Writing Center

What would children's learning look like in the Child Development Center's Re-Use Center if teachers, parents, and children could collaborate around the learning? This action research collaboration between a professor and a graduate student/teacher, examines the process the graduate student/teacher goes through as she documents the re-use center narratives of a small group of young children. A re-use center is likened to Reggio Emilia, Italy's Remida Center as a repository for found, rescued and repurposed materials. This center finds new meanings for discarded items destined for landfills and incinerators. The findings reveal stories of language, literacy and social development as well as explore how intentional collaboration can enhance project planning. Conclusions reveal that big questions for teachers, rich dialogue in reuse contexts for learning, and flexibility with participants are essential to collaborative learning in the reuse center.

What would children's learning look like in the Child Development Center's Re-Use Center if teachers, parents, and children could collaborate around the learning? This action research collaboration between a professor and a graduate student/teacher, examines the process the graduate student/teacher goes through as she documents the re-use center narratives of a small group of young children. A re-use center is likened to Reggio Emilia, Italy's Remida Center as a repository for found, rescued and repurposed materials. This center finds new meanings for discarded items destined for landfills and incinerators. The findings reveal stories of language, literacy and social development as well as explore how intentional collaboration can enhance project planning. Conclusions reveal that big questions for teachers, rich dialogue in reuse contexts for learning, and flexibility with participants are essential to collaborative learning in the reuse center.

In this exploratory study, we took as our point of departure Lori Salem's (2016) call to investigate the factors that affect students' decisions to visit the writing center. Rather than exploring student decision-making through a sociological lens, as Salem does, we drew on insights from social psychology to understand students' motivations. We explored two selftheories drawn from social psychology that are associated with students' academic achievement and with students' helpseeking: (1) implicit beliefs about intelligence or "mindsets"; and (2) sense of belonging. Using questions from previously validated scales, we measured first-year students' mindsets and sense of belonging and tested the relationships between these self-theories and students' visits to the writing center. We found correlations between students' mindsets and their willingness to seek support, but the relationships differed between minoritized students and comparison students. Although the numbers are modest, we noted a difference in the relationship between sense of belonging and writing center visits for minoritized students. Our study suggests areas for future research, which has the potential to change the way that writing centers conduct outreach to students and has possible implications both for our marketing efforts and tutor training.

En la vivencia diaria del trabajo con los estudiantes del sistema tradicional de la UNAD en el CEAD Barranquilla, los docentes y tutores de todos los cursos académicos desarrollados con los estudiantes principiantes, se encuentran con serias dificultades en torno a la debida estructuración de textos escritos tanto de forma (tipo de texto, redacción, ilación de ideas, ortografía, vocabulario, etc.) como de fondo (coherencia, cohesión, sentido). Expuesto este planteamiento, el tema o problema de investigación se sintetiza en el siguiente interrogante: ¿Cuáles son los problemas estructurales más comunes en los textos escritos, redactados por los estudiantes que ingresan a la UNAD en el CEAD Barranquilla en el sistema tradicional, que impiden su valoración como productos coherentes, cohesivos y gramaticalmente correctos? Para llegar a la respuesta a este interrogante, se hace necesario:  Describir las características del problema a partir de las categorías establecidas.  Hacer una indagación de los antecedentes del problema, revisando la manera como los estudiantes se iniciaron en la escritura.  Analizar las problemáticas más notorias en los textos escritos por los estudiantes que inician su proceso formativo.

The role of the Writing Center at Notre Dame University ‐ Louaize, Lebanon is to help students develop their writing skills by offering one-on-one tutoring. Specifically, Writing Center tutors meet with students by appointment to provide them with direct feedback on their work. Because this is a relatively new center with a limited capacity, tutors may not always be able to provide students with one-on-one appointments. According to Al Chibani, Ghosn Chelala, and Hindi (2011), collaborative networking can be used to motivate students by providing direct feedback to students on their writing. This paper explores how such an approach may be received and utilized at the NDU Writing Center. The findings indicate that this approach would be positively received and can ameliorate the problem of feedback clarity and limited capacity.

You know the story...the one about a curious little girl, captivated by a little white rabbit? Like young Alice, my curiosity compelled me to follow my own white rabbit down an unknown path, at least to me. It found me when I attained an internship in our university writing center the fall of 2012. And down the rabbit-hole, I fell. My adventures in writing center wonderland grew into an infatuation with writing—the tutoring of, the process of, the pedagogies of, the praxis of. Many discourses of writing pull at me, begging to be consumed and adapted to suit the situation. This infatuation led me down a path in which I could prepare myself for the rigors of graduate research, through the McNair Scholars Program, in 2013. For nearly two years, I developed and attained a summer research fellowship where I had the opportunity to explore the intersections of creative expressive writing, perceived selfefficacy, and the theory/practice of tutoring writing. I sought insight into new ways of...

Though most freshmen may not believe it, there is life after freshman comp -and even some writing to be done. Although the first mission of a new writing lab is usually to supplement or to be integrated into the freshman writing course, labs have begun to respond as well to the needs of writers throughout their years at college. Labs have and should expand to meet these needs because they are uniquely capable of doing so. It is the flexibility and the attention to individualized needs, basic features which distinguish labs from classrooms, that encourage and promote this growth. Adaptability, the ease with which change can occur, is the first crucial element. Because it offers a flexible form of writing instruction, a lab can respond promptly and easily to meet writing needs without waiting for the slow creaking of administrative machinery. Labs can launch in new directions, try new services, and readjust to fit new needs. They are able to offer varied amounts of help and to respond to single requests. That is, they can conform to fit the shape of the need, whereas traditional instruction comes packaged in a course, complete with a syllabus and reading list, which may have taken six months to a year to become a reality. This is particularly true of interdisciplinary efforts. Courses in other fields which incorporate some writing can get stalled in the planning stage or meet up with administrative roadblocks, but the lab's door is open for immediate instruction. In a lab, when a trial run of one approach proves unsuccessful, trying another one should be relatively easy, especially when quick and direct feedback has indicated the source of the difficulty with the first approach. Some call this formative evaluation;

This article, co-authored by former and current Composition-English Education Connections CCCC SIG leaders, describes the SIG's history, its member profile, and the nature of its collaborative work. English educators and composition scholars often live parallel professional lives, especially when their pedagogical and scholarly energies target new writing teachers. This group, which is surprisingly large, encompasses writing program administrators, writing center coordinators, and professorial writing faculty, as well as writing methods professors, field experience supervisors, and National Writing Project directors. Despite overlapping professional interests, however, this group's paths do not cross traditionally or automatically in terms of conference attendance, journal subscriptions, and departmental affiliations. Lacking a brought to you by C metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

In this article, an English education professor, a university writing center administrator, and a recent graduate of an undergraduate English education program discuss the role peer tutoring might play in enhancing the education of preservice teachers of writing. The authors argue that by providing additional, authentic field experiences which reflect constructivist, student-centered philosophies often adhered to in English education programs, university peer tutoring can provide undergraduate students with authentic experience in learning collaboratively, developing rapport with students, and conducting student-centered, one-to-one writing conferences.

Writing centers and their faculty are often considered to be "Others" because they have both power and no power-they have the ability to make a difference in students' writing abilities, but they are often excluded because they are seen as a "fixit," a clinic, a lab, an ancillary. Writing center faculty need to take more power so that they can exercise more power, and, in so doing, give more power to the university writing community. Writing centers must educate the university in writing center theory, functim, and aims-in the purpose of writing in a university-so that the center can be a place where the whole university can come together. Specific academic departments could set up workshops in teaching writing with the assistance of writing program and writing center staff. From there, writing programs can move to the grand step-encouraging and assisting in the planning and proposals for writing centers in different departments or areas. Obstacles include the resistance of other faculty members and the paradox of preparing students more definitively in the conventions of their own discourse (thus creating difference by attempting community). Writers in the disciplines will not always have to go to the English department's writing center for help if writing forces exist in their own programs. Writing centers will have plenty to do in sharing their abilities with the rest of the university so that all can benefit from that sharing. (RS)

This dissertation will broaden the purview of recent scholarship pertaining to socially just writing assessments by making connections among assemblage theory and materialism, studies of ecological and anti-racist assessments, and studies of writing center work, to ground theoretical conversations in everyday practices. Focusing on systemic oppression in the neoliberal university and consciously using assemblage theory as a mechanism for confronting multiliteracies allows writing center directors to see the constant movement and reshaping of students' knowledges as they approach different environments, different courses, and different genres. Notions of intra-relatedness and intertwinings evident in assemblage theory are essential to this dissertation's consideration of pedagogy and administration. Expanding upon research on ecological and anti-racist assessment practices, I argue that it is vitally important for writing program administrators and writing center directors to bring complex views of literacies and identities to their assessment protocols. I further argue that this practice can be aided by frameworks based in assemblage theory. Using archival research and critical discourse analysis, this project explores one WC's history and current practices in a large public, urban university system as a case study. Acknowledging the burden of negotiating hurdles set up by corporatized university structures, this dissertation examines the ways institutional pressures can shape v assessments, and makes suggestions for new, socially just approaches relying on assemblage theory that follow current trends in writing assessment. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, my gratitude goes out to Livia Katz, who generously allowed me to analyze and poke around her writing center for this study. Livia is a dynamo, and her tutors and students are very lucky to have her fighting for them. I hope to be half the writing center director she is throughout my career. I am also grateful to Pat Licklider and Bob Crozier for taking the time to record oral history interviews with me. Pat sat through the interview twice due to a technical glitch, and also allowed me to reference her personal files from her time at John Jay for this project, which makes her an absolute saint. Thank you also to the librarians and archivists at the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay, and to the interlibrary loan librarians at both Taylor Memorial Library at Centenary University and the Mina Rees Library at the Graduate Center. I am also unendingly grateful to Mark McBeth, my committee chair, without whom I would never have completed this journey. His unflagging support, generosity, and brilliance (and knack of finding archives where none are supposed to exist) continues to inspire me. Mark, I have been incredibly fortunate to have had you as an advisor, and I hope I can live up to the care, encouragement, and critiques with which you guided me during my graduate studies as a mentor to my own students. Sondra Perl and Jessica Yood, two of my committee members, have also been instrumental in helping me achieve this goal, and I thank them for their advice and presence during my time at the Graduate Center. Sondra and Jessica, both of your classes shaped so much of my thinking for this project. I'm so grateful to both of you, and to you, Sondra, for taking on this project with me despite its late hour in your time at CUNY. Happy retirement! Carmen Kynard, my fourth reader on the committee, has been inspiring me to experiment in the classroom and remain critical of writing studies since she sat in on the John Jay Teaching Practicum with me in 2013. Carmen, Mark, and Tim McCormack, the former Deputy Writing vii Program Director at John Jay, taught me to teach, and to love teaching. Thanks to all of you for giving me that wonderful gift, and for showing me the importance of having fun with my pedagogy. I also thank the past and current members of CompComm, the student composition and rhetoric group at the CUNY Graduate Center, for their emotional, professional, and scholarly support. You are truly a family for me, and I hope future students realize what a special group we have at the GC. I particularly recognize Seth Graves, Andrew Lucchesi, and Sean Molloy for their friendship and thoughtful collaborations, as well as Robert Greco, Lindsey Albracht, and Rohit Lanez-Sharma for their sharp peer reviews of my chapter drafts. I could not have done this without you folks next to me. Robert, your friendship and input has influenced my approach to so much of my work. Thank you for geeking out with me about politics, Doctor Who, and the latest CCC issue in the cafeteria for so many years. Thanks also to Emilia Phillips of UNC Greensboro and Emily Anderson of Centenary University for their companionship during long days of writing this summer and for being such strong, engaging, supportive presences in my life. I also thank Alicia Clark-Barnes for her friendship and input as I began developing the ideas for this project at the NEWCA conference in 2015. My professional gratitude extends to my colleagues in the English department at Centenary University, especially my chair, Sharon Decker, and my long-time mentor, Lisa Mastrangelo, who have supported me personally and professionally this year. I'm lucky to be part of such a wonderful department. Lisa, thank you for your teaching, scholarship, mentorship, and friendship that has been with me professionally since I can remember. Thank you, as well, to my staff of peer tutors in the Writing Collaboratory at Centenary University, who continue to inspire me and challenge me with new ideas. I'm grateful to be part of such a remarkable group in our writing center! viii On a personal note, thanks to Laura for being a sounding board for my frustrations and for checking in on me periodically to make sure I didn't perish in a dark library corner, laptop open and coffee mug in-hand. Thanks to my family and in-laws for their confidence and cheerleading. In particular, thanks to my parents, Tom and Jeanne, and my brothers, Michael and Glen, for inspiring my love of learning and writing, and for collectively being my "last homely house" when I needed a break. Thanks to my cats, Rocky and Blues, for always knowing when I needed a couple of fuzzy muses to keep going. But mostly, thanks to my husband, Dave, a person who took on more than his share of house chores and who never complained when asked to turn down the TV volume so that I could concentrate-even during the playoffs. I'll never be able to fully express my gratitude for his love, his support, and for taking care of me on the most difficult writing days. I love you, Dave. … Lastly, thanks to NJ Transit: Some days you tried your best to foil my attempts at traveling to my research site. Some days you provided me with three hours of solid writing time. We've had a love-hate relationship for seven years and over 5,000 hours together (yes, I did the math). I'm not sure if this expression of gratitude is sincere or sarcastic-probably both-but anyway… thanks a lot.

This dissertation will broaden the purview of recent scholarship pertaining to socially just writing assessments by making connections among assemblage theory and materialism, studies of ecological and anti-racist assessments, and studies of writing center work, to ground theoretical conversations in everyday practices. Focusing on systemic oppression in the neoliberal university and consciously using assemblage theory as a mechanism for confronting multiliteracies allows writing center directors to see the constant movement and reshaping of students' knowledges as they approach different environments, different courses, and different genres. Notions of intra-relatedness and intertwinings evident in assemblage theory are essential to this dissertation's consideration of pedagogy and administration. Expanding upon research on ecological and anti-racist assessment practices, I argue that it is vitally important for writing program administrators and writing center directors to bring complex views of literacies and identities to their assessment protocols. I further argue that this practice can be aided by frameworks based in assemblage theory. Using archival research and critical discourse analysis, this project explores one WC's history and current practices in a large public, urban university system as a case study. Acknowledging the burden of negotiating hurdles set up by corporatized university structures, this dissertation examines the ways institutional pressures can shape v assessments, and makes suggestions for new, socially just approaches relying on assemblage theory that follow current trends in writing assessment. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, my gratitude goes out to Livia Katz, who generously allowed me to analyze and poke around her writing center for this study. Livia is a dynamo, and her tutors and students are very lucky to have her fighting for them. I hope to be half the writing center director she is throughout my career. I am also grateful to Pat Licklider and Bob Crozier for taking the time to record oral history interviews with me. Pat sat through the interview twice due to a technical glitch, and also allowed me to reference her personal files from her time at John Jay for this project, which makes her an absolute saint. Thank you also to the librarians and archivists at the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay, and to the interlibrary loan librarians at both Taylor Memorial Library at Centenary University and the Mina Rees Library at the Graduate Center. I am also unendingly grateful to Mark McBeth, my committee chair, without whom I would never have completed this journey. His unflagging support, generosity, and brilliance (and knack of finding archives where none are supposed to exist) continues to inspire me. Mark, I have been incredibly fortunate to have had you as an advisor, and I hope I can live up to the care, encouragement, and critiques with which you guided me during my graduate studies as a mentor to my own students. Sondra Perl and Jessica Yood, two of my committee members, have also been instrumental in helping me achieve this goal, and I thank them for their advice and presence during my time at the Graduate Center. Sondra and Jessica, both of your classes shaped so much of my thinking for this project. I'm so grateful to both of you, and to you, Sondra, for taking on this project with me despite its late hour in your time at CUNY. Happy retirement! Carmen Kynard, my fourth reader on the committee, has been inspiring me to experiment in the classroom and remain critical of writing studies since she sat in on the John Jay Teaching Practicum with me in 2013. Carmen, Mark, and Tim McCormack, the former Deputy Writing vii Program Director at John Jay, taught me to teach, and to love teaching. Thanks to all of you for giving me that wonderful gift, and for showing me the importance of having fun with my pedagogy. I also thank the past and current members of CompComm, the student composition and rhetoric group at the CUNY Graduate Center, for their emotional, professional, and scholarly support. You are truly a family for me, and I hope future students realize what a special group we have at the GC. I particularly recognize Seth Graves, Andrew Lucchesi, and Sean Molloy for their friendship and thoughtful collaborations, as well as Robert Greco, Lindsey Albracht, and Rohit Lanez-Sharma for their sharp peer reviews of my chapter drafts. I could not have done this without you folks next to me. Robert, your friendship and input has influenced my approach to so much of my work. Thank you for geeking out with me about politics, Doctor Who, and the latest CCC issue in the cafeteria for so many years. Thanks also to Emilia Phillips of UNC Greensboro and Emily Anderson of Centenary University for their companionship during long days of writing this summer and for being such strong, engaging, supportive presences in my life. I also thank Alicia Clark-Barnes for her friendship and input as I began developing the ideas for this project at the NEWCA conference in 2015. My professional gratitude extends to my colleagues in the English department at Centenary University, especially my chair, Sharon Decker, and my long-time mentor, Lisa Mastrangelo, who have supported me personally and professionally this year. I'm lucky to be part of such a wonderful department. Lisa, thank you for your teaching, scholarship, mentorship, and friendship that has been with me professionally since I can remember. Thank you, as well, to my staff of peer tutors in the Writing Collaboratory at Centenary University, who continue to inspire me and challenge me with new ideas. I'm grateful to be part of such a remarkable group in our writing center! viii On a personal note, thanks to Laura for being a sounding board for my frustrations and for checking in on me periodically to make sure I didn't perish in a dark library corner, laptop open and coffee mug in-hand. Thanks to my family and in-laws for their confidence and cheerleading. In particular, thanks to my parents, Tom and Jeanne, and my brothers, Michael and Glen, for inspiring my love of learning and writing, and for collectively being my "last homely house" when I needed a break. Thanks to my cats, Rocky and Blues, for always knowing when I needed a couple of fuzzy muses to keep going. But mostly, thanks to my husband, Dave, a person who took on more than his share of house chores and who never complained when asked to turn down the TV volume so that I could concentrate-even during the playoffs. I'll never be able to fully express my gratitude for his love, his support, and for taking care of me on the most difficult writing days. I love you, Dave. … Lastly, thanks to NJ Transit: Some days you tried your best to foil my attempts at traveling to my research site. Some days you provided me with three hours of solid writing time. We've had a love-hate relationship for seven years and over 5,000 hours together (yes, I did the math). I'm not sure if this expression of gratitude is sincere or sarcastic-probably both-but anyway… thanks a lot.

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.

The need for empirical validation of a specific set of second language proficiency descriptors for the four skill areas-reading, writing, listening, and speaking-provided the impetus for the work described in this report. The University of California at Los Angeles Center for the Study of Evaluation developed a validation plan and undertook initial steps in the validation process with one skill area, writing. The process, which includes anchoring descriptor levels to student performance, involved the participation of writing experts from high schools, colleges, and universities across California. In addition, nine potential descriptor users from the same educational segments across the state were asked to help clarify descriptor applications. Work with the writing descriptors led to refinement of the validation process. The report includes a detailed description of that process and provides suggestions for steps that can be taken to validate the descriptors for reading, listening, and speaking. Eight appendixes contain lists of participants, the user interview protocol, descriptions of proficiency descriptors, writing samples, and some worksheets for the study. (Author/SLD)

Until 2022, D'Arcy Randall was a Professor of Instruction in the Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Now retired, she teaches part-time in the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering. She collaborated with other Cockrell School of Engineering faculty, the College of Liberal Arts' University Writing Center, and Undergraduate Studies to train Consultants to assist engineering undergraduates with technical reports. She publishes and presents research in two fields: engineering ethics and writing, and literature.

This contribution aims to introduce a non-English text, a landmark study of cross-genre writing, to a broader audience. Schreiben und Denken (translated as Writing and Thinking) was published in 2000 by Hanspeter Ortner, an Austrian linguist. Ortner identifies ten different approaches to writing that he terms "writer types" or "writing strategies. " The ten writer types are introduced and their benefits for writing center work are discussed.

Charles Bazerman and James Paradis, eds. Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historiealand Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities. (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991), 390 pages. On any given day, tutors in a writing center often find that their attention must shift from writers struggling to make sense of a Shakespearean sonnet, to writers attempting to marshal evidence in writing an argument in philosophy, or to writers trying to unravel the complexity of legal and technical writing. We are, perhaps, familiar with some of the obvious differences between the forms and conventions of writing in literature, philosophy, or any other field, but what are the assumptions and values that inform what it means to read and write in different disciplines? Research growing out of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement has begun to examine these assumptions in order to explain the social functions of different genres, as well as the dynamics of constructing knowledge that include social, cognitive, and rhetorical acts. In effect, this body of work has helped educators to reconceive the process of learning. More than acquiring or creating knowledge, learning to read and write in the disciplines entails acquiring a specialized form of literacy that consists of knowing the discipline's discursive practices. This knowledge also consists of understanding the issues and problems under discussion in a field, the relevant concepts and their relationship to one another, and the research programs and methodology that a community acknowledges as legitimate.

The goal of this article is to characterize the university writing center as a crucial institutional resource for the support of student writers and to advocate for its establishment at Tribhuvan University (TU). To achieve this, it explores the factors that prompted its origin and development in the universities of the United States of America. It also unpacks the underlying philosophy of the center by elucidating its pedagogical approaches, current practices, and administrative mechanisms. Building upon the historical contexts of writing centers, it proposes the establishment of a similar center at TU as a means to address the everyday concerns, needs, support, and assistance of the community of student writers within the university domain. Furthermore, it investigates the types and ways of potential academic opportunities that a writing center can provide to enhance effective writing skills and publishing practices in the university. Through a review of the historical as well as pedagogical practices of writing centers in the United States, the article establishes its argument that introducing a writing center at TU can contribute to various forms of support, such as source identification, audience awareness, review and feedback, documentation, etc., catering to writers of all levels, from novices to experienced, in developing their writing skills, habits, and practices. Additionally, the proposed writing center at TU is positioned not only as a productive student support system for a resourceful learning environment but also as a space offering on-campus employment opportunities for students, ultimately fostering a stronger connection between academia and the job market.

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Writing center scholars have long debated whether writers are best served by "generalist" tutors trained in writing center pedagogy or "specialist" tutors with insider knowledge about a course's content or discipline-specific discourse conventions. A potential compromise that has emerged is training tutors in the purposes and features of specific genres. The writing center literature showcases many different approaches to genre training. However, little empirical research, if any, has explored how tutors' genre knowledge affects session outcomes. The present study used a mixed-methods approach to compare session outcomes for students who worked with generalist and genre-trained tutors. We analyzed pre-consultation and revised literature review drafts to determine whether students who worked with tutors trained in the genre of literature reviews improved their drafts more or revised their drafts differently than students who worked with generalist tutors. Additionally, we performed a qualitative analysis of student reflections about their writing processes to explore how tutor training impacts students' impressions of their consultations. Findings indicated that students who worked with genre-trained tutors revised their drafts more substantively than did students who worked with generalist tutors. Moreover, students who worked with genre-trained tutors left with notably better and richer impressions of their consultations.

Working and writing in a time of heightened social justice and advocacy movements that recognize and amplify unheard, silenced, and marginalized voices, writing center practitioners and scholars are compelled to reckon with the stories we tell that may, whether overtly or inadvertently, reify discourses of marginalization. Turning a lens on the narratives we disseminate in the articles and books we publish, the editors of this collection ask: What stories and voices are left out when we perpetuate the writing center grand narratives? In Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, Jackie Grutsch McKinney points to the tendency in writing center studies to subscribe to "grand narratives," common (and often experience-based) stories that highlight our shared beliefs about the work we do (2013). While the problem of grand narratives-what some scholars call "orthodoxy" or "lore bias" (Kjesrud 2015)-has been examined before and through a variety of lenses including the way we collect data and relay information (Lerner 2014), Grutsch McKinney delves into why orthodox discourse may be so attractive, even though communities like writing centers can be vastly different in administrator's status, organizational structure, services, and practices. Our professional community is drawn to grand narratives because these are simultaneously "beneficial and constraining": writing center grand narratives create a sense of belonging

In the US, supplemental writing resources have played a strong role in higher education, emphasizing nondirective peer tutoring, but recent initiatives have developed discipline-specific teachingoriented resources, which have yet to be adequately analyzed. The present study analyzes data on student use of one such service (N = 2,353 appointments with 865 students over 5 years). We sought to determine which students attended appointments, and for what purposes. As hypothesized, results showed that these students' characteristics and purposes in seeking help differed from those commonly seen in writing center research. For faculty, results suggest that students may need more instruction on audiences and contexts for writing, and that faculty recommendations do seem to play a role in how students seek additional help. For administrators, results suggest that students may benefit from discipline-specific supplemental teaching, in more venues and from staff with more subject expertise than is commonly available in writing centers.

In the US, supplemental writing resources have played a strong role in higher education, emphasizing nondirective peer tutoring, but recent initiatives have developed discipline-specific teachingoriented resources, which have yet to be adequately analyzed. The present study analyzes data on student use of one such service (N = 2,353 appointments with 865 students over 5 years). We sought to determine which students attended appointments, and for what purposes. As hypothesized, results showed that these students' characteristics and purposes in seeking help differed from those commonly seen in writing center research. For faculty, results suggest that students may need more instruction on audiences and contexts for writing, and that faculty recommendations do seem to play a role in how students seek additional help. For administrators, results suggest that students may benefit from discipline-specific supplemental teaching, in more venues and from staff with more subject expertise than is commonly available in writing centers.

In the past decade, theories of the social construction of knowledge have resulted in the widespread use of collaborative learning techniques. Computer technology has been in the forefront of this movement, with one result being a minor revolution in writing instruction. Specifically, communications and text sharing through both local and wide area networks has promoted collaborative learning and writing. Through networking for * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document.

The status of WPAs, both writing program directors and writing center directors, has been an issue of central concern for the last two decades, as reflected in position statements such as the Portland Resolution (Hult et al.), "Evaluating the Work of Writing Program Administration," and "What Lies Ahead for Writing Centers: Position Statement on Professional Concerns" (Simpson) as well as many articles arguing for more power and better working conditions for WPAs. 1 Writing center directors, however, often feel that compositionists, and sometimes even other WPAs, have particularly neglected the work that they do. The 1989 draft of the CCCC Executive Committee's "Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing" argued forcefully for the importance of WPA work, especially in tenure and promotion decisions, but, as Valerie Balester pointed out, it overlooked the work of writing centers, presenting writing centers as "supplemental to the English department curriculum, useful for training graduate teaching assistants and lightening the burden on faculty by giving their students individual attention" (167). Muriel Harris has described the frustrations that writing center directors feel when "colleagues in our departments who are otherwise interested in and knowledgeable about the teaching of writing" do not understand the functions and practices of writing centers (19), while Mark L. Waldo's "What Should the Relationship Between the Writing Center and Writing Program Be?" charges that when a writing center is "the service appendage of the writing program" (76), "composition teachers become the elite while center staff become the

Redesigning the online writing lab (OWL) presented the opportunity for collaboration among writing center and professional writing program members. While the article briefly describes the OWL redesign process, the argument focuses on collaboration and presents a model for sustainable intra-program collaboration. Following Hawhee, usability research is defined as "invention in the middle," which offers a model for understanding research process as part of the infrastructure of new media instruction as described by DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill. This article offers four stakeholder perspectives on the process of participatory technology design: of writing center administrators, graduate students, technical writing practitioners, and writing program graduate faculty members. The model asserted by this article presents a dynamic understanding of expertise and of fluidity in the roles of participants. Collaborative usability research, seen as invention-in-the-middle, contributes both to long-term sustainability of technological artifacts as well as the discursive interactions among stakeholders whose work supports these artifacts.

This article discusses issues of accessibility and how user-centered and participatory approaches can inform empirical research to guide the Universal Design of virtual spaces and influence writing center efforts for students with disabilities. Because this article describes how to integrate usability/accessibility testing for online and in-person services, it can work as a model for writing centers struggling with the challenges of serving students with disabilities. Toward this end, the article discusses two generations of usability testing on a large, well-established online writing lab (the Purdue OWL), as well as the collaborative projects that emerged between the usability team and campus disabilities services as a result of this testing. The article concludes with heuristics and generative questions that may assist readers in developing similar projects tailored to their own contexts.

Although research and writing for publication are seen as important responsibilities for most graduate students and faculty, many struggle to understand the process and how to succeed. Unfortunately, writing centers at most universities do not cater to the research and publishing needs of graduate students and faculty, but instead to course-specific needs of undergraduate students. This chapter aims to describe initiatives undertaken to address the scholarly writing and publication needs of graduate students and strategies and programs for the improvement of scholarly writing and provide insight into the kind of learning that can take place in a university writing center. This chapter may be especially helpful to educators who seek to create services at their own institutions for graduate students.

Although research and writing for publication are seen as important responsibilities for most graduate students and faculty, many struggle to understand the process and to succeed. Unfortunately, writing centers at most universities do not cater to these kinds of needs, but rather to course-specific needs of undergraduate students. This chapter describes a writing center, The Office of Academic Writing and Publication Support, at Florida International University, USA that was specifically designed to aid the scholarly writing endeavors of graduate students. First, the authors review literature on how individual instructors and programs assist graduate students in improving their writing skills. Then they provide a history of university writing centers and examine the evolution of their purpose. In the second half of the chapter, the authors share their experiences envisioning and building this writing center and creating, implementing, and improving its services. In doing so, they also reflect on successes and missteps along the way. The authors hope this chapter may be especially helpful to educators who seek to create similar centers or services at their own institutions.