Review: The Everyday Writing Center

As I promote the services that our writing center offers to faculty members across disciplines, I always try to be careful of the language I use to discuss exactly what it is we do in our writing center. I know the perceptions: the writing center will help you with your grammar or the writing center will help you fix your paper. Our goal, I try to emphasize to faculty members, is not to help your students fix their papers; our goal is to help them become better writers. The way these two ideals contradict one another is not always apparently obvious to an individual not steeped in the scholarship of composition or writing center theory. Those of us who work with first year writers or in the writing center know that the metaphor invoked in the phrase “my writing needs to be fixed” is one that is inaccurate at best and crushing at worst; in fact, a student’s writing is not something that is broken. And even if the writing appears to convey a student’s gaps in knowledge regarding composition, we do not want our writing centers to be viewed as places where those with splintered skills receive a sort of diagnosis and prescription.

Writing centres play a vital role in supporting all forms of student academic writing in higher education (HE) institutions, including digital writing projects (DWPs)—multiliterate and multimodal, often video-and-audio-based projects, produced using digital technologies. The importance of writing support for multimodal composing is evident in emerging research on both the multi-skilled practices of writer-designers and the conceptual shifts involved in their adoption. Currently, no research exists regarding the Canadian context of writing centre support for DWPs. To address this, we conducted two surveys: one of 22 Canadian writing centres asking about DWPs prevalence, technology and skills readiness, and DWP awareness; and one of faculty at a large Canadian university, asking about DWPs prevalence and frequency and types of DWP assignments. We find a significant disconnect between the number of DWPs being assigned by faculty and the number being supported in writing centres. We also find a significant lack of writing centre preparedness for supporting DWPs. This paper calls, with some urgency, for writing centres to invest in the reality of student writing in Canadian HE, to begin developing instructional materials, equipment, and skilled staff to support DWPs.

This chapter seeks to explore how writing centre (WC) tutor training is approached across six countries: Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The analysis will discuss in-house produced tutor training documents and review their content in terms of training purposes, articulated tutoring goals, the presentation of the positioning of the WC to the larger university, and how the wider goals and assumptions of WC theory are applied locally. Ultimately, the analysis will yield insights into the nature of how Middle Eastern and North African WCs have implemented and adapted WC theory to their local contexts.

Monolingual practices that dominate university spaces can contribute to othering, resulting in the marginalisation and exclusion of students who are less competent in the dominant discourse. These limitations must be addressed to create a more inclusive learning space that accommodates all students regardless of their social, economic, educational, and linguistic backgrounds. This paper explores how peer tutors in writing centre leverage their South African indigenous language repertoire to help students access disciplinary content knowledge and improve their academic writing practices. This paper discusses the findings from two focus group discussions with peer tutors at the Wits School of Education Writing Centre (WSoE WC). We explore how peer tutors' integration of multilingualism during writing consultations can inform a new writing centre pedagogy. We also leveraged the principles of wayfinding to navigate and orient peer tutors within a complex university space, which challenges the university's stated educational transformation with a concrete proposition. Data analysis shows how peer tutors and students collaboratively explore and map out academic writing using familiar languages to navigate the rigid structure of academic writing in a manner that respects and incorporates students' linguistic backgrounds. Through wayfinding, peer tutors disrupt monolingual practices and by doing so, increase student participation and chances of success in higher education. Writing centres, as wayfinding spaces, are instrumental in championing the adoption of multilingual pedagogies, thus disrupting dominant monolingual practices in higher education.

In parallel to the unique history of writing instruction, Canadian writing specialists have drawn on different theories and principles from the U.S. literature in building their writing studies scholarship (Giltrow, 2016; Graves, 1993; Graves & Graves, 2006; Paré, 2017; Smith, 2006). This is evident in the “Statement on Writing Centres and Staffing” published by the Canadian Journal for Studies of Discourse and Writing (Graves, 2016). As a doctoral student researching U.S.-based writing centres from day one of graduate school, one striking cross-border difference I find was the statement’s clear recommendation that writing centres are fundamentally teaching units in which students learn to write in their disciplines. In American writing centre theory, peer tutoring is the basis of writing centre philosophy, with some claiming that the tutor’s unfamiliarity of the tutee’s discipline enhances the non-hierarchical learning environment (Bruffee, 1995; North, 1984; Pemberton, 1995).

The Bronx Community College Writing Center community is an eclectic mix of races, religions, cultures, and interests. Our tutors and staff are former or current BCC students. They are foreign nationals or have lived or traveled around the world; they speak languages from every corner of the earth—Spanish, French, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, Twi, English, and Patwa. They are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, and Agnostic. They are equally academically diverse, with degrees ranging from bachelor’s to master’s and majors in Business, Education, Psychology, Social Work, Physics, Creative Writing, and English. These significant differences might easily divide any other community, yet the BCC Writing Center staff instead celebrates its diversity with a unique, familial, and welcoming camaraderie. The Bronx Community College Writing Center film project Who We Are explores how this is possible through reflections of the BCC Writing Center staff on their work at the writing center and the ways that eclectic mix is addressed with still another question in mind—does diversity matter? The tutors offer reflections of the impact of their differences on each other and their work, as well as their perceptions of the diverse identities of our institution’s demographic.

The writing center and second language writers

Writing centers regularly work to serve an entire campus community, developing satellite centers to make their services more convenient, and establishing an online presence to serve tech-savvy students. Some units outside of arts and sciences, such as business or heath science, establish writing centers to better focus on their students’ specific disciplinary writing needs. Many centers do community outreach that varies from providing a “grammar hotline” to collaborating with public schools and outside agencies on projects ranging from high school writing centers to corporate consulting. All of these activities support the main mission of a writing center: helping students become better writers. But writing centers can do more

This article examines South African university writing centres as contested spaces where language, knowledge, and power intersect. Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial triad and decolonial theory, the article explores how the material layout, institutional messaging, and everyday practices within these centres either challenge or reproduce epistemic hierarchies, often privileging English and Western academic norms while marginalising local languages and alternative ways of knowing. Employing a reflective practitioner research approach, this study used spatial ethnography, discourse and visual analysis, and semi-structured interviews with students. The findings reveal that while the perceived and conceived dimensions of writing centre spaces largely uphold colonial logics, the lived space concurrently fosters moments of resistance, hybridity, and creativity. Specifically, students and tutors challenge dominant norms through translanguaging, code-switching, and the integration of indigenous knowledge systems. These practices accentuate the transformative potential of writing centres as sites of epistemic justice. The article concludes by offering context-specific strategies for reimagining writing centre spaces, tutor training, and multilingual practices to promote greater inclusion and decolonial transformation in postcolonial higher education. Though situated in the South African context, its insights are applicable to other multilingual and postcolonial settings globally.

Writing centers have long been rich sites of critical inquiry into individualized instructional styles and methods. One of the great writing center debates involves directive versus nondirective tutoring styles and methods. While many writing center scholars have discussed the intricacies of directive or interventionist versus nondirective or minimalist pedagogical methods, few have examined the rhetorical implications of this important debate in relation to more classroom-based peer collaborations. This article rhetorically analyzes the literature on directive/nondirective methods and various approaches to tutoring writing, drawing pedagogical and rhetorical connections and implications useful for all teachers of writing and rhetoric.

I think we are getting to a place in the proliferation of technologies in our writing centers where, not unlike that forty-four minute mark in a very intense writing consulting session, there is a need for reflection, for sitting back and looking around and determining what is working and why and what we should buy into and why. What does technology mean to you? Is it simply a transparent tool, something that you rely on for convenience, to use when needed and think about only when you want to cuss it out? The broad range of current technologies for writing centers--from PCs, to assistive software, to PDA downloads of FAQs on grammar, to ReadPlease [1], to a threaded discussion board for tutors, to virtual peer tutoring [2]--promises an equally wide range of fixes, problems, and unforeseen costs. I beg you not to be overwhelmed; my hope is to provide a problem-posing approach as you wend your way through a tangle of cables and spreadsheets.

The Writing Center Journal, Volume 20, Number 2, Spring/Summer 2000 quality of teaching; the teacher’s insights improve the quality of the learning. For writing centers to continue to be en(viable), those who teach and learn there must exploit the uses of the margins. They must claim their institutional space within the academy as well as their connectedness to the periphery, to the areas and spaces outside. They must find ways to build alliances within the university, while continuing to open its doors to those who have traditionally been excluded from university life. Writing centers must take advantage of the contradictions on which their work depends. In that way they can remain en(viable), while defining in new ways what it means to be viable. Preparing to Sit at the Head Table: Maintaining Writing Center Viability in the Twenty-First Century

Considering qualitative and quantitative student response data and comparing those data cross-institutionally improves writing center policies locally and helps define broader objectives of the writing center as a campus institution. As writing center practitioners, it can be difficult to determine whether we should focus our research and assessment energies on gathering quantitative or qualitative data. Few of us are trained as “numbers people,” yet most of us regularly collect masses of quantitative data in the form of user statistics, exit surveys measuring student satisfaction, and demographic information about the writers who use our centers. Still, qualitative data often feels like the best illustration of our pedagogy to us, our tutors, and our faculty and administrators. When we do collect qualitative data, it frequently reflects recurrent themes in our scholarship. Even if our qualitative data manifests cross-institutional similarities, it is difficult to compare across different schools. [1] Convinced that both quantitative and qualitative feedback is essential to effective assessment of writing center work, we - three very different writing center practitioners from three very different institutions - set out to create a collaborative research project that would allow us to harness the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Writing center people prefer to use words like "teaching" instead of "pedagogy"; "tutoring," not "individualized instructional session"; "what works," rather than "effective educative strategies."This simple diction is one feature of our linguistic practice we have celebrated across the writing center community.However, behind this facade of pragmatism, of action over theory, we have been actively involved in debates concerning the epistemologies to which we as a community should pledge our allegiance and on which we should build our instruction.We have been involved because, as James Berlin reminds us in Rhetoric and Reality, "every rhetorical system is based on epistemological assumptions about the nature of reality, the nature of the knower, and the rules governing the discovery and communication of the known" (4).While the academy has argued vehemendy about ways of knowing, with factions taking stands under such banners as structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, pragmatism, neo-pragmatism, postmodernism, we too have been involved in much the same inquiry.Unlike the majority of the academic community, however, the writing center community debates questions of epistemology without making a production of it; often, we do so without being too aware of the nature or implications of our theoretical stance.For instance, I was not drawn into this investigation because I have an unfulfilled love for philosophical argument.Rather, this investigation began when I was forced to think through the differences between the tenets on which a writing lab and a writing center are

Do we not have enough to do when consulting with students?
\nWhy reach out to faculty?
\nThe simple answer is that we feel our writing center work is accomplished in
\ncollaboration with both faculty and students. It is a center for everyone to talk
\nabout writing. The more complex answer is that many benefits are realized by
\nworking with faculty as well as students.
\nOne direct benefit is that we remove the stigma that the Writing Center is a
\nplace for poor writers, a place primarily for remediation. When we give
\nclassroom introduction talks, we can honestly say that we work with writers at
\nall levels on all kinds of writing. We mention that we work with faculty as well
\nas graduate and undergraduate students, and that the staff members make
\nappointments with one another. When freshmen arrive at our door, they should
\nnot feel they are there because they are problem writers. We want people on
\nour campus to know that everyone can benefit from talking about writing in our
\nwriting center, and working with faculty helps get across that idea.