Researching the Writing Center

Researching the Writing Center

Author: Rebecca Day Babcock

Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers

Published: 2018-02

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9781433135224

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Revised edition of: Researching the writing center, 2012.


Re/Writing the Center

Re/Writing the Center

Author: Susan Lawrence

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1607327511

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Re/Writing the Center illuminates how core writing center pedagogies and institutional arrangements are complicated by the need to create intentional, targeted support for advanced graduate writers. Most writing center tutors are undergraduates, whose lack of familiarity with the genres, preparatory knowledge, and research processes integral to graduate-level writing can leave them underprepared to assist graduate students. Complicating the issue is that many of the graduate students who take advantage of writing center support are international students. The essays in this volume show how to navigate the divide between traditional writing center theory and practices, developed to support undergraduate writers, and the growing demand for writing centers to meet the needs of advanced graduate writers. Contributors address core assumptions of writing center pedagogy, such as the concept of peers and peer tutoring, the emphasis on one-to-one tutorials, the positioning of tutors as generalists rather than specialists, and even the notion of the writing center as the primary location or center of the tutoring process. Re/Writing the Center offers an imaginative perspective on the benefits writing centers can offer to graduate students and on the new possibilities for inquiry and practice graduate students can inspire in the writing center. Contributors: Laura Brady, Michelle Cox, Thomas Deans, Paula Gillespie​, Mary Glavan, Marilyn Gray​, James Holsinger​, Elena Kallestinova, Tika Lamsal​, Patrick S. Lawrence, Elizabeth Lenaghan, Michael A. Pemberton​, Sherry Wynn Perdue​, Doug Phillips, Juliann Reineke​, Adam Robinson​, Steve Simpson, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran​, Ashly Bender Smith, Sarah Summers​, Molly Tetreault​, Joan Turner, Bronwyn T. Williams, Joanna Wolfe


Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies

Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies

Author: Jo Mackiewicz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-01

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 0429581866

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Writing Center Research

Writing Center Research

Author: Paula Gillespie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 9780805834468

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

There are writing centers at almost every college and university in the United States, and there is an emerging body of professional discourse, research, and writing about them. The goal of this book is to open, formalize, and further the dialogue about research in and about writing centers. The original essays in this volume, all written by writing center researchers, directly address current concerns in several ways: they encourage studies, data collection, and publication by offering detailed, reflective accounts of research; they encourage a diversity of approaches by demonstrating a range of methodologies (e.g., ethnography, longitudinal case study; rhetorical analysis, teacher research) available to both veteran and novice writing center professionals; they advance an ongoing conversation about writing center research by explicitly addressing epistemological and ethical issues. The book aims to encourage and guide other researchers, while at the same time offering new knowledge that has resulted from the studies it analyzes.


Center Will Hold

Center Will Hold

Author: Michael Pemberton

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2003-12-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 087421484X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges. Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.


Talk About Writing

Talk About Writing

Author: Jo Mackiewicz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1317666917

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Around the Texts of Writing Center Work

Around the Texts of Writing Center Work

Author: R. Mark Hall

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2017-05

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1607325810

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Student Writing Tutors in Their Own Words

Student Writing Tutors in Their Own Words

Author: Max Orsini

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-06-24

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1000607100

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Student Writing Tutors in Their Own Words collects personal narratives from writing tutors around the world, providing tutors, faculty, and writing center professionals with a diverse and experience-based understanding of the writing support process. Filling a major gap in the research on writing center theory, first-year writing pedagogy, and higher education academic support resources, this book provides narrative evidence of students' own experiences with learning assistance discourse communities. It features a variety of voices that address how academic support resources such as writing centers have served as the nucleus for students' (i.e., both tutors and their clients) sense of community and self, ultimately providing a space for freedom of discourse and expression. It includes narratives from writing tutors supporting students in unconventional spaces such as prisons, tutors offering support in war-torn countries, and students in international centers facing challenges of distance learning, access, and language barriers. The essays in this collection reveal pedagogical takeaways and insights about both student and tutor collaborative experiences in writing center spaces. These essays are a valuable resource for student writing tutors and anyone involved with them, including composition instructors and scholars, writing center professionals, and any faculty or administrators involved with academic support programs.


Everyday Writing Center

Everyday Writing Center

Author: Anne Ellen Geller

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 0874216621

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Noise From The Writing Center

Noise From The Writing Center

Author: Elizabeth Boquet

Publisher:

Published: 2002-03

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Noise from the Writing Center, Boquet develops a theory of "noise" and excess as an important element of difference between the pedagogy of writing centers and the academy in general. Addressing administrative issues, Boquet strains against the bean-counting anxiety that seems to drive so much of writing center administration. Pedagogically, she urges a more courageous practice, developed via metaphors of music and improvisation, and argues for "noise," excess, and performance as uniquely appropriate to the education of writers and tutors in the center. Personal, even irreverent in style, Boquet is also theoretically sophisticated, and she draws from an eclectic range of work in academic and popular culture-from Foucault to Attali to Jimi Hendrix. She includes, as well, the voices of writing center tutors with whom she conducted research, and she finds some of her most inspiring moments in the words and work of those tutors.