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

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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.

Talk About Writing
Talk About Writing

Author: Jo Mackiewicz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1317666917

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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.

Queerly Centered
Queerly Centered

Author: Travis Webster

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2021-11-01

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1646421493

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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.

Center Will Hold
Center Will Hold

Author: Michael Pemberton

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2003-12-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 087421484X

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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.

A Writing Center Practitioner's Inquiry into Collaboration
A Writing Center Practitioner's Inquiry into Collaboration

Author: Georganne Nordstrom

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-02-01

Total Pages: 115

ISBN-13: 1000348377

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This book presents a model of Practitioner Inquiry (PI) as a systematic form of empirical research and provides a rationale for its suitability within a writing center context. Exploring the potential of writing centers as pedagogical sites that support research, the book offers an accessible model that guides both research and practice for writing center practitioners, while offering flexibility to account for their distinct contexts of practice. Responding to the increasing call in the field to produce empirical “RAD” (replicable, aggregable, data-driven) research, the author explores Practitioner Inquiry through explication of methodology and methods, a revisitation of collaboration to guide both practice and research, and examples of application of the model. Nordstrom grounds this research and scholarship in Hawaiʻi’s context and explores Indigenous concepts and approaches to inform an ethical collaborative practice. Offering significant contributions to empirical research in the fields of writing center studies, composition, and education, this book will be of great relevance to writing center practitioners, anyone conducting empirical research, and researchers working in tutor professionalization, collaboration, translingual literacy practices, and researchmethodologies.

Beyond Dichotomy
Beyond Dichotomy

Author: Steven J. Corbett

Publisher: Parlor Press LLC

Published: 2015-03-15

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1602356335

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This book offers multi-method case studies of course-based tutoring and one-to-one tutorials in developmental first-year writing courses at two universities. The author makes an argument for more peer-to-peer learning situations for developmental writers and more detailed studies of what goes on in these peer-centered environments.

Partners in Literacy
Partners in Literacy

Author: Allen Brizee

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-07-18

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1475827636

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Partners in Literacy describes the process, research, relationships, and theories that guided a three-year partnership between the Purdue University Writing Lab and two community organizations in Lafayette, Indiana: the Lafayette Adult Resource Academy and WorkOne Express. This partnership resulted in a new section of the globally known Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) and the Community Writing and Education Station (CWEST), which featured adult literacy resources in the areas of GED preparation, English as a Second Language, and workplace and job search literacy. Using an empirical and iterative design process, the authors worked closely with their community partners to develop, test, revise, and launch these resources. In Partners in Literacy, the authors argue that writing centers can be effective spaces from which to work with the community and that writing centers’ missions of sustainability, outreach, and research-driven practice can offer valuable philosophies for civic engagement. To support this argument, the book discusses the research methods and findings, the process behind developing and sustaining the three-year engagement project, and the personal relationships that ultimately held the project together.

Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences
Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences

Author: Alexander L. George

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2005-04-15

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 0262262894

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The use of case studies to build and test theories in political science and the other social sciences has increased in recent years. Many scholars have argued that the social sciences rely too heavily on quantitative research and formal models and have attempted to develop and refine rigorous methods for using case studies. This text presents a comprehensive analysis of research methods using case studies and examines the place of case studies in social science methodology. It argues that case studies, statistical methods, and formal models are complementary rather than competitive. The book explains how to design case study research that will produce results useful to policymakers and emphasizes the importance of developing policy-relevant theories. It offers three major contributions to case study methodology: an emphasis on the importance of within-case analysis, a detailed discussion of process tracing, and development of the concept of typological theories. Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences will be particularly useful to graduate students and scholars in social science methodology and the philosophy of science, as well as to those designing new research projects, and will contribute greatly to the broader debate about scientific methods.

Writing Center Research
Writing Center Research

Author: Paula Gillespie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 9780805834468

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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.