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.
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.
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.
Noting a lack of sustained and productive dialogue about race in university writing center scholarship, the editors of this volume have created a rich resource for writing center tutors, administrators, and scholars. Motivated by a scholarly interest in race and whiteness studies, and by an ethical commitment to anti-racism work, contributors address a series of related questions: How does institutionalized racism in American education shape the culture of literacy and language education in the writing center? How does racism operate in the discourses of writing center scholarship/lore, and how may writing centers be unwittingly complicit in racist practices? How can they meaningfully operationalize anti-racist work? How do they persevere through the difficulty and messiness of negotiating race and racism in their daily practice? The conscientious, nuanced attention to race in this volume is meant to model what it means to be bold in engagement with these hard questions and to spur the kind of sustained, productive, multi-vocal, and challenging dialogue that, with a few significant exceptions, has been absent from the field.
The first book-length empirical investigation of writing center directors’ labor, The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors presents a longitudinal qualitative study of the individual professional lives of nine new directors. Inspired by Kinkead and Harris’s Writing Centers in Context (1993), the authors adopt a case study approach to examine the labor these directors performed and the varied motivations for their labor, as well as the labor they ignored, deferred, or sidelined temporarily, whether or not they wanted to. The study shows directors engaged in various types of labor—everyday, disciplinary, and emotional—and reveals that labor is never restricted to a list of job responsibilities, although those play a role. Instead, labor is motivated and shaped by complex and unique combinations of requirements, expectations, values, perceived strengths, interests and desires, identities, and knowledge. The cases collectively distill how different institutions define writing and appropriate resources to writing instruction and support, informing the ongoing wider cultural debates about skills (writing and otherwise), the preparation of educators, the renewal/tenuring of educators, and administrative “bloat” in academe. The nine new directors discuss more than just their labor; they address their motivations, their sense of self, and their own thoughts about the work they do, facets of writing center director labor that other types of research or scholarship have up to now left invisible. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors strikes a new path in scholarship on writing center administration and is essential reading for present and future writing center administrators and those who mentor them.
Mary Soliday calls on genre theory- which proposes that writing cannot be separated from social situation-to analyze the common assignments given to writing students in the college classroom, and to investigate how new writers and expert readers respond to a variety of types of coursework in different fields. This in-depth study of writing pedagogy looks at many challenges facing both instructors and students in college composition classes, and offers a thorough and refreshing exploration of writing experience, ability, and rhetorical situation.
CounterStories from the Writing Center gathers emerging scholars of colour and their white accomplices to challenge some of the most cherished lore about the work of writing centres. Writing within an intersectional feminist frame, this volume’s contributors name and critique the dominant role that white, straight, cis-gendered women have played in writing centre administration as well as in the field of writing centre studies. This work will shake the field’s core assumptions about itself. Practicing what Derrick Bell has termed “creative truth telling,” these writers are not concerned with individual white women in writing centres but with the social, political, and cultural capital that is the historical birthright of white, straight, cis-gendered women, particularly in writing centre studies. The essays collected in this volume test, defy, and overflow the bounds of traditional academic discourse in the service of powerful testimony, witness, and counterstory. CounterStories from the Writing Center is a must-read for writing centre directors, scholars, and tutors who are committed to antiracist pedagogy and offers a robust intersectional analysis to those who seek to understand the relationship between the work of writing centres and the problem of racism. Accessible and usable for both graduate and undergraduate students of writing centre theory and practice, this work troubles the field’s commonplaces and offers a rich envisioning of what writing centres materially committed to inclusion and equity might be and do. Contributors: Dianna Baldwin, Nicole Caswell, Mitzi Ceballos, Romeo Garcia, Neisha-Anne Green, Doug Kern, T. Haltiwanger Morrison, Bernice Olivas, Moira Ozias, Trixie Smith, Willow Trevino
"Imagining a writing center where directors and staff become agents in active social justice on campus and beyond. Introducing activist concepts and vocabulary challenging writing centers to recognize their complicity with oppressive systems. A call for a process of critical self-reflection and change to an activist paradigm"--Provided by publisher.
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.
Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers aims to inspire a re-conception and re-envisioning of the boundaries of writing center work. Moving beyond the grand narrative of the writing center—that it is a solely comfortable, yet iconoclastic place where all students go to get one-on-one tutoring on their writing—Grutsch McKinney shines light on other representations of writing center work. Grutsch McKinney argues that this grand narrative neglects the extent to which writing center work is theoretically and pedagogically complex, with ever-changing work and conditions, and results in a straitjacket for writing center scholars, practitioners, students, and outsiders alike. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers makes the case for a broader narrative of writing center work that recognizes and theorizes the various spaces of writing center labor, allows for professionalization of administrators, and sees tutoring as just one way to perform writing center work. Grutsch McKinney explores possibilities that lie outside the grand narrative, allowing scholars and practitioners to open the field to a fuller, richer, and more realistic representation of their material labor and intellectual work.
