Writing Center Director Research Articles

(Supporting) Writing Qualitatively: Errantry of Embodied Relational Writing

We write collectively and collaboratively to make more visible writing qualitatively and supporting writing qualitatively, both of which we approach as the process of embodied relational writing, to ourselves and to Others. We even consider that writing qualitatively always has an invisible prefix of supporting before it since the practice is not possible without multiple supports. From our different positionalities as a Black doctoral candidate, a white writing center director, and an Asian faculty, we write a collective autoethnography as an inquiry to examine what we do, how we do it, and what it produces when we are supporting (and) writing qualitatively in our private, teaching-oriented, regional, predominantly white institutional context where doctoral programs offer only one qualitative research course. What our writing reveals is that supporting writing qualitatively is possible only when we live/work together—stay long enough—in that in-between space of you know that I will not understand and you pray for me to understand. In this space, we get entangled with each other’s multiple relationships with our selves, Others, and errantries, which, in turn, changes each of us, our relation, and this writing.

Hitting a Brick Wall and the Women Who Do the Work: Is This the Same Old Story?

Utilizing Sara Ahmed’s work on “brick walls,” this article discusses a qualitative study of stories shared by twenty-five women writing center directors and the possible insights gleaned if we choose to “notice through feminism,” (Ahmed) and advocate for change across writing studies.

Review: Queerly Centered: LGBTQIA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace

Dr. Travis Webster’s monograph reports on qualitative research conducted into the working lives of 20 LGBTQIA-identifying writing center directors. From those interviews, Webster identifies three features of LGBTQIA writing center administrative labor: the unique capital with which their identities equip them, the activist labor that their identities call them to perform, and tensions between their labor and identities. He calls on writing center professionals and higher education administrators to become accomplices in the struggle against workplace injustices, moving beyond allyship that is all too often based in kind words rather than sustained action. The insights available in this book are valuable to anyone in higher education administration as they work to build more inclusive and welcoming spaces for LGBTQIA-identifying writing center professionals.

A Balancing Act: Black Women Experiencing and Negotiating Racial Tension in the Center

Writing centers increasingly have been concerned with issues of race and racism in the center. However, most of the conversation around race has centered on student writers, with references to tutors of color given only in passing or in the context of larger discussions on race. This study uses interview data and a grounded theory methodology to examine the experiences of racism and anti-Blackness in writing centers for female Black undergraduate and graduate peer tutors, categorizing the experiences in three ways: attacks on character and identity, denials of credibility, and silencing. Connections are drawn with the experiences the tutors have outside the center, and the argument is made that the racial tension of their centers puts the women in a position of constant negotiation, performing a balancing act in which they must filter their responses to their racist encounters out of self-preservation. The results indicate that writing centers are not yet where the field and practitioners would like them to be and that much of the emotional labor of maintaining a tolerable work environment is falling to tutors of color. Writing center directors must do more to take back this responsibility and change the culture of their centers.

Unicorn Status, Queer Activism, and Bullied Laboring: LGBTQ Writing Center Directors Reflect on Invisible Work

This article showcases interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) writing center directors about their administrative work. In it, findings reveal that participant work distinctly departs from recent empirical writing center research about labor (Geller & Denny, 2013; Caswell, Grutsch McKinney, & Jackson, 2016), particularly in ways that practitioners’ invisible administrative work is informed and complicated by their LGBTQ identities. Across 20 interviews, participants communicated that their work extends to making queer activist space through their writing centers; to supporting tutors, students, and colleagues of all orientations with issues central to queer communities and mental health; and to navigating tense interpersonal terrain, especially bullying. In closing, the article calls for disciplinary responses and resources to make for more equitable labor landscapes for LGBTQ writing center practitioners.

Review: Advocating, Building, and Collaborating: A Resource Toolkit to Sustain Secondary School Writing Centers edited by Renee Brown and Stacey Waldrup

The past decade has shown enormous growth in the number of SSWCs and a need for increased scholarship and research from this group. Inspired by the work of previous secondary school writing center director (SSWCD) authors, the content offered in the Advocating, Building, and Collaborating toolkit is rooted in directors’ real experiences in K–12 schools, rather than in the post-secondary context we find in most writing center scholarship.

Connecting the Dots

A chief difficulty administrators may face is supporting students as they strive to meet the challenges of academic writing. This literature review calls for a more robust focus on how writing center administrators can design tutor training for effective orientation, transition, and retention among the student population. Through identifying issues of access, sociolinguistics, and grammar instruction, this paper urges writing center directors and administrators to come alongside OTR professionals in their difficult, yet rewarding, work.

Translingualism in Three University Roles: Pedagogical Postures and Critical Cautions

This essay offers and develops some useful parameters toward the ongoing conversations on multilingual and multi-dialectic writing students in Europe and the United States, two settings with oft-competing views of writers’ varied language backgrounds. I present a synchronic snapshot of writing pedagogy as it relates to translingualism at this temporal moment. Specifically, I seek to link three different university roles—classroom teachers, writing center directors, and WAC directors—to certain translingual postures and their consequential applications. By introducing and elaborating upon the labels “Traditionalist,” “Allied Enthusiast,” and “Active Advocate” as they attend each role, I wish to offer helpful ways to understand the consequences of embracing these postures. This charting of stakeholders and their characteristics can more readily facilitate concrete scholarly discussion concerning translingual writing instruction as it moves forward. I conclude with recommendations and cautions, bringing into question some of the settled assumptions remaining in our field.

Collaborative Learning as a Leadership Tool: The Institutional Work of Writing Center Directors

Writing center directors have to face complex leadership tasks, but often do not have a background in management or administration studies. This study asks how they accomplish this demanding effort. Following a grounded theory approach, 16 writing centers in the USA were visited and expert interviews with the center directors were carried out. In bringing together the emerging concepts of the empirical work with the theoretical framework of the study of institutional work, this article shows that writing center directors transfer the pedagogy of writing centers to their leadership tasks. They use a stance of collaborative learning to deal with the challenges in their everyday work and to institutionalize their writing centers.

Collaborating With Writing Centers on Interdisciplinary Peer Tutor Training to Improve Writing Support for Engineering Students

Introduction: Faculty members have little time and usually lack expertise to provide writing feedback on lab reports. Sending students to a writing center, an existing resource on virtually all college campuses, could fill that gap. However, the majority of peer writing tutors are in nontechnical majors, and little research exists on training them to provide support for engineering students. Research question: Can peer writing tutors without technical backgrounds be trained to provide effective feedback to engineering students? About the case: Previously, sending students to the writing center was ineffective. The students did not see the value, and the tutors did not feel capable of providing feedback to them. To remedy this situation, an interdisciplinary training method was developed collaboratively by an engineering professor and the writing center director. Situating the case: Researchers have suggested that effective writing center help for engineering students is possible, and the authors have designed an interdisciplinary training method that has produced positive results. Supporting literature includes the use of generalist tutors, writing in the disciplines, genre theory, and knowledge transfer. Methods/approach: This was a three-year experiential project conducted in a junior-level engineering course. The assignment, a lab report, remained the same. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from students and tutors. Results/discussion: Tutor feedback and student satisfaction significantly improved. However, a few students who were satisfied overall still expressed interest in having their reports reviewed by a tutor with a technical background. Conclusions: Interdisciplinary tutor training can improve the feedback of peer writing tutors, providing support for faculty efforts to improve student writing. The method requires minimal faculty time and capitalizes on existing resources.

The Writing Center Director as Archivist: The Documentation Imperative

The Writing Center Director as Archivist: The Documentation Imperative

Review: The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors by Nicole I. Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, & Rebecca Jackson

Review: The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors by Nicole I. Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, & Rebecca Jackson

What Writing Center Directors Need to Know about Regional Accreditation

What Writing Center Directors Need to Know about Regional Accreditation

Director�s Column: �Local Work: Identity and the Writing Center Director�

Director�s Column: �Local Work: Identity and the Writing Center Director�

Special Issue on the Work of the Writing Center Director

Special Issue on the Work of the Writing Center Director

Collaborating, Calibrating, and Control: Writing Center Directors Navigate Institutional Interactions

Collaborating, Calibrating, and Control: Writing Center Directors Navigate Institutional Interactions

Heroics of Teaching and Writing Women’s History

Heroics of Teaching and Writing Women’s History Eileen Brumitt (bio) The women who have contributed to this forum are my heroes. As historians who use gender as an analytical lens to study the Civil War, they open the field to students who would otherwise feel alienated from the topic. There is bravery in their act of rescuing voices of women and other marginalized groups and challenging us to reconsider the traditionally masculine nature of war. Though, as Massey tells us, the Civil War gave women the catalyst they needed to “leap from their spheres” and advance, and even though the abolitionist movement gave rise to the first wave of feminism in the United States, female historians are still forging a pathway into the crowded stream of masculine perspectives on the war 150 years later. It would be difficult for female historians not to identify with Massey on some level. But she also raises troubling questions. Did Massey dance through a sexist minefield of historical publication? Did she know that her work would create a foundation for later scholars that, as Thavolia Glymph points out, delegitimized the struggles of enslaved women? Did she leverage their stories for her own power in a field where she used every tool available to secure her place? Do we do anything similar? And are we fully aware of how our contexts affect our interpretations? I work at an institution that resembles Massey’s own Winthrop College for women. But while Winthrop shed its identity as a women’s college decades ago, my institution strives to be the women’s college of the twenty-first century. Yet the campus is no bastion of feminist thought. There are no women’s history courses offered to students, and the women’s studies minor has been canceled after a strategic amputation-like program review. In my composition courses, I teach Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and my students discuss his description of education’s alienating effect. According to Freire, the oppressor uses education to force a singular interpretation of the world onto students, which denies their power to affect change. My [End Page 440] students grapple with this idea; we talk about how interpreting history from our perspectives gives us agency. Yet all the while, I realize that I am sending them on to history courses that privilege the usual perspectives on American history and the Civil War—perspectives that tend to overlook the significance of women and non-white individuals in American historical events. Sadly, I can’t change the slow-moving behemoth that is curriculum. Like Massey, I have to work within the limited framework available. Every essay in this discussion struggles with Massey’s identity as a scholar and with her work. She is an imperfect foremother. Unable to separate myself from my own identity as an educator at a women’s college, I would still like to think optimistically that to the women who followed her in the field and to her students at Winthrop, Massey was a heroic figure, rescuing some women from the silence of history and demonstrating that women’s lives are worthy of exploration. Eileen Brumitt Eileen Brumitt is the writing center director at Cedar Crest College. Eileen has earned a master’s degree in English literature and a master’s degree in history. Her academic interest is in nineteenth-century history and literature, and she writes about Civil War women and slavery. Copyright © 2015 The Kent State University Press

From comfort zone to contact zone Lessons from a Belfast writing centre

American writing center director Kathleen Shine Cain analyzes the transformative experience of spending a year in a Belfast writing centre, resulting in a renewed appreciation of cross-national and cross-cultural partnerships. Although American writing center theory and pedagogy have informed the development of centers in Europe, Asia, and Africa, those centers have developed practices reflective of their unique academic and national cultures. Perhaps even more significantly, dialogue among centers throughout the world has resulted in an opportunity for writing centers in the United States to reinvigorate themselves, to interrogate both their practices and the theories underpinning those practices — and to appreciate more fully their responsibility in dismantling oppressive institutional practices.

Review: Centered: A Year in the Life of a Writing Center Director

Review: Centered: A Year in the Life of a Writing Center Director

Writing Centers and Cross-Curricular Literacy Programs as Models for Faculty Development

The books under review here envision models of professional development not as episodes of developing skills or training faculty to conform to changing laws, rules, and pet projects of administrators, but rather as collaborative processes of education and reflection that encourage faculty to rethink their practices. They draw on research in composition theory and pedagogy, suggesting that more effective learning takes place when teachers trust learners to consider their own need for knowledge, invite learners to devise variations and applications of received knowledge, and resist keeping things simple to be sure they are correct. Applying different focuses, these books consider how to put teacher-learners at the center of the process of their own professional development. Jeffrey Jablonski argues that the expertise developed in composition studies needs to be recognized and respected in initiatives to implement Cross-Curricular Literacy programs. The writers of The Everyday Writing Center consider how, in the midst of increased professionalization, to maintain the serendipitous—even carnivalesque, at times—learning and teaching that the intimate and nonhierarchical space of a writing center can foster. And the collective wisdom in The Writing Center Director's Resource Book surveys the current state of writing center theory and practice, providing a reflective guide for developing the expertise of writing center administrators, who are (or could be) leaders in campus faculty development efforts.