19.2 Guidance in the Writing Center

PR AXIS a writing center journal

19.2 Guidance in the Writing Center

VOL. 19, NO. 2 (2022): GUIDANCE IN THE WRITING CENTER TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS From the Editors: Guidance in the Writing Center Kiara Walker and Kaitlin Passafiume Continuing to Labor in a Crisis: Counternarratives to Workism Culture Genie Giaimo Explicitness and Rationale: Purposeful Communication in Asynchronous Online Writing Tutor Sessions Anna Rollins

FOCUS ARTICLES Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection Erica Cirillo-McCarthy Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers Stacy Wittstock, Lisa Sperber, Gabi Kirk, Kristin McCarty, Karen de Sola-Smith, Jasmine Wade, Mitchell Simon, and Lauren Fink The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development: Enhacing Discourse Community Knowledge through Metacognitive Dialogue Brendan T. McGovern “Whose Space Is It, Really?” Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces Rachel Azima

BOOK REVIEW Review of Internationalizing the Writing Center: A Guide for Developing a Multilingual Writing Center, by Noreen Groover Lape Mustapha Chmarkh

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Rachel Azima, PhD is Writing Center Director and Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She served as Chair of the Midwest Writing Centers Association Executive Board, and her work has recently appeared in the Writing Center Journal. Her current collaborative research project focuses on the experiences of leaders of color in writing centers.

Mustapha Chmarkh, MA is Doctoral Candidate in Language Education at The Ohio State University. He is expected to receive his Ph.D. in June 2022. His dissertation research was titled “An Action Research Study into the Value of Role Play in the Teaching and Learning of Counter Argumentation in Undergraduate ESL Composition.” Mustapha received his MA in English from Tours University in France and his BA in English from Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco. Mustapha has taught ESL for 14 years in France, the Middle East, and the US. His current research interests include argumentation and counter argumentation in ESL, Writing to Learn in ESL and EFL classrooms, dialogic teaching in ESL Composition, scaffolding language and concept learning in the ESL classroom, and language attitudes.

Erica Cirillo-McCarthy, PhD is an Assistant Professor of English and directs the Margaret H. Ordoubadian University Writing Center at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research has been published in WPA Writing Program Administration, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, and in multiple edited collections.

Lauren Fink, PhD is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Previously, she earned her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of California, Davis. At Davis, Lauren served for one year as a Graduate Writing Fellow (2015-16) and three years, including the time of article writing, as the Lead Graduate Writing Fellow (2016-2019).

Genie Nicole Giaimo, PhD is Assistant Professor and Director of the Writing Center at Middlebury College. Their current research utilizes quantitative and qualitative models to answer a range of questions about behaviors and practices in and around writing centers. Their scholarly and programmatic interest in fair and "well" workplace practices have profoundly influenced their approach to writing administration to be inclusive, intentionally anti-racist, and focused on the wellness of both workers and students. The author of over two dozen peer reviewed articles and chapters, their forthcoming book, Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond comes out winter 2023.

Gabi Kirk is a PhD candidate in Geography with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research at the University of California, Davis. She was a Graduate Writing Fellow from 2017-2019. She has published numerous public scholarship essays and enjoys reflecting on the feminist pedagogy of writing centers.

Kristin McCarty, PhD received her doctorate in Sociology from the University of California, Davis where she was a Graduate Writing Fellow and the Writing Partner Program coordinator from 2018-2020.

Brendan T. McGovern, BA is currently serving as a middle school English teacher for Teach For America Chicago-Northwest Indiana. He holds a B.A. in English and political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was an undergraduate writing consultant at the university’s Writers Workshop for four years and has conducted research on discourse community knowledge in the writing center.

Anna Rollins, MA serves as the director of the Writing Center at Marshall University. Her work related to Writing Center studies has been published in Writing Lab Newsletter and in Praxis (“Equity and Ability: Metaphors of Inclusion in Writing Center Promotion" in 2015). Prior to directing Marshall University’s Writing Center, she tutored in the Writing Center for five years. In Fall 2010, she was featured in Praxis’s column “Consultant Spotlight.”

Mitchell Simon, PhD received his doctorate in Cardiac Physiology from the University of California, Davis where he was a Graduate Writing Fellow from 2016-2019.

Karen de Sola-Smith, RN, PhD received her doctorate in Nursing Science and Healthcare Leadership from the University of California, Davis at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. As a Graduate Writing Fellow in 2018-2019, her role was specifically to support nursing students in master's and doctoral programs through all phases of thesis and dissertation writing.

Lisa Sperber, PhD is a continuing lecturer in the writing program at the University of California, Davis. At the time this article was written, she worked in the WAC program, where she facilitated the training of Graduate Writing Fellows. Previous publications include an anthology of interviews with composition scholars, Teachers on the Edge (Routledge, 2017). Her research interests include transfer, threshold concepts, and contract grading.

Jasmine Wade, MFA is a storyteller, curriculum writer, and PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis.

She studies radical aesthetic practices related to contemporary Black and Indigenous social movements. She is also a lecturer in Ethnic Studies at Sacramento State University. Her short stories have appeared in Drunken Boat, TAYO Literary Magazine, The Copperfield Review and others. Jasmine was a Graduate Writing Fellow from 2018-2020.

Stacy Wittstock, MA is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis, pursuing an emphasis in Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition Studies. She currently teaches developmental and first-year writing and serves as Assistant to the Director of Entry Level Writing. Her research interests include writing program administration, developmental writing and writers, and faculty identity and contingent labor.

Stacy was a Graduate Writing Fellow in 2018-2019, then served as Lead Graduate Writing Fellow from 20192021.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 2 (2022)

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: GUIDANCE IN THE WRITING CENTER Kiara Walker University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com We here at Praxis are proud to bring you our Spring 2022 regular issue, “Guidance in the Writing Center.”

This issue brings together perspectives and research that demonstrate the importance of considering the goals and courses of action that writing center practitioners employ to improve their centers. In our discipline and in our writing centers, the issue of guidance appears in more obvious ways at the administrative level and in the work done within writing center sessions, but also in less noticeable or apparent ways, such as administrators and consultants guiding students through writing center spaces, be they online or in person, and through writing center forms and procedures. The columns and articles in this issue hinge on concerns about guidance, strategy, and goals, and they ask us to (re)consider our approaches to various practices within the writing center from the way we conduct sessions to the way we approach designing our spaces.

Genie N. Giaimo opens our current edition with her column “Continuing to Labor in a Crisis: Counternarratives to Workism Culture.” In this updated discussion that Giaimo originally initiated in the summer 2020 edition of Praxis, our author raises an eyebrow to the ever-present workism culture typically practiced by academics. She guides us towards best writing center practices by suggesting a readjustment of this culture in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In “Explicitness and Rationale: Purposeful Communication in Asynchronous Online Writing Tutor Sessions,” Anna Rollins turns our attention to tutor feedback and the presence of directive and nondirective tutoring strategies in asynchronous sessions. In her study of tutor feedback, Rollins uses Ahmar Mahboob’s and Devo Yilmaz Devrim’s framework to classify tutor responses, finding that interrogatives play a significant role in asynchronous sessions and therefore warrant more pedagogical focus. Rollins’s column speaks to the importance of training tutors to use feedback strategies that guide sessions in a manner that is both responsive to the asynchronous format and to a student’s perspective.

In our first focus article, Erica Cirillo-McCarthy addresses the responsibilities of writing center administrators (WCAs) striving toward an antiracist writing center, particularly the guidance that WCAs can offer to graduate students. In “Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process

Kaitlin Passafiume University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com through Critical Reflection,” Cirillo-McCarthy uses Asao Inoue’s understanding of white habitus to critically engage with her own practices as a writing center administrator mentoring graduate students. Based on this reflection and previous counterstories from BIPOC graduate students, Cirillo-McCarthy develops a set of elements for a “culturally responsive mentoring process,” offering WCAs guidance in approaching and handling their mentoring role.

In the following focus article entitled “Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers,” Stacy Wittstock and her co-authors present a practical guide for peer-graduate consulting practices in the writing center. They suggest that while much scholarship serves to support graduate writers, little has been done towards consistent practice for graduate consultants who support their peer-graduate writers. These authors draw from their own experiences in the writing center in what they term “a guide written by graduate students, for graduate students.”

Next, Brendan T. McGovern guides us on discursive tutoring strategies in his article entitled “The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development: Enhancing Discourse Community Knowledge through Metacognitive Dialogue.”

McGovern explores the role of metacognition in writers’ progress during tutoring sessions while he asserts a need to examine the specific role of writing center tutors in the development of individual student.

In our final focus article, “Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces,” Rachel Azima offers guiding principles for writing center design based on findings from her mixedmethod study of renovations at her writing center.

Azima’s study adds an empirical approach to previous scholarship on writing center space, using surveys and interviews of students and consultants to grasp and understand responses to the writing center before and after renovation. Azima ultimately argues that listening to students needs should be the core that guides writing center space design.

Our current edition closes with Mustapha Chmarkh’s review of the 2020 book entitled Internationalizing the Writing Center: A Guide for Developing a Multilingual Writing Center by Noreen G. Lape. This review aids us in the synthesis of Lape’s guidance

Guidance in the Writing Center • 2 towards best practices for those practitioners who hope to serve a multilingual writing community. Chmarkh’s review highlights Lape’s most salient advice as he weighs in on the book’s usefulness for our own advocacy of multilingualism in the writing center.

Finally, we here at Praxis want to thank our readers and our review board for their continued support. We are proud to share this collection, and we look forward to the conversations that these pieces will continue or start.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 2 (2022)

CONTINUING TO LABOR IN A CRISIS: COUNTERNARRATIVES TO WORKISM CULTURE Genie N. Giaimo Middlebury College ggiaimo@middlebury.edu

Introduction—Yet Semester

Another

COVID

I initially wrote this piece at the beginning of fall 2021, as the Delta variant was surging, to prompt our field to challenge the rhetoric around pandemic-era learning modalities and worker responsibilities. Since then, every 3 – 4 month period appears to correspond with a new COVID-19 variant and subsequent surge, in the United States. I updated this piece while I taught winter term (online) during an even larger rise in cases with the BA.1.1 Omicron variant. Now, we are seeing a rise in BA.2 create another surge this spring semester.

Since late fall, transmission rates at my institution have hovered around 10% (though testing has significantly declined) and the end of fall term was book-ended with another sudden and stressful campus-wide return to virtual learning. Each semester this academic year has been precipitated by a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions like masking and regular testing. Each semester this academic year has once again been disrupted by the pandemic.

The world has moved on quickly and suddenly after each new surge, despite the rapidly growing hospitalizations and deaths accompanying the fall and winter surges. Because my academic year starts late— after Labor Day and the Jewish High Holy Days—I had the uncanny experience of looking to colleagues’ experiences across the country to see my future. Many of my colleagues returned to in-class learning. Some were teaching without vaccination mandates, others without mask mandates, many expressed fear in returning to the classroom while yet others were teaching in-person for most of the previous academic year. The flexible work policies put in place during spring 2022 have all but disappeared. A return to inperson teaching and tutoring—has become the default even as surge after surge wreaked havoc on class attendance, student/faculty/staff well-being and health, and instruction continuity. Since the fall, I know of several people who plan to exit our profession or who have already left.

While in fall 2021, I felt like the pandemic would never end, I now feel like the pandemic has ended. In its place we have localized idiosyncratic policies and

messages of moving on, even as cases creep back up to fall 2021 levels. Perhaps this is what it means to move into endemicity—an endless disruptive cycle of infection peaks and troughs punctuated by absent policymakers and the end of mitigation practices. While the pandemic hasn’t ended in actuality for the purposes of our lived experiences in the United States the pandemic is over. It is a strange liminal space to occupy when the threat of COVID-19 is still omnipresent for me even though ~60% of Americans have antibodies from previous infections (Mandavilli, 2022).

This piece builds on one published in Praxis in the summer of 2020. A lot has happened since then. After the spring lockdowns, racial justice protests, and harrowing election year. At that point, we faced a very different kind of experience in the pandemic. It was still new. There was no vaccine. We weren’t sure that masks prevented people from becoming ill. We had periods of lockdown to “flatten the curve.” Now, many of us are teaching and laboring in the sixth, seventh, or even eighth semester of the pandemic and institutional responses seems to have fractured even more than I thought was possible when I wrote my original piece.

While furloughs and freezes (hiring and salary) are still occurring, the great restructuring of higher education appears to have slowed down—or perhaps is less newsworthy—and in its place the “great resignation” (a term shamelessly borrowed from the NY Times comment section) or #NotDyingToTeach (Kelsky, 2021) remains the topic of the day. Teachers and professors and even administrators are quitting in protest over what they see as the refusal of institutions to protect them.

The stories are harrowing. The professor with a baby on the way who begs their students to wear masks while brandishing a sonogram. The departmental chair who resigns after realizing that the institution has refused to put in place a sensible indoor mask mandate.

The teacher who quit during their first class—their students left to scramble to find a replacement so they can graduate on time. The immunocompromised lecturer—who has survived multiple bouts of cancer— required to teach in person and who cannot retire because they need the health benefits (Svrluga, 2021).

These are just some of the stories I have heard.

Continuing to Labor in a Crisis: Counternarratives to Workism Culture • Institutions removing online teaching options, even as cases peaked again in winter, and are ticking back up again this spring. Other scholars are collecting stories at their colleges and universities to counter the “fetishization of the normal” (Weineck, 2021) and the risk shaming faculty and staff are encountering in yet another COVID-19 semester.

Many of us are burnt out. Many of us are heading for the exits. Many of us are unwilling to die for our profession.

Yet, amidst these stories of resignation, there are also stories of people who eagerly returned to the inperson classroom. People who were excited to open their physical writing centers to students. People who could not wait to do in-person tutoring work. I have to admit, I am not part of this group.

At the same time, I am growing increasingly alarmed at administrators (and sometimes faculty) advocating for getting back to “business as usual,” the backlash against online modalities because of “Zoom fatigue,” and the frenzied approach to work that I am witnessing in aspects of my job as well as professional service work for my field. It seems like so many of us have been holding our breath for over two years, waiting for inperson events and programming to return, are now speeding up and churning out more things than ever before. The number of events is dizzying: hundreds every week at my small liberal arts college…

How Did We Get Here?

A lot has changed from the early days of the pandemic. Our work shifted from a triage model—so prominent in spring 2020—to one that could have more sustainable working conditions but for all the external forces pressing upon how we labor. Contrary to a more sustainable, greener, and non-space dependent writing center model that embraces digital technologies, we are contending with a return to pre-pandemic in-person models while the pandemic, yes, still rages on. At the same time, however, that external forces like administrators and politicians beckon us back into buildings to do work that many of us have done remotely for over two years because they believe that inperson work is better, despite all the metrics that identify the ways in which remote and flexible work schedules lead to happiness and more productivity. Even as I review articles for this journal, I am struck by this small but very vocal group of folks who see in person learning and work as the default and view the past 2+ years as a kind of aberration. A thing that needs to be corrected with in-person, community-focused work.

And while I applaud writing center practitioners (and others) who are trying to make their spaces more

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inclusive, more community-focused, and more activistoriented, I wonder, have we not been doing this work all along as we have reshaped our writing centers during the pandemic? And, if we have not, is the online modality to blame for failure to do this work or is there something else happening that has affected our communities? The conflation between community and in-person face-to-face engagement is concerning; it assumes all writing centers have communities worth preserving, it also presupposes that community building is contingent upon in-person work. Finally, it places pressure upon writing center administrators to create community which even in pre-pandemic times was difficult. In pandemic/endemic times, is community— as we have previously understood it—even possible to create in our centers?

To answer these questions, I to turn to labor studies. The expectation that during a worldwide crisis we carry on with business as usual or, worse, are morally obligated to make the world better through our work, is not something that I think we organically or instinctually feel—though some of us may cope with uncertainty and stress in this way in the short term. I believe that we have been pressured by our institutions and higher administrators to embrace “workism” and place it at the center of the forces motivating our professional lives.

Workism is “the idea that work is not just a means of economic production but is also a centerpiece for identity, community, and purpose” (Blair, 2006). We find workism in the hallways of our institutions when faculty and staff talk about what they do as “labors of love” or “not even real work” (Jaffe, 2021). We read about workism in our profession where people talk about going above and beyond—despite struggling with very real and personal mental health or other concerns—for their tutors and students (Wooten et al., 2020). We feel the very real and toxic effects of workism when we burn out on our positions and consider leaving them altogether.

Workism guides so much of how we handle our day-to-day administrative and teaching duties, particularly within writing center administration.

Whether it is the incredible amounts of advisement and research mentorship that we provide to our students, or it is the extensive training and professional development opportunities we develop for our tutors, or it is the service work and other work that we do for free as our budgets and support structures shrink, or it is the countless weekends, nights, and summers that are taken up by any manner of crises or needs, many of us place our work at the center of our identities and community building at the center of our work. I personally cannot count the number of colleagues who I have heard

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Continuing to Labor in a Crisis: Counternarratives to Workism Culture • working for free or without contract above and beyond their job responsibilities for “the students.” I cannot count the number of colleagues who have struggled with unaddressed health concerns because they have been unable or unwilling to step back from their administrative work. I cannot count the number of times that I have personally pushed past my own selfimposed boundaries to offer students and colleagues around me extensive feedback, extensive advisement, extensive amounts of care during off-work time. And while some of workism might seem like it is a personal choice (however one might understand systemic pressures as they work upon our decision-making processes), workism is also encouraged and uplifted by academia and other businesses because austerity measures make it impossible to do the amount of work we need to do with the current staffing and support we have. In place of meaningful support, we are given “wellness days” or self-care newsletters. We have wracked our brains to make our training more approachable and shorter. We have wondered what more we can do to make our workplaces “thrive.” As I have written elsewhere, these shallow interventions are simply not enough to mitigate the stress that austerity and crises create in our work. It not all in our control.

Previously, I wrote about the opportunism of administrators and institutions during the early stages of the pandemic. Before we knew how long this crisis would take to unfold, higher administrations were cutting entire tenured departments, were furloughing, or freezing current staff and faculty, and were crying about a budgetary crisis. At that point, we were less than a couple of months into the pandemic. These tactics have continued throughout the pandemic while, at the same time, the S&P500 had returns that were nearly double (~21%) the average rate of returns over the past 50 years (~11%). Of course, since the winter, those returns have been tempered by months of chaos abroad and at home.

The war in Ukraine, energy crises around the world, and the creeping dread of rising inflation rates and continued supply chain shortages. Still, institutions’ endowments have grown and colleges—at least ones with hefty endowments—have became richer overall during this crisis. Yet even as these institutions saw their endowments growing, they engaged the same wage theft tactics (hiring freezes, salary freezes, and scarcity circumstances) that were used by many of the wealthiest institutions in the United States before the pandemic. Of course, the situation is more dire at public institutions, community colleges, HBCUs, and other perennially under-funded institutions. But even wealthy institutions are crying poverty to justify underhanded labor tactics

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such as hiring freezes, pay freezes, retirement and other benefit cuts, etc.

Navigating the Austere Writing Center

You may ask, what does all this money stuff have to do with my writing center work? Everything, I would argue. Because as the slice of the pie has disappeared and left only crumbs, many institutions cut the budgets and positions of writing center administrators. There have been countless stories on our listservs and at our professional events of writing centers losing half or even all of their budgets. Writing centers that have been operating without directors or leaders for years on end.

Writing Center administrators that have had to choose between working for free and shuttering their centers.

The labor crisis has come home to roost in the writing center, and, like the pandemic, it is sabotaging our daily lives, at home and at work. And without support or sustainability, I argue, we often revert to what we believe that we, as WCDs, can control. We can control how much we work. We can also control how much we center or make meaning through our work. We can control how we interact with and support those around us. This is the insidious way in which kindhearted and moral people become subsumed by workism. We beat back the tide of austerity and neoliberal extraction by creating “homey” and otherwise pleasant spaces on our campus. We create community but without acknowledging the very real labor that it takes to create these communities (Concannon et al., 2020), especially when we are drawing from personal—rather than institutional—reserves to do so. In short, we deplete ourselves further as our institutions become more and more extractive.

The pandemic has created a perfect storm where those of us who have become indoctrinated to workism culture are also being acted upon by administrators who share similar values (though they benefit from workism culture because the neoliberal university operates and benefits under such extractive models). So, as we confront our own struggles with or usages of workism to get us through, we are also being guilted, bullied, or downright forced into working beyond our means, beyond our capacities, and, sometimes, against our better judgements, by external forces.

Counternarratives about Pandemic Writing Center Work In place of workism rhetoric about our work— particularly teaching and writing center work—we need to uplift our accomplishments and recognize the limitations we have been laboring under for the past

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Continuing to Labor in a Crisis: Counternarratives to Workism Culture • several years. We also need to recognize and examine the labor issues that the pandemic has cracked wide open in our field but that were around well before March 2020. While it is easy to gloss over the past two years and to see them as an aberration, because of the climate crisis and other disasters that shape our everyday lived experienced, this disruption might be better described as our “new normal.” Therefore, we need to contend with everything that the pandemic has revealed.

Some of it is dismal. But some of it might allow us to engage with our work in new and more sustainable and healthy ways; to rethink our pedagogies and practices and untether them from workism.

So, I propose here three counternarratives to those that populate my inbox, my professional meetings, my hallway and zoom conversations, and even some of the scholarship that is being developed about the pandemic.

These three counternarratives are:

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1. The pandemic has sabotaged much of our daily lives—not just work—and the fact that we are coming through with any output is miraculous.

2. Online modalities are as good, or perhaps even better, than in-person tutoring and teaching.

3. We don’t need to pivot quickly in one way or the other just because our administrations dictate that we do. It is OK to slow down our responses.

prominent in our field to include inclusive and antiracist practices.

The levels of connectivity in the past two years may be unprecedented—particularly given the regional structure of many affiliate professional organizations— while the amount of conversation about our profession is far more visible and critical. It is worth honestly retracing and reflecting on that work without allowing the messages of optimization and deficiency to steep in.

Of course, these messages are older than the pandemic—administrators touting new ventures to generate revenue otherwise lost from State and other funding sources—yet the pandemic has ripped away the blinders, so to speak, on the financial sustainability of many institutions in higher education. And, as Enstad (2020), identifies, revenue generating projects cannot solve the crisis in higher education. So, while we might feel like our extra labor and embrace of workism in a time of crisis will make the difference between X and Y (a flourishing writing center and a defunct one, perhaps), the system is rigged and individuals are left to contend with the poor decisions of the collective. So, when faced with suboptimal work conditions—which so many of us contend with anyway in non-pandemic times—we must reframe our labor so as not to be complicit in this unjust “workism” culture. Instead, our work should be seen as miraculous (and finite), particularly in this extended moment.

1. The pandemic has sabotaged much of our daily lives—not just work—and the fact that we are coming through with any output is miraculous.

2. Online modalities are as good—or perhaps even better—than in-person tutoring and teaching modalities.

The scarcity model that many of us are laboring under is affecting our work and our lives. The fact that we have been able to do anything during the pandemic—host a tutor training or a Zoom gathering, write a chapter for an edited collection, or, even, move our centers online—is entirely miraculous. Don’t let the bootstrapping rhetoric of disaster capitalism get you down. Don’t denigrate what you have accomplished over the past two years. Don’t call the online pandemic writing center suboptimal or otherwise lacking. I saw colleagues in NEWCA, SLAC-WPA, IWCA, ECWCA, RMWCA, SWCA, and countless individuals and other groups move mountains in their work. I saw colleagues running free workshops, webinars, and mentorship meetings and I contributed my own workshops on wellness and care to our profession. I also saw a lot more discussion about the missions and values of such professional organizations and re-framing our work and goals as moving beyond the annual conference model so

Over the past several months, I have heard a lot of negative sentiments about online teaching modalities.

People apologize for yet another meeting in Zoom or yearn for the time when we can all be back in person.

Some people are scheduling meetings in-person without offering modality choice while others are fully online.

This kind of hybridity started in the fall and continues as we experience peaks and troughs in COVID-19 infection rates. Our day-to-day engagement has become chaotic and unbound from early pandemic conventions.

This rhetoric has crept into the ways in which we talk about tutoring as well as our administrative work. I have read articles under review that lament the lack of community in writing centers during the pandemic.

And, while I appreciate my own community, these kinds of arguments give me pause—why are we responsible for creating community in our workplace? What is wrong with working online? Are these wistful laments yet another part of our work(ism) culture (and work

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Continuing to Labor in a Crisis: Counternarratives to Workism Culture • indoctrination) that lead us to frame everything with do within the rhetoric of optimization?

I want to challenge framing online modalities as suboptimal, because it upholds a lot of incorrect assumptions that are not in line with the issues of social justice that so many of us concern ourselves with. So, here is a list of all the ways in which in-person work— especially meetings—are non-inclusive: 1. They reward and encourage those who are comfortable speaking in front of a group.

2. They reward and encourage neurotypical people who do not struggle with fluorescent lighting, fragrances, focusing, sitting, being still, navigating physical space etc.

3. They reward and encourage people who view the office as a social space vs. a production space or an action space.

4. They reward and encourage people who are comfortable in their bodies and who do not mind having their bodies on display for others to see—this includes dress, physical appearance, gender identity, racial identity etc.

5. They reward and encourage people who do not struggle with mental health concerns like PTSD, anxiety, depression, etc.

6. They reward and encourage people who are not afraid to traverse physical spaces—mainly, white cisgender people without disabilities.

So, taken together, in-person meetings—and this can extend to teaching and tutoring—privilege extroverted abled people who are white, who are neurotypical, who do not have mental health concerns (or physical health concerns in pandemic times), and who do not struggle with gender or body dysmorphia. It also demonstrates what disability scholars mean when they say that “disabled embodiment” is overlooked in many discursive (and physical) spaces (Snyder & Mitchell, 2001; Kumari Campbell, 2009), replaced by a normalized and normalizing embodiment. In never previously being given modality options, how many of us simply pushed past our pain and discomfort to perform our work?

This work model also rewards people who are comfortable navigating power structures through personal engagement rather than official (albeit potentially opaque) channels. People who, again, think of their work as a place filled with social opportunities and friends rather work as a space filled with microaggressions, violence, or other forms of negative stressors that come from interacting with people and

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institutions in physical space (especially during a pandemic).

For the rest of us, in-person meetings can be great sources of anxiety, stress, and yes, even danger. I didn’t realize how much discomfort I felt in navigating physical workspaces until I didn’t have to for over a year. I didn’t realize how happy I was not to think too much about my appearance or how my body is perceived by others.

I didn’t realize how much more quickly I got my work done because people weren’t volunteering me for additional work at the spur of the moment or stopping by my office to talk about workplace politics. I realize that I am describing feeling a reprieve from the invisible labor that marginalized faculty (people of color and women) regularly perform (Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, 2017), yet the labor continued, I was simply more adept at calibrating my response and setting up boundaries online. Moving online was a way for me to engage in less rumination about work. Moving online gave me the critical distance I needed to prioritize my goals and shed unnecessary busy work. Moving online was revelatory for me.

I am not alone in finding online work revelatory. In a host of articles by the New York Times, folks like to split the virtual workers and the in-person workers into separate and equal camps, which, again, as the comments section and actual research shows isn’t true.

Most folks enjoy more online time away from the physical constraints of their workplaces. Most folks like not having to commute for hours. Most folks like more life-work balance.

In educational spaces, online teaching modalities have expanded in popularity, scope, and possibility. The recent creation of the Online Writing Centers Association and resources like Hewitt’s The Online Writing Conference: A Guide for Teachers and Tutors (2015) demonstrate the popularity and growth of online writing tutoring modalities and the demand for empirical research on this subject. Elsewhere, and during the pandemic, people are writing about how virtual spaces have helped radically alter teaching practices and made online teaching more attractive (Lee & Hubbs, 2021). It has also been found that faculty satisfaction with online teaching has increased with institutional support and engagement (Lederman, 2020). Additionally, for people with chronic health issues or other barriers, remote learning could be a “game changer” (Morris & Anthes, 2021). So, there are a lot of positive outcomes of online education for faculty as well as students that we are only starting to explore in earnest because of the pandemic and our move to remote learning for several semesters.

Of course, even as I write this, I acknowledge my position as a child-free academic with decent internet

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Continuing to Labor in a Crisis: Counternarratives to Workism Culture •

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access. I know that systemic inequities plagued many people in the pandemic. Many women with children experienced additional burdens placed on them in a remote environment. Many unhoused students and students with poor internet access struggled to attend school. These issues often intersected with women leaving the workforce to care for (and educate) their children. I would argue, however, that these burdens are a perfect storm of weak social policies, aging infrastructure, and antagonistic labor practices rather than an issue with online work and learning environments. This statement doesn’t make it any less true that women left the workforce in overwhelmingly larger numbers than men or that attendance plummeted among working class students and students of color. But I think it warrants exploration around systemic inequities that have always existed but that the pandemic placed in stark relief.

Additionally, many corporations stepped-up to close the internet access gap by offering free wi-fi to students in need during the pandemic. Institutions paid for students to have emergency wi-fi hotspots and laptops. Why aren’t these (and other) equalizing opportunities offered in a regular year, outside of a crisis? I haven’t seen such offers since early 2021. Why aren’t we invested in better internet access from an institutional and infrastructure standpoint?

So, in thinking about the move to online tutoring and teaching—was the modality the reason for dissatisfaction or, again, did the pandemic dampen most experiences? Was the issue the online modality or the ability for students to access internet? We must not blame online educational models, but the systems of inequality that create educational gaps.

community that writing centers had prior to March 2019? Do we need to do more and more with less and less? Do we need to create solutions to problems that aren’t really problems (like, for example, whether online tutoring is good enough for our institutions?)

Of course, I believe we need to become comfortable talking about writing centers outside of evaluator models, especially in the era of COVID-19.

Instead of talking about what we cannot do, we should reflect on what we have accomplished. And, in addition to showing gratitude to ourselves and others, I hope we can work towards preventing even more burnout in our professional lives by engaging in sustaining and affirming practices including:

3. We don’t need to pivot quickly in one way or the other just because our administrations dictate that we do. It is OK to slow down our responses.

Until Next Time

My final point is similar to my first point. Just because the whole world seemed to move on from the pandemic sometime around the summer of 2021 (and then again this winter, 2022) doesn’t mean that we are all ready to move on. This coming year might be the first year where COVID-19 is considered endemic—a part of our daily lived experience—and, given the prolonged stress of managing living with the virus, we WCAs might want to ask ourselves what we are honestly capable of doing workwise. Do we need to create the same kind of

• • • •

Wellness and care policies and programs Community-oriented goal setting Honest assessment of bandwidth Labor-forward policies and practices

This issue of labor is one that is critical to the work that we do. And, in a strong pro-labor environment, we might not want to scramble to make up for perceived losses over the past several years. We might, instead, reorient and reimagine our work in more sustainable, more manageable, and less extractive ways. Already, around the country workers in different industries— including higher education—are advocating for their rights. Student workers are demanding safer working conditions and better payment. Non-tenure track faculty are doing the small at liberal arts colleges not so unlike my own. Let’s imagine a future where work is sustainable, safe, rewarding, justice-oriented and helps us grow.

My pandemic writing center work has taught me that crises are likely to be a regular part of the work that we do as we face the outcomes of climate change and encroaching neo liberalization. If we are continually in crisis than that becomes the new “normal” and we must respond in kind. So, in an endemic writing center, we cannot count on business as usual no matter what platitudes are offered to us from on high. We must find a new more sustainable and kinder way forward. I know I am ready for that and am finding it in online spaces (yes, still). What are you doing?

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Continuing to Labor in a Crisis: Counternarratives to Workism Culture • Works Cited Blair, J. (2020). Capitalism, Workism, and COVID-19, Harvard Political Review.

Concannon, K., Morris, J., Chavannes, N., & Diaz, V. (2020). Cultivating Emotional Wellness and Self-Care through Mindful Mentorship in the Writing Center.

WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, 44(56), 1-19.

Enstad, N. (2020). Why Revenue Generation Can’t Solve the Crisis in Higher Education, Or, What’s That Smell?

Journal of Academic Freedom, 11, 19-22.

Hewett, B. (2015). The Online Writing Conference: A Guide for Teachers and Tutors. United States: Bedford/St. Martin's.

Jaffe, S. (2021). Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone.

Hachette UK. Kelsky, K. (2021). #NotDyingToTeach. The Professor Is In Blog.

Kumari Campbell, F. (2009). Having a career in disability studies without even becoming disabled! The strains of the disabled teaching body, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 13:7, 713-725.

Lederman, D. (2020). Faculty Confidence in Online Learning Grows. Inside Higher Ed. Lee, A. & M. Hubbs (2021). How COVID-19 Created Opportunities for Teachers and Students. Campus Technology.

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Mandavilli, A. (2022). The Coronavirus Has Infected More Than Half of Americans, the C.D.C. Reports. The New York Times.

Morris, A. & Emily Anthes (2021). For Some College Students, Remote Learning Is a Game Changer. The New York Times.

Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group. (2017). The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 39, 228–245.

Snyder, S.L., & Mitchell, D.T. (2001). Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment. Public Culture 13(3), 367-389.

Svrluga, S. (2021). With students back on campus, many faculty members are worried about covid — and pushing back. Washington Post.

Thompson, D. (2019). Workism is making Americans miserable. The Atlantic, 24.

Weineck, S. (2021). The Dystopian Delta University Organ loss, cancer, pregnancy — at Michigan, in-person teaching exemptions are hard to come by. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Wooten, C. et al. (2020). The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration. Utah State University Press.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 2 (2022)

EXPLICITNESS AND RATIONALE: PURPOSEFUL COMMUNICATION IN ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE WRITING TUTOR SESSIONS Anna Rollins Marshall University jones453@marshall.edu In the February 2018 interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education “What’s Wrong with Writing Centers,” a tutoring strategy utilized frequently in the writing center setting was problematized: nondirective tutoring (Jacobs). Much writing center tutoring pedagogy advocates for a tutoring session to function as a conversation, with the tutor posing open-ended questions about a student’s writing and the student writer revising her own writing based upon answers formulated in response to the tutor’s particular, probing questions (Ryan and Zimmerelli).

Nondirection as a tutoring strategy, though, has received pushback, and some argue that direct tutoring that provides students with explicit models to emulate is a more effective way to conduct a tutoring session (Barnett and Blumner). In asynchronous online sessions, where tutors provide feedback to student writing in the form of marginalia and endnotes, the conversations that often occur in face-to-face and synchronous online sessions are not achieved in the usual way due to constraints of digital modality, medium, and student audience. Still, tutors aim to enact pedagogy that incorporates feedback that resists copyediting while incorporating a conversational style of response.

Beth Hewett noted that online conferencing (both synchronous and asynchronous) is hard to do well because it requires “quick thinking and clear, purposeful communication” (The Online Writing Conference 22). Hewett then elaborated upon what “clear, purposeful communication” is comprised of; she noted that indirect speech (not to be conflated with nondirection as a tutoring strategy), while often utilized as a way to mitigate power dynamics in the tutoring session and as a politeness strategy, often leads to student confusion in online conferencing (The Online Writing Conference 116-118).

The use of nondirection and its effectiveness is debated in face-to-face tutoring sessions; this strategy, then, becomes all the more complicated when utilized in online sessions. Principles 13 and 14 of the CCCC Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) directly reference online writing tutoring. While the CCCC OWI Committee stated that there is no evidence that synchronous online tutorials are superior to asynchronous online sessions, they

noted that “online tutoring differs drastically from onsite tutoring; using asynchronous text to explain and intervene, for example, is quite different from orally talking a student through writing strengths and weaknesses or encouraging change while never touching the students’ paper with a pen” (Hewett, Foundational Practices 85). This committee also noted that “published literature often does not address the specific differences between online and onsite strategies for tutoring” (Hewett, Foundational Practices 84).

In fact, after finding that student tutors often reverted to copyediting when tutoring in the online format, Kelly Shea postulated that it may be ideal to train online writing tutors in face-to-face practices so that these online sessions would better resemble the pedagogy that prizes writing as a conversation. This directive aligns with principle 4 of the CCC OWI Committee for Effective Practices in OWI which stated that “appropriate onsite composition theories, pedagogies, and strategies should be migrated and adapted to the online instructional environment” (Hewett, “Fully Online” 52). One major pedagogical hurdle that online teachers/tutors must creatively address is the lack of connection via facial expressions and body language. The conversation about writing in the asynchronous online format requires tutors to use writing to communicate about writing; this distinction necessarily requires a revision in pedagogy and praxis.

Writing center tutors must consider the pedagogical purposes that guide their interactions with students in tutoring sessions. As Hewett noted, “an eclectic theoretical approach to the OWI seems best because online writing teachers need to use any and all effective strategies from any and all epistemologies” (“Fully Online” 197). Our tutors are instructed to evaluate a student’s level of knowledge about a particular part of the writing process, and they are then encouraged to utilize a combination of directive and nondirective strategies based upon the student’s needs.

This evaluation becomes less straightforward in an asynchronous tutoring session; because a tutor cannot converse in real time with a student about his or her current level of knowledge about various components of the writing process, the tutor must infer this information from the student’s writing. Directiveness,

Explicitness and Rationale • 11 therefore, may be utilized more frequently and necessarily in asynchronous tutoring sessions. Beth Hewett provided a process for providing feedback in asynchronous writing pedagogy. This process involved asking and directing the following: “what is the problem?”; “why is it a problem?”; “how can this problem be revised and avoided?”; “do these steps to address the problem” (Reading to Learn 197). This heuristic took into account the writing process and required specificity from the individual providing written feedback, but it still allowed tutors to utilize strategies that are often characterized as nondirective.

Our writing center offers tutoring sessions in two separate digital modalities – asynchronous and synchronous – but for the purposes of this research, I have analyzed and discussed tutoring feedback in the asynchronous modality. In our asynchronous appointments, students are directed to upload a written document to an online scheduling system; our tutors provide feedback to students within 24 hours of their scheduled appointment time. The medium of communication in this modality is entirely text-based, and students at all levels (both undergraduate and graduate), in all disciplines, and at all stages of the writing process utilize this tutoring service. On Marshall University’s campus during the Fall 2017 semester, nearly 20 percent of all tutoring sessions were held asynchronously online; in these sessions, tutors provide feedback to students in the form of marginal comments and endnotes. A conversation, with both individuals giving and taking information, is not present in this type of session.

Because a significant number of sessions are conducted in this manner, I decided to look at the specific feedback that tutors on our campus provide to students in these asynchronous sessions. Utilizing a framework developed by Ahmar Mahboob and Devo Yilmaz Devrim, I classified each comment under one of four descriptors: handholding, carrying, bridging, and basejumping. These feedback classifications were developed as a means to avoid feedback that was simply corrective or signaling an error in a student’s language usage. These classifications are rooted in the Teaching-Learning cycle and therefore privilege the notion of scaffolding (Vygotsky). These descriptors relate to the presence of a rationale and the level of explicitness in feedback.

These categorizations allow an individual to evaluate the language utilized in essays commented upon by tutors. The two criteria – explicitness and rationale – can also be correlated with feedback that is linguistically direct (explanations and commands, for instance) or linguistically indirect (rhetorical questions,

for instance). By categorizing and analyzing specific language features present in our writing center tutor’s comments, I aim to gain insight into linguistic patterns that are present in our tutors’ feedback. From this analysis, I make the claim that good tutoring pedagogy can incorporate strategies of both direction and nondirection depending upon situation and context; however, linguistic indirectness is a feature that should be avoided by tutors in their feedback. Basejumping feedback is by definition linguistically indirect and is often utilized as a politeness strategy and as a way of avoiding hierarchical linguistic moves. This type of feedback, though used most infrequently by our tutors, should be reconsidered and revised in order to keep students from interpreting valuable feedback as suggestive rather than directive.

During Fall 2017, five tutors in Marshall University’s writing center agreed to participate in an IRB-approved study. Tutors who agreed to participate in the study had asynchronous feedback collected and de-identified. I then analyzed and classified comments based upon Mahboob and Devrim’s aforementioned categories. After documenting feedback types, I analyzed the comments and looked for trends related to the presence of explicitness and rationale. Over the semester, 115 de-identified student papers submitted for asynchronous tutoring sessions were collected. In these student papers, I analyzed tutor feedback to see how tutoring practices are made manifest in the grammar of the feedback given to students.

Based upon this comment analysis, our tutors often (73 percent of the time) provided explicit feedback to students – feedback that told the students precisely what they should do in order to improve (or “fix”) their work. Our tutors’ feedback often provided a rationale for their suggestions (52 percent of the time), but a rationale was given less frequently than explicit direction.

Perhaps most interesting to me was that of the tutors who provided the most online feedback to students (tutors A, B, and C provided 1,301 out of the 1,399 comments), each had similar percentages of carrying, handholding, bridging, and basejumping feedback. No single tutor provided just carrying feedback or just basejumping feedback; the type of feedback given was evenly distributed amongst tutors.

This means that tutors were not relying on just one pedagogical method for providing feedback; tutors varied their approach depending upon situation and context.

Of the 1,399 comments given by tutors to students, 271 of those comments (or 19 percent of feedback) were crafted as interrogatives. The presence

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Explicitness and Rationale • 12 of questioning is a key feature of nondirective tutoring and can be used productively to guide students toward thinking about larger issues in their writing that need to be developed for the sake of cohesion or clarity. These interrogatives were not always utilized to invoke brainstorming or conversation, though this was the intent in some instances. In many other instances, however, tutors would provide carrying feedback and then conclude that feedback with a question mark.

Tutors, in these instances, seemed to know precisely how a student should edit a paper; the use of the question mark, however, was a way that tutors seemed to soften their feedback, or decrease the perception that he/she was explicitly copyediting a student’s paper. For instance, one tutor would often comment, “in text citation?” in places of a student’s paper where an in-text citation was needed. This feedback was classified as carrying feedback – the tutor was providing explicit instruction that an in-text citation was needed in the paper – but the tutor was softening his/her approach with the presence of a question mark. This type of feedback happened frequently, and while this phenomenon could be interpreted multiple ways, it seemed that this was the tutor’s attempt to avoid explicitly copy-editing the student’s paper or to avoid feedback that could be interpreted as hierarchical or impolite.

Another observation I made while categorizing tutor feedback was that, most frequently, the interrogatives utilized outside of the “carrying” feedback occurred in basejumping feedback. These interrogatives were likely tutors’ attempts at nondirective, “conversational,” feedback. An example of this type of feedback is as follows: “What do you mean by this? Do you mean that this is the best explanation that you have? Do you mean that this explanation is the most correct?” In this feedback, the tutor is not providing explicit instruction, nor is the tutor necessarily giving a rationale for questioning the student about his/her explanation. This comment, though lacking explicitness and a rationale, is not devoid of helpful feedback; rather, these interrogatives function to engage the student in the type of conversation that could lead to productive revision.

However, this feedback can still lead to problems with student interpretation and implementation.

Not all basejumping feedback was always as focused and clear as the aforementioned example. A piece of feedback that I classified as basejumping that read to me as less clear was as follows: “What is this type of data?” This question was posed in response to a term that was utilized in the student’s paper, monotonous data. The tutor was asking for additional

clarity in their question, but the tutor’s lack of content knowledge was made apparent by the construction of a question surrounding a discipline-specific term.

Based upon my analysis, it became clear to me that, as I revised my future units on online instruction, I needed to focus specifically on pedagogical practices regarding feedback that utilizes interrogatives. This was particularly crucial because, in my analysis, interrogatives were frequently classified as basejumping feedback, and this feedback most frequently included linguistic indirection. While this feedback, from my perspective as the director, often came from a place of empathy for students, it did not take into account the nuances present in student interpretation and implementation of commentary. For instance, one tutor’s basejumping comment read as follows: “What do you mean by this? Do you mean that this is the best explanation that you have? Do you mean that this explanation is the most correct?” From my vantage point, I knew that the tutor was indirectly telling a student that there was lack of clarity in a portion of the paper. The tutor was utilizing interrogatives as a means to simulate a conversation and to soften what could be interpreted as harsh criticism. From a student’s perspective, though, this feedback could easily be misinterpreted as a tutor’s genuine misunderstanding of the content of the paper. This interpretation could then lead to an evaluation of the tutor as ignorant, and that piece of feedback – along with others – could be dismissed due to this appraisal.

I realized when analyzing feedback that the use of the interrogative can accomplish many different and often divergent purposes, and at times, the use of this grammatical construction can impede readability of feedback. Because interrogatives were often utilized to invoke a more conversational tone, future training of asynchronous writing tutors at our institution needs to incorporate a discussion of ways to invoke a conversational, accessible tone in feedback without impeding the clarity of that feedback.

Whether tutors choose to utilize directive or nondirective strategies in asynchronous sessions, tutors need to be reminded that their decisions should be based upon analysis of student understanding and pedagogical appropriateness. By looking at the language features present in the feedback that my tutors are currently providing, I am now better equipped to revise asynchronous tutor feedback training based upon current comment patterns.

Works Cited

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Explicitness and Rationale • 13 Hewett, Beth. "Fully Online and Hybrid Writing Instruction." A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, edited by Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper Taggart, Kurt Schick, and H. Brooke Hessler, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 194-211.

Hewett, Beth, and Kevin Eric DePew, editors. Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2015, pp. 33-92, www.wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/owi/front.pdf.

Hewett, Beth. Reading to Learn and Writing to Teach: Literacy Strategies for Online Writing Instruction. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2015.

Hewett, Beth. The Online Writing Conference: A Guide for Teachers and Tutors. Macmillan, 2015, www.community.macmillan.com/docs/DOC-1474.

Jacobs, Rose. "What's Wrong with Writing Centers." The Chronicle, 5 Feb. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/What-s-Wrong-WithWriting/242414.

Mahboob, Ahmar, and Devo Yilmaz Devrim. "Supporting Independent Construction Online: Feedback in the SLATE Project." Linguistic and the Human Sciences, vol. 7, 2013, p. 23-101, doi:10.1558/lhs.v7i1-3.101.

Ryan, Leigh, and Lisa Zimmerelli. The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors. 6th ed., Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016.

Barnett, Robert W., and Jacob S. Blumner, editors. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory. Allyn and Bacon, 2001, pp. 225-41.

Thompson, Isabelle, et al. "Examining Our Lore: A Survey of Students' and Tutors' Satisfaction with Writing Center Conferences." Writing Center Journal, vol. 29, no.

1, 2009, pp. 78-105.

Vygotsky, Lev. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press, 1978.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 2 (2022)

DEVELOPING AN ANTIRACIST, CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE GRADUATE MENTORING PROCESS THROUGH CRITICAL REFLECTION Erica Cirillo-McCarthy Middle Tennessee State University Erica.Cirillo-McCarthy@mtsu.edu Abstract

Antiracist writing centers work towards inclusivity, and thus resist and transgress narratives that limit who can tutor and who can serve in leadership roles in the writing center (Barron and Grimm; Condon; Aikens). However, the responsibilities of writing center administrators (WCAs) do not end with simply hiring a more representative and inclusive staff. In order to increase equity and inclusion in the field of writing center studies, WCAs need to disrupt the traditional mentoring that happens in writing centers and move towards a deeper consideration of racialized experiences in graduate students who staff writing centers. This article weaves together theories of mentoring that are grounded in culturally specific ways of knowing (Alaoui and Calafell; Ribero and Arellano) with narratives from BIPOC graduate students in the writing center (Burrows; Epps-Robertson; Faison and Treviño; Martinez). The author develops a process of critical reflection driven by Asao Inoue’s elements of white habitus to help identify and excavate the ways her current mentoring practices serve to reproduce the status quo, and then the author moves themselves through this reflective process for readers. Ultimately, the author develops a set of antiracist, culturally responsive mentoring elements informed by BIPOC graduate students’ experience to replace the elements of white habitus in her practice. By building a culturally responsive mentoring program that centers BIOPC graduate students’ embodied experiences, all graduate mentees benefit (Faison and Treviño).

WCAs who are committed to access and equity in writing center studies and who mentor historically oppressed graduate tutors will find this article useful in building a culturally responsive mentoring process.

Writing center studies has recently begun to examine the importance of graduate tutor mentoring in the writing center, particularly as it relates to historically oppressed students in predominantly white institutions (PWIs) (Bell; Epps-Robertson; Singh-Corcoran). As a White writing center administrator (WCA) committed to antiracist writing center practices, I have been critical of my own practices and have worked to uncover ways I reproduce oppressive and exclusionary academic practices. For example, I have shifted the curriculum of my tutoring pedagogy course to center antiracist writing center scholars; I have collaborated with antiracist reflection groups within my department and at the institutional level to identify institutional and programlevel policies that are inherently racist, whether implicitly or explicitly, and to generate replacement policies. But until now, I have not examined my mentoring practices of students who work in the writing center. According to the 2018-2019 Writing Center Research survey, 68% of writing centers employ graduate students. Like many

writing centers, the one I direct employs graduate student tutors and provides leadership opportunities that come with a range of responsibilities and time commitments. I also teach graduate courses and serve on thesis and dissertation committees. Despite these high-stakes and important interactions with graduate students, my approach to building and sustaining a mindful mentoring practice has lacked theoretical grounding. Further, I have not approached mentoring in a reflective way; nor have I developed a way to measure the efficacy of my mentorship. I just keep doing the same ad hoc mentoring semester after semester.

This mindless approach to mentoring could further marginalize graduate tutors, especially those who identify as BIPOC, because it avoids the culturally informed ways in which they engage with the world and instead reproduces the status quo (Figueroa and Rodriguez 28).

In 2006, Victor Villanueva invited the field of writing center studies to name the racism embedded in writing center practices; since then, writing center studies scholars have begun to excavate the ways racist gatekeeping and the status quo is reproduced through writing center practices, e.g., hiring and tutoring practices, tutor training, and outreach (Condon; Geller et al.; Greenfield and Rowan; Aiken; Dees et al). Each of these areas needs to be examined both separately and as part of a set of discursive practices so that the work of decentering whiteness can begin. Wonderful Faison and Anna Treviño posit that writing centers can support students best after centering marginalized embodied experiences in all their practices; however, before writing centers can do that, WCAs need to recognize their own “complicity within the colonial functioning of the academy, to reflect on these colonial tendencies, and to build resistance and space with underserved students through coalitional practices” (Martinez, “Alejandra”).

Writing centers enact what Asao Inoue identifies as white habitus precisely because “they exist in and because of white educational institutions, exist because of predominantly white academic disciplinary histories and theories.” Inoue compels writing centers to investigate the ways in which they enact white habitus, and to uncover, name, and transgress their oppressive practices.

Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection • 15 Writing centers have traditionally been predominantly white spaces. Sarah Banschbach Valles, Rebecca Day Babcock, and Karen Keaton Jackson’s 2014 writing center survey research found that WCAs overwhelmingly identify as White (91%), straight (93%) and monolingual (97%). They argue that WCAs can increase access and inclusion in the field by explicitly and mindfully inviting BIPOC students to work in the writing center and consider it for a career, and access to graduate student assistantships makes that easy.

However, graduate faculty and WCAs who mentor graduate students in the writing center often mentor the same way they were mentored. All types of mentoring are raced because of our inherent system of reproduction in the academy. We want to mentor folks like us, and that often includes choosing mentees who are the same gender and same race as ourselves, thereby reproducing whiteness in the academy (Blackwell; Figueroa and Rodriguez). Mary Jo Hinsdale writes, “Traditional concepts of mentoring do not recognize the deep and abiding tensions that marginalized students might feel in the university” (xiv). Unexamined mentoring can lead to “reproducing the logic of white supremacy in mentoring models” (Madden 7). I seek to disrupt that reproduction by first critiquing and reflecting on the racialized way I mentor. I examine how my mentoring as a White woman administrator reproduces narratives that continue to center whiteness and reproduce limiting institutional hierarchies. More importantly, I want to identify strategies to resist and transgress these limitations in ways that support graduate students’ navigation of leadership and academia writ large.

I have identified this critical reflective mentoring challenge as a way to answer Rasha Diab, Beth Godbee, Thomas Ferrell, and Neil Simpkins’ call to make commitments to racial justice actionable. Antiracist writing centers work towards inclusivity, and thus resist and transgress narratives that limit who can tutor and who can serve in leadership roles in the writing center (Barron and Grimm; Condon; Aikens). However, the responsibilities of WCAs do not end with simply hiring a more representative and inclusive staff; in particular, WCAs who invite BIPOC graduate tutors to serve in writing center leadership roles must also create a robust mentoring program to complement and inform leadership experience. In order to increase equity and inclusion in the field of writing center studies, WCAs need to disrupt the traditional mentoring that happens in writing centers and a move towards a deeper consideration of racialized experiences in graduate students who find themselves staffing writing centers either because they were actively recruited, or they are

working off part of their graduate program and assistantship responsibilities.

Before this project, I tended to conflate advising and mentoring when I engaged with graduate students.

James E. Blackwell defines mentoring as a process wherein a mentor “counsels, instructs, and guides” growth and development in a mentee (9). Allan Schnaiberg argues that “[m]entors can help bridge the gap between the formal requirements and expectations of graduate programs,” showing graduate students how “to accumulate more emotional and social capital to enable them to shape their own careers'' (40). One way to distinguish between advising and mentoring is to categorize mentoring into two behaviors: academic and psychosocial (Kram). Sharon Fries Britt and Jeanette Snider argue that academic support often focuses on the professional aspect of graduate life, whereas psychosocial support is more holistic, centering mentees’ “personal well-being and confidence in their academic abilities and in personal identity” (4). A robust mentoring practice blurs the academic and the psychosocial aspects of our lives because these are not discrete categories, but ones with porous edges. This stance is important because while many value the ability to compartmentalize professional and social aspects of our lives, BIPOC graduate students may find that compartmentalizing nearly impossible, especially if their research interests use a racialized lens (Anzaldúa; Burrows; Martinez “A Plea”).

In this article, I weave together theories of mentoring that are grounded in culturally specific ways of knowing (Alaoui and Calafell; Ribero and Arellano) with narratives and counterstories from BIPOC graduate students in the writing center (Burrows; EppsRobertson; Martinez) to do the “transformative listening” Romeo García prompts writing center studies scholars to do. I then develop a process of critical reflection driven by Inoue’s elements of white habitus to help me identify and excavate the ways my current practices reinforce whiteness, and then I move myself through this reflective process for readers. Ultimately, I develop a set of antiracist, culturally-responsive mentoring elements that are informed by BIPOC graduate students’ experience, specifically those who have worked in writing centers. By building a culturally responsive mentoring program that values embodied experiences, all graduate mentees benefit. WCAs who mentor graduate tutors will find this article useful in building culturally responsive mentorship programming that centers racially-inclusive graduate tutor experiences.

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Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection • 16

Authenticity and Belonging: Listening to BIPOC Graduate Student Voices So much of a graduate program is about reproducing the status quo but focusing solely on the act of reproduction elides the racist element in this act: that we are in fact reproducing a White way of being in the academy. Graduate students of color are underrepresented because of deeply rooted systemic racism in the academy. According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Survey of Earned Doctorates, in 2019, 5.5% of doctorates are earned by Black or African American students and 5.1%

by Latino students. BIPOC graduate students and writing center tutors have begun to share their lived experience in graduate school, and almost every recounting of experience ends with a call for white WCAs and program administrators to listen to their stories (Burrows; Faison and Treviño; Green). One pattern that emerges in these lived graduate student experiences is the concept of belonging, namely the relationship belonging has to their ability to be their authentic selves in graduate school. Aja Martinez explains how this happens: “As a practice, unquestioned Euro-Western-centric curricula, pedagogy, and program administration actively chip and strip away writerly identity from Chicanx students” (“Alejandra”). If we pay close attention to other graduate students’ narratives, we can see patterns on centering authenticity (Inoue; Green; Lockett; Burrows). This goes beyond the concept of imposter syndrome, a feeling of inadequacy experienced by many graduate students regardless of positionality. The writing center can serve as a place where students learn how to navigate belonging while maintaining authenticity, or it could be the place that reinforces the stripping away of identity.

Treviño describes her experience in a PhD program as a time of loss due to internal tensions: “I felt loss, an emptiness caused by the disconnect between my identity and my surroundings, as well as facing the reality of how much of myself, of my ties to family and heritage I gave up to be here; I betrayed myself, and it disgusted me” (Faison and Treviño). Candace Epps-Robertson writes of her experience with belonging and authenticity in graduate school: I remember sitting on the floor, looking out the window at the snow piled up past the tires of my car and asking myself: How am I going to find my way? How will I find a path and a place in academia? I’d entered a world that felt so different to me, a Black woman from the South, a wife, and mother. At that moment, I didn’t see how I’d ever feel comfortable as a scholar

in the ivory tower because my ways of knowing, of problem solving, and of doing, seemed incompatible with academia. (“Writing with your Family”) Epps-Robertson experiences the institution as unwelcoming and even hostile to her authentic self.

None of her intersectional identities—Black woman, Southerner, Wife, Mother—has an established space in the academy. Treviño notes the sacrifice of navigating through academia as a BIPOC graduate student. Their embodied experiences come up against what Sara Ahmed calls “institutional walls'' that serve to exclude and reproduce the status quo. Pushing back against these institutional walls is emotionally and mentally exhausting for BIPOC in the academy and, as many have written, a never-ending process (Ahmed, On Being Included, 174). People in power positions are invested in not seeing the walls BIPOC graduate students encounter because not seeing them maintains the status quo (Denny; Ahmed, “Feminism and Fragility”). In their own words, BIPOC graduate students have detailed their experiences in graduate programs and writing centers that make these institutional walls visible for those of us who cannot see them; more importantly, their narratives can inform a culturally responsive mentoring practice that can lead to a more authentic graduate experience.

Issues of belonging and authenticity tend to manifest in graduate student writing expectations and thus in writing center work and graduate writing assessment. Cedric Burrows argues that there is never an “acceptable form of blackness” that will grant belonging and acceptance in academia. Burrows names the writing center as a place and a practice that reinforces this concept. He describes his encounter with a White writing center tutor and the racialized linguistic assumptions the tutor brought with them into the tutoring session, an experience that sent Burrows looking for writing support outside of the writing center.

As it relates to oppressive linguistic practices, Laura Greenfield claims that the persistent myth that argues a mastery of Standard Academic English (SAE) conveys a certain sense of belonging, acceptance, and success on BIPOC and multilingual students needs to be dismissed.

Graduate students are repeatedly told that they do not write well or that they are not writing academic discourse, as if they are avoiding it on purpose and can flip a switch. However, as Burrows details, the tax he and Black students pay is due to inferences based on skin color, not on any mastery or perceived lack thereof of SAE. These linguistic institutional walls can seem insurmountable for some graduate students, mainly because the problem does not lie within them or their

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Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection • 17 writing, but instead in those who reproduce the myth of SAE through implicitly racist evaluation processes and policies.

Effective mentoring can have a lasting effect on a BIPOC graduate student’s career path, but effective mentorship can also reverberate throughout the field.

Ana Ribiero and Sonia Arellano argue that developing more culturally responsive mentoring is foundational to decolonizing rhetoric and composition (335). They guide readers through their own experiences in both vertical and horizontal mentoring, identifying key elements of successful mentoring WCAs can engage with, starting with a broader definition of mentoring that includes or even centers kinship, what they call “comadrismo” (Ribiero and Arellano). They also center empathy in their supportive practice and specify actionable empathy: “the empathy of a comadre should not be understood as passive inaction. Empathy comes with the urgency to persevere, not through assimilation but through strategies that sustain the soul” (Ribiero and Arellano 348). They ask readers to consider how care and support can be networked, including but not limited to digital/live and in formal/informal spaces, academic and non-academic, and of course those in-between spaces. Thinking expansively about networks and creatively about connecting mentees to these networks leads to horizontal mentoring among graduate students (Van Haitsma and Ceraso), which can affect belonging and encourage authenticity. Finally, mentoring is necessary, Schnaiberg argues, because the process helps prepare students for the “diffused demands of the professional (or activist) marketplace” (40). Wellprepared and well-supported graduate students stay in the field, so in some ways mentoring is a part of sustaining the field.

Critical Reflection I am grateful for the scholars of color who have written about their experiences as graduate students and as writing tutors and for those who share their experience at conferences (Green; Epps-Robertson; Burrows; Martinez). I draw upon their stories to help me cultivate a space where they feel a sense of belonging rather than a space, like so many others on campus, that serves to exclude them and their lived experiences. But to start this process, I have to critically reflect on my own practices in order to identify those that reproduce and remake the writing center as an exclusionary space.

Critical reflection also starts the process of my own learning, especially in my role as a White WCA who mentors graduate students in the writing center.

Alexandria Lockett encourages WCAs to endeavor “to understand the potential of [the writing center] as a

route to success or detour to failure, depending on who runs it and the extent to which that director recognizes and leverages the power of the space.” Lockett’s call for WCAs to grapple with the “power of the space” begins with a process rooted in recursive and iterative reflective practice. In order to “understand and recognize,” WCAs need to cultivate a reflective practice. Frankie Condon details the reflective process necessary for antiracist work: At the same time, whites who come to through desire or out of necessity to anti-racism must decenter, must recognize and account in some public way for the partiality of our perceptions, our experiences, our knowledge--those stories we tell about ourselves and others. Anti-racism work necessitates both inward or private reflection aimed at personal transformation and an outward, public turn that is at once both humbled and determined and is aimed at productive engagement in collective and institutional transformation. (22) This article is in some ways a detailed account of my own critical reflective practice as a White WCA who seeks to disrupt limiting practices in order to build new inclusive practices. It also serves as my own “public turn” that invites others in the field to do similar work in their own institutional and personal contexts.

Critical reflection is an ongoing and iterative process that is always framed through the lens of social justice and equity, and the role we play in our institutions (Larrivee, “Transforming”). Further, “[a]cknowledging that classroom and school practices cannot be separated from the larger social and political realities, critically reflective teachers strive to become fully conscious of the range of consequences of their actions” (Larrivee, “Development” 343). Critical reflection should help practitioners in “remaining open to viewpoints different from their own, letting go of the need to be right, and acknowledging their own limiting assumptions'' (Larrivee, “Development” 346). Larrivee distinguishes the different levels of reflection, starting with prereflection, then surface reflection, moving to pedagogical reflection, and finally critical reflection, where we move past just thinking about how something works in the classroom, but also how it functions outside the classroom. Critical reflection asks us to expand our situational awareness to include other contexts and to probe our assumptions and underlying ideologies.

Finally, it asks us to consider what is just in our actions and identify where we can be more actionably committed to social justice.

Critical reflection is a starting point for developing a theory of mentoring that is socially just, culturally

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Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection • 18 responsive, iterative, and embodied, and as such can be useful to White WCAs who want to do the work but don’t know how to begin. You might ask: But won’t this just be an internal echo chamber? How do I hold myself accountable so that I engage in critical reflection? While Larrivee offers an effective heuristic practitioners can use to assess their level of reflection, I pivot to Inoue’s four elements of a white racial habitus to help prompt critical reflection on my mentoring of graduate students in the writing center. Inoue’s four elements include: Hyperindividualism; Individualized, Rational, Controlled Self; Rule-Governed, Contractual Relationships; and Clarity, Order, and Control. Inoue argues that these elements are not inherently negative or problematic on their own, but they are not race neutral. When woven into a mentoring process, they reinforce a White standard, a White way of mentoring and inculcation into the field and academia.

However, if we come to understand the elements of white habitus in our mentoring processes, critique them, excavate them and replace them, we can “help students navigate the social and racialized structures of judgement that determine them,” especially at the graduate level (Inoue). For the rest of this section, I model the way I use Inoue’s elements of white habitus to prompt critical reflection on how I’ve approached mentoring; afterward, I develop a new set of antiracist and culturally responsive mentoring elements and show how they can manifest in mentoring practices.

Inoue lists hyperindividualism as the first element of a white habitus. As a WCA who works closely with graduate students tutoring in the writing center, I think about this element when working with dissertating students. I am so careful to not take control of the text that I stay far away, too far, farther than I would prefer. But I do so because this deeply embedded value informs so much of my interactions. It might also be a legacy of minimalist tutoring that is so often emphasized in tutor training. I reflect and think that I ask students to do so much on their own, but to what end? And I think about how hard that is for any graduate student with whom I work who is multilingual, multidialectical, or first generation.

Being explicit about the graduate school gatekeeping that is intentionally obscured and coded is how we help students develop ways to negotiate academia and authenticity. I had to reflect on what I was holding behind my back when working with dissertating writers, and how that was informed by white habitus and hyperindividualism specifically. I had to be honest that I was doing that, and that maybe I tried to justify it in some ways, e.g., this is the only way they can become independent writers. Instead, I should approach dissertation and thesis writing from a more collaborative

stance, making transparent the moves they are expected to make in their writing to progress through evaluations and checkpoints, such as qualifying exams, preliminary exams, grant and proposal writing, and thesis/dissertation writing. At the same time, I need to explicitly discuss the linguistic racism that undergirds these evaluations and checkpoints with graduate mentees. Just as importantly, I need to talk about the ways in which an emphasis on hyperindividualism obscures the collaborative and social nature of writing and research.

Hyperindividualism also obscures the ways in which oppressive linguistic practices, such as blind adherence to SAE in graduate student writing, contribute to the linguistic invisible walls graduate students face (Inoue).

For too long, the concept of SAE has been defined as something an individual must master in order to be perceived as legitimate, as respectable, as part of the group. But as Greenfield gracefully points out, this is a myth—or lie that we tell ourselves and our students— perpetrated to maintain the status quo. Using hyperindividualism to prompt my critical reflection, I realize that I’m not explicit with my mentees about oppressive linguistic practices. Nor do I offer ways to navigate these languaging practices and maintain a sense of authenticity, to understand, acknowledge, and master SAE while finding ways to disrupt oppressive language practices, many of which are reproduced by writing centers (Young; Greene; Burrows). As Shannon Madden argues, “[w]e must recognize how certain ways of knowing are privileged in the academy over others and consider what impact that privileging has on writers from marginalized identity groups, as well as the future of knowledge across fields” (33). Part of the SAE lie is that mastery of SAE directly results in more opportunities, i.e., students will sound more professional, be more respected, and thus have more opportunities. Acknowledging this part of the SAE lie is important because it brings into view the institutional wall that these oppressive linguistic practices uphold, but further, it helps me see how much I’ve participated in maintaining the wall. In the past, I did not talk about oppressive linguistic practices, and I ignored invitations to discuss the violence these practices can have on multidialectical and multilingual graduate students. I did not push back hard enough on departmental dissertation rubrics that focused on SAE, and I could have more quickly and strategically developed coalitions in my department that could have overcome my concerns of being labeled the antiracist (untenured) contrarian who just wants to disrupt. But this is exactly where hyperindividualism thrives and is reproduced.

Hyperindividualism justifies the centering of the self rather

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Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection • 19 than fostering a complex understanding of power, privilege, and coalition.

The next step is to figure out how to chip away at the SAE wall, and, more importantly, how to show graduate students how to strategize a way to chip, bit by bit, calling attention to the wall and bringing on more people to help chip away. I can continue to introduce them to antiracist authors and invite them to workshops and sessions on oppressive linguistic practices. I can hold discussions on the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” and subsequent “Statement on White Language Supremacy,” detailing the ways the field publicly grapples with its history of linguistic oppression and how it defines its future. At the same time, however, I need to hold space for graduate students to talk about the realities of exclusion and inequity and listen to them. I can chip at the wall by leveraging my position as a White woman to challenge departmental assumptions about SAE and its problematic association with “good” writing. I recently pushed back against an initiative that was grounded in oppressive linguistic practices, and one of my colleagues asked me if I was calling them racist because of the way they evaluate grammar. I didn’t have a good answer and stumbled a bit in my response. While I realize the imperative to develop effective ways to speak back against policies that support the status quo (and overcome fear of retribution), I was grateful that I had a coalition of antiracist faculty alongside me helping with this discussion, underscoring the fact that coalitioning is one antidote to hyperindividualism.

Inoue’s second element of white habitus is Individualized, Rational, Controlled Self, which, for the purposes of this article, I collapse this with his final element, Clarity, Order, and Control. These elements of white habitus devalue support systems and therefore dissuade graduate students from developing networks of support. When we combine the isolation typically experienced by graduate students with the message that graduate students should repress their emotions and focus on the rational and logical, the institutional wall strengthens. In her critical reflection on her time as a graduate student working in the writing center, Treviño argues that performing whiteness means performing a lack of emotion so that “people would not have to see my color” (Faison and Treviño). I think about my actions that have been informed by this element of white habitus. I wonder if my mentoring practices help to create a space where graduate students can express their emotion, but just as importantly, if I am helping them theorize that emotion and thereby acknowledging it as a

valid form of meaning-making in the academy (Jaggar).

I work to disabuse students of the notion that research can be free of bias and instead impress upon them that narrative, emotion, and experience are all valid forms of communication and evidence. This means supporting graduate students, specifically those who conduct research that centers embodied experiences, navigate processes such as IRB applications and grant proposals.

But I can do more. I need to have explicit discussions on how I value emotions—as a researcher, an administrator, a human—and how I understand that taking on a graduate degree is an embodied experience, more so if family comes along. Specifically, I could show them how administrators can use emotions to identify new rhetorical strategies that push back on racist policies in the institution. Reflecting on this element of white habitus and how it manifests in my mentoring, I am learning how to show, through words and actions, that I value developing a network of support and more than that, I will help graduate students in the writing center cultivate that network of support that is contextualized to their individual needs.

Inoue’s third element of white habitus is “Rulegoverned, contractual relationships that value rules and fairness while ignoring interconnectivity and collaborative support and problem solving.” After reading Inoue’s description of this element, I have identified it as the driving element that prevents me from rhetorically listening, from learning about my graduate students’ lives, or from sharing mine with them because really listening and sharing demands a certain closeness for which I was not ready. When I conducted a directed reading last year on zoom, there was not one zoom meeting where I shared my space. I always used a background filter so that no one could see my home.

Even in my graduate seminar, students saw me floating in space or teaching from a virtual beach once a week for 16 weeks. Reflecting on this, I realize I do it because I am performing a type of professionalism that I thought was necessary in my role. It is that performance of professionalism that prevents me from being vulnerable, to show my home, my workspace right next to my messy bed. For some reason, I felt that showing my home would automatically revise our “contractual relationship” between professor and student. I wonder now what message this sends to graduate students. Am I fostering an interconnection in this way, or am I precluding any type of relationship other than a formal, contractual one? I wonder if I engage in conversations that talk about socially-oriented values enough and invite graduate students into these discussions, showing them that their voice has value and their experience can

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Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection • 20 contribute to collaborative knowledge-making. Overall, can I be more intentionally invitational?

I’ve recently joined an antiracist reflection group in my English department and in that context, I have conversations with graduate students about these socially-orientated values, like antiracist writing assessment and fair and just graduate program policies.

Many graduate program policies are not just precisely because they were created and exist for a graduate student body from the past. Enacting change must happen on two levels: at the policy level where faculty change policies that are exclusive in nature and uphold practices that exist to exclude; and in our mentoring of historically marginalized and oppressed graduate students in ways that support their authentic successful selves. Doing so may help them graduate and become faculty members who find meaning in their work but also ones who know how to cultivate new networks to sustain them throughout their career.

Now that I’ve used Inoue’s elements of white habitus to generate critical reflection and consider how I reproduce whiteness in my mentoring practices, I can begin to replace these elements with new ones that are informed by BIPOC graduate students’ narratives about their experiences.

Elements of Antiracist, Responsive Mentoring

Culturally

Element One: Transparency about “Institutional Walls”

Acknowledging that writing centers can and often do reproduce oppressive language practices and, for the purpose of this text, restrictive and limiting graduate student experiences, is the first part of antiracist work and developing a mentoring process that is culturally responsive. Mentors who seek to do disruptive antiracist work must acknowledge the inequities graduate programs reproduce in conversations with their mentees, but also “teach the structures, academic norms, and power dynamics they wish to disrupt. How are mentors to promote egalitarian relationships with students, given the fact that a protégé may enter the relationship with guardedness, already associating the mentor with the exclusionary systems and history of higher education?” (Hinsdale 109). Being transparent with BIPOC graduate students about the role writing centers have traditionally played in exclusionary linguistic practices is not easy, but it is necessary. Many of them already know it and talking through this could establish trust between White WCAs and BIPOC graduate students. However, it is just as important for WCAs to let graduate students take the lead in these

conversations in order to avoid reproducing hierarchies of power.

White WCAs also need to provide a generative space for brainstorming strategies for navigating and ultimately changing this reality. It’s not enough to just acknowledge oppressive linguistic practices; we can respond to Neisha-Anne Green’s call for accomplices and identify ways to dismantle the linguistic institutional walls' with BIPOC graduate students, all the while being mindful to protect mentees from retaliation or retribution. WCAs can start keeping a list of strategies that work to not only disrupt and interrupt the status quo, but also strategies that sustain BIPOC graduate students. We have to move beyond what works for White WCAs, because as all of these scholars have pointed out, that does not always work for BIPOC graduate students. But developing a keen eye and recording ways in which students develop strategies will help when encountering new students looking for ideas.

Doing so moves us beyond just acknowledgement towards a deeper engagement with the actionable empathy Ribero and Arellano suggest.

Element Two: Support for Emotion and Embodied Experiences The second element centers emotional support. It values embodied knowledge and is explicit about it.

Emotions are part of our embodied experience because we physically feel emotions, but we have been taught that they have no place in academia. This barring of emotions in the academy becomes part of the institutional walls some BIPOC graduate students face, devaluing not only their experience as historically oppressed bodies in PWIs, but also any research that seeks to examine embodied experiences, such as anything critical of race, gender, or class. EppsRobertson remarked that her mentors practiced active listening and respected what she calls her “local knowledge.” All of this supported her negotiation through the dissertation writing process. Recognizing, and in some cases helping graduate students recognize their own “local knowledge,” can be powerful for BIPOC graduate students, especially if their research centers race. I need to mindfully invite graduate students to express their emotions, and to see themselves as embodied researchers who respond to research from their own experiences. I can encourage them to see teaching and writing center work as embodied emotional work by sharing my own values, such as collaboration, transparency, and flexibility. It is important for me to model ways to sustain networks of care by talking about my own network—how I developed it and how I sustain it—while encouraging

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Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection • 21 them to create horizontal networks to complement vertical ones. In this way, my mentoring process addresses the important and sensitive intersections of academic and psychosocial aspects of graduate student life.

Emotional support and deeper engagement with embodied experiences means discussing and reframing the concept of work-life balance. I remember in my graduate program hearing stories of a faculty member who slept in her office the entire six months before she went up for tenure. We would repeat this peculiar myth to each other, shocked and impressed and unsure of our own commitment to a career that would demand that much. Now that I am on the tenure-track myself, I see how ridiculous this all was and how the discussions around this faculty member avoided talking about the challenge women and marginalized scholars face in developing and sustaining a work-life balance. But talking about the challenges and myths fosters kinship, a practice and value I saw reverberating throughout BIPOC graduate students’ narratives (Burrows; Ribero and Arellano). Kinship can disrupt the limiting binaries we encounter in our relationships in higher education, including limitations on the mentor/mentee relationship which tend to reinforce racist and inclusive practices, boxing out BIPOC graduate students who will then choose a different path. And this is a loss for the field of writing center studies. I’m not saying that by shifting writing center studies to a more culturally responsive place for BIPOC graduate students will result in more of them choosing to study and work in writing centers. But even if a shift in our mentoring leads to more BIPOC graduate students feeling a sense of belonging in the academy, then this work is worth it.

Element Three: Mutual and Reciprocal Sharing of Lives The third and final theme centers the interpersonal.

I am not a very open person. In my role as a WCA, I have multiple stakeholders with whom I interact. I suspect that informs my more private nature because it’s easier to share oneself at the same level across the board.

But not all stakeholders have the same experience, and some may benefit from a deeper, more intentional relationship, especially as it pertains to cultivating kinship and empathy. But it also implies a mindful consideration of the spaces in which mentoring happens. This particular point is salient in developing an antiracist, culturally responsive theory of mentoring, because if we can identify where mentoring happens, we can identify both the affordances and limitations of these spaces. How does a relationship between mentor and mentee change when meetings happen outside of the office space? What does it look like when we open

up our spaces and invite the practice of mentoring in, and how does that change mentoring? Further, looking at the spaces we inhabit when we mentor helps us to better identify and then examine the power dynamics between mentor and mentee. This also helps us identify other networks, formal and informal, within the academy and without, into which we can invite mentees.

I draw upon Christina Cedillo and Phil Bratta’s concept of “positionality stories” to help tease out this important element. The authors argue that it is not enough just to share my academic experience with graduate mentees; by doing so uncritically, I would miss a chance for my story to “provide students with opportunities to move away from self-impressions of deficit that arise from assumptions that instructors are “naturally assimilated into educational cultures” (Cedillo and Bratta 216). Instead, the authors argue that positionality stories are open invitations for students to understand how they can “confront and contest often unquestioned norms” about academia and their place in it (Cedillo and Bratta 216). So when I share my experience as a first-generation student and daughter of a working-class immigrant, I also want to share with mentees what institutional walls I encountered, even though they may be very different from the institutional walls they encounter, and more importantly, the strategies in which I engaged to scratch and chip away at the wall. I also want to be honest and talk about how I too felt I had to sacrifice my family values in order to succeed in graduate school when I was surrounded by colleagues who were second- or third-generation academics or who had already earned degrees at much better schools than I attended. I do this while acknowledging my particular positionality that also allowed me to move through graduate school without coming up against racialized walls because I am White.

By doing so, I attempt to use my positionality story to “make space to contest whiteness, straightness, maleness, eliteness, and other dominant positions as default norms that students oftentimes must strive to emulate, revealing these instead as intersecting locations of interpretation among many” (Cedillo and Bratta 220).

Disrupting what constitutes the norm in graduate school allows for a broader conception of who belongs and who succeeds in graduate school and writing centers.

Conclusion Antiracist, culturally informed mentoring is emotional and embodied. It takes time, something that not every WCA has. It bestows a responsibility on WCAs to be vulnerable and open to uncomfortable discussions and situations. It places even more stress on WCAs in vulnerable, precarious, and

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Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection • 22 overworked/underpaid roles. Nevertheless, mentoring BIPOC graduate students still needs to be done, and given the statistics, will likely be done by White WCAs. Because of this reality, White WCAs have a responsibility to examine their mentoring practice through critical reflection and to pay close attention to the way it is racialized. But critical reflection can be used to uncover white habitus that informs other writing center practices, including hiring, tutor training, and campus outreach; therefore, my next step is to engage in the process and examine my other administrative and pedagogical practices, such as the ways I mentor undergraduate tutors, with the hope that I will develop new processes and practices that are guided by inclusive, antiracist values. My goal is to identify a wide variety of context-specific strategies that speak back to individual objections to antiracist work and chip away at institutional walls. Ultimately, culturally responsive mentoring is ongoing and actionable. It is not something that you can clock out on and leave the mentees on their own. It is a commitment to something larger, like antiracism, like institutional change; but it is also about the interpersonal relationships for which writing centers, by the nature of their practices, exist.

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MAKING WHAT WE KNOW EXPLICIT: PERSPECTIVES FROM GRADUATE WRITING CONSULTANTS ON SUPPORTING GRADUATE WRITERS Stacy Wittstock University of California, Davis snwittstock@ucdavis.edu

Lisa Sperber University of California, Davis ldsperber@ucdavis.edu

Gaby Kirk University of California, Davis gekirk@ucdavis.edu

Kristin McCarty University of California, Davis kmccarty@ucdavis.edu

Karen de Sola-Smith University of California, Davis karen.desola@ucsf.edu

Jasmine Wade University of California, Davis jhwade@ucdavis.edu

Mitchell Simon University of California, Davis msimon@ucdavis.edu

Lauren Fink University of California, Davis lkfink@ucdavis.edu

Abstract

While scholarship on supporting graduate writers in the writing center has increased in recent years, guides outlining best practices for writing center consultants rarely speak to graduate students working with other graduate writers. In this article, we present a practical guide for graduate writing consultants. Written collaboratively by graduate writing consultants and a program coordinator, this guide represents our collective knowledge built over several years of conducting writing consultations and professional development in graduate writing support. Inspired by Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s “threshold concepts,” our guide is organized around two fundamental ideas: 1) that positionality plays an important role in interactions between consultants and graduate writers, and 2) that consultants must cultivate disciplinary awareness to be successful graduate writing coaches. In each section, we synthesize our own experiences as graduate writers and consultants with writing studies scholarship, and present concrete strategies for conducting graduate-level writing consultations.

Through this guide, we demonstrate the mutual benefit of involving graduate student writing consultants in the production of knowledge in writing centers.

Introduction Graduate students occupy a unique position in institutions of higher education in that they are simultaneously considered emerging experts in their areas of research and trainees learning professional norms within their fields. Often, this dichotomy manifests most clearly as a struggle to meet expectations for writing in their academic discourse communities. Just as norms for writing differ across disciplines, so too do the experiences graduate students

have with writing support. Research indicates that attrition in graduate programs is often related to challenges completing a thesis or dissertation, suggesting that graduate programs and committee chairs may not always offer adequate advising or writing support to students (Brady and SinghCorcoran; Madden; Rigler et al.). This issue is compounded for graduate students from marginalized or underrepresented communities; even as graduate programs across the US have broadened their admissions to include more graduate students from international, multilingual, first-generation, and racially minoritized backgrounds, graduation rates for these students have remained much lower than their peers from more privileged groups, with attrition often occurring during the thesis or dissertation stage (Madden).

Several misconceptions drive a mismatch between the types of support needed by graduate student writers and the types of support they may or may not receive from graduate programs and advisors. One prevailing assumption is that reading complex academic articles and books is sufficient to prepare students to write in such genres—a false belief arising from the fact that many graduate advisors have largely tacit knowledge about writing (Lawrence and Zawacki; Madden; Paré et al.; Rogers et al.). Another related assumption, one that often disproportionately impacts

Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers • 25 multilingual writers and writers who use marginalized dialects of English, is that “fixing” students’ grammar and language will address concerns that may in reality be linked to students’ underdeveloped knowledge of genre conventions within their academic discourse communities (Madden; Rogers et al.). This latter assumption also fails to account for the ways that writers may make deliberate choices about language that are counter to the assimilationist drive of Standardized Edited American English (SEAE) (Green; Matsuda and Cox). Writing centers are uniquely suited to address the consequences these assumptions may have on graduate writers by helping them gain access to knowledge of disciplinary writing conventions and develop a sense of how such conventions shape scholarship in their fields.

Research focused on writing center pedagogy and practices for supporting graduate student writers has steadily increased alongside the volume of graduate students seeking consultations over the last decade (Lawrence and Zawaki). A 2016 special issue in WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship focused on the institutional partnerships and resources necessary to bolster graduate writing across the university.

However, guest editors Lawrence and Zawaki note that perspectives on multilingual graduate students were absent from the conversation. A 2016 Praxis special issue on “Access and Equity in Graduate Writing Support” amplifies the need to consider the intersections between graduate writing support in writing centers and the cultural experiences and identities of graduate student writers, particularly in regard to race (e.g., Alvarez et al.; Burrows; Martinez; Inoue), language and marginalized dialects of English (e.g., Green; Cirillo-McCarthy et al.), and dis/ability (Keedy and Vidali). In the introduction to their 2019 edited collection on writing centers and graduate writers, Lawrence and Zawaki note that both consultants and writers agree on the necessity of reexamining whether current best practices in writing center pedagogy are appropriate for graduate students writing in advanced, disciplinary genres. Their book also importantly expands on the ways that writing centers can address the needs of domestic and international graduate students for whom English is an additional language (see Simpson; Turner; Cox).

Yet, even as scholarship on graduate writers in the writing center has increased, resources for writing center consultants outlining best practices remain primarily geared toward supporting undergraduate writers. Guides aimed at graduate students, such as Swales and Feak’s series English in Today’s Research World, or Karen Kelsky’s The Professor is In, provide

practical guidance for graduate writers but are designed for personal or classroom use. Similarly, while the chapters in Lawrence and Zawaki’s 2019 book do address pedagogy and strategies for training tutors and consultants to work with graduate writers, most are primarily aimed toward an audience of writing center directors and staff and not at consultants themselves.

This article attempts to bridge this gap in resources by presenting a practical guide with strategies for working with graduate writers based on our experiences as graduate writing consultants and the knowledge we have synthesized from scholarship on graduate writing support. That is, we present a guide written by graduate students, for graduate students.

Our Process: How We Constructed this Guide

Our Graduate Writing Fellows Program is located within an established WAC program at a large, doctoral degree-granting institution in Northern California.

Graduate Writing Fellows (GWFs) are graduate students who provide writing consultations, retreats, and workshops for other graduate students and postdoctoral researchers across disciplines. GWFs come from a wide range of disciplines (e.g., neuroscience, education, geography, computer science) and participate in an annual training retreat, followed by a monthly practicum. Though our GWFs come to us as strong writers, they usually have little knowledge about writing consultation best practices, writing studies, or WAC. Unlike undergraduate writing centers where many tutors are on staff for relatively short periods of time, most of our consultants stay on for at least two years, often longer, allowing for ample training.

The process for writing this guide was scaffolded by the GWF Program Coordinator and the guide was collaboratively written by a cohort of seven GWFs. During 2018-2019, several of the fellows who had been in the program for many years were graduating; we wanted to find a way to capture their experience and knowledge, while using the process to train new consultants. We also considered that although our GWFs are skilled writers and effective coaches, most of them had not had the opportunity to articulate and consolidate their knowledge about writing and consultations. As Yancey et al. note, the practice of writing does not necessarily lead to conscious, conceptual knowledge about writing. Research on transfer suggests that when writers have deeper conceptual understandings, they are better able to transfer their knowledge to other contexts (Salomon and Perkins; Yancey et al.). We wanted both our new

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Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers • 26 and experienced GWFs to gain conceptual knowledge to draw on in writing consultations, their own writing, and their future professions, especially since some would go on to academic careers in which they might mentor their own graduate students.

With that in mind, we chose Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies as one of our core readings and as inspiration for our consultation guide. According to Meyer and Land, “a threshold concept can be considered akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something” (1). Threshold concepts are ideas central to disciplinary thinking that can often be counterintuitive, difficult, and transformative for learners. As one new fellow remarked in response to a TC in writing, “this is true, but I never thought about it before!” From an undergraduate writing center context, Nowaceck and Hughes argue that a threshold concepts framework in writing can help consultants “conceptualize their own work with writers” (171). Therefore, TCs provided us with theoretical frameworks that GWFs could use to organize their knowledge into practical guidance for future consultants. Further, like Nowacek and Hughes, we found that engaging with TCs of writing helped us to better articulate the goals for our program.

Our guide centers on two intersecting threshold concepts: 1) the crucial role that individuals’ positionalities play in graduate writing and the impact these positionalities might have on interactions between the consultant and the writer, and 2) the importance of cultivating disciplinary awareness in both graduate writing and the consultation space.

While we acknowledge that both of these concepts are key to undergraduate writing center work as well, we argue that they take on an additional layer of significance given the high stakes nature of graduate level degrees and graduate writing by proxy.

In writing each entry, we synthesized our own experiences with writing studies and writing center scholarship, and adapted advice from several undergraduate tutoring handbooks for a graduate context. As advocated by Yancey et al., constructing our consultation guide also included systematic reflection to help consultants connect theory with practice. Each week throughout the academic year, we wrote reflections on readings and consultations, often connecting what occurred during a consultation to the readings we discussed in our monthly professional development meetings. Toward the end of the academic year, we re-read everyone’s reflections and collaboratively identified core concepts for graduate

writing support, focusing on ideas the fellows thought were most important for new consultants.

Thus, entries in this guide are organized around three interrelated sources of knowledge: 1) what we know based on what we’ve read, 2) what we know based on our experiences as graduate writers, and 3) what we know based on our experiences as consultants, including concrete strategies to enact this knowledge in consultations. Following the mandate from the 2016 special issue of Praxis, our guide also considers issues related to inclusion, access, and equity, particularly as they pertain to working with domestic and international multilingual graduate students, graduate students of color, and first-generation graduate students. Each entry is written in the consultant’s own voice, producing a tapestry of different tones, approaches, and points of view. When deciding on the organization of this guide, we found that as we looked for themes across our collection of entries, awareness of the role of disciplinary conventions and individuals’ positionalities emerged again and again as key to successful consultations.

Thus, these two concepts served as broad umbrellas under which each entry was organized. In this way, this guide represents a collaborative approach to theorybuilding and reflects the distillation of our program’s knowledge and practices.

Positionality Plays an Important Role in the Consultation Space for Both Writers and Consultants Much of graduate school is an ongoing process of developing a disciplinary and professional identity, often primarily through writing. At the same time that students are building new professional identities within their disciplines, they are also navigating how that new identity interacts with and impacts their existing positionality. Indigenous Initiatives at the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology define positionality as referring to “how differences in social position and power shape identities and access in society.” Luis Sáchez contends that positionality is “the notion that personal values, views, and location in time and space influence how one understands the world.”

Both the writer and the consultant bring to the consultation space their own positionalities shaped by their experiences as members of diverse disciplinary, professional, class, cultural, racial, linguistic, etc. communities. These positionalities may impact both the writing itself and the interactions between the consultant and the writer during a consultation; navigating that impact can be difficult.

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Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers • 27 Estrem argues that “For many people, the idea that writing is not merely a matter of recording one’s research or thoughts, but is in fact a process linked to the development of new, professional identities, is troublesome” (56). Yancey further contends that writing is “inherently paradoxical” in the sense that “we write both as individuals and as social beings, and that helping writers mature requires helping them write to others while expressing themselves” (53). Like faculty and advisors who may not recognize that writing in graduate school is a complex negotiation of identities and expectations, graduate writing consultants who do not consider the role positionality plays in writing consultations may struggle to adequately identify and address the actual needs of graduate writers. For example, writing coaches may not recognize when a writer is experiencing challenges that are rooted less in the writing itself than in understanding an advisor’s implicit expectations. They may also miss when students are struggling to map their own cultural experiences or linguistic identities onto the established norms of their discipline which have largely been dominated by white, upper-class, native English-speakers.

Writing consultations with graduate writers are often a negotiation between the expectations of the writer and those of the consultant; it is the consultant’s job to attune themselves as much as possible to the ways conflicting positionalities might influence either the writing a graduate student brings to the consultation space or their ability to articulate what they need help with. The entries below address examples of several distinct positionalities graduate writing consultants may encounter in the consultation space. We want to note that the experiences represented here are influenced by our institutional context, in which first-generation and domestic and international multilingual students make up a significant proportion of the graduate student population.

Because Graduate Writing Is Tied to (Often Fraught) IdentityBuilding, Coaching May Involve Emotional Labor Graduate writing can be uniquely tied to a student’s identity and professional aspirations. Students may come in for consultation after their mentor tells them the quality of their writing makes them unfit for graduate school. Others may have received harsh feedback from members of their qualifying exams or dissertation committees and need help addressing them. Sharing these situations and pieces of writing with a consultant is a vulnerable act, possibly tied to an

internalized sense of inadequacy, fear, and/or shame.

As one consultant noted, “I assumed the consultations would be strictly about writing. […] I didn’t understand that I would spend an equal or greater amount of time empathizing with, validating, and reassuring writers, as working with them on writing. Some of the stories about relationships with mentors, family background, etc., are tough to hear and it becomes easy to understand the prevalence of mental health issues in grad school.”

During consultations, as we navigate the relationships between ourselves and writers, we also need to consider the potentially complex relationships graduate students have with writing.

Several elements of writing consultations are potential points of conflict between the consultant and writer, requiring emotional intelligence to navigate.

Such tension points include understanding what the writer wants help with, as well as negotiating expectations for the appointment, especially if they are unrealistic given time or other constraints. Most importantly, consultants must communicate suggestions clearly and gently. As consultants, we can also mediate the often-fraught relationships graduate students have with writing, which may be exacerbated by unhelpful mentor feedback. Normalizing writers’ experiences and offering encouragement can help repair these relations.

Consultation strategies: ● Acknowledge an aspect of the writing you like before offering constructive feedback or suggestions. ● Normalize writers’ experiences—graduate school can be isolating and struggles with writing can feel unique. Remind writers that they are not alone and that writing is a process that most people, including yourself and perhaps even their mentors, struggle with. ● Provide information about mental health and peer-support groups on campus.

Working with Multilingual Writers Requires Sensitivity to Systemic Biases Often, writers may come to our consultations completely discouraged by dissertation advisors who focus on line editing for grammar, rather than providing helpful comments about the organization of ideas or merit of research questions. International

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Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers • 28 students, Generation 1.5 students, and students who use non-dominant dialects of English (Green) may encounter advisors and reviewers who confound supposed issues with grammar with a students’ scholarly merit. We acknowledge the issues around students having to assimilate their language to fit the scholarly mold, which has problematic political implications and may result in the erasure of the student’s unique voice or perspective (Matsuda & Cox). Graduate students and faculty alike are often not aware of such issues, nor the repercussions their focus on grammar and language may have. Writing well academically is a skill to be developed and not a reflection of intelligence (Roozen).

Matsuda and Cox outline three orientations toward understanding differences in multilingual writers’ texts: assimilationist, accommodationist, and separatist. The assimilationist stance reads differences as errors and therefore focuses on helping multilingual writers assimilate to the language of the dominant culture by erasing their differing language patterns.

Accommodationists and separatists both read differences as simply that—differences in language uses. However, the two differ in how they approach supporting multilingual writers in addressing those differences. Accommodationists help multilingual writers identify and enact writing styles and patterns of Standardized Edited American English (SEAE), while still maintaining their own linguistic and cultural identities. Separatists argue that multilingual writers’ language differences should be preserved and that readers should learn to value multilingual texts.

When it comes to approaching a consultation with a multilingual writer, consultants should try to be aware of their own orientations toward multilingual texts, as well as the positionalities of the writer and their audience(s). The assimilationist perspective can often be particularly ingrained in the ways that many advisors across the curriculum approach graduate students’ writing. As a consultant, you may have consultations with multilingual graduate students who have received feedback from their advisor or course instructor that treat differences in their use of English as deficiencies.

In these moments, it is important to get input from the writer themselves on how they wish to address that feedback—that is, “‘how much like a native speaker’ [they want] to sound” (Matsuda & Cox 45). In this way, while consultants must be mindful of the various, often conflicting agendas in writing consultations, at the end of the day, the goals of the writer should be what matter most in a consultation.

During consultations, we try to be mindful of systemic biases while also acknowledging that

addressing grammar can be an important exercise in making the writing center an inclusive space for all graduate students (Cirillo-McCarthy et al.). We have found it helpful to remind non-native speakers that academic writing is a skill that native speakers also struggle with and to point out that sometimes advisors are not well-trained in how to give effective writing feedback.

Consultation strategies: ● Ask the writer what goals they might have for how they would like their writing to “sound” by the end of the consultation. Then, have them identify places in their writing that do not currently achieve those goals and focus the consultation on those areas. ● Help the writer to identify patterns of difference in their own writing that might be perceived as errors by native English speakers. ● If the writer has received feedback about their use of language, have them articulate what they think that feedback means. You might then tell the writer your own interpretation and what suggestions you would make based on that, while also helping them identify strategies they can use to address feedback on their own. ● It can be helpful to discuss with the writer how they approach their mentor with regards to feedback and give them language to ask for what they need: “I still need to edit this draft for concerns like grammar and punctuation, but I was hoping that you could give me feedback on the organization of the paper.” ● Some non-native speakers come into consultations incredibly stressed about grammar and may become frustrated when consultants assert the impossibility of lineediting an entire paper or dissertation. We have found it best to say something like “In this half hour, we can probably only get through a few pages. Let’s pick a section you are most concerned about, read it out loud, and find patterns of error that you can then recognize and correct in other sections.”

Consultants and Writers Must Negotiate Goals Regarding Grammar Early in the Consultation Copy-editing is a common request in consultations, particularly but not exclusively from multilingual writers. In these moments, it is valuable to dig deeper into what brought the writer to the room.

Often an advisor, journal reviewer, or editor has

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Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers • 29 identified grammar issues as a barrier to publication or even graduation. Such high stakes can make it difficult to negotiate other goals for the consultation.

Additionally, the hierarchy between “lower order” and “higher order” concerns in writing may be complicated by expectations for grammatical correctness in graduate-level writing from graduate advisors and programs (Rogers et al.). Ranking the importance of concerns can be particularly tricky for multilingual students since “for many ESL students, grammar may in fact be a higher-order concern” (Bruce 36). This reality explains why some writers may be pushy about proofreading (Bruce). But, as Cirillo-McCarthy et al. argue, refusing to address writers’ grammar-related concerns can perpetuate deficit discourses about multilingual graduate students by suggesting that their writing may be “too deficient for the writing center,” potentially discouraging them from seeking help.

As Bruce discusses, it is important for both consultants and writers to agree on common goals for the consultation, particularly as they pertain to grammar and proofreading. Graduate students may have had different access to formal academic help before graduate school and may be new to consultations on writing (Bruce). Goal-setting is, therefore, especially important for setting expectations for both the writer and the consultant. The first five minutes could be used to explain to students that when working on grammar, we may read aloud to listen for problems with phrasing or syntax, or focus on patterns of error, rather than spend time on line-editing throughout. This process will also give writers a chance to direct the consultant’s attention to areas they are nervous about or that their advisors have criticized, giving them agency in setting goals as well.

Another important aspect of the first five minutes of a consultation is addressing the social niceties of brief introductions, which are vital not only in building comfort and rapport, but also because conversations often veer towards issues beyond the writing itself: how to navigate advisor or reviewer feedback; how to make time for writing in a hectic graduate student life; what it even means to write as an academic. Showing writers that we are peers navigating these or similar issues offers us as resources, not experts. It allows us to give advice to the writer, but also to create new knowledge about writing. We can commiserate over how the intense focus some advisors and reviewers place on grammar can feel punitive, while also illustrating how issues with grammar may co-occur with other writing concerns.

Consultation strategies:

●

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Establish a protocol for yourself for the first five minutes. You might decide what information is most relevant to share and what you want to know about the writer. See Bruce for suggestions.

Try asking if you can address other concerns while also discussing grammar: “I hear your concerns about grammar. Let’s read this out loud together and see if we notice patterns.

Would it be ok if we also talk about other things we notice while we read, like places where the meaning is unclear? Or ways we might improve the organization?”

Develop a repository of handouts on common issues, like article usage or verb tenses, to reference during consultations and give writers to take home.

Take a few moments to reflect on how you work to build rapport in sessions, and how you can successfully co-create consultation goals, so that you can be intentional moving forward.

Navigating Cultural Capital Is an Important Part of Serving First Generation Students Both Casanave (“Literacy Practices”) and Whitcomb discuss the importance of understanding that writing in graduate school is a socialization process in which students must learn how to “do” graduatelevel writing. Being a student is different in every context, with the norms and expectations differing sometimes drastically by discipline. Being a student and a student writer is a performance, with roles, stage directions, and an intended audience. As a graduate student, it is often expected that we should be able to learn these things on our own. But what about the experiences of first-generation graduate students who have a different set of cultural tools with which they approach this new role? How can we best serve them?

One of our consultants described the situation aptly: “As a first-generation graduate student myself, learning how to navigate this new style of writing, and my new identity as a graduate student writer, was complex and took place over the course of many years. While my peers were often able to dive right in, I felt much more timid in my new role and at times lesser for not having the same resources as other writers with more dominant cultural capital. I didn’t know how to ask for help without ‘exposing’ myself for the fraud that I felt I was. I already felt like I wasn’t ‘supposed’ to be in graduate school because no one expected it from

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Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers • 30 me, like I had stumbled my way into being admitted while others had guidance and help.

Acknowledging that I needed help with writing seemed like just one more way I was lacking.”

As Denny and Towle note, “For first-generation and/or working-class students coming to a writing center, who often lack assumed economic, cultural, and social capital for college success, help-seeking behavior represents both risk and reward.” As writing consultants, we have the privilege of working with first-generation graduate students and should be prepared to confront feelings of insecurity not just with writing, but also with seeking help. Perhaps a student has been told by their advisor that they need to work on their writing, but they are not sure where to start or how to ask for further clarification. In these situations, it is important to acknowledge that the student already feels at a disadvantage and that the same things that we may take for granted as more experienced graduate writers may not be intuitive to them. An important part of any writing consultation is guiding the writer to find their voice, confidence, and ability to assert themselves as they grow into their new roles.

Consultation strategies: ● Approach consultations with empathy for the culture shock that many students experience and their ongoing battle with imposter syndrome. Empathy builds rapport and helps lay the foundation for long-term writing success. ● At the beginning of consultations, make it clear that the consultation space is not remedial; it is for students at all skill levels and stages of graduate school. Break down the myth that seeking help indicates a deficiency; instead, show how the consultation room is a space for development. ● Suggest books, articles, or other resources that may provide additional tools for continued development, such as Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day or Casanave’s Before the Dissertation. ● As Bell and Hewerdine note, writing centers may not always be ideal spaces for meeting the intense writing needs of graduate students.

Make sure writers are aware of any additional resources or writing communities that may be available on campus. ● The consultation can also be a space to help students advocate for themselves. For

example, if a student is struggling to understand what is expected of them, you can use the consultation time to help draft an email or develop language to get clarification from a professor or adviser.

Disciplinary Awareness Is Crucial to Effective Coaching Because graduate writing coaches consult across disciplines, our awareness of writing as disciplinespecific is crucial. While many disciplines share the broader academic genres of graduate school, such as literature reviews, research articles, or dissertation chapters, these genres can have very different conventions across disciplines. For example, in the helpful and popular Telling a Research Story: Writing a Literature Review, Feak and Swales discuss general expectations in the literature review genre while frequently distinguishing between expectations in different disciplines. Literature review readers in engineering, for example, may not expect an historical overview, while such moves may be more common in other fields. Writing consultants, therefore, need to develop genre awareness and disciplinary awareness. If a consultant from neuroscience assumes that a research article in geography requires the same style of argumentation, she may struggle to ask useful questions or provide helpful feedback.

Genre and disciplinary awareness play an especially important role for consultants who coach graduate students across the curriculum. We are in a unique position to assist other graduate students in “learning how to learn” in their disciplines, a key practice to aid learners in moving from novice to expert (Elon Statement). For example, the third sub-section below reflects our consultants’ consensus that disciplinary awareness is crucial to effective coaching. Awareness of disciplinary conventions, even across the same genre, helps consultants ask questions that raise writers’ awareness of discourse communities, helping them to “learn how to learn” in their fields.

Consultants also benefit from this knowledge, as they learn to ask the same questions when approaching writing in their own fields.

We find Casanave’s “Learning Literacy Practices in Graduate School” helpful for understanding the rhetorical situation and challenges faced by many graduate student writers. Drawing on her own experience, Casanave (“Literacy Practices”) describes the anxiety-filled endeavor of trying to participate in an academic community of practice as a novice. Most professors have been fully acculturated to their disciplines for many years, and, therefore, may have a

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Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers • 31 difficult time making what they know explicit to their graduate students, such as how to situate one’s work through citation and why it is so important to do so.

Usually, neither professors nor graduate students understand that “learning to write is always ongoing, situational, and involving cultural and ideological immersion” (Scott).

When consultants understand that graduate students are in the process of forging disciplinary identities within new communities, they can normalize some of the struggles graduate students face as they try to participate in the writing practices of these communities. As coaches continue to emphasize the disciplinary nature of graduate writing, they can help guide graduate students in asking useful questions about their own writing and about the texts they read.

Graduate Student Writers Are in the Process of Constructing Disciplinary and Professional Identities Learning to write in graduate school is a difficult adjustment for many new graduate students. While undergraduates typically encounter writing as part of coursework, graduate students are beginning to enter scholarly conversations and contribute new knowledge to their field. Because getting accepted to graduate school in many ways feels like the apex of studenthood, many graduate students and their advisors feel they should already be experts in writing. As Casanave (“Literacy Practices”) describes, graduate students may be afraid to admit that they need help, let alone ask for it. Some attempt to hide their ignorance (Casanave “Literacy Practices”), which may result in a vicious cycle of feeling like they are inadequate or unproductive but unable to ask for help.

During consultations with earlier stage graduate students, it can be helpful to make sure that the writer has a grasp on the larger context in which their writing takes place, referred to as the rhetorical situation (audience, genre, purpose, context).

Like undergraduates, many graduate writers want to prove their knowledge to their advisors or peers; rather than thinking about what a specific piece needs to accomplish within the context of a larger research trajectory, some writers attempt to add all possible relevant information. We see this particularly in consultations regarding literature reviews; some graduate students have trouble focusing specifically on the research relevant to their niche and often paint a broad or unfocused picture. Similarly, with genres like the dissertation, graduate students may have trouble remembering who the actual audience is (their committee) and the function it serves (enabling completion of their graduate degree). Consultants can

help graduate students make the transition to disciplinary writing and gain perspective on the rhetorical situation of graduate school. In addition, it is important for consultants to recognize that academic genres like literature reviews or research articles have discipline-specific expectations.

Part of being a successful graduate writer involves constructing a public, scholarly identity within one’s department and larger disciplinary community. The majority of our consultations involve high-stakes documents, like journal articles for publication, cover letters for jobs, or grant applications to fund research.

We have found it beneficial to ask students how a document may fit into their professional identity or what function it might serve in helping them achieve their career goals. This enables students to see the larger context in which they are writing and is hopefully a motivating factor towards completion. We also think it is important to note that writing can have different meanings for students trying to break into academia vs. those transitioning into industry or other professions. For some, publications will define future career prospects, while for others, publications are simply a requirement for graduation. We try to keep the writer’s particular writing context in mind and use it to inform our guidance during consultation.

Consultation strategies: ● Ask writers questions about aspects of genre, like audience, context, and purpose, and set goals for the consultation based on their responses. ● If a writer is unsure about the conventions of the genre, including discipline-specific expectations, help them locate samples of the genre in journals in their field. ● Consultants can also help writers ask discipline-specific questions about genres and craft language they can use to approach their advisor or seminar professor with questions. ● If writers are having difficulty understanding how to situate their research within the literature, review sections of Feak and Swales with them.

Genre Awareness Is Essential for Graduate Writing; However, Expectations Are Not Explicit and May Serve a “Gatekeeping” Function For graduate students to succeed, it is critical to develop an awareness of genres specific to graduate school, like theses and dissertations, as well as the genres in one’s specific discipline. However, instruction on the features and typifications of these genres is

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Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers • 32 often implicit, with the expectation that graduate students will simply “pick up” knowledge of these genres along the way to becoming professionals. Clark notes that advisors often fail to provide students with explicit instruction or even useful models from which they can draw. When talking about her own experience, one GWF noted that “it was never made clear to me what the expectations were [of the prospectus], what needed to be in it, and how I should write it. Could I figure out how to write that thing on my own or not? If not, then I wasn’t fit to be an academic.”

John Swales calls documents like thesis proposals and dissertations “occluded genres,” or genres that are “typically hidden, ‘out of sight’” from outsiders or apprentices (46). Occluded genres are problematic, particularly in graduate school, because there is a faulty expectation that apprentices will simply osmose knowledge of them by virtue of entering a discourse community. Advisors often have trouble articulating genre typifications, perhaps in part because they were never directly taught those typifications themselves; thus, they have little conception of how to teach students genre-specific conventions and expectations (Clark). With this in mind, graduate writing consultants can play a vital role in making occluded genres more transparent.

Consultation strategies: ● Develop a collection of models for commonly occluded genres in graduate school like the dissertation proposal. The collection should include examples from a variety of disciplines since these genres often have different expectations based on the discourse community. The consultant can then use these models to help point out typifications and genre features to writers during consultations. ● When working with writers on genres they may not be familiar with, have them create a list of things they have heard about the genre.

Sometimes having writers think about what they know can help them get past the initial inertia and imposter syndrome that comes from admitting you don’t know something in graduate school. After the writer lists what they know, the consultant can add their own knowledge to the list as well.

Graduate Writing Consultants Can Provide Useful Writing Help Within and Outside Their Disciplines Graduate students often assume that writing consultants need a working knowledge of their field to

understand their writing and provide useful feedback.

Their skepticism about our ability to help is usually proportional to the distance between our respective fields of study. However, consultants who have developed awareness of how disciplinary expectations influence writing can use their knowledge of the rhetorical situation and common genres of graduate writing to cut through disciplinary boundaries and provide useful feedback to students in fields much different than their own.

The goals of writing in graduate school are similar across the disciplines: get funded, get published, or get signatures to graduate. While these are highly consistent, the particulars of the projects that students bring in are highly variable. Thus, when working with students outside of our disciplines, we spend time at the beginning of the session learning about the audience, purpose, length, structure, and other conventions of the project. Even without an expert understanding of the piece’s content, we can usually assess whether the writing is achieving the goals outlined by the writer. By collaborating with the writer and gathering information at the beginning of the session, consultants can provide a variety of responses without having discipline-specific experience or knowledge. For example, consultants can evaluate the strength of an argument and indicate how to shore up weaknesses, or they can indicate to the writer areas where the writing strays from a given purpose or goal.

Consultants can also identify inappropriate or inconsistent use of tone, language, or grammar, or help writers operationalize feedback from advisors.

It’s also important to be aware of ways your own disciplinary expectations may influence your response to writing from another field, including whether you are giving writers feedback because of something you have assimilated from your discipline or because of something a general reader would need. Your field may require you to use evidence in particular ways or ask particular kinds of questions. However, when you are working with a writer from another field, those conventions may not be appropriate. It can be helpful, in this way, to craft a consultant persona that is both rooted in your discipline and in your own professional pedagogy (giving feedback as a reader, etc.).

When working with writers from your discipline or an adjacent one, you can use your own experience in your academic discourse community to offer more discipline-specific feedback. A consultant at the School of Nursing reflected on her session with another nursing graduate student: “I found myself getting away from a writing-specific focus to a broader look at his research process, using local knowledge of Nursing

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Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers • 33 School faculty and resources [...]. Through the appointment, the overall scope of the project became more clear and he was able to articulate a couple of research questions.” Drawing on your own disciplinary expertise, you may be able to provide more explicit feedback on discipline-specific conventions, including tone, use of jargon, organization or structure, genre features, etc. You might also be able to suggest additional sources or provide models that you have used in your own writing or research. Your disciplinary knowledge may even help you to ask valuable questions about things like methodological approach or use of evidence. However, if you do provide research-specific guidance, be sure to suggest that writers check with their advisers before making significant changes.

Consultation strategies: ● Determine early in the consultation whether the writer is in a field closely related to yours.

If you are working in very different fields, get a solid understanding from the writer of the audience, purpose, and conventions of the piece you are working on, at the beginning of the consultation. ● Defer to the writer as the expert in their discipline and try to help them become more aware of the disciplinary expertise they already have. It can be helpful for both the writer and for your own professionalization to identify the conventions of the writer’s field and to speak in terms of discipline. “In my field of _______, I might write ________ because of our conventions. Does your field have similar or different conventions?” “As a reader with a background in _______, I am noticing ________ and that affects me in these ways…” ● If the writer is unclear on their disciplinary conventions, consider spending time looking up models of discipline-specific genres with the writer. ● Ask the writer if they have received any feedback on the piece from an advisor or peer in their discipline; if so, see if that feedback can help you guide the writer through revision. ● Be transparent about your limitations and direct the consultation toward areas you can help with. ● If you are in similar fields, determine at the beginning of the session whether the writer wants discipline and/or content specific feedback, or wants a more general response.

●

This discussion helps constrain the scope of advice that could be given to a concrete set of priorities.

If you are providing disciplinary feedback, determine whether the writer would benefit from discussing their research focus, methods, and other research-specific issues.

Serving Graduate Writers in Professional Programs Requires Special Attention to Professional Norms and Knowledge Whitcomb describes the situation for graduate students in professional programs, noting that “there is currently very little research that addresses graduate students who do not aspire to academic careers.” In Masters programs such as Nursing, Social Work, and Business, many students return to school from the workforce with already established professional identities in order to expand their professional practice or horizons, not become academics. While doctoral students with academic career goals probably have a sense of how research and writing fit the purpose of their academic program, for those seeking professional degrees, the relationship between academic writing and professional goals can be unclear. For example, one consultant working with professional nurses found that for these students, there is often no obvious link between the writing they do in graduate school and the professional roles they would be qualified to assume with their degree. This discrepancy makes the socialization process of graduate school and graduatelevel writing particularly difficult for both students and faculty, whose backgrounds and goals may differ (Whitcomb).

Writing coaches must recognize that for students in professional programs, a writers’ professional identity and goals have a significant impact on the relationship they have with writing, and by proxy, their expectations for a writing coaching session. One consistent problem for professional students is audience awareness. The audience for professional students is often not conceptualized as a larger scientific community or even a community of likeminded professionals, but instead may be the faculty member(s) in charge of approving their written work.

We have found ourselves frequently acting as disciplinary guides for students, helping them understand the purpose of each part of an assignment, to identify their audience more broadly, and asking them to articulate connections between their graduate work and their professional identity and goals. Framing specific assignments within the larger purposes of the program and discipline creates space for “higherorder” thinking and making sense of faculty feedback

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Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers • 34 while also helping students connect their own sense of themselves as professionals to those purposes.

Consultation strategies: ● Professional students may have little familiarity or fluency with the standard form of scholarly journal articles, such as the IMRD format. It can be helpful to use relevant scholarly paper formats and models to anchor consultations to the research process. ● Empathize with students as they experience the flood of new information and writing conventions that define graduate school. Such empathy can help to disrupt writer’s block and anxiety spirals. ● Offer concrete help on “lower-order” concerns as a way to build trust with students who have such issues at the top of their list.

Once addressed, there is usually plenty of time to discuss “higher-order” issues. ● Identify when issues in a consultation may originate from students navigating their advising relationships. What might seem like an audience problem may actually be a mentoring issue or a need for students to exercise self-advocacy. If possible, direct the student to resources on campus to help in communicating with advisors.

Conclusion

In the process of showing up for other graduate students, relating to their struggles, and helping them grow, we ourselves have grown. We have witnessed benefits to our own writing, emotional awareness, and communication style. We believe it is important to consider the whole person coming in for a consultation—their disciplinary context, professional goals, and individual positionality—in relation to ourselves. The consultation room should not be another location where graduate students are made to feel inadequate. During consultations, we seek to build trust by offering empathy, and a kind, supportive example that empowers writers to build confidence in the knowledge they already have and to be unafraid to seek help in the future. As consultants, we act as ambassadors of scholarly ideals, conventions, and occluded knowledge, and we provide resources writers need to which they may not previously have had access. Because of the unique nature of our work, we are in a position to help students not only with their academic writing but with acculturation to graduate school and to their discourse communities. When we build our own conceptual knowledge of writing, we are

able to mobilize that knowledge in consultations and help build writers’ knowledge, not just about how to work on the document at hand, but how to think about writing in a larger context, and how to pose questions that will continue to help them learn independently.

The existence of this guide speaks to the potential value of reflecting on one’s individual and institutional writing consultation practices. The process of developing our own conceptual guide for graduate writing support has been a valuable learning experience for us as writers, consultants, and graduate students.

We believe that graduate writing consultants have knowledge to offer writing centers based on our disciplines and our tutoring experience, and we hope other writing center directors consider involving their writing consultants in the knowledge production of their centers.

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THE WRITING CENTER’S ROLE IN DISCIPLINARY WRITING DEVELOPMENT: ENHANCING DISCOURSE COMMUNITY KNOWLEDGE THROUGH METACOGNITIVE DIALOGUE Brendan T. McGovern University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign brendan.t.mcgovern@gmail.com Abstract

This research contributes to our knowledge about writers’ acquisition of discourse community knowledge within tutorial sessions. This study examines the dialogue of writing center sessions focused on disciplinary writing by applying the coding schemas of discursive tutoring strategies (Mackiewicz and Thompson) and domains of discourse community knowledge (Beaufort). Drawing on data from coded session transcripts and post-session interviews with eight undergraduate students, this study sought to analyze how the co-occurrence of established tutoring practices and domains of discourse community knowledge contribute to writers’ disciplinary writing development. Trends in the results indicate that the metacognitive dialogue within tutorial sessions co-constructs discourse community knowledge through tutors explaining genre and rhetorical knowledge while writers contribute writing process and subject matter knowledge. Furthermore, the results from student interviews indicate that tutors take on the instructional role that professors and TAs of disciplinary courses cannot take on due to institutional constraints. Finally, the results of this research suggest that writing center practitioners can include existing frameworks of genre theory to situate the writer more clearly within the conventions of their discourse community.

“As we turn our attention to the work of the tutor, we become increasingly aware that writing instruction without a writing center is only a partial program, lacking essential activities students need in order to grow and mature as writers.” (40) — Muriel Harris, “Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors”

Introduction

The writing center plays a salient yet understudied role in students’ disciplinary writing development. Increasingly, composition and writing center scholars have pointed to the role of writing centers within college students’ academic writing development, yet very few studies have examined student development in the context of disciplinary writing. Leading scholars of university writing development (Beaufort; Carroll; Flower; Harris; Sommers and Saltz) have pointed to the interactive nature between the writing center and freshman writing programs, writing-in-the-discipline programs, programs to train teaching assistants and tutors of writing, and writing center pedagogies, all of which begin to sketch a

still-incomplete picture of writing development. This scholarship has identified key elements that contribute to student writing development, such as metacognition and acquisition of discourse community knowledge.

With its emphasis on goal-setting and reflective dialogue among knowledgeable peers, the writing center may play a key role in how students develop metacognitive strategies and knowledge about writing.

As knowledge from the larger field of writing studies has informed the practice of writing center tutors, researchers have become increasingly interested in the role of metacognition in students’ development of writing knowledge. Conceptually, metacognition has long been understood as “thinking about thinking” (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking; Flavell) with the central goal of developing a writer’s awareness beyond the subject matter to the writer's own thinking, choices, and the outcomes of those choices. As a practice, metacognition allows students to “monitor one’s current level of understanding and decide when it is not adequate” (National Research Council, 47) and “reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge” (Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English and National Writing Project, 5). Metacognitive strategies include posing questions, problem-solving, and gaining rhetorical knowledge, terms, and concepts to use in assessing writing tasks (CWPA, NCTE, and NWP; Moore). In the writing center context, tutors use metacognitive strategies to develop a writer’s critical awareness of themselves as a thinker and writer in a variety of contexts (Devet). While a deepened understanding of metacognition has informed writing center practice, few studies have examined the intersection of tutorial metacognitive strategies and a writer’s disciplinary writing development.

Empirical and ethnographic research in the field of writing center studies has increased, yet we know little about the essential role campus writing centers play in the writing development of college students. Since her 1995 “Why Writers Need Tutors,” Muriel Harris and others have argued for a vision of student writing

The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 38 development that includes the writing center, claiming, “A writing center encourages and facilitates writing emphasis in courses in addition to those in an English Department’s composition program,” allowing “writers to gain kinds of knowledge about their writing and about themselves that are not possible in other institutionalized settings” (27). Harris’s arguments and those of others have uniquely situated the space of the writing center as a site of writing development in need of further examination.

Similarly, the role of tutors within the disciplinary writing development of college students is largely unknown. Several studies have examined how tutors support students’ writing within the discipline, finding that tutor expertise increased the session’s overall effectiveness (Dinitz and Harrington; Mackiewicz; Walker). While these studies have added significant insight into the generalist-specialist debate and tutor training, they do not provide an outlook into the broader development of disciplinary writers within writing centers. What is needed, therefore, is a more explicit examination of how these tutoring strategies contribute to students’ understanding of disciplinary writing.

This research aims to examine how the metacognitive tutorial strategies employed by writing center tutors contribute to students’ development of discourse community knowledge and disciplinary writing development. To do so, I bring together two frameworks that have been widely taken up in writing centers and composition studies: Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Kramer Thompson’s discursive tutoring strategies and Anne Beaufort’s conceptual model of writing expertise. In what follows, I will first review scholarship covering factors that contribute to undergraduate disciplinary writing development and the writing center’s role in supporting disciplinary writing development. I will share results from an IRB-approved study that analyzes tutorial observations and student interviews to examine how tutors use discursive strategies to engage writers within domains of discourse community knowledge. Specifically, I argue that discourse community knowledge is co-constructed within tutorial sessions through metacognition in which the tutor explains genre and rhetorical knowledge while the writer contributes writing process and subject matter knowledge. I suggest that writing center tutors can more strategically situate writers within the expectations of their discourse communities. Overall, my results illustrate how writing centers contribute to disciplinary writing development by offering a more robust examination of the ways in which this dialogue

enhance students’ understanding community knowledge.

of

discourse

Review of Literature

Scholars have identified the writing center as an essential campus resource for students’ writing knowledge and skill (Beaufort; Carroll; Sommers), yet we know relatively little about the writing center’s role in disciplinary writing development. In particular, research falls short in articulating the means by which writing center practices contribute to students’ disciplinary writing skills. The following review of literature will first examine existing support structures within students’ disciplinary writing development and frameworks for conceptualizing disciplinary writing.

Second, I will survey the writing center’s role in fostering metacognition and its relationship to disciplinary writing development.

Key Components of Disciplinary Writing Development Few studies have explicitly examined the role of writing centers or tutors in how students develop disciplinary writing knowledge. Longitudinal studies of undergraduate writing development (e.g., Beaufort; Carroll; Sommers and Saltz) have examined major elements within students’ writing development, namely the role of faculty, teaching assistants, and writing intensive curricula. These studies have recommended that university students use the writing center, yet their discussion of writing tutors remains sparse, instead focusing on these other instructional interactions that affect writing development. For instance, while professors and teaching assistants are the primary individuals assigning and evaluating writing, these instructors of writing-intensive disciplinary courses often hold distorted views of student literacy and tend to view writing as “a unitary ability simply applied in a variety of different circumstances” (Carroll 5).

Longitudinal studies have also found that instructors of writing-intensive disciplinary courses focus their attention on the most obvious features of students’ writing including word choice, sentence structure, usage, and punctuation and often assign only one to two writing assignments, which according to Lee Ann Carroll, “mistake a one-time performance constrained by time and circumstance for an abstract quality called writing ability” (5). Carroll makes clear that disciplinary writing classrooms often do not provide students with the necessary feedback or attention students need to develop within their discipline. Ultimately, the findings from these longitudinal studies have aided in understanding the complexities of student writing development; however, they have also raised significant

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The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 39 questions surrounding the role of the tutor and how writing center practices enhance students’ disciplinary writing development in ways that other academic resources cannot.

Secondly, these longitudinal studies have provided frameworks for disciplinary writing instruction. For example, after interviewing students and examining over 600 writing samples, Nancy Sommers and Laura Saltz found that students’ disciplinary knowledge played a critical role in their ability to address an audience within their major. In addition to subject matter, Sommers found that student writers must also be provided with clear frameworks for the expectations of their discipline.

Sommers explains, “We observe that when students do not know that there is a method in one discipline, they are less likely to look for disciplinary conventions elsewhere” (159). Her conclusions suggested more tangible ways for writing instructors to assist students in developing “audience awareness” (159) so that they can better use their subject matter knowledge to address an academic audience in their discipline. However, despite the influence of her study and its implications for writing center administrators and tutors, Sommers provides very few recommendations for writing center practice.

Beaufort’s work offers a useful framework for conceptualizing disciplinary writing development by defining “writing expertise” through overlapping but distinct domains of discourse community knowledge.

After conducting a six-year study of a college writer named Tim from first-year composition into the first two years of his career as an engineer, Beaufort sought to build upon existing research of writing expertise (Bryson et al.; Carter; Smagorinsky and Smith) to create a more inclusive model, capturing the multiple knowledge domains activated during expert writing performances. Broadly, Beaufort defines discourse community as “a social group that communicates at least in part via written texts and shares common goals, values, and writing standards, a specialized vocabulary and specialized genres” (179). College writers must learn the “established norms for genres that may be unique to the community or shared with overlapping communities and roles and tasks for writers [that] are appropriated within this activity system” (19). From the data within her ethnographic study of Tim’s transition from academic to professional writing, Beaufort theorized that successful writing development within a student’s discourse community consists of four overlapping yet distinct domains of knowledge. First, a college writer must develop writing process knowledge, or knowledge of how to get discipline-specific writing tasks accomplished (meta-knowledge of cognitive processes in composing and phasing writing projects). Second, the

students’ major coursework develops disciplinary subject matter knowledge consisting of specific topics, central concepts, and appropriate frames of analysis for documents, which includes critical thinking skills to apply, manipulate, and draw from subject-matter for rhetorical purposes. Third, writers’ texts must exhibit genre knowledge, including an understanding of standard genres used in the discipline and features of those genres: rhetorical aims, appropriate content, structure, and linguistic features. Finally, students must possess rhetorical knowledge: the needs of a specific audience and specific purposes(s) for a single text (148).

Together, these domains capture the multitude of tasks and expectations a student must face if they are to be successful within advanced disciplinary writing.

Beaufort’s research is central to the practice of writing center tutors, as the dialogue of writing center sessions engages students within all four domains of her conceptual model. While Beaufort included some recommendations for writing center practice, she did not examine how students acquire discourse community knowledge within the space of the writing center.

Finally, the role of metacognition is not only necessary to teaching students the domains of discourse community knowledge, but it further provides the greatest insight into how the writing center aids in students’ disciplinary writing development.

Metacognition has become a focal point of writing instruction, and scholars have increasingly considered students’ meta-monitoring of composing processes, rhetorical situations, and genre knowledge in order to promote the positive transfer of learning into new contexts (Gorzelsky et al.; Negretti; Nowacek; Reiff and Bawarshi). Beaufort, in her recommendations for teaching students components of discourse community knowledge, argues that tutors and instructors can integrate a series of high-level questions within instruction in order to increase students’ ability to learn new writing skills and apply existing knowledge appropriately within new writing contexts. Very few studies, however, have examined how metacognitive strategies or domains of discourse community knowledge can aid in writers’ disciplinary writing development. The following section will consider existing scholarship examining how tutor talk and metacognitive strategies aid in students’ understanding of discourse community knowledge.

Tutor Talk and Tutoring Disciplinary Writing Writing center scholarship has increasingly identified how tutor-writer dialogue promotes metacognition and rhetorical awareness. Rebecca Nowacek et al., for example, find that “transfer talk” or

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The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 40 “the talk through which individuals make visible their prior learning” engages writers within a conversation that can facilitate transfer across multiple contexts.

Nowacek et al.’s coding scheme identifies the many ways that writers and tutors make visible their prior learning and apply this understanding to new writing context. Nowacek et al.’s findings not only draw attention to the transfer of learning that routinely occurs in writing center sessions but also suggest that the process is much more collaborative than previously represented.

Among discursive writing center practices, perhaps no other work provides a clearer framework for studying tutorial talk than the work of Mackiewicz and Thompson. Quickly becoming a centerpiece of writing center administration and tutor training, their research examines the effectiveness of three categories of discursive tutoring strategies: instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding. Together, these three categories provide integrative practices that help students move forward in completing tasks and developing expertise. Considered alongside scholarship examining writing development, Mackiewicz and Thompson’s categorization of instructional strategies (telling, suggesting and explaining), cognitive scaffolding strategies (pumping, or asking open- or closed-ended questions; reading aloud; responding as a reader; etc.), and motivational scaffolding strategies (showing concern, praising, reinforcing ownership, etc.) gives substantial tutoring techniques to help students meet challenges writing within their discourse communities.

Mackiewicz and Thompson’s framework captures the metacognitive conversation that takes place in tutorial sessions, as both the tutor and writer gain awareness beyond the subject matter into the writer's own thinking, choices, and the outcomes of those choices.

While many of these discursive tutoring strategies have been presented as having generalized use, writing center scholars have previously debated how tutors can best assist students’ disciplinary writing development.

This conversation has been inherently tied to the debate over whether tutors should be generalists or specialists.

Sue Dinitz and Susanmarie Harrington, for example, find that tutor expertise is related to directness and allows tutors to more fully access all discursive strategies at their disposal. From their data, tutors who held disciplinary expertise led more effective sessions compared to generalist tutors, as specialized tutors were able to identify students’ inaccurate assessments and opinions of the subject matter (93). Other studies, however, have found relatively little difference between the tutors’ expertise and session effectiveness. Kristin Walker for instance, argues that instead of focusing on

the dichotomy between generalist/specialist, writing center staff can focus on genre theory as a broader theoretical framework for tutor training that prepares both generalist and specialist tutors to help in all disciplines. Walker explains that all genres are localized and that the set expectations and academic norms of the disciplines are their own cultures of “socially constructed environments” (35). The effective use of genre theory allows tutors to teach how disciplinary writing presents a “culture of a discipline” that all students become acclimated to through the tutor’s explanations of the conventions of genre and form within tutorial sessions (38). Similarly, Bonnie Devet argues that teaching frameworks such as Michael Carter’s theory of metagenre “demystifies” academic writing for students, “reveals how writings in the academy are not arbitrary and capricious,” and “extrapolates the common ways of thinking behind disciplines.” While Devet’s recommendations provide a plausible framework to tutoring writing in the discipline, Beaufort’s discourse community theory may provide a more comprehensive and replicable framework for tutoring students the conventions of advanced disciplinary writing.

Both composition studies and writing center studies have increasingly alluded to the intersection of metacognitive tutoring strategies and frameworks for conceptualizing disciplinary writing development within the space of the writing center. What is needed, therefore, is a more explicit examination of this intersection. Understanding how tutors use discursive strategies to promote metacognition and enhance students’ understanding of discourse community knowledge builds upon our limited understanding of the writing center’s role in students’ disciplinary writing development.

Methods

This study sought to better understand how students use the writing center to advance their disciplinary writing knowledge. Specifically, I asked: How do writing center tutors use metacognitive dialogue to help students develop discourse community knowledge? How do students describe what they gain through the dialogue with the tutor? To answer my research questions, I observed eight writing center conferences involving undergraduate writers seeking to improve a course paper within their major course of study and held post-session interviews with the writers.

The tutorial sessions occurred within the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Writers Workshop, which conducts nearly 7,600 one-to-one tutorial sessions per year. The Writers Workshop employs about

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The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 41 50 tutors a semester, the majority of whom are graduate students; the tutors are from a range of disciplines.

I utilized the Writers Workshop scheduling interface to identify students who booked appointments for courses within their major. I then invited both the tutor and writer to participate and asked for permission to attend, record, and transcribe their consultations. Of the eight student participants, the majority frequently used the writing center, with only one being a first-time user. I selected students from a wide variety of majors and experience within disciplinary writing (see Table 1).

All of the students who agreed to participate in the study were women, and their self-identified race/ethnicities are representative of demographics of users who visit the campus writing center. Finally, all tutors who participated in this study held at least one semester’s experience tutoring, and during their orientation and biweekly professional development meetings tutors learned instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and metacognitive scaffolding strategies (Mackiewicz and Thompson).

In order to better understand how discourse community knowledge is communicated within tutorial dialogue, I observed each of the eight sessions, which took place via WCOnline and Zoom and lasted 50 minutes on average. At the beginning of each session, I instructed the tutor to treat the consultation like they would any other session and asked the writer to share their text with me. During the sessions, I kept my audio and video off, read the entirety of students’ texts to understand their argument, and noted instances in which the writer and tutor communicated elements of discourse community knowledge. I then took note of the discursive strategies used by the tutor to later use within my student interviews.

After each session concluded, I conducted a 30–35minute interview with each student. My interview script asked writers questions specific to Beaufort’s four domains of discourse community knowledge (subject matter, writing process, genre, and rhetorical situation), how the discursive strategies used by the tutor altered the understanding of their own argument, and what they gained from visiting the writing center for texts within their major. Writer feedback from these questions allowed me to better understand how tutorial dialogue contributes to their development of the four domains of discourse community knowledge. I referenced specific examples of when tutors had used techniques in order to prompt a better understanding of what I was asking.

For example, some of the questions I asked included: •

How did your conversations with [Tutor] make you think about your own writing process, for

•

•

instance brainstorming, editing, revising, rewriting in today’s session?

How did [Tutor] help you think differently about [discourse community]? For instance, in your discussion you talked a lot about other instances and examples from your course even though this was not included in your paper.

How do these other elements of subject matter play into the revisions you made today?

How did [Tutor] help you think differently about how [major concept A] related to [major concept B]?

Both the consultations and student interviews were audio recorded and transcribed through an online transcription software. To analyze the session data, I first developed a three-part coding scheme (see Appendix A) to capture tutors’ and students’ discursive strategies and domains of discourse community knowledge. First, I used the tutor talk schema developed

by Mackiewicz and Thompson in Talk About Writing, which captured the discursive practices tutors used to create metacognition. The second framework included student talk adopted from Nowacek et al.’s “Transfer Talk.” I added the code “student explaining” to this framework in order to identify types of student explanations within elements of discourse community knowledge. The third section captured how students respond to discursive practices within their discourse community by using Beaufort’s discourse community domains. Finally, once all eight sessions were coded, I identified the frequency of co-occurrences for discursive strategies and domains of discourse community knowledge. These included questions, comments, and responses used by the tutor that simultaneously engaged the writer within the domains of discourse community knowledge. A summary of the co-occurrences across the eight sessions can be found in Table 2.

Results

My analysis of writing center sessions and interviews with eight undergraduate student writers revealed three major findings: 1) Among the cooccurrences of discursive tutorial strategies and domains of discourse community knowledge, tutors did the most of explaining genre knowledge. 2) Writers contributed to metacognitive dialogue primarily by explaining elements of subject matter to the tutor. 3) Writers described the writing center as a space for specialized instruction within their discourse community that cannot be found elsewhere on campus.

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The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 42 Tutors’ Explanation of Genre Knowledge Tutors most frequently contributed to students’ knowledge of writing in their disciplines by explaining genre knowledge. This co-occurrence provides the strongest response to the first research question of how do writing center tutors use discursive metacognitive strategies to help students develop discourse community knowledge. Explaining was the most frequently used discursive strategy employed by tutors, with explanations of genre knowledge occurring 71 times, explaining writing process and subject matter knowledge each occurring 34 times, and rhetorical knowledge being explained 28 times across the eight sessions (see Table 2). Tutors’ explanations of academic genre conventions included elements such as form, use of evidence, citation practices, structure, linguistic features, and academic tone. These co-occurrences of explaining genre knowledge frequently followed writers’ explanations of subject matter or requests for writing advice.

While tutor explanations of genre knowledge included a wide range of the conventions and expectations of advanced academic writing, the two most prevalent areas of explaining genre knowledge included purpose and citation integration. For instance, the dialogue within all eight sessions included a discussion of the strength of students’ thesis statements in relation to their draft essays, and several tutors explained the role of the thesis within the text as a whole. For example, within her draft senior economics thesis Writer 3 wrote that she “proposed hypotheses and influencing factors from three aspects.” In response, Tutor 3 engaged the writer within genre knowledge by explaining, “The hypothesis is specific within a research paper based on the data. So, you're taking the data, and your study considers the influencing factors from three aspects: personal, public, and social through the data processing.” After this explanation, the tutor and writer collectively produced a thesis statement that fit the described role, explained the trend within the data the student identified, and was specific, arguable, and defendable within the subject matter.

Aim and form was similarly explained to students whose texts did not match the conventions of MLA/APA/CMS style. After reading the initial pages of Writer 7’s political science paper, Tutor 7 discussed the purpose of using an abstract. Tutor 7 explained, “An abstract is a summary of the whole paper in around 200 words, including what the paper is about, your thesis, your findings and your conclusions. It is what you suggest in around 200 to 250 words.” The instances of explaining structure to students helped them understand the expectations of advanced disciplinary writing

ubiquitous across all discourse communities. In explaining the role of the thesis, the purpose of the abstract and how the paper as a whole is structured, tutors better aligned students’ arguments with the expectations set forth by their professors and explained genre conventions that could be repeated in future writing contexts.

Secondly, citation use and source integration represented a significant portion of the co-occurrences of explaining genre knowledge. In all eight sessions, tutors explained how writers can better integrate the arguments of discipline-specific texts while simultaneously strengthening the papers’ structure and rhetorical aims, and several instances of explaining genre knowledge centered around the correct use of citations.

Tutor 1, for example, explained, “So I saw in the rubric that you're supposed to be using APA, right? Right now, you're not citing any of your quotes. So, in APA you want to introduce the author and the title of the work and then the quote. From then on, if you're going to be referring to the same author you can just refer to them as their last name, and then [parentheses, last name, comma] year the article [was] published.” Following this explanation, the tutor and student worked together to correctly integrate the arguments of psychologists into the writer’s argument concerning poverty in urban African American communities. Explanations of citation use was consistent across all sessions, with every tutor explaining how to correctly format and integrate citations from prior research. Tutor 3, for instance explained, “And then if there is a page number that you want to cite, the page number goes at the end in APA” while Tutor 8 explained, “Okay, in the references list, you still alphabetize them and then just indicate whichever one comes first alphabetically by title.”

Together, citation use presented a significant portion of tutors’ explanation of genre knowledge, expanding students’ understanding of the conventions of MLA, APA and CMS citations within their own writing.

Writers’ Explanation of Subject Matter Knowledge Second, I found that writers contributed to the metacognitive conversation primarily by explaining subject matter knowledge to the tutor. In responding to the discursive strategies used by tutors, especially pumping (e.g., “What’s another possibility here?”), which prod and help students to think, and reader responses, the eight writers explained their subject matter knowledge a total of 54 times over eight sessions, with explaining writing process knowledge occurring 30 times, genre knowledge 14 times, and rhetorical knowledge only three times. In responding to tutors’ use of pumping, writers explained subject-specific

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The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 43 terminology to the tutor and clarified the logical presentation of their argument.

During their conversations, tutors asked students to explain key terms that were unfamiliar to them. For instance, Tutor 3 asked questions in order to follow the student’s review of literature. In explaining how an Hindex is calculated in macroeconomics, Writer 3 explained, “It is one aspect of the theory that income is not related to happiness. So, the second [graph] is showing that relative income is related to happiness and plays a very important role in deciding people's overall happiness. It's kind of like three different series.”

Writers’ explanations of key concepts were necessary to the tutors’ comprehension of their texts, and oral explanations of the subject matter allowed students to explain how discipline-specific concepts relate to the larger argument within their paper.

Additionally, tutors’ use of pumping and reader responses allowed students to clarify the logical presentation of their arguments. For instance, Writer 8 brought to the session a comparative political science paper in which she argued in favor of a parliamentary system of government over a semi-presidential one. In responding to the questions of the tutor, Writer 8 explained that within a parliamentary system “the majority of representatives will pick the executive, and that's a good thing because then the majority opinion is consistently making the decisions, if that makes sense.

Like, they control like the top of the government.”

Having the tutor read the paper aloud and ask clarifying questions allowed Writer 8 to independently clarify her position to her audience. Explaining her reasoning to the tutor allowed Writer 8 to see connections between course concepts she did not see previously. Similarly, as Writer 3 explained in her interview, “I use different economical series and [Tutor] give me ideas about how to integrate them and elaborate on their difference and similarities. Because I just used examples but did not make connections, but really the idea of how to make them big being connected.” Often, these verbal explanations of subject matter allowed students to make changes to their texts independently, and students explained that having the ability to explain topics within their discipline to a new audience significantly helped in clarifying their own arguments.

The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development During their interviews, students discussed a multitude of ways the writing center aids their disciplinary writing development alongside classroom instruction. While writers described a number of benefits, three major themes arose in their discussions: 1) Institutionally, the writing center offers a space for

specialized instruction within discourse community knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere on campus.

2) Writers’ metacognitive conversations with tutors resolved cognitive dissonance in the moment and gave them replicable strategies to use in similar writing contexts. 3) Students left the sessions feeling that the changes had strengthened the rhetorical appeal of their argument.

First, several students described that they sought out the writing center because it offers specialized instruction within discourse community knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere on campus. Recognizing the constraints placed upon professors and teaching assistants of large lectures, Writer 8 described how her conversations with writing tutors aids in her disciplinary writing development. She explained, “I think a lot of time professors, at least for political science, don't necessarily give you feedback on your writing. You know, they are like, ‘okay, yeah, you made a direct comparison; you used an example; I could read it; it wasn't a total mess.’ It's very basic. So, I think like coming to the writing center and having somebody else one-on-one, ask, ‘Okay, what do you want to focus on?’

‘Let's go through it.’ ‘Let's read through the whole thing if that's what you want,’ and taking it step by step with you is like something that you don't necessarily get in class.” Writer 8 explained that while rhetorical and genre knowledge is expected within her course papers, neither her professors nor teaching assistants are able to provide the form of feedback or assistance that the writing center offers. She explains, the “TA is going to not really want to go through and talk about the mechanics of your argument. They're more there for just content. So, I think, you know, you're not really getting this type of indepth analysis of your writing really anywhere else on campus.” Several other students had echoed this same thought, noting that they frequently bring course papers to the writing center for this very reason.

Second, several students described the ways in which the metacognitive conversations with tutors resolved cognitive dissonance in the moment and gave them replicable strategies to use in similar writing contexts. By using discursive tutoring strategies that engaged writers in dialogue and reflection, tutors deepened writers’ understanding of the domains of discourse community knowledge. In explaining the aims of their paper and their major writing concerns, students gained a much clearer sense of their own writing process for future writing contexts. Writer 7, for example, explained that her writing tutors “ask critical questions to help clear [her] own head.” She further explained, “Usually, before I was writing my paper, my brain inside my head is a huge mess. I don't even have a clear idea

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The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 44 what exactly I want to write about. I bring a very general idea to the [writing center], like making this huge topic and we will help you to narrow down to more nitty gritty things of the topic, so that I will be able to just narrow down this huge general idea to something more specific that I can make an argument in my own writing.” The writer cited the tutors’ use of pumping such as “how do you feel about this paragraph” as a strategy she found helpful and had independently integrated into her own revision process for similar assignments.

Finally, all eight students described heightened awareness of rhetorical knowledge through a deeper understanding of audience, purpose, and genre, although these terms were not always invoked within tutorial sessions. Several students explained that the tutor presented the first audience that would critically evaluate the message of their writing. Writer 4 explained, “the session today strengthened my rhetorical appeals even by changing simple things such as sentence structure and how I was talking about transitioning from the information I'm providing and the information that I'm getting from the sources. So, I think that definitely strengthened the rhetorical appeal of my claim and the subject matter overall.” The response from writers that tutors had strengthened the rhetorical appeal of their text is consistent with the coding data for rhetorical knowledge. Writer explanation of rhetorical knowledge is largely absent (only 3 instances), yet tutors explained rhetorical knowledge to writers a total of 28 times.

Implications This study attempted to identify how the metacognitive dialogue between a writing tutor and writer develops the writer’s discourse community knowledge. My analysis of the tutorial sessions and writer interviews revealed three major trends. The first was that between discursive strategies and domains of discourse community knowledge, tutors did the most of explaining components of genre knowledge to the writer. The second was that writers contributed to the metacognitive conversation primarily by explaining subject-matter knowledge in relation to their argument.

The third was that writers identified the writing center as an important complement to classroom instruction because they gained replicable strategies, resolved cognitive dissonance, and strengthened their rhetorical knowledge. In the following, I offer implications from these results. Conceptually, students’ interviews suggest that the writing center holds a much larger role within their disciplinary writing development than composition scholars have previously thought. Further, the observed co-occurrences suggest that writing center tutors already engage writers within the overlapping domains of

discourse community knowledge; however, I will demonstrate more specifically how these domains of knowledge are communicated and constructed through discursive metacognitive practices. Finally, I offer practical recommendations for tutors to build upon existing frameworks to more clearly situate the writer within the conventions of their discourse community.

First, participants’ interviews suggest that writing tutors play a larger role in some students’ disciplinary writing development than composition scholars have traditionally thought. Several longitudinal studies suggest that students may use campus writing centers to aid in their disciplinary writing development (Beaufort; Sommers and Saltz); however, the participants in this study explain that one-to-one tutor interaction was a necessary component of their university disciplinary writing development. Unlike other studies of writing development that recruited students from composition classrooms, I was able to capture a different perspective by recruiting students who have used the services offered by the writing center. In recruiting writing center users directly, I was able to examine the impact that writing center sessions currently have on students’ writing development. Although I selected eight students who visited the writing center with different frequencies, seven of the eight undergraduate students regularly returned to the writing center to improve texts within their major. Writer 7, for instance, had visited the writing center for each paper of first-year composition and her introductory major courses. In her interview, she explained that her visit to the writing center was one of the final steps in her own disciplinary writing process.

“They ask me questions to look into a concept or idea more in depth,” she explains, “So they [writing consultants] are my test audience. If I can convince them successfully, I will be able to convince other audiences.” For Writer 7, the outcome of the “question asking,” or discursive metacognitive strategies, is a heightened sense of Sommers’s “audience awareness,” rhetorical knowledge that traditionally has been examined within the classroom. This response was echoed among other students who frequently visited the writing center and holds interesting implications for further research. Scholarship has focused on the role that assignments, curricula, and teaching practices play in student writing development, but has less often looked at out-of-classroom feedback or when, where, and why students receive feedback. The explanation from seven of the eight writers that visiting the writing center to review a major course paper before submission was a final step in their writing process raises further questions surrounding the institutional “place” of writing centers, highlighting Harris’s claim that writing

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The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 45 centers are needed for the growth and maturity of college writers.

Second, the data from this study suggests that domains of discourse community knowledge are activated through tutorial dialogue; however, writers and tutors did not discuss each domain equally. One of the major findings from the data is that tutors contributed the most of genre knowledge while writers contributed subject matter knowledge to the tutorial conversation.

Yet, in looking at all the co-occurrences collectively, it is clear that tutors provided through instructional and cognitive scaffolding strategies (telling, suggesting, explaining, and pumping) domains of discourse community knowledge that writers did not provide.

Writers frequently engaged in writing process and subject matter knowledge but engaged very little in rhetorical knowledge or genre knowledge. In turn, tutors frequently engaged in explanations of genre knowledge and described rhetorical knowledge through a number of discursive strategies. This relationship between knowledge domains suggests that the students’ heighted discourse community knowledge is not simply taught directly by a tutor but rather is co-constructed within the session dialogue. Like Walker and Devet suggest, using the domains of discourse community knowledge as an introduction of genre theory proved effective; however, the data suggest that students develop disciplinary writing knowledge through collaboration and co-construction, rather than the direct instruction described by these researchers.

The results of this study further confirm Walker’s argument that writing tutors can employ a conceptual framework of “culture(s) of a discipline” in order to mediate the debate between generalist or specialist tutoring (38). Explicit instruction of the domains of discourse community knowledge can be used as the “broader theoretical framework” Walker suggests for writing center tutors (34). While two students (Writer 7 and 8) reported that tutor expertise within their discipline did lead to the more direct and in-depth instruction that Dinitz and Harrington identify, all students reported that they were satisfied with the instruction they received from their tutors. Using Beaufort’s model alongside discursive strategies allows tutors to effectively teach students the “culture of [their] discipline” while also focusing on the more sentencelevel mechanics of their writing. Beaufort’s model accounts for linguistic and mechanical elements of students’ writing not explicitly captured within other models of genre theory, and this allows for more specialized instruction at both the global and local level.

Finally, for tutorial practice, the findings of this study underscores Beaufort’s recommendation that

discourse community knowledge be taught and tutored to students through metacognitive strategies. The role of the tutor is to create a space for the writer to engage in practices of metacognition that work through their writing needs. Integrating more direct practices that focus on the balance of discourse community knowledge between a writer and tutor will aid in the “bridging” or “mediating process of abstraction and connection making” between students’ expressed intentions and their execution within writing (Perkins and Salomon 29). As writing studies continue to develop tutoring practices that support metacognitive conversation and frameworks, like that of Mackiewicz and Thompson’s, it is critical that researchers within writing center studies take a step back to consider how these refined practices aid writers in the larger developmental trajectory of college writing. For instance, writing tutors can integrate several of Beaufort’s recommended practices for teaching the concept of discourse community. At the beginning of discipline-specific sessions (course papers, capstones, senior theses) tutors can provide a brief definition of discourse communities and have students speculate on different features using the definition as a heuristic.

Further, tutors can ask more general questions at the end of sessions to promote students’ mindful abstraction of knowledge. Questions might include the ones posed by Beaufort in her recommendation for writing instructors to have students keep a process journal: • • •

What do you want to remember to apply to the next writing project or situation?

How did this assignment add to your understanding of the concepts of discourse community?

Which knowledge domain did you struggle with the most in this writing assignment: discourse community knowledge? Subject matter knowledge? Genre knowledge?

Rhetorical knowledge? Writing process knowledge? What could you do better in the next project in one of these knowledge domains? (Beaufort 183)

Through metacognitive reflection, tutors can use these end-of-session questions to promote high road transfer through the elements of discourse community knowledge. Finally, tutors can use the understanding that they will often engage much more within genre knowledge and rhetorical knowledge and prompt students to think about how they can apply their

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The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 46 renewed understanding of these domains into future disciplinary writing contexts.

Conclusions

The results of this study demonstrate how writing tutors already engage writers within domains of discourse community knowledge. In tracing the cooccurrences of domains of discourse community knowledge and discursive tutoring strategies employed by tutors, this study sought to provide a more robust examination of how writing tutors help to develop students’ disciplinary writing ability.

This study was affected by limitations. COVID-19 made recruiting participants online especially challenging, affecting both the research timeline and sample size. The data was collected over a two-semester period and is therefore unable to fully capture the great variety of discourse communities on campus. In order to confirm that these suggested approaches would be beneficial for all students, a larger participant pool from a great variety of disciplines is needed, perhaps using a longitudinal design.

The trends revealed in my interviews and session data suggest that more writing center research should examine the intersection between tutoring strategies and frameworks for conceptualizing disciplinary writing development. In working to integrate more practices that student participants found helpful, this study identified a need for more metacognitive practices and tutorial techniques that allow students to practice mindful abstraction of knowledge. The explanation from student participants that visiting the writing center was a central part of their writing process for disciplinespecific texts calls for a closer examination of the role of the writing center within the larger arc of students’ disciplinary writing development. Understanding the relationship between discourse community knowledge and metacognitive tutoring strategies will allow for tutors to better to “access the full range of tutoring strategies … at their disposal” (Dinitz and Harrington 93) and offer a clearer conceptualizing of the complexity of disciplinary writing development.

Works Cited Beaufort, Anne. College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction. U P of Colorado, 2007.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cgnk0.

Bransford, John D., Anne L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, editors. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning and Committee on Learning

Research and Educational Practice, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council. Washington, D.C.: National Academy P, 2000, DOI 10.17226/9853.

Bryson, Mary, et al. “Going Beyond the Problem as Given: Problem Solving in Expert and Novice Writers.” In Complex Problem Solving: Principles and Mechanisms, edited

by Robert J. Sternberg and Peter A. Frensch, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991, pp. 61–84.

Carroll, Lee Ann. Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers. Southern Illinois UP, 2002. WAC, https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/carroll/roles.p df.

Carter, Michael. “The Idea of Expertise: An Exploration of Cognitive and Social Dimensions of Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 41, no. 3, 1990, pp.

265–286. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/357655.

Devet, Bonnie. “Using Metagenre and Ecocomposition to Train Writing Center Tutors for Writing in the Disciplines.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, 2014, pp., 28-34. http://www.praxisuwc.com/devett-112.

Dinitz, Sue, and Susanmarie Harrington. “The Role of Disciplinary Expertise in Shaping Writing Tutorials.”

The Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no. 2, 2014, pp. 73– 98. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43443372.

Flavell, John. “Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring: A New Area of Cognitive–Developmental Inquiry.”

American Psychologist, vol. 34, no. 10, 1979, pp. 906–911.

DOI:10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906.

Flower, Linda. “Cognition, Context, and Theory Building.”

College Composition and Communication, vol. 40, no. 3, 1989, pp. 282–311. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/357775.

Gorzelsky, Gwen, et al. “Cultivating Constructive Metacognition: A New Taxonomy for Writing Studies.” Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer, edited by Chris M. Anson and Jessie L. Moore, WAC Clearinghouse, 2016, pp. 215-246, https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/ansonmoore/c hapter8.pdf. Accessed 21 June 2021.

Harris, Muriel. “Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors.” College English, vol. 57, no. 1, 1995, pp.

27–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/378348.

Mackiewicz, Jo. “The Effects of Tutor Expertise in Engineering Writing: A Linguistic Analysis of Writing Tutors’ Comments.” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 316-328, 2004, DOI: 10.1109/TPC.2004.840485.

Mackiewicz, Jo, and Isabelle Thompson. “Instruction, Cognitive Scaffolding, and Motivational Scaffolding in Writing Center Tutoring.” Composition Studies, vol. 42,

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The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 47 no. 1, 2014, pp. 54–78. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/compstud.42.1.0054.

Mackiewicz, Jo, and Isabelle Kramer Thompson. Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors. Routledge, 2015.

Negretti, Raffaella. “Metacognition in Student Academic Writing A Longitudinal Study of Metacognitive awareness and Its Relation to Task Perception, SelfRegulation, and Evaluation of Performance.” Written Communication, vol. 29, no. 2, 2012, pp. 142-179.

10.1177/0741088312438529.

Nowacek, Rebecca., Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U P, 2011.

Nowacek, Rebecca et al., "“Transfer Talk” in Talk about Writing in Progress: Two Propositions about Transfer of Learning." Composition Forum, vol. 42, 2019. https://compositionforum.com/issue/42/transfertalk.php.

Perkins, David N., and Salomon, Gavriel. “Teaching for Transfer.” Educational Leadership, vol. 46. no, 1, 1988, pp. 22-32. ASCD, http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el _198809_perkins.pdf.

Reiff, Mary Jo, and Anis Bawarshi. “Tracing Discursive Resources: How Students Use Prior Genre Knowledge to Negotiate New Writing Contexts in First-Year Composition.” Written Communication, vol. 28, no. 3, 2011, pp. 312–337. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088311410183 Smagorinsky, Peter, and Michael W. Smith. “The Nature of Knowledge in Composition and Literary Understanding: The Question of Specificity.” Review of Educational Research, vol. 62, no. 3, 1992, pp. 279–305. doi.org/10.3102/00346543062003279 Sommers, Nancy. “The Call of Research: A Longitudinal View of Writing Development.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 60, no. 1, 2008, pp. 152– 164. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20457050.

Sommers, Nancy, and Laura Saltz. “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 56, no. 1, 2004, pp. 124–149.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4140684.

Walker, Kristin. “The Debate over Generalist and Specialist Tutors: Genre Theory’s Contribution.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, 1998, pp. 27-46. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43442046.

Walker, Kristin. “Using Genre Theory to Teach Students Engineering Lab Report Writing: A Collaborative Approach.” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 12–19. DOI: 10.1109/47.749363 Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 2 (2022) www.praxisuwc.com

The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 48 Table 1 Participant Demographics Writer: Gender

#1

#2

Female

Female

Race/Ethnicity Black

#3 Female

Hispanic

Asian American Freshman Senior

#4

#5

#6

#8

Female

Female

Female

Female

Female

Asian American Sophomore

Black

Chinese

Chinese

White

Senior

Sophomore

Freshman Sophomore

Communications Political Science

Year

Senior

Major/ Discourse Community User Frequency

Psychology Social Work

Economics

Kinesiology

Health

Weekly

Major assignments

Major assignments

Weekly Major assignments

First time

#7

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Weekly

Political Science Major assignments

The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 49 Table 2 Aggregated Co-Occurrence of Tutor Talk and Discourse Community Knowledge Writing Process Subject Matter Rhetorical TUTOR TALK Knowledge Knowledge Knowledge Genre Knowledge Telling

20

12

28

28

Suggesting

17

14

11

19

Explaining

34

34

28

71

Pumping

21

30

8

18

Responding as a reader Prompting, hinting, demonstrating

8

3

8

6

2

4

0

1

Showing concern

1

0

0

0

Praising Reinforcing ownership and control

8

2

8

9

0 Writing Process Knowledge

1 Subject Matter Knowledge

1 Rhetorical Knowledge

0 Genre Knowledge

1 30

4 54

0 3

5 14

WRITER TALK Course context Explanation

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The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development • 50 Appendix Dialogue Coding Scheme 1. Codes for Tutor Talk

2. Codes for Writer Talk

Telling Suggesting Explaining Pumping

Requesting for writing advice Requesting evaluation of writing Establishing tutor expertise Requesting content expertise

Reading aloud Responding as a reader Referring to a previous topic

Course context Explanation/elaboration Statement of Emotion (class or writing)

3. Discourse Community Knowledge Writing Process Knowledge Subject Matter Knowledge Rhetorical Knowledge Genre Knowledge

Forcing a choice Prompting, hinting, demonstrating Showing concern Praising Reinforcing ownership and control Being optimistic or using humor Showing empathy or sympathy

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 2 (2022)

WHOSE SPACE IS IT, REALLY? DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS FOR WRITING CENTER SPACES Rachel Azima University of Nebraska-Lincoln razima2@unl.edu Abstract

While space was once a central topic in Writing Center Studies, conversations around physical space have quieted somewhat in recent years, particularly after Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s critique of the idea of writing centers as “cozy homes” in Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. But as empirical work in allied fields such as Writing Studio Studies and Library Studies has shown, physical spaces do affect both student learning and instructor pedagogy.

This article discusses findings from a study focused on a writing center renovation that sought to create an “invitational,” “zoned” space (Purkey, Inman). This IRB-approved mixed-methods study employed surveys and interviews conducted before and after renovations to examine what difference space changes made to how students and consultants felt about and worked in the space.

Results suggest space matters differently to different stakeholders, and writing center professionals should continue to question received knowledge about “ideal” space. Based on these findings, I offer data-supported guiding principles for writing center leaders looking to create, renovate, or make the most of current writing center spaces.

Introduction As I complete this in my “home office” in summer 2021 (read: from a couch in my basement), it feels like a strange time to reflect on writing center space. Our writing center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) sat vacant over the 2020-21 academic year.

Every consultation took place online.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, conversations about physical writing center spaces appeared to have lost some currency. Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s questioning of the “grand narrative” of writing centers as “cozy homes” in Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers marked the end of an era of relative consensus on space. Much-needed scholarship on online modes of delivery (see, for example, the scholarship collected on the Online Writing Centers Association website) seemed to take the place of a focus on physical space. Ever-shrinking writing center budgets have likely played a part: how many writing center leaders can currently afford to make significant changes to their center spaces? And at this historical moment when serious questions around power, inequity, and social justice have been front-of-mind for many, the intricacies of writing center space design may seem less pressing.

But spaces are not, in fact, neutral, and none are ever exempt from questions of power: who wields it in

that space, how it is negotiated, the messages it sends about who belongs and who may find it a “cozy home,” and so on. And in this pandemic time when many of us have missed the camaraderie of face-to-face centers, we have been further reminded that physical spaces1 do, in fact, matter. The study I discuss explores how it matters and to whom, using the 2015-16 renovations of UNL’s Writing Center as a lens. Before beginning the renovation process, I attended Roberta Kjesrud’s 2015 IWCA Collaborative workshop on writing center space, which inspired me not only to proceed in as informed a way as possible, but also to study what measurable differences renovations actually made for students and consultants.2 After attending the workshop, I quickly designed an IRB-approved mixed-methods study incorporating surveys and interviews with consultants and students conducted before and after renovation. I wanted to learn: • Do changes in writing center space shape how consultants and students teach and learn within that space?

• Are there measurable differences in how consultants and students feel about and behave in differently organized writing center spaces?

My findings may reassure those unable to make significant changes: the tl;dr of my analysis is that space both matters and doesn’t, and it matters quite differently to students and staff. While the data I discuss are 5+ years old, I do not make claims for the latest-and-greatest in technology. Rather, I share what worked and didn’t on practical and conceptual levels, focusing on considerations that remain relatively constant over time for standalone writing centers. I offer data-supported guiding principles writing centers leaders can use when contemplating changes, large or small, to their spaces. Overall, I argue for letting go of received notions of what constitutes “ideal” writing center spaces in favor of listening with genuinely open minds to what consultants and (especially) students need.

Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 52

Space in Writing Center Studies and Beyond Practical and theoretical discussions of writing center space were once ubiquitous in the literature but have ebbed somewhat in recent years. Joyce Kinkead and Jeanette Harris’s foundational Writing Centers in Context: Twelve Case Studies, published in 1993, contained physical descriptions of each center, offering a primer for directors setting up new spaces.

Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, writing center scholarship tended to focus on how writing center spaces differed from others on campus, particularly via their “hominess” (Bishop; Sunstein; Hadfield et al.). In 2005, however, Grutsch McKinney’s “Leaving Home Sweet Home” called into question these truisms on writing centers as “home” or homey—what she would later frame as the “cozy homes” grand narrative in Peripheral Visions. Still, in their 2012 look back at scholarship to that point on writing center space, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran and Amin Emika note that, after Grutsch McKinney’s article, “the community appears to be only slightly more attentive to the complexities of space.” Like Grutsch McKinney, Melissa Nicolas, and others, Singh-Corcoran and Emika invoke Nedra Reynolds on the importance of place in the teaching of writing, and they consider writing centers’ relationship to Edward Soja’s “thirdspace,” which meshes the concrete aspects of space with their “imagined geographies,” as well as Melvin Webber and Marc Augé’s concept of the “nonplace” (I return to their discussion of the latter in due course). Like Grutsch McKinney in particular, Singh-Corcoran and Emika urge us to get beyond our own lenses as writing center insiders, arguing that “seeing the writing center through the eyes of a passerby adds new layers of dimension to our conceptions of what is real and what is possible within the center.”

While some scholarship contemporaneous with Peripheral Visions continued to explore writing center spaces in the context of postmodern geography (Burns) and articulate considerations for new, groundbreaking spaces and renovations of old ones with multimodality in mind (Carpenter et al.; Lee et al.), discussions of space have been largely limited to the occasional article and blog post for much of the last eight years (De Herder; Gardiner). Recently, however, Alicia Brazeau and Tessa Hall have connected conversations about space to ideas of museum creation, and Lindsay Sabatino and Maggie Herb shared insights from a study of writing centers located in shared spaces (“Turf Wars”). Kjesrud’s recentlypublished chapter, “Placemaking through Learner-

based Design,” reinvigorates the conversation in particularly significant ways, as she argues for transforming how we talk about and design our spaces.

In particular, she underlines the need for creating equitable and recursive design processes that foreground student learning above aesthetic concerns.

Readers wishing to know more about how discussions of space and learning have developed in Writing Studio Studies and Library Studies should review Kjesrud’s work; I will only touch on highlights from those associated fields here. The early 2010s saw a push for empirical research on connections between space and learning; the Journal of Learning Spaces, founded in 2011, houses a growing number of such studies (and featured Nova Southeastern University’s Write from the Start Writing and Communication Center in 2019—as a “spotlight,” however, not as the subject of a study). In several empirical studies of active learning classrooms, D. Christopher Brooks found that space can, in fact, enhance student learning and influence instructor pedagogy. Broadly speaking, the concept and practices of the “studio,” in which artists, architects, and other practitioners engage actively in their creative work, often take center stage in the study of space and learning (e.g., Taylor, Crowther, Marshalsey). Given the overlap between writing center pedagogy and studio pedagogy more broadly—many writing centers frame themselves as “writing studios,” after all—ongoing and increasingly empirical studies of studio spaces offer useful information for writing center professionals looking to learn how design choices can foster student engagement.

Furthermore, not only are writing centers often housed within libraries (Sabatino and Herb), but they share affinities as non-classroom learning spaces. A turn toward empirical research has also emerged in Library Studies (e.g., Applegate; Kim, Bosch, and Lee).

Yet, generally speaking, student usage of library space tends to be less structured than their use of writing center spaces, unless the center follows the Western Washington model of a wall-less, boundary-less center (Kjesrud). And as writing center scholars have argued for decades, writing centers are not classrooms— though with the advent of active learning classrooms specifically designed to have a café feel, that gap may be narrower than ever (Morrone et al.). And while centers may take theoretical and practical models for space design and pedagogy from studios, student practices in art, design, or architecture studios often do not correspond directly to the largely textual, usually one-to-one work that remains central in many writing centers. There is ample room, then, for empirical

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 53 studies designed to explore the relationship between space and the work that goes on specifically in writing centers. What I discuss below represents one such investigation.

What We Did and Why

Before going into study particulars, however, I will briefly describe the renovation process, resulting changes, and a few theoretical foundations for our choices. While I strove to ground our renovation plans in space design research, the process also necessarily involved improvisation, in true writing center fashion.

In Spring 2015, the graduate student Assistant Director and I collected informal feedback during a staff meeting about what consultants wanted/needed. Better tables (we had mystifying trapezoidal ones), comfortable and moveable furniture (the chairs were huge, difficult to move, and the arms prevented us from pushing them in), a dedicated space for staff, and outlets to plug in laptops were all priorities. Formal data collection during the study period uncovered similar desires for a more usable, easier to understand, and quieter space.

After gathering information from staff and visitors about what they would like to see from the space, I turned to the literature to help guide my decisionmaking process. My vision for the space was heavily informed by James A. Inman’s “zoning approach” for multiliteracy centers, in which anticipated uses of space guide the design. Inman argues against purely fluid spaces with open-ended uses in favor of “zones”: dedicated spaces for particular uses that exist in relation to one another. Although we did not and still do not explicitly cast ourselves as a multiliteracy center, we wanted to build in enough flexibility for future consulting needs, be they in person or virtual.

Following Kjesrud, I was also influenced by educational theorist William Purkey’s notion of “Invitational Education,” in which space plays a key part: “The physical environment of the school offers an excellent starting point for moving from theory into practice, because places are so visible” (7). I sought to create a space that would be “intentionally inviting”— that is, one that would not only avoid disinviting signals, but would send inviting ones with intention rather than as happenstance (Purkey calls the latter “unintentionally inviting”). Many of my choices were also guided by a handout from Bradley Hughes, particularly his recommendations for “A very welcoming entrance, with lots of glass on the outside which allows students and faculty to see and sample what’s going on and reassures them before they enter,” a café-like feel, and a reception desk “that isn’t too

high or forbidding looking, not the command center for the starship enterprise” (1). This advice seemed likely to ensure the space felt collaborative and studentcentered.

Arguably, who makes these decisions and how is as important as the decisions themselves. Kjesrud incisively points to the need to build equitable, decolonial principles into design practices. We were fortunate that the primary decision makers in our own renovation happened to be a person of color (me) and a person with a disability (Nicole Green, then the Assistant Director, who is blind), providing some diversity of perspective even in our small team of two.

This, however, was happenstance, and a genuinely inclusive approach can’t be accomplished by just two individuals who are both writing center insiders. Still, that we embodied more than one form of difference undoubtedly helped us improve the space design, not only in the writing center, but throughout the first floor, which was also being renovated. As Inman points out, accessibility is vital to keep in mind when designing zoned multiliteracy spaces; while the architecture/design firm was prepared to follow ADA requirements, Nicole offered key guidance on choices that went beyond mere compliance. For instance, she recommended altering the tile pattern near the walls to make the main corridor easier for visual impaired members of the university community to navigate.

Nicole’s invaluable feedback thus improved spaces both within and beyond the center, powerfully illustrating the necessity of inclusive renovation teams.

The iterative nature of the process ensured we were able to incorporate recommendations such as Nicole’s as we worked toward a design that reflected our vision. When I initially began meeting with the architects/interior designers, they already had a preliminary plan drawn up. Unsurprisingly, I had to spend significant time educating these professionals about what we actually do in writing centers and why: as one example, I had to talk the designer out of parking multiple consultant/writer pairs at each table separated by dividers, a scheme they had devised in an effort to maximize efficiency. Throughout the summer, the architects/designers would present possible plans for the Writing Center and the rest of the first floor; we’d discuss how to improve them to better serve our actual (rather than imagined) needs; they would revise and bring updated plans to the next meeting. This process continued for several months. The extended nature of the design process thus gave us opportunities to reflect deeply about what needed to happen in each space being renovated and ensure the design would meet those needs.

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 54 Once we finally settled on a design, actual renovations could begin. Throughout 2015-16, while renovations were happening, our center relocated to the main university library. By Fall 2016, we had a new space with four round tables for consultations; a longer table with computers and outlets; a seating area for reading or informal consultations; a low reception desk with storage cabinets behind; a centrally located waiting area with a writable table; a workspace with computers and stools for post-session notes; a separate staff room with exterior and interior windows; and a smaller enclosed room for video chat consultations (Figs. 1 and 2). The consulting chairs had flexible backs, some with arms, some armless, to accommodate consultants of various sizes. Each consulting table was placed near a window and by an outlet, so laptops could be plugged in. While a center’s location on campus is key (Nicolas), that is beyond the scope of the present study. I will, however, note that we moved from one end of the English building to the other, placing us a stone’s throw from the main library’s newly renovated Learning Commons, a popular informal study space.

I cannot pretend to be unbiased, but I find our space both pleasant and welcoming. But did these changes actually affect what happens in the space or how consultants and writers feel about their time there?

Methods To answer these questions, I employed surveys and semi-structured interviews to compare student and consultant perceptions of the space before and after renovation.3 In Spring 2015, I distributed a survey with Likert-scale and open-ended questions to consultants and students who had used the Writing Center that year, and I conducted follow-up interviews with those who agreed in the survey. I repeated this process in Fall 2016, after we’d spent a semester in the new space.

84 students and 13 consultants responded to the prerenovation survey; post-renovation, 65 students and 10 consultants responded. We typically have 20-25 undergraduate and graduate consultants on staff, so roughly half the consulting staff responded each round.

Surveys asked students and consultants to rate their ability to work in the space, to indicate what they used it for, and to give their impression on several sliding scales: uninviting to inviting, studious to casual, friendly to unfriendly, stimulating to relaxing, and fixed to flexible. I also asked both groups what would make the space better for the work they do. Post-renovation, both surveys included a Likert-scale question about whether they found the new space better or worse.

In follow-up interviews, I sought a deeper understanding of subjective student and consultant attitudes toward the physical space than could be captured on a Likert scale. Pre-renovation, 10 students and 8 consultants agreed to follow-up interviews; postrenovation, 8 students and 7 consultants participated. I asked students to describe their experiences, what they liked/disliked about the space, and what we could do to improve the space and/or services. Post-renovation, I asked what they thought of the changes, if they’d used the center before. I asked consultants more specific questions about how they used the space and what they liked/disliked. Post-renovation, I also asked if they found themselves working differently in the new space. During interviews, I asked for participants’ input on the pseudonyms I employ. I transcribed all interviews myself.

One limitation involves the staff/student visitor turnover endemic to writing centers, which renders a true before-and-after comparison virtually impossible.

Our renovations took long enough that only one consultant I interviewed (Louise) had worked in both old and new spaces, though several had worked in the library during the renovation year. The question of how space shapes consultant practices thus was virtually impossible to answer. That said, soliciting feedback directly from writing center stakeholders yielded important data about what students and consultants want from and how they feel about writing center space—findings that can help guide decisionmaking around space design.

To analyze the quantitative data, I contracted with UNL’s Bureau of Sociological Research, which used Mann-Whitney U tests to look for significant differences among student responses pre- and postrenovation, consultant responses pre- and postrenovation, as well as differences between the two groups of respondents. I analyzed the qualitative data from both surveys and interviews in Dedoose using a mix of in vivo and latent coding, then reduced the codes, identifying apparent trends in responses in the process (Saldaña). I focus below on areas where either differences pre- and post-renovation were measurable or where the data led to meaningful takeaways about how students and consultants relate to center space.

Results and Discussion I break down my findings into two major categories: concrete aspects of space design and usage, and affective considerations around the space.

Space Design and Usage

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 55 One of the only statistically significant differences pre- to post-renovation emerged in response to the question, “How effective is the design of the current Writing Center space for the work you do?” Postrenovation survey respondents reported a significantly higher average score for effectiveness, which held true for both student users (U = 1244, z = -2.929, p = .003) and consultants (U = 24, z = -2.427, p = .021).

Furthermore, as shown in figure 3, 63.6% of students who had used the old space rated the new one “much better” (though one did rate it “a little worse”). All 4 consultants who had used the previous space rated the new one “much better.” While the samples sizes for respondents who could make direct comparisons were small, their responses together with the overall effectiveness ratings suggest renovations did indeed have a measurable and positive effect.

What led to this increase in perceived effectiveness? Creating differentiated, legible spaces following Inman’s zoning approach likely contributed, according to the qualitative data. Both students and consultants had complained about the lack of waiting area pre-renovation (7 instances); this concern was absent from post-renovation surveys and interviews.

Another zone improved by renovations was the front desk, which had been oddly walled off with glass panels, making entering the space confusing. Lack of clarity when arriving can be off-putting and effectively disinviting: as May, a student visitor, put it in a prerenovation interview, “it’s just so much easier when you walk into a place and, like, you see the person that you’re supposed to talk to, and they’re right there to help you. It just puts everything at ease.” Moreover, Louise, the graduate consultant who had worked in both spaces, commented on how the clearly legible front desk made it easier for her to focus on her actual consultant role post-renovation: I really appreciate the visibility of the desk workers in this space, like I think often before, even when we had desk workers working, writers would be confused when they came in, and so I would often end up greeting writers that weren’t mine . . . or like, seeing lost people wandering in and trying to direct them, and so I think here I can focus more on consulting and worry less about seeing what’s going on around me.

Louise’s remarks highlight how space design isn’t important merely for its own sake; rather, as Brooks and others have found, space design can affect the kind of pedagogical work that happens in a given space. For Louise, an easier-to-read space enabled her to devote

mental energy to consulting rather than the practical matter of guiding students through the space.

Unsurprisingly, adding a staff room was popular with consultants, as it created a “zone” for socializing and peer support. Several consultants commented on how positive the staff room was for building community post-renovation; Piper, an undergraduate consultant, said in an interview: I really like the staff room a lot this semester, cause it creates a nice space for all of the consultants to, like, hang out . . . I really like the staff, I think it’s fun working here, and I think the space can enhance that, especially when I’m like in between classes, like if we’re not on the schedule at the same time, like, ‘hey, I don't really see you, how’s it going?’

Stuff like that. That’s really nice.

Furthermore, having a designated space for consultants to socialize does not solely benefit staff. Prerenovation, students often complained about the omnipresence of consultant socializing: in the survey alone, 5 students commented specifically on how distracting consultant conversation was: “Less talking amongst the consultants, especially when there are clients”; “other consultants who are free might want to keep their chatting voice down”; and, perhaps most damningly, “sometimes I feel like the writing center is a place for those assistant students to talk.” Consultants talking among themselves was thus not only annoying, but also disinviting for students. I will discuss general noisiness further below; I will simply note here that containing consultant conversation in a separate space made an evident impact, as no student writers shared similar complaints either in post-renovation surveys or interviews.

While there is assuredly more one could say about furniture, I will only discuss the most striking—and unintentional—finding. Although round tables to encourage collaboration in learning environments are a commonplace in the literature (e.g., Cornell; Baepler and Walker; Taylor), two consultants who had worked in our temporary home in the library actually stated they preferred rectangular tables they’d used at the library. Consultant Ellen went so far as to frame circular tables as less collaborative, rather than more so: “one thing I did like about the library was, like, the tables were rectangular, and I feel like sometimes here, I have to chase the writer around the table to sit close to them so I can see. But I felt like when the tables were rectangular you were more, like, co-working together, I guess?” As Grutsch McKinney, Kjesrud, and others exhort us, we ought to question whether design elements we assume to be equalizing or

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 56 collaborative function that way in practice. While round tables may indeed lead to greater levels of collaboration when more than two people are involved, they may not serve one-to-one consultations—the bread-and-butter of much writing center work—nearly as well.

But did these changes to furniture and layout affect what happened in the space? While changes in reported uses were not dramatic, the data showed a few shifts pre- to post-renovation. According to surveys, student use of the space was nearly identical before and after, although while a small number of students reported “relaxing” in the space prerenovation (2.9%), none reported doing so postrenovation. The percentage of students who reported staying in the space before or after a consultation also went down, but only slightly, from 33.8% to 29.4% (Fig. 4). Consultant space usage showed greater changes: post-renovation, a higher percentage reported using the space for “relaxing,” “meeting with other consultants,” and “writing/revising,” while the percentage using the space for reading decreased (Fig. 5). Among consultants, renovations thus sparked a shift away from the solitary activity of reading toward greater collaboration.

Taken together, these results are somewhat concerning, since casual use of the space increased for consultants but declined for students—though this decline is minimal, since so few students ever relaxed in the space at all. Regardless, that usage changed more for consultants than students invites hard questions about whom changes to the space actually serve and whose needs get prioritized in space design. The relative consistency in reported student uses of the space before and after renovations may also indicate that changes were not dramatic enough to alter how they interacted with the space. Perhaps only reimagining the space entirely rather than just improving it would truly change how students use it.

Furthermore, not every “zone” of the space functioned as intended. Both in the surveys and informally, the tall stools at the notetaking station garnered complaints from consultants post-renovation, and that area has ended up being rarely used at all. The small, enclosed room that we had intended for video consultations, however, is a different story. This room has almost never been used for that purpose; it was initially used almost exclusively for small meetings (not consultations). But it never needed to be limited to just one or two uses, and it became clear that, despite having a multipurpose zone available, both consultants and students needed education on how to use it. We ultimately re-branded this room the “Low Distraction

Room,” or LDR, to be used for consultations where more privacy was desired or necessary. Students can indicate a preference for this room when requesting an appointment, and we have repeatedly encouraged consultants to offer it as an option.

What our LDR reminds us, however, is that flexibility, even when deliberately designed into the space, doesn’t always pan out as we hope. Flexibility is often identified as a desirable aspect of learning spaces (Cornell; Gee; Lee et al; Kjesrud and Helms). In our case, despite wheeled chairs alone making the renovated space far more configurable—in fact, we rearrange the room before and after every staff meeting!—there was no significant difference pre- to post-renovation on the fixed-to-flexible ratings given by either students or consultants. Communication scholar Torin Monahan’s breakdown of flexibility into five “properties”—“fluidity, versatility, convertibility, scaleability, and modifiability” (emphasis in original)— may explain why post-renovation respondents did not actually rate the space as more flexible. As Monahan writes, “Some designers might respond that the creation of flexible spaces does not guarantee flexible practices. This is where the imaginative challenge of my final attribute of flexibility comes into play.

Modifiability implies a space that invites alteration and appropriation by design.” While the furniture embodied certain aspects of flexibility, its placement in fairly conventional arrangements (pairs of chairs at tables, waiting area with seating ganged together, etc.) likely did not communicate modifiability.

Similarly, we populated the center with writable and other interactive surfaces throughout, yet they rarely serve their intended purpose of engaging student visitors. In post-renovation interviews, 4 students noted these surfaces, yet none talked about actually using them. As Kelly put it, “I like the ability to draw on everything, you guys have those cubes that you can write on, or the encouraging ‘Poet-tree’ in the back there, I really like it.” When I asked if she’d contributed any poems, she laughed, said “no,” and added, “I just like seeing other people's work.” In some ways, resistance to changing one’s environment might be entirely psychologically predictable. As one example, psychology professor Robert Gifford relates the results of a 1970s study in which individuals contorted themselves repeatedly in a laboratory rather than moving furniture out of their way: “The tables came to seem magically immobile; one knew they required only a tiny amount of effort to move, yet they withstood over 238 carefully maneuvered peoplepassages” (7). The question of flexibility, and whether this flexibility is perceived or utilized, thus manifests in

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 57 several ways. On one hand, consultants in particular made use of the space’s flexibility without consciously noting it; on the other, consultants and students at times did recognize and express appreciation for areas that could be manipulated, but without actually changing them. We should think further, then, about what modifiability looks like in writing center spaces, and how we might design more intentionally around conferring authority (Fulton), especially to students, so they will go ahead and alter our spaces to meet their needs.

Affective Dimensions of the Space That writable surfaces were appreciated but largely unused by writers raises a key question: is a felt sense of modifiability enough to render a space invitational?

What impact does the “feel” of a center have on the people who work there and who visit? While more research is needed to answer these questions satisfactorily, this study reveals the value of listening, particularly to students, about their attitudes toward writing center space. Responses from both students and consultants coalesced around 3 affective topics: clutter and associated questions of who “owns” the space, noisiness and distractions, and a desire for privacy.

While students and consultants gave a variety of responses connected to hominess, my findings confirm critiques of the “cozy home” idea are indeed merited.

As Grutsch McKinney frames it, “one problem is the fact that homes are culturally marked. If a writing center is a home, whose home is it? Mine? Yours? For whom is it comfortable?” (25). Romeo García and Eric Camarillo have issued even more direct challenges to this idea’s implicit and explicit whiteness and how it thereby serves to exclude. While the ways culture and identity shape students’ and consultants’ ideas of home did not surface directly in the present study, my findings point to the very real existence of tensions around who belongs and feels they can belong in a space. Take, for example, this pre-renovation comment from consultant Anna: Because I’ve always been really comfortable in the Writing Center, I kinda treat it like my own...space. . . . I just feel really comfortable so, I don't feel like my behavior’s any different. And maybe it should be, maybe I should be a little more professional when I’m there, as a consultant, but—I don’t know. I just feel really comfortable, and so I treat the whole space kind of like I would my home space, or a friend’s house, just any place where I feel comfortable.

Even Anna is aware that she is, perhaps, too comfortable in the space; one might wonder what this means for someone whose home did not look or feel like our pre-renovation center, or for students who might feel they are intruding into the consultants’ home—a disinviting outcome, indeed. Some consultants, such as Randall, explicitly worried that renovations would change the center’s hominess: “I like the homey feel of it, you know? I'm not sure if I can quantify that in, you know, cause I—cause I do worry that it might become too cold and—and, you know, efficient.” The idea of the writing center as cozy home and anxieties about departing from it appeared very much at play, especially among consultants prerenovation.

The fault lines in the idea of the “homey” center become apparent, however, when we turn to clutter, a topic that came up frequently in pre-renovation surveys and interviews (I applied this code 20 times).

In writing center scholarship, clutter has been positively associated with hominess: Grutsch McKinney cites Colleen Connolly et al.’s “Erika and the Fish Lamps,” noting how the authors depict the shift away from “funky,” eclectic decor as a loss, despite their acknowledgement that it was consultants, not students, who found the center less appealing once clutter was cleared away. Pre-renovation, our own center was similarly full of punny signs, stuffed animals, and other miscellany. The data I collected, however, underscores these markers are really more for consultants than students—and not even all consultants. In response to the open-ended survey question about what would make the space better for learning, 5 students specifically mentioned the messiness and/or clutter in surveys as something that needed to be addressed. Moreover, newer consultants’ negative perceptions of clutter often paralleled those expressed by students. As Louise put it in an interview, I just feel like we have inherited a lot of clutter, I feel like there’s a lot of stuff in there that no one really knows what it’s being used for, and some of it has, like, long traditions, but I’m—I’m hoping with getting a new space, we can pare down some of the clutter . . . I’m kind of a minimalist, so like, the amount of stuff that’s in there stresses me out sometimes.

Louise was far from alone in expressing such sentiments. Given the frequent negative attitudes expressed toward the collection of “stuff,” my findings demonstrate that what some perceive as “homey” clutter is, for others, anything but. Centering the needs of both students and newer staff members can serve as a welcome corrective for the tendency to view clutter

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 58 solely as inviting or an obvious marker of resistance against the homogenizing tendencies of the neoliberal university. Consultants may or may not view clutter as homey or symbolically resonant, but students are even less likely to, as the objects are unlikely to be imbued with historical significance or emotional weight for them.

Yet I also want to make clear that responses about the subjective feel of the center did not break down neatly along student/consultant lines. Pre-renovation, individuals in both groups expressed anxieties about impending changes. One student wrote in a survey, “It shouldn’t become something clinical, though, or severely isolated where I would feel like I was just another manufactured fixture in the wall”; another student said in an interview, “I do like the more informal atmosphere to it, so I guess I wouldn’t want to see something that’s too, like, clinical, or not, like, walking to a doctor’s office for an appointment, but having that kind of ability to have a[n] open and collaborative space.” These fears of a “clinical” outcome largely did not come to pass: in postrenovation interviews, 6 students and 5 consultants commented positively on the aesthetics of the space, with several deeming it “welcoming” and “comfortable.” Perhaps ironically, the only negative comment on aesthetics post-renovation came from a writer, Mei, who proposed more decorations might make the space feel more “homey.” Still, there is arguably substantial middle ground between cold, institutional space and chaotic clutter that is only homey to some.

Given how subjective these questions of the “feel” of the space are, turning back to the quantitative data helps clarify what measurable differences our renovations choices made (or didn’t). For students, there were no statistically significant differences between pre- and post-renovation ratings on any of the sliding scales. If we attempt to map where we landed in Purkey’s matrix of invitational education, however, it is worth noting the percentage of students giving the top rating on the uninviting-to-inviting scale increased from 27.9% pre-renovation to 41.2% post-renovation (Fig. 6). Even more striking are the consultant results, which did show a marginally significant difference, with very slightly more inviting ratings post-renovation (p = .071). Notably, every consultant respondent gave a 4 or 5—top ratings—post-renovation, versus a wider spread pre-renovation (Fig. 7). It is not easy to pinpoint what led to these (admittedly small) differences, given that so many changes occurred (less clutter, somewhat larger space, better window coverings that let in more natural light, more clearly

zoned layout, etc.). Nevertheless, even a small increase on the uninviting-to-inviting scale suggests our decluttering did not result in a space that students or consultants judged as less inviting.

Implicit in these debates around clutter, hominess, and invitingness is a more basic question: whose space is it, really? As I asked consultants how they guided students through the space, an interesting split emerged around who was in charge of deciding where to sit. Pre-renovation, consultant Sue made a joking reference to “my sacred table”; similarly, Louise discussed her preference for remaining at a single table throughout her shift: “I like to take a table, and, like, stake it out for my shift, and that’s my table, and I prefer to keep it.” Conversely, in a pre-renovation interview, Anna expressed her opposition to the parkoneself-at-one-table-for-the-entire-shift approach: No, I—I think that—[sigh]. I can understand why some people would do that, but that’s not me, because, to me, that would be like, “I’m more important than you are, so come sit by me”—no. if they have chosen to come sit by me, and I say “okay I’ll be with you in a—you know, 5 minutes, I’ll be with you at 3:30,” and they choose to sit by me, that’s fine. And then, there we are. But if they choose to sit at a different table, then, at our assigned time, I close my laptop and I go over to them, because they’re not more—I’m not more important than they are. And I think that would send the wrong kind of message.

Letting students pick where to sit versus deciding for them does set the tone around whose needs will be privileged, as Anna points out. And while Anna is the consultant who thought she might be too comfortable in the space, her actions were geared toward sharing that comfort. While responses varied from consultant to consultant, they did not change appreciably pre- to post-renovation, suggesting this is more of a common practice question than a space design one per se.

Explicitly discussing invitational policies and practices that will help students feel a sense of ownership in the space—how to make best use of the space one already has—may therefore be even more important than the design.

The final cluster of results revolve around the interrelated topics of noisiness/distractions and privacy. Following Beth Boquet, noise is an oftencelebrated aspect of writing centers; student participants in this study, however, had many negative things to say about it. The “noisiness/distraction” code was one of the most frequently applied in my data (44 instances), appearing 3 times as often in student

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 59 responses than consultant responses. Happily, the frequency of this code decreased in the postrenovation data: 70.5% of instances occurred in prerenovation responses. Often respondents connected noisiness to wishing the space were larger: this would give more room to spread out, making it more difficult to overhear what was going on at a nearby consulting table. Since we did gain a modicum of additional space during our renovations, the extra buffer between tables may well explain the decline in complaints about noise and distractions post-renovation.

Interestingly, concerns about privacy appeared almost as frequently as noisiness/distractions (31 instances). Again, the frequency decreased after renovation, but student writers still made a point of mentioning their desire for more privacy. In a prerenovation interview, student Ray said, “it would be better, you know, if they have, like, private room for each, so that no one can hear what I wrote, and, like, essay paper, you know. You don’t want to, like, anyone to read my paper, except the teacher.” Post-renovation, a student commented in the survey, “it might be nice to have some space where you can talk with a consultant privately. When I went in the last time, the Writing Center was completely silent and I felt awkward being the only person in the room talking when there were others working.” These comments point to how noise and privacy issues can be linked: too noisy, and focusing is difficult. Too quiet, and one can feel exposed. Herb and Sabatino also document how staff in library-located writing centers wish for privacy, which they interpret as evidence that writing centers need differentiated spaces where writers and consultants feel comfortable making noise (“Sharing Space,” 25). I would argue, however, that because student participants in the present study requested privacy even in a standalone center, the problem may reside more with our fundamental practices than whether noise is permissible in a given writing center space. Soliciting feedback from student writers can thus invite us to question long-held ideas about our work, such as the tendency to prioritize making the writing process visible (and audible) to others regardless of student preferences.

post-renovation. Furthermore, another unintended result of this study is telling: in interviews, it was often difficult to persuade students to talk about the physical space at all. Students typically talked at greater length about how they wanted more consulting time, or they asked for more discipline-specific services, or they wished for access to more writing resources.

Particularly post-renovation, when pressed, students would comment positively on the aesthetics of the space, but it comes as no surprise that the space itself matters more to people who spend more time there.

This meshes with Singh-Corcoran and Emika’s conclusions that “From the student-user perspective, the center then may be more akin to a nonplace”—in other words, somewhere they pass through that is “transient, temporal, and intermediary.”

That said, we need not accept this as the only possible student orientation toward our spaces. What can we do to help students feel greater senses of ownership in the pass-through space of the writing center—to make space matter in a good way, in other words? Because spaces do shape staff and visitors’ experiences on both conscious and unconscious levels, it remains vital to emphasize making writing center spaces genuinely invitational. I offer the following guiding principles as first steps toward this goal.4

Conclusions and Recommendations

Strive for intentionally inviting space design, with modifiability in mind. Though increases in how inviting

As I began by saying, this study led me to conclude that writing center space both matters and doesn’t. To start with the latter: while the few quantitatively measurable differences suggested the renovated space did serve both student and consultant needs better overall, the “feel” of the space, when assessed via the sliding scales, was not substantially different pre- to

Zoned space, following Inman’s recommendations, works. Giving consultants their own zone to socialize

helped build community among staff and eliminated student complaints about consultant socializing—an effectively disinviting phenomenon. The staff room enabled what many of us missed in 2020 and beyond: community, mentorship, casual interaction. In general, our efforts to create zones appears effective. While our setup has not been 100% used as intended—students still need guidance to use the waiting area, and the post-session note station was a bust—the space is much more legible and usable than in the past. As consultant Airlie put it in a post-renovation interview, “it’s not a confusing place, like people understand, I think, just from the way that the space appears, what it’s for.” Writing center administrators working on new spaces or renovations need a clear idea of what will happen where, or it’s a virtual guarantee that consultants and students won’t. students and consultants perceived the center to be were small, reactions to our renovated space were consistently positive. But it is crucial to keep in mind that significant psychological barriers often prevent all members of the community from taking initiative and manipulating the space. Seeking out expert advice on

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 60 how to maximize a sense of modifiability may well help create more invitational space.

In any space, staff education is indispensable for effective, invitational space use. Whether a given writing

center is in a new, old, or reconfigured space, we can’t assume students and consultants know immediately how to best make use of available zones. For Purkey, the physical environment is just one of the “Five P’s” of invitational education: “People, Places, Policies, Programs and Processes” (4). Using professional development moments to discuss zone use and invitational practices with consultants and front desk staff, including the value of purposefully ceding authority by putting students in charge of where to sit, can help move any space toward being more intentionally inviting.

Listen to consultants and especially to students, and be open to design choices that may conflict with prior understandings of what works in writing centers. My

unintentional finding that round tables do not always function as intended was one of the most striking pieces of evidence in the data. If rectangular tables will work better in your space, there seems to be good reason to choose them. Listening carefully to both students and consultants with open minds may lead to new or different design choices that can better serve our pedagogical goals.

The question about how to balance openness and students’ desire for privacy (and quiet) merits serious consideration. Here again we must question received

ideas of how writing center space should function. For both students and consultants, noisiness was a consistently voiced concern, and it is connected to— but not synonymous with—a desire for privacy. To what extent do we want to provide options to work in quieter, more private spaces? There are many tradeoffs involved. Private spaces might increase the ability of both students and consultants to focus and concentrate; they may lead to greater feelings of safety and willingness to be vulnerable, especially when discussing sensitive subject matter. In her MWCA 2021 keynote, however, Carol Severino called attention to the dominant idea of a writing center as “an aggregation of dyads”—and is this always the best model? Keeping consultant-student pairs cordoned off from each other too strictly can interfere with collaboration beyond the dyad as well as the ability for consultants to support one another, particularly in the context of difficult interactions that may feel unsafe for consultants as well as students. The tension between the desire for privacy and the benefits of visible/audible, communal work are not easy to

resolve. Ultimately, we may need to give up some cherished ideas of openness and normalizing sharing writing in progress by letting others overhear in order to provide options that feel more welcoming to student visitors. I will not pretend to have all the answers, but I urge fellow directors to listen to students and take their desires for privacy seriously when working through space design.

As we return to our physical spaces and/or think about improving them, it is well worth considering how to maximize their benefits for all constituents. My findings point to ways writing center professionals should continue to question assumptions around what is considered ideal. Listening to writing center stakeholders about what they need and want is indispensable for determining priorities in our spaces.

The wellbeing of staff is important, but keeping student needs firmly in mind can help avoid replicating exclusionary aspects of past “cozy homes.” As we continue to interrogate ways in which power is negotiated, wielded, and shared in our writing centers, attention to the implications of our space designs and how we use them will remain crucial in any quest toward equitable writing center work.

Acknowledgements My sincere thanks to Nicole Green for being on the renovation journey with me and to Jasmine Kar Tang and Harry Denny for the writing group that kept me on track. Extra thanks to Jasmine for her indispensable feedback.

Notes 1. There is far more scholarship on “space” as a concept than I can review here. In particular, “space” is often considered in relationship to “place,” where, in the words of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, “if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause” (6). Whether writing centers function as spaces or places (or both) is a question for an interesting but quite different essay. Here, I define “space” as the physical environment of the center, which is not just a collection of objects, but is suffused with myriad political, social, and cultural layers of meaning.

2. My deepest gratitude to Roberta Kjesrud, who not only led me to key theoretical principles as I thought about the renovation, but also encouraged me to study it formally, generously granting me access to her

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 61 research group’s Zotero collection of resources on space.

3. I also recorded videos of space usage in one-hour increments throughout several weeks of each semester.

These data did not yield significant findings, however, so I do not discuss them here.

4. One caveat: these principles do assume that writing center leaders have control over their own, separate spaces; often not the case, as Sabatino and Herb make abundantly clear (“Turf Wars”).

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Sabatino, Lindsay, and Maggie M. Herb. “Turf Wars, Culture Clashes, and a Room of One’s Own: A Survey of Centers Located in Libraries.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, 2021.

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Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 63 Appendix A Figure 1

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 64 Figure 2

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 65 Figure 3. If students used the Writing Center before the renovations, how would they describe the renovated space?

Figure 4. What did/do students use the Writing Center space for?

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 66 Figure 5. What did/do consultants use the Writing Center space for?

Figure 6. Student ratings of the Writing Center on the uninviting-to-inviting scale.

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Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces • 67 Figure 7. Consultant ratings of the Writing Center on the uninviting-to-inviting scale.

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REVIEW OF INTERNATIONALIZING THE WRITING CENTER: A GUIDE FOR DEVELOPING A MULTILINGUAL WRITING CENTER BY NOREEN G. LAPE Mustapha Chmarkh The Ohio State University chmarkh.1@buckeyemail.osu.edu Lape, Noreen G. Internationalizing the Writing Center: A Guide for Developing a Multilingual Writing Center. Parlor Press LLC, 2020, pp. 230, ISBN-10: 1643171658.

Internationalizing the Writing Center offers a roadmap for how to transition from an English-centric writing center to a multilingual writing center (MWC). The book “provides a rationale, a pedagogical plan, and an administrative method to maximize the potential of writing centers’ nascent multilinguality” (Lape 3). One of Noreen G. Lape’s goals behind writing this book was to streamline a response to the questions she received from Writing Center Administrators (WCAs) regarding foreign language (FL) tutor training and overall operation of the MWC. Specifically, Lape makes a compelling argument for implementing MWCs, especially given the author’s position as the director of the M. Eberly MWC at Dickinson College. Established in 1978, this MWC is currently offering peer tutoring in eleven languages.

Before Lape’s publication, the idea of a MWC received scant attention. In 2000, John Trimbur was among the first scholars to mention WCs’ “neglect of writing in languages other than English” and to suggest “making alliances with modern language teachers, promoting bilingualism in writing, and transforming writing centers from English Only to multilingual ones” (30). In Europe, Liesbeth Opdenacker and Luuk Van Waes reported on the University of Antwerp’s (Belgium) online WC that was designed as a multilingual environment where students receive writing support in Dutch, English, French, German, and Spanish.

Moreover, Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands operates a writing support service called Worldwide Writing where students are tutored in Dutch, English, Spanish, French, and German. It is noteworthy that Internationalizing the Writing Center is not the first time that Lape explored multilingualism in WCs. Her 2013 article “Going Global, Becoming Translingual: The Development of a Multilingual Writing Center” had already established her as a pioneer in multilingual WC practice.

Moving from tutor training related issues to administrative considerations regarding implementing an MWC, the book is comprised of an introduction, six chapters, nine appendices, and an extensive reference list. Appendices serve as a training guide that is equally useful to WCAs and tutors. In a notable characteristic of the book, Lape derives interwoven narratives from tutorial case studies and tutors’ interviews. The M. Eberly MWC tutors’ experiences and voices are echoed in every chapter. They represent the richest evidence the author uses to make her case for MWCs and to also acknowledge the contributions of the multilingual writers and tutors to the everyday conversations at the Dickinson College MWC. The first chapter addresses the hegemony of English, a language that is increasingly becoming the de facto lingua franca of globalized WCs. Lape’s main concern here was to challenge monolingualism by delineating a rationale for MWCs, namely that they promote linguistic diversity in an increasingly globalized world. Most importantly, the chapter enumerates what the author sees as benefits of MWCs. In her view, MWCs provide students with additional access to foreign language besides in FL classrooms, complement the instruction offered by FL faculty, and decenter the dominant status of English.

Chapters two, three, and four examine FL tutor training through the lens of holistic tutoring. Chapter two explains how English-centric WCs tend to distance themselves from the grammar fix-it shop label. However, in the FL context students write in part to learn the language, so a focus on correct language use is inevitable. In this context, Lape notes that a holistic approach to tutoring is judicious since it allows FL writers to simultaneously compose and acquire the FL. Chapter two also addresses one of the most intractable problems in MWCs: FL writers’ use of translation services such as Google Translate. Predictably, Lape makes a compelling argument against the use of translation since it sabotages FL learning and complicates the task of tutors.

Chapter three emphasizes tutor training and building rapport with FL writers. FL tutoring is complex since FL learners are writing in part to learn the FL. The

Review of Internationalizing the Writing Center: A Guide for Developing a Multilingual Writing Center • 69 chapter focuses on holistic tutoring by training MWC tutors to facilitate writers’ learning to write and writing to learn in the FL. Lape argues that we cannot reasonably expect FL tutors, who are used to nondirective approaches to tutoring to effectively negotiate FL tutoring. At issue here is the fact that FL tutoring requires a constant back and forth between lower and higher order concerns. FL tutors should also be aware of the challenges related to FL students’ writer’s block and writing anxiety However, without explicit tutor training, WCs will continue to fall short from effectively attending to FL students’ needs. Lape invokes the stories of two FL tutors to illustrate how simple rapport building strategies (i.e., active listening, creating a nonjudgmental space, being supportive, etc.) contribute to positive FL tutoring experiences where FL writers feel safe to take risks, make mistakes, and learn.

Chapter four explores the problematic topic of culture. Learning an FL and learning about its culture often go hand in hand. Let’s face it: if there is a notable distance between the FL student’s L1/culture and the culture of the target FL, tension, or what Lape calls writing culture shock, is likely to happen. In this instance, Lape encourages FL tutors, especially those who had FL learning experiences abroad, to mediate FL students’ writing culture shock. Mirroring Judith Powers’ recommendation for WC tutors to adopt a cultural informant role (Powers 45), Lape focused much of this chapter on the value of having interculturally competent tutors help FL writers develop an interculture competence and demystify intercultural encounters due to unfamiliar genres and different writing rules.

Chapters five and six address the administrative and collaborative components of MWCs. Chapter five distinguishes between three types of appeals that WCAs could utilize to convince stakeholders—Lape refers to stakeholders as FL faculty and senior academic administrators—that the idea of an MWC is worth pursuing. The cultural appeal uses qualitative data to reimagine the value of a WC, the quantitative appeal uses statistical data to support requests for better budget, space, and equipment, and the value-added quantitative appeal examines how the WC improves students’ learning experiences. These appeals emphasize MWCs as assets to students’ learning and to universities’ commitment to multiculturalism and global education.

Of course, the collaboration between WCAs, FL departments, and relevant university offices is indispensable. Lape views these partnerships in terms of committees whose mission evolves in nature from planning MWCs to advising once the centers are operational.

The last chapter articulates Lape’s vision for a collaborative governance of MWCs. Lape views collaboration through the lens of a community of practice framework. Characterized by reciprocity, the partnerships between the MWC and FL faculty are informed by communicative language teaching (CLT) which prioritizes interaction rather than a narrow focus on grammar. Specifically, CLT considers that the four skills—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—are interrelated; hence, there is value in implementing instructional approaches that integrate the four skills in FL classrooms. These insights go some way toward explaining why WCAs and FL faculty’s collaborations are complementary: FL instructors “shape the MWC, and the MWC, in turn, shapes the culture of writing in FL courses” (12).

Overall, Internationalizing the Writing Center articulated a clear, solid, and evidence-based argument for the value of MWCs. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in developing an FL writing curriculum and for WCAs considering expanding their English-centric WCs to include multilingual writing support. Similarly, FL faculty would find in Lape’s book a sincere invitation to collaborate with WCAs and a concrete incentive for doing so. As its title indicates, the book has a broad scope and addresses a global audience. In this sense, I recommend this book to emerging WC scholars and graduate students researching WC pedagogy.

Undoubtedly, Internationalizing the Writing Center illuminates our understanding of FL tutoring: an issue that received scant attention before this publication. To her credit, Lape starts this conversation about the value and need for a multilingual approach to WC administration, but there is scope for other scholars to expand this conversation in the hope of disrupting the current hegemonic monolingual WC narrative.

Notwithstanding Lape’s brilliant argument for MWCs, the book did not clearly address challenges related to logistics, personnel, and finances that WCAs would have to reckon with if they want to make the MWC dream become a reality.

In short, Lape expressed an eloquent vision for MWCs and provided the reader with relevant theoretical, pedagogical, and practical underpinnings involved in undertaking such project. Certainly, the experience of the MWC at Dickinson College provided her with a success story to share, but, most importantly, with a rich source of evidence to support her argument for MWCs. Indeed, one means of raising awareness about MWCs lies in their potential as research sites. It is remarkable, in this respect, that Lape’s MWC is not only a place that supports FL writers, but it serves as a

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Review of Internationalizing the Writing Center: A Guide for Developing a Multilingual Writing Center • 70 research laboratory that examines FL peer tutoring as well.

Works Cited Lape, Noreen G. Internationalizing the Writing Center: A Guide for Developing a Multilingual Writing Center. Parlor Press, 2020.

---. "Going Global, Becoming Translingual: The Development of a Multilingual Writing Center." The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 38, no. 3-4, 2013, pp. 1-6, https://wlnjournal.org/arch ives/v38/38.3-4.pdf Opdenacker, Liesbeth, and Luuk Van Waes.

"Implementing an open process approach to a multilingual online writing center: The case of Calliope." Computers and Composition, vol. 24, no. 3, 2007, pp. 247-265, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2007.05.003 Powers, Judith K. “Rethinking Writing Center Conferencing Strategies for the ESL Writer.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 39– 47. www.jstor.org/stable/43441929 Trimbur, John. “Multiliteracies, Social Futures, and Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 20, no. 2, 2000, pp. 29–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43442098 Wilson, Sheena. "Campus Saint-Jean’s Bilingual Writing Centre A Portal to Multiple Cultures and Cosmopolitanism Citizenship." The Canadian Writing Centres Association, 2010, pp. 9-12.

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