Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors offers a book-length empirical study of the discourse between experienced tutors and student writers in satisfactory conferences. The study uses a research-driven, iteratively tested framework to help writing center directors, tutors, writing program administrators, rhetoric and composition researchers, first-year composition instructors, and others interested in talk about writing to systematically analyze tutors’ talk and to use that analysis to train new tutors. The book strives toward two main goals: to provide an analytical research and assessment tool—the coding scheme—that other researchers can use to understand writing center tutor talk and to provide a close, empirical analysis of experienced tutor talk that can facilitate tutor training. The study details tutors’ use of three categories of tutoring strategies—instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding—at macro- and microlevels and results in practical recommendations for improving tutor training.

In the last 15 to 20 years, writing centers have placed greater importance on tutor training, focusing on teaching tutors best practices in fostering student writers’ engagement and writing skills. Writing Center Talk over Time explores the importance of writing center talk and demonstrates the efficacy of tutor training. The book uses corpus-driven analysis and discourse analysis to examine the changes in writing center talk over time to provide a baseline understanding of the very heart of writing center work: the talk that unfolds between tutors and student writers. It is this talk that, at its best, motivates student writers to continue to improve their writing and scaffolds their learning and that makes tutors proud of the service that they provide. The methods and analysis of this study are intended to inform other researchers so that they may conduct further research into the efficacy of writing center talk.

Writing centers in universities and colleges aim to help student writers develop practices that will make them better writers in the long term and that will improve their draft papers in the short term. The tutors who work in writing centers accomplish such goals through one-to-one talk about writing. This book analyzes the aboutness of writing center talk—what tutors and student writers talk about when they come together to talk about writing. By combining corpus-driven analysis to provide a quantitative, microlevel view of the subject matter and sociocultural discourse analysis to provide a qualitative macrolevel view of tutor-student writer interactions, it further establishes how these two research methods operate together to produce a robust and rigorous analysis of spoken discourse.

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.

This book presents a model of Practitioner Inquiry (PI) as a systematic form of empirical research and provides a rationale for its suitability within a writing center context. Exploring the potential of writing centers as pedagogical sites that support research, the book offers an accessible model that guides both research and practice for writing center practitioners, while offering flexibility to account for their distinct contexts of practice. Responding to the increasing call in the field to produce empirical “RAD” (replicable, aggregable, data-driven) research, the author explores Practitioner Inquiry through explication of methodology and methods, a revisitation of collaboration to guide both practice and research, and examples of application of the model. Nordstrom grounds this research and scholarship in Hawaiʻi’s context and explores Indigenous concepts and approaches to inform an ethical collaborative practice. Offering significant contributions to empirical research in the fields of writing center studies, composition, and education, this book will be of great relevance to writing center practitioners, anyone conducting empirical research, and researchers working in tutor professionalization, collaboration, translingual literacy practices, and researchmethodologies.

Writing Centers at the Center of Change looks at how eleven centers, internationally, adapted to change at their institutions, during a decade when their very success has become a valued commodity in a larger struggle for resources on many campuses. Bringing together both US and international perspectives, this volume offers solutions for adapting to change in the world of writing centers, ranging from the logistical to the pedagogical, and even to the existential. Each author discusses the origins, appropriate responses, and partners to seek when change comes from within a school or outside it. Chapters document new programs being formed under changing circumstances, and suggest ways to navigate professional or pedagogical changes that may undermine the hard work of more than four decades of writing-center professionals. The book’s audience includes writing center and learning-commons administrators, university librarians, deans, department chairs affiliated with writing centers. It will also be useful for graduate students in composition, rhetoric, and academic writing.

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.

Writing centres exist in nearly every university in the US. This title seeks to open, to formalize, and to further the dialogue about research in and about writing centres. The essays in this volume offer accounts of research and demonstrate a range of methodologies.

In a landmark collaboration, five co-authors develop a theme of ordinary disruptions ("the everyday") as a source of provocative learning moments that can liberate both student writers and writing center staff. At the same time, the authors parlay Etienne Wenger’s concept of "community of practice" into an ethos of a dynamic, learner-centered pedagogy that is especially well-suited to the peculiar teaching situation of the writing center. They push themselves and their field toward deeper, more significant research, more self-conscious teaching.

As the arts become an increasingly popular pedagogical tool in writing studies, Arts-Based Research Methods in Writing Studies offers scholars and educators in the field ways to leverage the arts for their own scholarship through the practice of arts-based research (ABR). Tailored to the needs of writing studies scholars, this concise guide presents ways of exploring and addressing unresolved research questions from the past as well as new, pressing questions that are emerging in light of increasingly fraught and complicated current contexts. It explores motives and methods for taking up ABR, sheds light on the processes of representing research and the ethical imperative of methodological disclosure, and looks critically at the complexities of fully realizing ABR in writing studies while offering some pedagogical applications. Connecting theory to practice, this book also performs ABR through a co-created mixed-media text about the everyday and extraordinary stories woven into the fabric of new American artists’ composing processes. Arts-Based Research Methods in Writing Studies lends itself to insight that is at once personal for writing studies researchers, useful for research communities, and a catalyst for social change beyond institutional walls; as such, it will be an important resource for scholars, educators, and graduate students in writing studies and those interested in multimodal, multilingual, and translingual learning; equitable pedagogies and administrative practices; online writing instruction; transnational literacies; research methods; community-based research; and disability studies in composition.