Around the Texts of Writing Center Work reveals the conceptual frameworks found in and created by ordinary writing center documents. The values and beliefs underlying course syllabi, policy statements, website copy and comments, assessment plans, promotional flyers, and annual reports critically inform writing center practices, including the vital undertaking of tutor education. In each chapter, author R. Mark Hall focuses on a particular document. He examines its origins, its use by writing center instructors and tutors, and its engagement with enduring disciplinary challenges in the field of composition, such as tutoring and program assessment. He then analyzes each document in the contexts of the conceptual framework at the heart of its creation and everyday application: activity theory, communities of practice, discourse analysis, reflective practice, and inquiry-based learning. Around the Texts of Writing Center Work approaches the analysis of writing center documents with an inquiry stance—a call for curiosity and skepticism toward existing and proposed conceptual frameworks—in the hope that the theoretically conscious evaluation and revision of commonplace documents will lead to greater efficacy and more abundant research by writing center administrators and students.

This collection helps students and researchers understand the foundations of writing center studies in order to make sound decisions about the types of methods and theoretical lenses that will help them formulate and answer their research questions. In the collection, accomplished writing center researchers discuss the theories and methods that have enabled their work, providing readers with a useful and accessible guide to developing research projects that interest them and make a positive contribution. It introduces an array of theories, including genre theory, second-language acquisition theory, transfer theory, and disability theory, and guides novice and experienced researchers through the finer points of methods such as ethnography, corpus analysis, and mixed-methods research. Ideal for courses on writing center studies and pedagogy, it is essential reading for researchers and administrators in writing centers and writing across the curriculum or writing in the disciplines programs.

No less than other divisions of the college or university, contemporary writing centers find themselves within a galaxy of competing questions and demands that relate to assessment—questions and demands that usually embed priorities from outside the purview of the writing center itself. Writing centers are used to certain kinds of assessment, both quantitative and qualitative, but are often unprepared to address larger institutional or societal issues. In Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter, Schendel and Macauley start from the kinds of assessment strengths already in place in writing centers, and they build a framework that can help writing centers satisfy local needs and put them in useful dialogue with the larger needs of their institutions, while staying rooted in writing assessment theory. The authors begin from the position that tutoring writers is already an assessment activity, and that good assessment practice (rooted in the work of Adler-Kassner, O'Neill, Moore, and Huot) already reflects the values of writing center theory and practice. They offer examples of assessments developed in local contexts, and of how assessment data built within those contexts can powerfully inform decisions and shape the futures of local writing centers. With additional contributions by Neal Lerner, Brian Huot and Nicole Caswell, and with a strong commitment to honoring on-site local needs, the volume does not advocate a one-size-fits-all answer. But, like the modeling often used in a writing consultation, examples here illustrate how important assessment principles have been applied in a range of local contexts. Ultimately, Building Writing Assessments that Matter describes a theory stance toward assessment for writing centers that honors the uniqueness of the writing center context, and examples of assessment in action that are concrete, manageable, portable, and adaptable.

Re/Writing the Center illuminates how core writing center pedagogies and institutional arrangements are complicated by the need to create intentional, targeted support for advanced graduate writers. Most writing center tutors are undergraduates, whose lack of familiarity with the genres, preparatory knowledge, and research processes integral to graduate-level writing can leave them underprepared to assist graduate students. Complicating the issue is that many of the graduate students who take advantage of writing center support are international students. The essays in this volume show how to navigate the divide between traditional writing center theory and practices, developed to support undergraduate writers, and the growing demand for writing centers to meet the needs of advanced graduate writers. Contributors address core assumptions of writing center pedagogy, such as the concept of peers and peer tutoring, the emphasis on one-to-one tutorials, the positioning of tutors as generalists rather than specialists, and even the notion of the writing center as the primary location or center of the tutoring process. Re/Writing the Center offers an imaginative perspective on the benefits writing centers can offer to graduate students and on the new possibilities for inquiry and practice graduate students can inspire in the writing center. Contributors: Laura Brady, Michelle Cox, Thomas Deans, Paula Gillespie​, Mary Glavan, Marilyn Gray​, James Holsinger​, Elena Kallestinova, Tika Lamsal​, Patrick S. Lawrence, Elizabeth Lenaghan, Michael A. Pemberton​, Sherry Wynn Perdue​, Doug Phillips, Juliann Reineke​, Adam Robinson​, Steve Simpson, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran​, Ashly Bender Smith, Sarah Summers​, Molly Tetreault​, Joan Turner, Bronwyn T. Williams, Joanna Wolfe

This book highlights the work of talented teachers and tutors who connect theory and practice with the lessons they learned from working with students in their high school writing centers. The authors offer innovative methods for secondary and post-secondary educators interested in adolescent literacy, English Language Learners, new literacies, writing center pedagogy and evaluation, embedded professional development, differentiated instruction, and cross-institutional collaboration. The Successful High School Writing Center demonstrates how writing centers help school communities that serve diverse student populations grapple with the realities that come with literacy education. Depicting real-life writing centers as leaders in literacy education, the accounts presented will enrich the work of teachers, writing center directors, writing center tutors, and student writers in socially significant ways. Book Features: Models of writing centers and literacy centers that explicitly integrate reading and writing across the curriculum. Creative strategies from a diversity of schools, models, and students served. Literacy-based, collaborative research projects for writing center evaluation. Helpful forms.

Queerly Centered explores writing center administration and queer identity, showcasing LGBTQA labor undertaken but not previously acknowledged or documented in the field’s research. Drawing from interviews with twenty queer writing center directors, Travis Webster examines the lived experiences of queer people leading writing centers, the promise and occasional peril of this work, and the disciplinary implications of such work for writing center administration, research, and praxis. Focused on directors’ queer histories, administrative activisms, and on-the-job tensions, this study connects and departs from oft-referenced lenses, such as emotional and invisible labor, for understanding work in higher education. The first book-length project that exclusively bridges writing centers and LGBTQA studies, Queerly Centered is for researchers, administrators, educators, and practitioners of all orientations and backgrounds in writing center and writing program administration, rhetoric and composition, and higher education administration.

"Motivated by a scholarly interest in race and whiteness studies, and by an ethical commitment to anti-racism work, contributors address a series of questions related to institutionalized racism in American higher education, especially in college and university writing centers"-- Provided by publisher.

Unlimited Players provides writing center scholars with new approaches to engaging with multimodality in the writing center through the lenses of games, play, and digital literacies. Considering how game scholarship can productively deepen existing writing center conversations regarding the role of creativity, play, and engagement, this book helps practitioners approach a variety of practices, such as starting new writing centers, engaging tutors and writers, developing tutor education programs, developing new ways to approach multimodal and digital compositions brought to the writing center, and engaging with ongoing scholarly conversations in the field. The collection opens with theoretically driven chapters that approach writing center work through the lens of games and play. These chapters cover a range of topics, including considerations of identity, empathy, and power; productive language play during tutoring sessions; and writing center heuristics. The last section of the book includes games, written in the form of tabletop game directions, that directors can use for staff development or tutors can play with writers to help them develop their skills and practices. No other text offers a theoretical and practical approach to theorizing and using games in the writing center. Unlimited Players provides a new perspective on the long-standing challenges facing writing center scholars and offers insight into the complex questions raised in issues of multimodality, emerging technologies, tutor education, identity construction, and many more. It will be significant to writing center directors and administrators and those who teach tutor training courses.

Changing Spaces makes a forceful and credible case for the role of writing centres in engaging with students, staff and institutional structures in understanding issues of access from a social perspective ... This is a specialist book for those working in writing centres and for academics of all disciplines. It is based on research and provides an important set of theoretical arguments, developed through reflection on writing centre practices, about student writing and the work of the university. Professor Sioux McKenna Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University How do we select and train tutors? How do we work with faculty? How do we combat the image that we are remedial, a ?fix-it? shop? How do we prove our worth? How do we show that we improve retention? ... Changing Spaces demonstrates the flexibility of writing centers and the unique roles they play in South Africa. Writing centers everywhere represent institutional responses to the learning needs of their students, and they do so because writing centers adapt easily to different contexts and situations. They meet students where they are, as a group and individually. Professor Leigh Ryan Writing Center Director, University of Maryland, USA

Over the last decade, colleges and universities have begun to pay significant attention to "multimodal rhetoric" ---rhetoric that uses not just words, but a wide range of compositional elements, including still images, moving images, charts, graphs, illustrations, animations, layout schemes, colors, music, ambient noises, and other media components. This book explores how multimodal rhetoric may prompt foundational changes in writing centers, which have proven themselves, over the last several decades, to be a highly effective means of providing peer-based support for writers. Bringing together the insights and experiences of ten researcher-practitioners working in a diverse range of institutional contexts, the chapters collected here explore the transformations potentially involved in this shift to multimodality, including changes in the way centers configure space, the way they allocate resources, the way they train peer consultants, and the way they interact with other units on --