The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice offers, in unparalleled breadth and depth, the major scholarship on writing centers. This up-to-date resource for students, instructors, and scholars anthologizes essays on all major areas of interest to writing center theorists and practitioners. Seven sections provide a comprehensive view of writing centers: history, progress, theorizing the writing center, defining the writing center's place, writing-across-the curriculum, the practice of tutoring, cultural issues, and technology.
Why we tutor -- The writing process -- The tutoring process -- Examining expectations -- Observing in the writing center -- Tutoring practice -- Reflecting on the first session -- Reading in the writing center -- Working with ESL writers -- Writing center research -- Writing centers: historical and theoretical contexts -- Interdisciplinary and on-line tutoring -- What if
Grounded in current writing center theory and practice, The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring provides students with a comprehensive introduction to effective tutoring. Throughout the text, readers hear the voices of tutors and writers in first-person peer tutor accounts, reflective essays, and transcripts from actual sessions. Within each chapter, techniques, models, and exercises provide instruction appropriate for any level of tutoring.
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.
Changing Spaces makes a forceful and credible case for the role of writing centres in engaging with students, staff and institutional structures in understanding issues of access from a social perspective ... This is a specialist book for those working in writing centres and for academics of all disciplines. It is based on research and provides an important set of theoretical arguments, developed through reflection on writing centre practices, about student writing and the work of the university. Professor Sioux McKenna Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University How do we select and train tutors? How do we work with faculty? How do we combat the image that we are remedial, a ?fix-it? shop? How do we prove our worth? How do we show that we improve retention? ... Changing Spaces demonstrates the flexibility of writing centers and the unique roles they play in South Africa. Writing centers everywhere represent institutional responses to the learning needs of their students, and they do so because writing centers adapt easily to different contexts and situations. They meet students where they are, as a group and individually. Professor Leigh Ryan Writing Center Director, University of Maryland, USA
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.
This book addresses issues surrounding writing centers in the Arabian Gulf region. Including a foreword by Professor Ken Hyland, it brings together a number of thought-provoking chapters on the history, concept, and ground realities coupled with critical comparative discussions of writing centres in the region. The book begins by offering critical historical accounts of writing centers in the Gulf countries, before moving onto empirical research and reports on pedagogical practices that vividly capture the on-the-ground realities faced and experienced by different actors. These accounts serve to highlight how the writing centers vary between countries, as well as how they differ from the more well-known writing centers in the US and the UK. Finally, the book explores what sort of commonalities and differences the current trend of writing centres is producing within and between the six countries of the Arabian Gulf. This book will be highly relevant to those involved with writing centres along with directors, policymakers, researchers and teacher educators in the fields of Education and Sociology, particularly those with an interest in the Arabian Gulf area.
Redefining Roles is the first book to recognize and provide sustained focus on the presence of professional, faculty, and graduate student consultants in writing centers. A significant number of writing centers employ non-peer consultants, yet most major training manuals are geared toward undergraduate tutoring practices or administrators. This collection systematically addresses this gap in the literature while initiating new conversations regarding writing center staffing. Thirty-two authors, consultants, and administrators from diverse centers—from large public four-year institutions to a private, online for-profit university—provide both theoretical frameworks and practical applications in eighteen chapters. Ten chapters focus on graduate consultants and address issues of authority, training, professional development, and mentoring, and eight focus on professional and faculty consultant training as well as specific issues of identity and authority. By sharing these voices, Redefining Roles broadens the very idea of writing centers while opening the door to more dialogue on the important role these practitioners play. Redefining Roles is designed for writing center practitioners, scholars, and staff. It is also a necessary addition to help campus administrators in the ongoing struggle to validate the intellectually complex work that such staff performs. Contributors: Fallon N. Allison, Vicki Behrens, Cassie J. Brownell, Matt Burchanoski, Megan Boeshart Burelle, Danielle Clapham, Steffani Dambruch, Elise Dixon, Elizabeth Festa, Will Fitzsimmons, Alex Frissell, Alex Funt, Genie Giaimo, Amanda Gomez, Lisa Lamson, Miriam E. Laufer, Kristin Messuri, Rebecca Nowacek, Kimberly Fahle Peck, Mark Pedretti, Irina Ruppo, Arundhati Sanyal, Anna Scanlon, Matthew Sharkey-Smith, Kelly A. Shea, Anne Shiell, Anna Sicari, Catherine Siemann, Meagan Thompson, Lisa Nicole Tyson, Marcus Weakley, Alex Wulff
This reference guide provides a comprehensive review of the literature on all the issues, responsibilities, and opportunities that writing program administrators need to understand, manage, and enact, including budgets, personnel, curriculum, assessment, teacher training and supervision, and more. Writing Program Administration also provides the first comprehensive history of writing program administration in U.S. higher education. Writing Program Administration includes a helpful glossary of terms and an annotated bibliography for further reading.
