCAs in the same ways, we believe they influence WCAs' empirical research production and their relationships with department-based colleagues in interesting albeit context-dependent ways when viewed across the experiences of the current study's participants and those queried in earlier studies. After examining the implications of these factors -factors that suggest a separate and unequal WCA experience -we first propose the need for more comprehensive study of current professionals in our field to determine the degree to which the themes that emerged from our sample resonate

critical challenges for many writing center administrators (WCAs), who interrogate their "marginal" status with questions about how position type, education, oversight, responsibilities, resources, and support impact individual WCAs and writing centers as well as their research practices and production.

2002b), Neal Lerner (2009),

In fleeting "spare" moments, she pens "Married on a Monday -7 Vi Years Later -