FULL SPECIAL ISSUE UPDATED

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No. 2 (2026)

VOL. 23, NO. 2 (2026): SPECIAL ISSUE ON HYPER-REVISION TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMN

From the Editors Genie Nicole Giaimo and Sam Turner

FOCUS ARTICLES

Why do Writing Center Professionals Publish? Examining and Improving Our Practices ​ Candis Bond, Elisabeth H. Buck, Elizabeth Culatta The Cost Of Representation: How The Publication Process Impacts Black Researchers In Writing Studies ​ Ronada Dominique Mentoring in Editorial Spaces: Graduate Co-Editors as Literacy Brokers ​ Rabail Qayyum Sis, Put That Playlist On and Sip Through the Emotions of Writing ​ Shewonda Leger From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction: Thriving through Principles of Relationship-Rich Collaboration Stephanie Roach, James Schirmer, Bob Barnett, and Jacob Blumner Assessing the Field: Establishing the Ethos of Writing Center Publications ​ Joseph Cheatle The Research Tax: The Hidden Costs of Publishing Underrepresented Knowledge ​ Sarah Rewega and Waed Hasan Quantity Over Quality? Defining Educator Flexibility Through Tutor Strategy Use and Session Engagement ​ Genie Nicole Giaimo and Sam Turner Rejected: Co-authoring With Undergraduate Students ​ Erin B. Jensen Exhausted: The Toll of Hyper-revision on a Writing Center Administrator ​ Andrea Efthymiou

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No. 2 (2026)

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Candis Bond, PhD, is an associate professor of English and interim chair of the Department of English and World Languages at Augusta University, where she served as director of the writing center for nearly a decade.

Her writing center scholarship has appeared in WLN, Writing Center Journal, The Peer Review, and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. She currently serves as the president of the Southeastern Writing Center Association (2024-2026) and is a co-editor of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship.

Elisabeth H. Buck is an associate professor of English and the Director of the Writing Center at Fordham University in New York City. She is the author of Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies (Palgrave, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2018 IWCA Outstanding Book Award, and the co-editor of the forthcoming collection Writing Centers and AI: Generating Early Conversations (WAC Clearinghouse Perspectives on Writing Series, 2026). Dr. Buck is the incoming professional editor of The Peer Review journal.

Elizabeth Culatta, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Social Sciences at Augusta University. Dr. Culatta studies social determinants of health, especially focused on identity tied to mental health and substance abuse for young adults. She has published in journals including Society and Mental Health, Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education, and Journal of Health Psychology.

Dr. Ronada Dominique is a Black millennial scholar focused on advancing equity and inclusion in higher education. Her research centers the experiences of Black students and challenges the systemic gaps in academic curricula and institutional practice. Through her teaching and scholarship, she advocates for classrooms that honor diverse perspectives and make space for every student’s story.

Rabail Qayyum, PhD, teaches Intensive English Program students in the Language and Culture Center, University of Houston. She spent over a decade teaching academic writing, public speaking, and business communication to university students in Karachi, Pakistan. Her research interests include second language writing, assessment, writing center studies, and adult literacy.

Dr. Shewonda Leger is an Assistant Professor of Multilingual Writing and Pedagogy in the Department of English at Florida International University. Her research interests include Haitian narratives and histories, heritage linguistics, Caribbean women’s rhetorics, Black feminist film theory, and health disparities affecting Black women.

Stephanie Roach is an Associate Professor of English who has been teaching writing at the University of Michigan-Flint since 2003. Stephanie is the former Director of Writing Programs and Associate Chair of English. She has co-authored scholarship on reflective pedagogies, integrative learning, and folio thinking with members of the UMFlint Persistence and Mattering in Undergraduate Education Research Cooperative.

Within the field, she has written on WPA metaphors, and, with the authors here, on spaces for composing.

James Schirmer is an Associate Professor of English who has been teaching writing at the University of Michigan-Flint since 2008. A former Chair of English, he currently heads the Department of Language & Communication. He has written about social media and video games in relation to composition pedagogy and worked with his coauthors here on the histories, futures, and spaces of writing centers and computer writing classrooms.

Bob Barnett is a Professor of English who has been teaching writing at the University of Michigan-Flint since 1994. Bob is a former writing center director and former Dean of the School of Education and Human Services at UM-Flint. He has written about writing center theory and practice, general education reform, and leadership development. He is currently working on a book on the history of American Counterculture.

Jacob Blumner is a Professor of English and Director of the Marian E. Wright Writing Center at the University of Michigan-Flint since 2005. He teaches writing courses that span the curriculum. He writes about

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No. 2 (2026) writing centers, writing across the curriculum, and secondary school to college connections. He has co-edited three books, and his work has appeared in The WAC Journal, Across the Disciplines, and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. He enjoys writing haiku and is exploring haiga.

Dr. Joseph Cheatle is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Writing and Communication Center at Oxford College of Emory University. In addition to researching the broader narratives of writing center studies, he is interested in the organization and systems that help writing centers to be successful. His work is previously published in Writing Center Journal, The Peer Review, The Journal of Writing Analytics, and Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

Sarah Rewega is a PhD candidate in English with research interests in feminist theory, visual culture, and digital discourse. She has over two years of experience working in post-secondary writing centres and is deeply committed to student-centred, process-based, and inclusive writing support. She has also taught academic writing and literature at the university level. Her recent article, “Women’s March and the Borders of Belonging: Rethinking Collective Space Through Transnational Feminism,” was published in (Un)Disturbed: A Journal of Feminist Voices. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook becoming.

Waed Hasan is a Palestinian refugee and scholar. She holds a PhD from the University of Guelph (2025).

Her research lies at the intersection of Palestinian Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, and postcolonial theory.

Drawing on intergenerational narratives of exile, Hasan’s work establishes Refugee Poetics as an inclusive, decolonial framework that centers lived experience, memory, and creative expression in theorizing refugee life.

Her scholarship bridges personal testimony and critical theory to foreground refugees as producers of knowledge, culture, and resistance. Hasan has published and has forthcoming articles with Liverpool University Press, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal (University of Texas), University of Toronto Press Journals, and Routledge’s Literary Studies in Social Justice series.

Dr. Genie Nicole Giaimo is an Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric and Writing Center Director at Hofstra University. Their research utilizes quantitative models to answer a range of questions about behaviors and practices in and around writing centers and writing programs. They are the co-editor of Writing Assessment at Small Liberal Arts Colleges with Megan O’Neill (2025), the co-author, with Dan Lawson, of Storying Writing Center Labor for Anti–Capitalist Futures (2024); the author of Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond (2023) which won the IWCA Outstanding Book Award in 2024, and the editor of Wellness and Care in Writing Center Work (2021). They have also published in Praxis, Journal of Writing Assessment, Composition Studies, Writing Center Journal, TPR, Journal of Writing Research, Kairos, Journal of Writing Analytics, and Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, among others. They are the outgoing professional editor of TPR: The Peer Review. This is the second time they have served as guest editor for Praxis.

Sam Turner is a PhD candidate in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation project leverages feminist rhetorical theory and critical disability studies to explore how people narrativize their experiences of obsessive-compulsive disorder outside of diagnostic settings. Sam currently serves as a managing editor of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal and teaches rhetoric and composition courses at UT and for incarcerated adults in Austin.

Erin B. Jensen is a tenure track Associate Professor at Midwestern State University, Texas. Previously she taught at Belmont Abbey College where she co-authored several articles with undergraduate students including the one discussed in this issue. She focuses on encouraging students to be involved in undergraduate research projects and in publication opportunities.

Andrea Efthymiou, PhD, is Writing Center Director and Associate Professor at Queens College (CUNY).

She serves as treasurer for the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing and co-editor for WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. Andrea’s current projects include a collaboratively-edited collection on interfaith dialogue in writing centers and writing classrooms and a study of the rhetoric of child adoption in the U.S. Her scholarship has appeared in various journals and edited collections.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No 2 (2026)

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION Genie Nicole Giaimo​ Hofstra University​ genie.n.giaimo@hofstra.edu Publishing, a mainstay in academic disciplines, is not a neutral or uncomplicated practice. For many scholars, publishing can be a herculean task made more complex by reviewer feedback and hyper-revision. Many articles have been written about the complexities and intersecting challenges in academic publishing, from plagiarism controversies (Awasthi, 2019), to how exploratory and creative research is inhibited by the metrics and standards of well ranked journals (Agafonow et al., 2024), and the citational inequities and bibliographic biases that drive impact factor scales. Gender, racial, linguistic, and geographic bias, as many studies have shown, is rampant in academic publishing (Drieschová, 2020; Conklin & Sing, 2022; Lee et al., 2021; Thien, 2023). In writing center studies, Alexandria Lockett (2019) aptly identifies the taxes placed on Black graduate students, which includes a writing tax that impedes production and publishing. In 2017, Elisabeth Buck found that writing center researchers yearned for more digital and open access publication platforms as these offer greater idea dissemination, including outside of the United States.

This special issue of Praxis explores the publishing, revision, feedback, and writing experiences of practitioners in writing center studies and the broader discipline of writing and rhetoric. Contributors like Shewonda Leger and Rabail Qayyum explore autoethnographic experiences with writing and publishing, while Bob Barnett, Jacob Blumner, James Schirmer, and Stephanie Roach outline an approach to writing and publishing as “relationship-rich” collaborative practice. Joseph Cheatle, Ronada Dominique, Waed Hasan and Sarah Rewega, and Candis Bond, Elisabeth Buck, and Elizabeth Culatta share empirical research on the state of journal publishing in our field.

Several contributors–including Andrea Efthymiou and the editors of this issue–write about experiencing hyper-revision and being repeatedly rejected by journals in the field.

It is no secret that many of us have experienced significant barriers to publishing in writing center studies and the broader field of composition and rhetoric. Some of this might

Sam Turner​ University of Texas at Austin​ praxisuwx@gmail.com have to do with writing center research struggling to gain traction in composition journals, and it may also have to do with the preferences, feedback, and training of reviewers or even journal editors. This special issue had two interrelated goals: to publish pieces that give in-depth insight into the challenges of the publication process in our field–especially for those of us who are working in contingent and non-tenure track positions–and giving a venue to submissions that have been previously peer reviewed but were rejected by other journals. All submissions went through a mentorship-based peer reviewed process; we did not sacrifice quality in the process but led with humanity and the goal of bringing all submissions to press.

Publishing in our field frequently relies on free labor performed by editors, reviewers and authors. While tenure track and tenured colleagues benefit from the academic currency of the publication process, many do this work for free and outside of their job duties. The majority of writing center practitioners occupy contingent non-TT positions (Herb et al., 2023). So, while we appreciate the material conditions of publication work–and want to extend our gratitude to those who have joined editorial teams or review boards and worked for little-to-no compensation performing time-consuming and intricate work–we also want to recognize the profound amount of labor that bringing a single article to publication requires for authors. For those without institutional support or those, like Erin B. Jensen (“Rejected: Co-authoring With Undergraduate Students,” 2026), who work with undergraduate students to co-publish, this work is even more complex and time consuming. We ought to make the publication process–particularly the review process–more transparent, ethical, and streamlined to honor the labor of all those involved in this work.

In other fields, as well as our own, publication practices are changing. Open-access publishing is becoming commonplace–over the last few years, for example, two of the major journals in writing center studies became open access, joining the other two journals. Journals are publishing standards for inclusive review work

Editors’ Introduction and, also, citational practices.

Journal review-and-editorial boards are expanding to include underrepresented scholars. Editors and reviewers are being paid for their labor. Reviewers are required to identify themselves rather than a double-blind process. Professional associations and journals are creating mentorship programs and models to help bring authors to publication.

In writing center studies–and the broader field of Composition and Rhetoric, we have seen some of these changes while others–like an open-review process or paid review work–remain elusive. ​ ​ ​ References

Association. Virtual Conference. October 20-23, 2021.

Lockett, Alexandria. “Why I call it the Academic Ghetto: A Critical Examination of Race, Place, and Writing Centers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 2019.

Thien, Nguyen Hoang. “Reducing the Risk of Bias in Academic Publishing.” European Science Editing, vol. 49, 2023, e90942.

Agafonow, Alejandro, and Marybel Perez. “When an A is not an A in Academic Research, or How A-Journal List Metrics Inhibit Exploratory Behaviour In Academia.”

Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, vol. 36, no. 1, 2024, pp. 105–121.

Awasthi, Shipra. “Plagiarism and Academic Misconduct: A Systematic Review.”

DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, vol. 39, no. 2, 2019, pp. 94–100.

Buck, Elisabeth H. “Conversations with Writing Center Scholars on the Status of Publication in the Twenty-First Century.”

Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies.

Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017, pp.

93–110.

Conklin, Michael, and Satvir Singh. “Triple-blind review as a solution to gender bias in academic publishing, a theoretical approach.” Studies in Higher Education, vol. 47, no. 12, 2022, pp. 2487–2496.

Drieschová, Alena. “Failure, Persistence, Luck and Bias in Academic Publishing.” New Perspectives, vol. 28, no. 2, 2020, pp.

145–149.

Herb, Maggie M., Liliana M. Naydan and Clint Gardner.

“Contingency and Its Intersections in Writing Centers: An Introduction.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, 2023.

Lee, Sohui, Julie Prebel, and Elizabeth Kleinfeld.

“Rethinking Publishing In Writing Center Studies: Imagining an Anti-Racist, Decolonial, Anti-Ableist Publishing Model.” International Writing Center Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No 1 (2025) www.praxisuwc.com

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No 2 (2026)

WHY DO WRITING CENTER PROFESSIONALS PUBLISH? EXAMINING AND IMPROVING OUR PRACTICES Candis Bond Augusta University​ cbond@augusta.edu

Elisabeth H. Buck Fordham University​ ebuck7@fordham.edu

Abstract Why do writing center professionals, many of whom are not required to engage in scholarship, opt to go through the laborious process of publication? And what factors might facilitate or inhibit the publication process for authors in the discipline? To help answer these questions, we conducted a mixed-methods IRB-approved study consisting of a web-based survey (N=58) and follow-up virtual interviews with six writing center practitioners. We illustrate in this article a framework, grounded in quantitative and qualitative data, for fostering more inclusive practices for welcoming voices into published writing center spaces.

We also provide insight into how publishing fosters writing center scholars’ positionality within a discipline and the extent to which the peer review process informs (and complicates) why writing center practitioners do or do not publish in the field.

Introduction Our research here was born out of a semi-existential question: why do writing center professionals (WCPs) engage in scholarly work? In the current “post” pandemic educational context, where burnout and other issues impacting the retention of higher education faculty continue to dominate news cycles (Lederman; Lu), we wanted to better understand what motivates scholars to engage in research. WCPs have written extensively about emotional labor, burnout, and wellness (Caswell et al.; Giaimo Unwell; Giaimo “Laboring”; Giaimo & Hashlamon; Giaimo et al.; Green; Jackson et al.; Lockett; Morris and Concannon; Webster; Wooten et al.) as well as marginalization (Denny et al.; Faison and Condon; Geller and Denny; Perryman-Clark and Craig; Wooten et al.), and yet, as evidenced by the very existence of these conversations, many continue to publish. The question of motivation is especially prescient for WCPs, as their positions do not always require publication and are often tenuous or contingent. For example, the 2020-2021 Writing Center Research Project survey showed that only 25% (n=30) of 117 writing center administrators who responded were tenured or tenure-track (Purdue OWL). Those that participate in published writing center spaces thus generally do so because they have a choice, not a

Elizabeth Culatta Augusta University​ eculatta@augusta.edu

mandate. We are publishing this article, in something of a meta-inquiry, because we sought to understand the breadth of WCPs’ reasons for pursuing scholarly publication, along with what could be equally important factors that discourage would-be researchers from participating in peer-reviewed spaces.

Elisabeth began to explore these questions in her 2017 book Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies. Her robust survey of rhetoric and composition scholars yielded reasons for why researchers tend to publish in one journal over another, with respondents indicating that perceived prestige, scope or focus, and/or editorial board composition significantly impact a decision to submit to one journal over another (19-20). Even within the much narrower sub-field of writing center studies, WCPs have many choices about when, where, and how they participate in professional and scholarly conversations. Our current project seeks to expand on Elisabeth’s investigation by not only focusing more specifically on writers’ decisions and experiences in publishing their work, but also on how they conceptualize their labor and identities when they participate as reviewers of academic texts themselves. In other words, how does the field’s publishing process impact WCPs’ sense of professional belonging and identity?

Both experiences–submitting research and reviewing the scholarship of others–undoubtedly inform the extent to which scholars understand and conceptualize their role(s) and position(s) as professionals in a discipline.

Our personal experiences in writing center publishing have significantly impacted our professional identities in both positive and negative ways–something we heard echoed anecdotally by other WCPs in informal conversations and through professional networking. At times, we experienced the editorial and peer review process as affirmative. The mentorship we received from reviewers and journal editors contributed to our sense of belonging in the writing center community and built up our confidence as experts in the field. Similarly, serving as reviewers ourselves helped us develop as disciplinary mentors, shaped our disciplinary identities, and added to our sense of professional belonging. At other times, however, we found publishing in writing center

Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 2 journals, and mentoring others through the publication process, challenging. We were discouraged by extended timelines and the intensive revision required, and sometimes the style of commentary felt opposed to the field’s pedagogical values. When we attended conferences and shared these experiences with other WCPs, we heard similar stories.

As Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Sohui Lee, and Julie Prebel argue in Disruptive Stories: Amplifying Voices from the Writing Center Margins, writing center publishing practices are inherently tied to issues of diverse representation, access, inclusivity, and belonging. Our own positions within writing center studies are very privileged. Candis and Elisabeth are both white women who are tenured writing center directors and associate professors of English. (Elizabeth is also a white woman with tenure in the discipline of sociology.) Underrepresented and contingent WCPs are likely to experience additional barriers and challenges when they seek to publish in the field’s journals. Writing centers claim to be inclusive and welcoming spaces, and many writing center publications also tend to be particularly and outwardly conscious of a disciplinary tradition and praxis that is very attentive to accessibility. When we began our study, an original goal was to better understand the extent to which the field’s publishing practices reflect or undermine these values, and the impact publishing practices have on WCPs’ sense of professional identity and belonging. Due to the homogeneity of our sample, we ended up focusing less on professional identity and demographics and more on why writing center practitioners do or do not publish in the field.

Below, you will find an overview of publishing practices in the field of writing center studies, followed by our study methods and results. Our findings focus on why WCPs publish, including the advantages and challenges of publishing in the field. We conclude with our interviewees’ ideas for improving writing center publishing practices. What we hope to illustrate is a framework, grounded in quantitative and qualitative data, for fostering more inclusive practices for welcoming writers into academic publishing. We also hope to provide insight into how authors and reviewers see themselves and the extent to which this serves as an extension of their positionality within a discipline.

Ultimately, we hope our findings provide pathways for making our scholarly platforms more inclusive, accessible, and diverse.

Publishing Practices in Writing Center Studies: Where We’ve Been and Where We Are Now Historically, writing centers have been led by a rather homogenous group. Reporting on director surveys dating from the 1950s, Valles et al. point out that, since at least the 1990s, white women have accounted for 70-80% of writing center directors nationally. This was affirmed in their own 2014 director survey. Out of 314 respondents, 71.5% identified as women; only 8.7% of participants identified as non-white, 3.2% identified as disabled, and 6.5% of respondents identified as LGBT. These percentages were far below national averages for these communities (Valles et al.). Kleinfield and her colleagues link the field’s lack of diversity to inequitable publishing practices that exclude underrepresented and contingent WCPs from scholarly conversations.

Through a survey they conducted, they found that “writing center leadership (directors and coordinators) as well as writing center scholarship are not reflective of the current US population,” which should be “unsettling” considering that writing centers are “known for their wide range of institutional contexts and administrative roles” (14). Finding that publications trended toward white voices employed at high-status institutions, they note, “When the entire picture of who works in writing centers, how their positions are structured, and what models of writing center work they enact in their centers is shaped by a demographically narrow group of scholars, it is harder to imagine writing center work, scholarship, and models that look different from what is established as ‘normal’ or expected” (11).

The lack of authorial diversity in writing center publishing is exacerbated and perpetuated by the field’s insular citation practices (Lerner and Oddis). This insularity affects not just whom, but what gets published. For example, although a valuable form of research, the field’s call for more RAD (replicable, aggregated, and data-driven) studies in the 2010s (Driscoll and Perdue)—which requires significant time, resources, and institutional security to conduct—may have made publication inaccessible to many underrepresented and contingent WCPs. Although more than 70% of writing center directors are contingent (Isaacs and Knight), as Maggie M. Herb et al. observe in their special issue of Writing Center Journal on contingency, scholarship for and by contingent WCPs is lacking. Kleinfield et al. point out that, when a field is as homogenous as writing center studies, it is “harder for alternative voices to break the grand narratives that are shaped by scholarship” (11).

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 3 One of the main publishing practices that Kleinfield et al. critique is double-anonymous peer review. They cite multiple studies that show this practice privileges full-time tenure-track directors who are primarily white and work at secure, four-year research comprehensive institutions (Kleinfield et al.

13-14). In response, Kleinfield et al. offer their model of “activist editing,” which involves active recruitment of diverse authors and collaborative, non-anonymous mentorship to publication. Others have noted the limitations of the peer review process within the broader field of rhetoric and composition, drawing attention to the ways this practice is normalized in the field yet inconsistent in its delivery and purpose.

In their 2019 article “A Study of the Practices and Responsibilities of Scholarly Peer Review in Rhetoric and Composition,” for example, Lars Sutherland and Jaci Wells interviewed 20 rhetoric and composition scholars and found that they were divided in their views on the purpose of peer review. Some scholars felt that reviewing should work similarly to how the field teaches writing, focusing on collaborative relationships between authors and reviewers, while others felt that reviewers should “bluntly assess the merits of the author’s text” (118). The latter, they explain, is “out of respect to the author, who deserves to know how their work is received” (118). The former view focuses on process and providing a gateway to publication; it also focuses on developing a sense of community through relational dialogue. The latter view takes a product-oriented approach and frames the peer review process as a vetting, or gatekeeping mechanism.

Sutherland and Wells point out that these two perspectives were articulated at the 1995 Symposium on Peer Reviewing in Scholarly Journals in Rhetoric Review and have not changed much since—now three decades later (118). Within the narrower sub-field of writing center studies, divided views on peer review take on heightened significance, since a gatekeeping model is in opposition to the field’s pedagogical praxis, which focuses on writing as a process, centering the author, and non-evaluative mentorship.

Since 2020, some writing center journals have taken steps to create more accessible and inclusive publishing practices, including being more explicit about guidelines and expectations for reviewers and the feedback they provide to authors. For example, in their section on “Scholarly Review Practices,” The Peer Review (TPR) commits to anti-racist, accessible, and inclusive reviewing practices (“About”). The journal provides reviewers with access to the document “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors,” which offers guidance in how

to engage in anti-racist reviewing and publishing practices. The journal also provides its own, in-house “Guidelines for Reviewers,” as well as an accessibility guide. TPR is explicit about the purpose of the peer review process in its guidelines for reviewers, stating “our goal is to get just about every pertinent submission to publication, and, secondly, we expect our reviewers to offer feedback that allows the author(s) to grow and develop throughout the review process. In other words, our reviewers are invited to act like writing consultants.” The journal provides detailed instructions on how to give “encouraging” feedback to authors that is “useful,” “engaged,” “thoughtful,” and “actionable.”

Like TPR, Writing Center Journal (WCJ) refers reviewers to the Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices heuristic. The journal also offers its own “Guidance for Reviews” document, although this guidance is less clear than TPR’s about the purpose and role of reviewers and does not mention inclusivity, accessibility, or anti-racism explicitly. The guidance does encourage reviewers to “practice the sorts of empathy and respect for writing in progress as we would in any writing center.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and SDC: A Journal of Writing Center Studies do not post guidelines for reviewers on their websites, although WLN does ascribe to the WAC Clearinghouse’s “Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice,” which includes promoting equitable publishing practices to “encourage greater representation across cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints.” All writing center journals also provide reviewers with the option to leave comments that only the editors will see. This practice allows reviewers to express concerns to editors that will not be shared with authors directly. Some journals, including Praxis, WLN, and TPR, request that reviewers share areas of specialization within writing center studies. This practice theoretically ensures that an article is appropriately matched with a reviewer who is willing to disclose particular identities, interests, or experiences. Reviewers are also encouraged to decline a review if they do not feel they know enough about an article’s subject area.

Although we are encouraged by shifting editorial and publishing practices in the field, we hope our study can also contribute to reshaping disciplinary publishing practices to make the field more inclusive, accessible, and diverse. Our study offers insight into why WCPs publish, as well as how engaging with writing center journals influences their sense of professional identity and belonging. Writing center journals and editors can use this information to think

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 4 critically about their practices, including whether they are serving WCPs well and helping them to meet their professional goals.

Methods In order to learn more about writing scholars’ experiences with academic publishing, we conducted a mixed-methods study that included a web-based survey and follow-up virtual interviews. To be included in the study, participants had to be at least 18 years of age and identify as a writing center professional who has received a review from a writing center journal and/or has served as a reviewer for one or more writing center journals. “Writing center professional” was defined as someone who works professionally within writing centers as a director, assistant director, coordinator, or tutor/consultant. “Writing center journal” referred to the following publications: Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, The Peer Review, and Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation.

“Reviewer” referred to having reviewed at least one time for one or more of the journals listed above.

Being a recipient of a review meant the participant had received at least one review from one or more of the journals listed above. “Review” referred to both peer and editorial reviews of submitted manuscripts.

Web-Based Survey We used Qualtrics to create an anonymous, web-based survey consisting of 43 closed and open-ended questions. Convenience and snowball sampling was used to solicit participants. The survey was distributed electronically via email to the Writing Studies (writingstudies-l@listserv.nodak.edu) and Writing Center (wcenter@lyris.ttu.edu) list-servs. The authors also emailed the survey directly to colleagues whom they thought might be interested in participating and encouraged them to share with others who fit the eligibility criteria. The authors also shared the survey on the Directors of Writing Centers and Writing Center Network Facebook pages.

Questions were categorized into four sections: 1.​ Experience working in writing centers 2.​ Experience receiving feedback from writing center journals 3.​ Experience giving feedback on submissions to writing center journals 4.​ Demographics The survey contained a final question asking participants if they would be interested in participating

in a follow-up interview. If participants responded “yes” to this question, they were prompted to provide a name and email address. Contact information was disaggregated from survey responses to protect participants’ anonymity and to reduce the chances of bias when selecting interviewees.

We received 58 complete responses to our survey between July and August of 2022. Elizabeth used the software program STATA version 18 to analyze quantitative results. Forty-five respondents stated they had received reviews from writing center journals, while 42 stated they had given reviews for writing center journals. Unfortunately, although perhaps unsurprisingly considering what we know about the demographics of writing center studies as a discipline, the sample was fairly monolithic: 91% (n=51) were 35 years of age or older (50% of respondents were between the ages of 35 and 44); 91% (n=52) were white; and 67% (n=35) identified as cisgender women. Eighty-four percent of respondents (n=49) held a leadership position within their respective writing center as a director, coordinator, or assistant/associate director/coordinator and 74% (n=43) had worked in writing centers for 10+ years. In other words, participants were experienced and advanced in their writing center careers. While our goal in this study was to promote inclusive, accessible practices, our findings fall short of providing insight into the experiences of underrepresented practitioners and scholars in the field. However, our respondents still provide valuable information about disciplinary publishing that can be used to improve practices.

Although the sample was monolithic in many ways, a clear distinction emerged between participants who were tenured or on the tenure track and those who were not. Forty-seven percent of respondents (n=27) stated they were tenured or on the tenure track while 53% (n=31) stated they were in non-tenure track roles. Those not on the tenure track identified as students, staff, adjunct/contingent faculty, non-tenure track faculty, and “other,” with the majority occupying staff roles (n=19). This split was interesting because it suggested that tenure-track status may not be the driving motive for engaging in scholarly publication within writing center studies. Tenure is frequently associated with research output as well as disciplinary identity and belonging, but it may not be a significant factor for writing center professionals who publish.

This sparked our curiosity: Why were these folks publishing if they weren’t required to do so? This early observation also helped inform our process for selecting candidates for follow-up interviews since we knew we wanted to hear from both

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 5 tenured/tenure-track and non-tenured/tenure track respondents.

Follow-Up Virtual Interviews Twenty-six survey respondents stated they would be willing to participate in a follow-up interview. We interviewed a total of six survey respondents–four women and two men–who held leadership positions within their writing centers as directors, associate directors, or coordinators. Three were in tenured/tenure-track positions and three held non-tenure-track roles. All the tenured/tenure-track interviewees stated that they were required to publish as part of their job, although one noted that they did not have to publish as part of their administrative assignment to direct the writing center–their publishing was connected to their faculty position in English literature. None of the non-tenure-track interviewees were required to publish as part of their writing center jobs.

Candis and Elisabeth conducted 45-60-minute interviews virtually over Zoom between November 2022 and March 2023. Interviews were recorded and Zoom’s transcription feature was enabled to allow the authors to accurately transcribe responses for analysis.

After verbal consent was obtained, Candis and Elisabeth asked participants the following questions: 1.​ We want to know your story. Tell us about your experiences receiving reviews from writing center journals.

2.​ How have these experiences impacted your perceptions of the field and your place within it?

3.​ Tell us about your experiences giving reviews for writing center journals.

4.​ When you review, how do you perceive your ethos and purpose?

5.​ Is there anything you would change about the review process to make receiving reviews from writing center journals a more positive experience?

6.​ Is there anything you would change about the review process to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and access within the field of writing center studies?

7.​ Several of our survey respondents noted they published even though their positions do not require it. Can you tell us if your position requires you to publish? What motivates you to publish, especially if this isn’t a required component of your position?

8.​ Is there anything else you would like us to know that we didn’t ask you about?

After all interviews were completed, Candis and Elisabeth cleaned up and anonymized the Zoom transcripts and used a grounded theory approach to code the data manually using Excel spreadsheets. A grounded theory approach meant we approached the data iteratively in several cycles without applying pre-existing codes or categories; instead, we identified concepts that led to codes and, later, categories emerged organically as we inductively analyzed the text (Saldana 1-2). Although we did not approach the data with pre-existing categories or themes in mind, we did prioritize our research questions and looked for emergent patterns related to reviewer ethos/approach, motivations for publishing, barriers to publishing, and recommendations for improving publishing practices.

During the first cycle of coding, Candis and Elisabeth chose one interview and each coded it independently to identify emergent categories. We used brief words and phrases to describe what we were seeing and took notes so that we could compare our interpretations of the data. We then met to review our independent coding results and discussed areas of agreement and difference. After comparing our notes and initial results, we agreed upon a list of 13 categories and completed a second cycle of coding for this same interview (see Appendix B for a complete list of categories). After comparing our results for this second cycle, we agreed that we were on the same page when it came to interpreting the data, and Candis coded the remaining five interviews using the same method and list of categories. After Candis completed coding, Elisabeth reviewed her work to ensure agreement and enhance reliability. We used our coding results to develop the themes we discuss in the next section. After the full manuscript was drafted, Candis and Elisabeth assigned pseudonyms to the interview participants, and they were individually contacted to review the full article draft to verify that we represented their words accurately and authentically.

We also offered an opportunity to change their assigned pseudonym, if they desired. Candis and Elisabeth also offered participants author credit, as promised in their consent process, but all six interviewees declined this offer and chose to remain anonymous.

Why do Writing Center Practitioners Publish?

Advantages and Challenges In our results section, we share themes that emerged related to writing center professionals’ experiences publishing in the field. We focus on their “whys,” beginning by discussing the positive advantages of

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 6 publishing in writing center journals followed by barriers and challenges.

Activism, Joy, and Gaining “Street Cred” We were curious to learn why WCPs publish, especially when their positions frequently do not require them to do research, or to do research specifically on/in writing centers. Historically, writing centers have been perceived as marginalized or under-resourced spaces, and yet, WCPs are often prolific writers and researchers. Our interviewees shared several sources of motivation. Only one of our participants, notably an interviewee with tenure, expressed financial motivations for publishing, but as a “first-generation college student” who “grew up poor” it was difficult for him to not see publication as the best way to “get that next pay bump” (David). Several interview participants opted to pursue publication to give themselves–and perhaps by extension their affiliated centers–credibility in the eyes of the institution. Khloe illustrates this argument succinctly: “in the institutions where I've been that have been very hierarchical, and have had a heavy faculty-staff divide, being able to show that I have just as many publications [as many faculty members] gains me street cred with them.” The idea that publication brings a specific form of institutional cachet can be especially significant for non-tenure track directors. Khloe in particular saw her publication record as a means of combating the tendency of certain parties to see the writing center director as a “a literal servant to the university [that is] there to meet their needs.” She also saw her research as a means of resisting the legacy publication model where white male scholars were able to publish prolifically largely due to their wives’ unseen and uncredited labor. For Khloe, the ability to publish despite both her heavy administrative workload and no obligation to do so renders her research a “weapon” against these standards. “I also don't feel like there's any choice in some contexts,” Khloe says about her use of the term “weapon” to describe her publication record; it exists within the arsenal of her other professionalizing experiences: I guess it evens things out when faculty members are like, ‘Oh, well, you're just staff.

You don't understand what it's like.’ No, I carry a half time faculty load, teaching just as many students as you are. I'm having way more one-to-one contact [with them]. I've published. I'm presenting at these conferences, and I'm an invited speaker at these places.

What do you bring to the table?

For Khloe in particular, the concrete evidence that she has engaged in as much academic labor as her tenure-track or tenured colleagues helps to importantly cohere her institutional ethos, and publishing exists as perhaps the most visible and legible manifestation of this labor.

Other interview participants saw their publication efforts as specifically motivated by activism. Bella felt her efforts to publish about the experiences of first-generation students and labor issues were especially significant: “I’m contributing something that might actually positively benefit somebody.” Bella does have some percentage of her workload allocated toward research but also sees it as essential to her role as writing center director. “For me, personally, it’s a very important part of me being in the field,” Bella noted whilst also echoing Khloe in suggesting that publishing research is a critical way “to demonstrate to the University how we're doing.”

Another interview participant also saw activism in publication as extending to mentoring students through the research process. On this point, Josie notes that “I try to include students in conference presentations and publications…I let students know if they're interested in research, they can reach out to me.” Josie sees publication and research as an important way to validate tutors’ experiences and stories by demonstrating “that people want to learn from them.” Janelle also shared the importance of mentoring graduate students through publication efforts, even if such efforts are challenging. “I really want those positions to offer as rich a professional development experience for the graduate students as is possible,” she noted—and working through the publication process with a writing center director mentor can be one of the most fruitful professionalizing experiences. Engaging students in research efforts can be seen as another way to showcase writing centers as spaces for developing academic skill-sets, thereby also contributing to the writing center’s reputation as a site for robust intellectual inquiry. It is significant that participants see their motivation for publishing as having meaning beyond their own professional reputation. Writing center directors, by virtue of their close and unique work with students, can play a role in modeling how anecdotal experiences, when shared through story and research, can lead to rigorous inquiry and significant results. Mentoring lets writers know that they have an important perspective worth sharing, which in and of itself is a form of activism within the academy.

Another motivation for publishing emerged, quite simply, from the joy of participating in writing

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 7 center conversations, especially with other like-minded professionals. WCPs seem to find a sense of self, place, and belonging through publication. This finding was borne out in quantitative survey results as well as in interviews. Thirty-seven percent (n=17) of respondents somewhat or strongly agreed that receiving reviews “affirms [their] professional identity” and 69% (n=31) somewhat or strongly agreed that receiving reviews “positively contributes to [their] professional development.” Fifty five percent (n=25) of survey respondents reported that receiving peer/editor reviews “make me feel welcome in the field of writing center studies,” while fifty one percent of survey respondents also somewhat or strongly agreed that “receiving reviews from writing center journals has been a positive experience.”

Our interview participants provided examples of these positive experiences. Colin said that “for me, [engaging in research] is kind of fun. It's a source of creative expression…and just allows me to kind of cultivate ideas that often feed back into my teaching, feed back into my writing center work and administration.” For David, participating in writing center research can be a way to connect with others, which took on new meaning post-pandemic. “If I do anything now,” David says, “I want it to be because I'm working with people I like working with...and getting to have chats with some folks like, maybe this could be a conference talk we could do together. Maybe I can convince this person to write an article together, because they're really cool.” Josie argues that the space of the writing center inherently inspires engagement with research, as “I find [the experiences I have every day in the writing center] really interesting and engaging, and [they] make me want to learn more and read more, and study more. Those everyday experiences feel to me like really valuable places of inquiry.” As these comments make clear, writing center research provides space for creativity and camaraderie.

That the site of our labor (i.e., the writing center) can itself be a source of inspiration to engage in research is perhaps unique to our profession. Yet, throughout their conversations with us, a number of participants shared that, despite whatever difficulties they have encountered both professionally and institutionally as writing center constituents, their enthusiasm for and commitment to the value of writing centers was a strong motivation for engaging in the discipline as a publishing professional: “It's kind of where my bliss is. I didn't intend to be a writing center person, but when I fell into a directorship, I loved it again. I think that's very common” (David). The belief in the value of writing centers, and research’s ability to

convey and articulate that value, thus emerges as perhaps the strongest motivation to publish in the field.

A “Gentle Introduction to Scholarly Publishing”: Collaboration and Mentorship During our interviews, it became clear that publishing in writing center journals offered participants more than a line on their CVs. Over and over, interviewees focused on the collaborative, encouraging mentorship they received from reviewers and editors, and they noted the ways writing center publications offered a “gentle introduction to scholarly publishing” (Khloe) by taking time to demystify disciplinary conversations, genre conventions, and audience expectations. This approach contrasted noticeably to publishing practices participants had observed in other adjacent disciplines, including literature, linguistics, and rhetoric and composition. The way authors and reviewers described the writing center publication process may offer an explanation for why so many writing center professionals publish, even if it is not required by their position–publishing seems to function as a form of relationship and community-building, as it also serves to teach the ins and outs of a specialized field in ways that lend credibility and legitimacy to directors and their centers.

As they recalled their early publishing experiences, interviewees expressed appreciation for reviewers and editors who took time to coach them through a collaborative process. For example, Khloe stated that, as a late grad student, she struggled with her first writing center publication, especially “trying to make it feel very scholarly,” but, after receiving anonymous peer reviews, the editor of the journal “worked with us in a Zoom format…and kind of coached me and my writing partner through some pretty massive revisions.” Khloe explained that this editorial coaching “gave us a chance to ask questions about what the reviewers had said…and clarify what [the journal] was looking for.” The coaching offered by reviewers and editors also helped authors navigate new audiences and disciplinary expectations. For example, Bella noted her first writing center journal peer reviewers were “really good at addressing genre conventions… They’re like, okay. You want to pull your results out a little separately from your analysis a bit more, and that kind of thing where I was like, okay, this is stuff that’s really helpful for me, just in terms of figuring out the genre, and that…helps me in terms of my professional identity and figuring out my ability to write in these different academic genres.” This kind of

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 8 collaborative coaching helps new professionals transition into the discipline and gain expertise.

Several participants also appreciated the extra coaching journal editors offered authors after peer reviews came in. This is a step in the publication process that seems to be a hallmark of writing center studies–editors are willing to act as gateways to publication and offer an extensive amount of time to coach authors through the revision process. David, for example, shared an early-career publication story that showcased how editorial mentoring helped him “traverse that threshold” from graduate student writer to published professional. He said: [The editors] really beat that manuscript up, but in a very kind way that was a really formative experience for me. I really felt I was being apprenticed in a lot of ways, and it just helped. They were really patient. They let me go back and forth with them. And so it was a really positive experience. It took a minute, but I was really proud of that piece when it came out.

The “back and forth” that David mentioned was also appreciated by Colin, who praised reviewers’ “supportive” and “positive” comments that often “had nothing to do with things they thought needed to change.” Instead, it was a “collegial interaction.” He said, “We’re all writing center people, and we’re having a conversation, and you know, as part of our discipline, right?” Several interviewees mentioned the positive impact of reviewers and editors who treat feedback as a form of mentorship. For example, Josie said, “I’ve found…a lot of mentorship and a lot of work with people to, I guess, enhance and make the work better.”

Josie noted this form of collaboration is especially helpful for student and novice authors in the field: Having [a] collaborative feedback model was really helpful…for showing [students] the process of publication, and that, even when you're publishing something, multiple people are looking at your work. So it's not just one person, and I think that that…sort of helped demystify the publication process… there are sometimes conflicting pieces of feedback you have to work through, and there's a lot of navigating involved. But, like I said, I think it's really supportive, and that kind of furthers my idea of what the writing center field is: being supportive, being mentoring, being encouraging of new voices and student publications.

Interview participants whose disciplinary background was not in rhetoric and composition or writing center studies were even more mindful of a need for coaching during the publication process, especially if the field wants to be inclusive of voices from underrepresented communities and those in positions that do not support research. Janelle, whose background is in the arts, received negative reviewer feedback and an article rejection from a writing center publication early in her first job as a writing center coordinator. The feedback was not encouraging and focused on a lack of engagement with disciplinary scholarship and past conversations. She said it “was challenging to receive that [negative] feedback,” but it “was also really useful to recognize, oh, this is a field unto itself. There is scholarship here that needs to be respected.” She said, “I don’t think [our manuscript/research] was naive, but I think that was the reception of it. It was received as, ‘Oh, yes, you just, there, there. You’re excited about your ideas that we’ve all already had.’” For WCPs like Janelle, coaching could offer a way into the discipline rather than closing doors. Although some interviewees had experiences with negative reviewer feedback, most focused on positive experiences grounded in a spirit of collaboration and mentorship. In our survey, 58% (n=26) of respondents somewhat or strongly agreed that the reviewer comments they received on their own work “promoted the field’s values of writer-centered, process-oriented, equitable writing instruction.”

Participants’ generally positive experiences with reviewer feedback aligned with the way interviewees described their approach to reviewer work. Most stated they aimed to mentor authors by providing pathways to publication and intentionally avoided taking a gatekeeping approach to promote equity. For example, none of our survey respondents disagreed (and 38% strongly agreed) with the statement “my reviews promote equitable publishing practices in the discipline of writing center studies.” In her interview, Josie elaborated, explaining that she strives to be a “mentor guide” when she reviews. Since many writing center scholars are new to the field and may not be familiar with the scholarly conversation, she tries to “give [authors] access to resources” “if there are certain people they should be talking about” or if they are “not signaling foundational scholarship” rather than “shut[ting] them down” because they’re “not citing the right people.” She does not want writers to feel excluded or “defeated” because they “didn’t know who the right people were” to include. She also tries to find “strength and points of encouragement” while “emphasizing the value of the piece as a whole” and telling them “they do have really important

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 9 contributions to make.” Similarly, Khloe said “I would much rather see us work with writers to build them up and make sure things are getting in rather than rejecting them and just sending them on the way. I think that that contributes to the mentoring. I'm hoping that the feedback I've given makes people feel welcome and makes their ideas feel valued.” David thinks reviewing is “really about mentoring someone and making sure they kind of understand the ‘Why’s’ of [the requested revisions] rather than just kind of tearing [the draft] down.” Bella said she sees herself as a “helper,” and she tries to be conscious of the background and experience level of authors she reviews so she can tailor the amount and type of feedback she offers to be the most encouraging and useful as possible.

Colin also views his role as reviewer to be one of inclusion and initiation rather than exclusion and gatekeeping. He said, I think [reviewing and publication] is kind of, in a sense, a process of initiation. If it's with people that are less experienced, because I just think a lot of us…well, just a lot of us are insanely busy. A lot of people in our field maybe didn't professionally identify as writing center people when they started their jobs.

They're just keeping their nose down and are just trying to keep things under control. And so sometimes there can be a kind of tunnel vision or myopia, where they'll be presenting something that's actually…they're presenting something local, and they're presenting something as if it's this amazing discovery that no one has ever talked about. And then when you're giving feedback, you have to be like, oh, here, actually, we've been talking about this.

Why don't you talk about that, too? How does this fit into this ongoing discussion we've been having, right? And so part of that is about, like I said, sort of welcoming people into the community and transferring membership and trying to situate them within a, you know, a much bigger kind of scholarly discussion.

Overall, our participants prioritized mentorship when reviewing and saw it as central to the reviewer role.

Even when a piece is not a good fit for a particular journal, Bella tries to offer the authors a path toward publication by suggesting other publishing venues. She explains, “I have read things [as a reviewer] that…I felt had interesting things to say but were not a right fit for the journal…and that's always tough, because I want them to understand their work is important. It just doesn't fit…this journal. And that's a

situation where I try to be really encouraging of, like, here's why I think it would fit better for this [other] publication or this [other] publication.” Bella’s comments indicate how committed she is to empowering writers’ voices, a theme other participants echoed.

Several interviewees explained that they tried to stay true to writing center pedagogy and practices when they reviewed by being author-centered and serving as gateways rather than gatekeepers. They approached reviewing with a mindset of positivity and curiosity. Khloe, for example, said she tries “to approach [reviewing]” by using “the same strategies that I would use as a writing center tutor” by asking open-ended questions. David also “appl[ies] a writing center ethos” in his reviews by asking questions and responding as a reader. He will ask, “How might a reader who believes in X or Y respond to what's related here?” Similarly, Janelle sees reviewing “as an extension of [her] work in the writing center” and tries to “respond as a particular, situated reader.” She says, “I think of myself as a champion of the piece…Basically, I always approach reading something as a peer reviewer from the stance of, I want to see this published. And what can I offer? What do I see when I read this that I think will help to move it a next step forward?” She described her role as sitting in this space between, and responding to what is there, and also what could be there, what is not yet there…So there’s also this, like, coming to be-ness of the writing, and so I guess I see the peer reviewer role very similarly to that, which is that we’re sitting between the expectations of the journal and the publication, and the piece of writing and the author, and we kind of have obligations to both of those things, and to respond to where they intersect, and where they might diverge…I think I approach it more in line with my writing center work, where I think, okay, I have a responsibility to what is the expectation of the journal, but I also have a responsibility to meet this author and their piece of writing, and to be curious and inquiring about what are they trying to do.

And maybe that’s something that the journal has never seen before or didn’t account for in their expectations, because it’s not a way that people have felt they could write before, or, you know, or maybe they just, maybe the author doesn’t know, but maybe they do know, and they’re challenging something on purpose…I think that does play into how I

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 10 talk to tutors about, sort of, what is our role [in the writing center]...because our role isn’t to fix anything or assume the writing is broken from the outset, but it is to champion the writer to feel ready to hand in their best work, and I think that, to me, that would be a great thing for peer reviewers [for writing center journals] to think of their role as, like, how do I champion this writing and this writer to publish their best work, or choose not to, if they want?

Janelle’s comments capture a potential rather than deficit-oriented perspective that seems common among writing center reviewers.

Overall, reviewers emphasized a focus on the writer–not just the writing, and they took a process, revision-oriented rather than product-oriented approach in their feedback. Indeed, 83% (n=35) of survey respondents somewhat or strongly agreed that their own reviews for writing center journals are “writer-centered” and 79% (n = 33) of respondents somewhat or strongly agreed that they would describe their own reviews as “process oriented.” As Colin noted, “writing center people tend to give pretty nurturing, supportive feedback [in reviews], even when they’re being critical.” Many of our interviewees noted that this approach to publication contributed to their sense of belonging in the discipline and academe more broadly. Khloe, for instance, said, “I feel like the accessibility and kindness of the majority of the reviewers in writing centers makes it so that I want to stay in this field. I want to stay in academia. I don't feel like anything is false or overly elevated, or extra elitist in that process, and that was something I was really afraid of when I started publishing.” Moving into the role of supportive, writer-centric reviewer seemed just as formative for our participants as did receiving reviews, potentially motivating them to remain active in publishing themselves. Our survey results indicated that providing reviews to writing journals was important to respondents’ development of professional identity (81% somewhat or strongly agreed) and fosters their sense of belonging within the field (83% somewhat or strongly agreed).

Barriers to Publishing in Writing Center Journals As implied in the previous section, imposter syndrome (which can admittedly strike at any stage of one’s career) and learning a new, specialized discipline can act as barriers to publication in writing center studies. In addition to these potential barriers, participants commented on several others, including lack of time, resources, and support; the ways writing center

reviewer and editor ethos can extend the publication process for too long, leading to frustration, delays, and, sometimes, thwarted or wasted efforts; and a disconnect between the ways work is received at conferences and other informal venues as compared to its reception in scholarly journals, a disconnect that can also lead to extended timelines to publication and discouragement from publishing altogether.

Many participants, especially those in staff and non-tenure-track roles, stated they did not have the structural support or time needed to publish. For example, Janelle said she “didn't necessarily think about [publishing…] because I was still working, busy, and stuff, but just recognizing that there were people in writing centers who had the kinds of positions that allowed them to do much more scholarly type work, like do studies and get ethics approval, and that kind of thing, and be faculty members and do that kind of work. And that was not the kind of position that I had.” Bella also acknowledged the competing demands on directors’ time that can make publishing difficult.

She “understands why people wouldn't [publish].

Because it is incredibly time consuming. And you know our center's been crazy busy this semester, and we've had a million workshop requests. And so it’s like, when things are like this, it's like, yeah, how would you have time for [publishing] on top of everything else.” She went on to say, “it's tough when [research and publication is] a relatively small percentage of what you're supposed to be doing for your job, but it's also something you really care about. It's like, ‘Okay, How am I gonna manage this?’” Similarly, Khloe stated that it is difficult to “balance in writing time and publication” when writing center directors’ roles are often filled “with turmoil” and “up in the air.” Yet, she notes that they must “carve out time” to publish in order to maintain their credibility on campus: “when people are questioning my professionalism, where people are questioning my belonging in a university or the existence of my line, or if I'm a teacher (right now I'm arguing for faculty status at my institution), and one of the things I have is, ‘well, I've actually published more than the majority of your core faculty, who haven't published at all since they started working here.

Here are the plans that I have for my research agenda[...] I think that is helpful.’” These concerns are of particular significance in a higher education landscape where contingency is the norm and the value of research is being called into question.

While participants appreciated mentorship throughout the publication process, they also noted it could lead to delays and overly extended timelines that further discouraged them from publishing. In some

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 11 cases, authors revised extensively through several rounds of peer review, only to have their piece rejected.

For example, Bella explained that a manuscript was “reviewed [and revised] three times and ultimately rejected.” Bella noted she was “unhappy, to say the least, at the end” and would have preferred it if the journal would have rejected the article at the beginning “because I ended up spending a year and a half on this thing that will probably never see the light of day, because I have no interest in going back to it at this point.” Similarly, David submitted a piece to the same journal and was asked to revise and resubmit. After revising substantially, the piece had to go to new reviewers because the original reviewers were unavailable. The new reviewers asked for many of the revisions to be reverted, so David made substantial revisions again and sent it back for a third round of review. After “months of radio silence,” the piece was rejected. David decided to submit the manuscript to a different writing center journal and went through two additional rounds of peer review there, only for the journal to become unresponsive for more than 10 months. At the time of our interview–nearly four years after he had submitted his first draft to the first journal–his piece remained unpublished, and he had not heard back from the editors of the second journal.

David called his experience “disheartening,” and while many factors, including inconsistent communication, backlogs, and reviewer turnover were involved, he also pointed to the mentorship model of reviewing as a potential stumbling block for authors. Writing center journals, he stated, have “almost cultivated a culture of hyper revision at that level where you know it’s almost micromanagement in some ways” (David).

While long timelines to publication and unresponsive journals are exasperating, they can also have tangible negative effects on scholars’ careers and can limit access and representation in the field. Long timelines to publication and extensive coaching through revisions can discourage newcomers and marginalized scholars from entering disciplinary conversations. David noted, “There needs to be a decent enough turnaround time” so we can get people, especially students and those new to the field, “acquainted with [publication], and to get a sense of what [the discipline] looks like” (David). Long timelines can also hinder career advancement. During the four years David waited to hear about his manuscript, he had gone up for tenure and promotion–without this publication on his CV. While this did not affect his case, it can have serious repercussions for many academics. In a different situation, for example, David decided to pull a

manuscript from a writing center journal because the editors had been unresponsive for more than a year and their co-author did need the publication for their tenure and promotion dossier. When they resubmitted the essay to a general education journal, the co-authors received “feedback right away.” David lamented, “it sucked because I really believed in that piece. But there were material consequences for it not going through, and we had to make sure [my co-author] got [it] through [to publication for tenure]” (David).

Many participants also commented on the role of writing center conferences in publication. Most spoke highly of the feedback they received at these conferences and were grateful for activities such as publishing workshops and journal editor meet-and-greets. However, one participant observed that writing center conferences can set up unrealistic expectations for the publishing experience, which can also slow down the publishing timeline and be discouraging to newer authors. She stated, “it does feel like we end up having very different scholarly conversations, right, in a conference, which I hope we think of as part of our scholarly conversation that we have in our profession...some of them are very ‘scholarly’ scholarship and research and RAD…presentations. But we also have a lot more scope and space for human-to-human and curiosity about, like, ‘oh, what happens in your center? Our center is different.’ And then it doesn't feel like there's a lot of space for that in publications, which is, I don't know, maybe a bit odd” (Janelle). She went on to explain: “writing center conferences and professional associations [are] so welcoming, and are like, “yes, great presentation about this stuff that you're doing…just tell us about your program.’ [...] And then [there is a very different] response to a publication, which is like, ‘where's the scholarship, it needs to be grounded in the scholarship,’ which is not the experience we had at conferences or in other professional associations.” She expressed how this can be discouraging and “a bit jarring” (Janelle). Although none of the other interviewees spoke about this disconnect, it resonated with the two first authors who have both had similar experiences where their work was received much more positively at writing center conferences than it was in the peer review process.

Future Directions: Fostering a More Positive and Inclusive Publication Experience While participants spoke at length about the advantages and challenges associated with publishing in writing center journals, they also mentioned several ways to improve the publication experience, especially

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 12 for underrepresented, contingent, and novice authors.

In this conclusion, we share some of the ideas expressed by our respondents, including recruiting diverse reviewer pools, being more intentional about timelines to publication and integration of technology, and providing more extensive training for peer reviewers.

Recruiting a Diverse Reviewer Pool A primary motivation for engaging in this project was to consider how our participants’ perspectives could support recommendations for a more inclusive and accessible publication experience–both within writing centers and across broader academic contexts. Many of our interviewees spoke about the extent to which engaging in writing center research as both a reviewer and a participant contributed to their own sense of belonging, especially vis-a-vis reviewing practices that enable reviewers to draw on their own identities and experiences. Khloe notes that, “I'm white. I'm queer.

I'm a child of first-generation immigrants and I felt super great about being recruited into reviewing. To me that was a compliment.” For others, however, this recruitment might be more complicated if one is regularly asked to take on this labor due to specific identities or experiences, as Khloe describes: I carry a lot of white guilt around and feel like it's my job to review for free, and to contribute for free, because I have profited so much off of the system. I don't feel the same way for people who have more intersectionalities than I do, who have been historically excluded or oppressed. I think that being able to seek out those scholars and offer them honorariums for their work is really important, particularly because they're being asked to do so much of [this]. I know that's making a broad, sweeping generalization, but it's what I’m observing for my colleagues of color, who are constantly being tapped for their input in terms of inclusive or DEI articles.

most diverse possible editorial team is a priority, then attention must be paid to how this labor is compensated and recognized.

Writing center reviewers, as both our literature review and survey results illustrate, tend to be a particularly homogeneous population, and Colin rather dryly notes, “We're a very white field, and, interestingly, we're also a very feminized field, right? So, actually, as a guy, like, it's like, oh, my gosh, I'm diverse, yay! …

Believe me, I don't think we need to do anything to make our field more inclusive of, you know, cis-het, straight white men, like, we got our, you know, we have plenty of venues for that.” Colin’s point–that writing center studies tends to center the perspective of white women–certainly has an impact on the kinds of scholarship that we produce and the way(s) that it is reviewed, as Kleinfield et al. have demonstrated so aptly. It is an oversimplification of a complicated problem to suggest that the field would benefit from a pool of more diverse voices, but it should be a serious consideration for any journal editor on how to recruit a diverse editorial team and make that labor legible.

Kleinfield et al.’ s “activist editing” model may also work for reviewers, but a field’s practices do not necessarily make a dent in wider systemic inequities that continue to devalue and underpay the labor associated with editing, reviewing, and, for many, authorship. Khloe suggests that “more conversation about how we talk about and how we use the reviewing process in our professional portfolios” might be one way to accomplish this, if reviewers are given space to robustly explain their labor as reviewers within their institutional review process. Taking this a step further, editors of journals could narrativize the reviewer’s labor and the impact it had on the publication of a piece. This narrative could be a component to submit with an annual review and/or a tenure and promotion file. In any case, the ways that reviewing labor is recognized and compensated should certainly be at the center of editorial conversations, especially regarding increasing the diversity of reviewing pools.

Compensating peer reviewers is certainly not a new proposition, and it is one that most journals would probably happily participate in with robust institutional or external support. Sylvia Goodman’s 2022 Chronicle article, “Is it Time to Pay Peer Reviewers?” posits that pay and more institutional recognition would significantly increase motivation for engaging in peer review labor, but writing center journals tend to exemplify a lack of substantive support, perhaps even more so than other publications in the humanities. Yet still, if making sure that pieces are reviewed by the

Timelines and Technologies As indicated in the previous section, many of our participants noted that complicated and confusing timelines contributed to their negative publication experiences. Many suggested, however, that more streamlined tools and guidelines for the reviewing process might contribute to a smoother and more expedient publication experience. Bella explained, “I think, having clear guidelines for reviewers is really necessary… In some instances, I've gotten that and other instances, I haven’t as a reviewer. When I do get

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 13 those guidelines, I find it so much more helpful.” Our participants noted the utility of specific heuristics related to review, whether that was a checklist; a form that asks reviewers to respond to specific, targeted questions; or a collaborative review tool where reviewers commented together, like Google Docs.

Several of our interviewees specifically mentioned the helpfulness of Google Docs due to its “transparency,” particularly considering writing center studies is a small, rather insular field. Colin effectively describes how these tools can theoretically contribute to a more conversational and less obscure review experience: I do think the move towards Google Docs, or, you know, whatever broader category you want to call that–collaborative online documents–is a positive move. Honestly, I just feel like anything that can make the process more transparent. And I really think we're at a moment where maybe the traditional values of academic publishing are kind of coming up against, well, first of all, our own values as a community, like, us, specifically, the writing center field, because we're very personal, and we're very individualized, and we're very not anonymous, you know.

Colin takes this a step further by advocating for non-anonymous peer reviews, echoing Kleinfield et al.

He argues the process should be “treat[ed] more as a mentorship” similar to the IWCA mentor matching program. Josie also commented on the utility of Google Docs to foster a conversation amongst reviewers, again arguing in favor of non-anonymous peer review. She explained, “My experience doing the reviews with Google Docs [was positive] because different people on the editorial team were commenting.” She continued, stating “They could respond to one another as well. So someone could have a comment, and then someone else would respond and say, ‘You know, I don't really agree with that, I actually see it going this way.’” Khloe also “[doesn’t] understand why reviewers get to hide behind anonymity,” as she “would much rather have at least a reviewer statement go out to each person I review for that, says ‘I'm reviewer one, this is my background.

This is my intersection. This is a perspective I'm coming from. This is my approach to giving you feedback.’” While participants had different perspectives about their preferences for completing reviews, there was again consensus that guidance from the journal was very helpful, and that the use of specific tools like Google Docs could help a great deal in making the review process more transparent. Several interviewees questioned the double-anonymous peer

review model and preferred a mentorship process, where writers would be paired with reviewers and identity is known to both parties. Implicitly aware of the reviewer ethos dichotomy described so well in Sutherland and Wells’s earlier study, respondents favored publishing technologies, timelines, and reviewer ethos that are grounded in writing center pedagogy and support writing-as-process, authorial autonomy, and collaboration.

Reviewer Training and Feedback A common concern noted by our participants is that they were given very little training when they first took on the role of reviewer, as well as the uncertainty about the extent to which they could disclose their own voice or perspective in reviews. Khloe was especially conscious of this, noting that “My biggest fear [when I'm reviewing], especially with other professionals, is any sort of intersectional or voice erasure in the way that I give feedback. I want to make sure that I’m not imposing my own preferences… How do I help them make it cohesive without making it mine?” Bella was also concerned that there was no mentorship for her first reviewing experience, sharing that “They kind of just expect you to know what it is to be a reviewer, and when you do it for the first time you just have to be like, okay? Well, I guess I'm gonna build on my own experiences, and if my experiences were negative now, I really don't totally know how to handle this.” Many interviewees said that they experienced imposter syndrome as a result of completing reviews and that the lack of mentorship from journals contributed to this. The only way they could navigate completing these reviews, as Bella alludes to above, was to draw on their own experiences. Bella shared that it wasn’t until she received a model of what she felt like was a helpful and productive review that she began to understand how to model her own way of giving feedback. “I had awesome reviews that were incredibly helpful that pointed to specific scholarship I should read,” Bella notes, “They were really, really clear about what they wanted to see in terms of revision. It also felt like [my article] was sent to people who understood the kind of work I was doing.”

Our interviewees’ responses suggest that, although many writing center journals now provide written guidance and heuristics for reviewers, these may not be used effectively in practice. Reviewers may need more explicit training in how to use this guidance, as well as clear models for what adhering to guidelines looks like. Journals may need to do a better job mentoring reviewers and holding them accountable for upholding guidelines and developing an inclusive ethos.

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 14 In other words, more training and, perhaps more importantly, practical models, would be helpful. Of course, reviewing is already uncompensated and often invisible labor; the added time required to complete comprehensive training will, no doubt, present additional challenges for journals and their reviewers.

Requiring training may also make it more difficult to recruit diverse reviewers and could extend timelines to publication. The field will need to think critically about ways to improve the quality and collaborative spirit of reviews without adding to the systemic barriers and inequities that writing center practitioners already face.

But if you have read this piece and want to know how you, personally, could help mitigate the concerns shared here, reach out to a journal and volunteer to be a reviewer! And, when contacted to complete a review, do so in a timely and constructive manner. Ask for sample reviews; have a conversation with the editor about their expectations for providing feedback; help develop guidelines for reviewing; and ask if the editor(s) will document your labor for personnel review purposes. All of these represent tangible steps toward helping to evolve these issues.

Moving forward, our study suggests that writing center journals should come together to discuss the larger issues that authors and reviewers face when publishing in the field to determine ways to improve publication timelines, reviewer and author recruitment, collaborative mentorship models, and reviewer training.

We have already seen major strides in our field regarding more inclusive publishing practices. For example, one of Elisabeth’s primary recommendations in Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies was for writing center journals to move to open-access publishing models (113-121); in the seven years since her book was published, we’ve seen the majority of journals in our field (WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship; Praxis: A Writing Center Journal; Writing Center Journal; The Peer Review) maintain or shift to an open-access publishing format. We believe then that similar strides can be made regarding review practices, provided those in editorial positions are willing to have ongoing and multifaceted conversations about equity and access. Our study, like many others in the field, also points to a significant gap in our knowledge: we still do not know about the experiences, perceptions, and needs of underrepresented and contingent writing center practitioners. The field needs to find ways to fill this gap so that our publications become more inclusive and representative. Future studies on writing center publishing practices would benefit from purposeful sampling to include more diverse perspectives.

Works Cited Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors. 2021, https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic Buck, Elisabeth H. Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Caswell, Nicole I., et al. The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors. Utah State UP, 2016.

Denny, Harry et al. (Eds.). Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles. Utah State UP, 2018.

Driscoll, Dana Lynn, and Sherry Wynn Perdue.

“Theory, Lore, and More: An Analysis of RAD Research in ‘The Writing Center Journal,’ 1980–2009.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, 2012, pp. 11–39, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43442391 Faison, Wonderful, and Frankie Condon (Eds.).

Counter-Stories from the Writing Center. Utah State UP, 2022.

Giaimo, Genie Nicole. “Laboring in a Time of Crisis: The Entanglement of Wellness and Work in Writing Centers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 17, no. 3, 2020, http://www.praxisuwc.com/173-giaimo —. Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond. UP of Colorado, 2023.

Giaimo, Genie Nicole, and Yanar Hashlamon (Eds.).

Wellness and Self-Care in Writing Centers [special issue]. WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 44, no. 5–6, 2020, https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/wln/v44/44.5-6.p df Giaimo, Genie Nicole, et al. (Eds.). Wellness and Care in Writing Center Work. WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship Creative Commons Publication, 2021, https://ship.pressbooks.pub/writingcentersandwel lness/ Goodman, Sylvia. “Is it Time to Pay Peer Reviewers?”

The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 December 2022. https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-it-time-to-p ay-peer-reviewers Green, Neisha-Anne. “Moving beyond Alright: And the Emotional Toll of This, My Life Matters Too, in the Writing Center Work. The Writing Center Journal, vol. 37, no. 1, 2018, pp. 15–34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26537361 Isaacs, Emily, and Melinda K. Knight. “A Bird’s Eye View of Writing Centers: Institutional Infrastructure, Scope and Programmatic Issues, Report Practices.” WPA: Writing Program

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 15 Administration, vol. 37, no. 1, January 2014, pp.

36–67, https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/p dfviewer?vid=1&sid=83160ee8-e8dc-4a17-8635-2 b74ad5bf433%40redis Kleinfield, Elizabeth, et al. (Eds.). Disruptive Stories: Amplifying Voices from the Writing Center Margins.

Utah State UP, 2024.

Lederman, Doug. “Turnover, Burnout and Demoralization in Higher Ed.” Inside Higher Ed, 3 May 2022, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/05/ 04/turnover-burnout-and-demoralization-higher-e d Lerner, Neal, and Kyle Oddis. “The Social Lives of Citations: How and Why ‘Writing Center Journal’ Authors Cite Sources.” Writing Center Journal, vol.

36, no. 2, 2017, pp. 235–262, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44594857 Lockett, Alexandria. “Why I Call It the Academic Ghetto: A Critical Examination of Race, Place, and Writing Centers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 2019, https://www.praxisuwc.com/162-lockett Lu, Adrienne. “Faculty and Staff are Feeling Anxious, Depressed, and Burnt Out, Study Says.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 December 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/faculty-and-sta ff-are-feeling-anxious-depressed-and-burnt-out-stu dy-says Morris, Janine, and Kelly Concannon (Eds). Emotions and Affect in the Writing Center. Parlor Press, 2022.

Perryman-Clark, Staci M., and Collin Lamont Craig (Eds.) Black Perspectives in Writing Program Administration: From the Margins to the Center. NCTE, 2020.

Purdue OWL. (n.d.). Writing Center Research Project Survey: 2020–2021 [Tableau data workbook]. https://tableau.it.purdue.edu/t/public/views/WC RP2020/2020-21WCRPResults?%3Aembed=y&% 3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y&%3Aorigin= card_share_link&_ga=2.116686406.1770181636.1 709930359-1245339018.1704912880 Saldana, Johnny. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers (2nd ed.). Sage, 2013.

The Peer Review. “About.” https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/about/ —. “Accessibility Guide.” May 2021, https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/about/accessibilit y/ —. “Guidelines for Reviewers.” https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/about/guidelines-f or-reviewers/

Valles, Sarah Banschbach, et al. “Writing Center Administrators and Diversity: A Survey.” The Peer Review, vol. 1, no. 1, spring 2017, https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/issue-1/wri ting-center-administrators-and-diversity-a-survey/ WAC Clearinghouse. “Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice.” https://wac.colostate.edu/about/deij/ Webster, Travis. Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace. Utah State UP, 2021.

Wooten, Courtney Adams, et al. (Eds). The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration.

Utah State UP, 2020.

Writing Center Journal. “Guidance for Reviews.” https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/wcj/review_guidance. pdf Appendix A: Web-Based Survey BLOCK ONE: CONSENT You are being invited to participate in a research project to study how the manuscript review process of writing center journals (Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, The Peer Review, and Southern Discourse in the Center) impacts perceptions of professional identity and belonging in the field of writing center studies. The study seeks to promote greater diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in writing center publishing by focusing on publishing practices and aspects of professional identity and labor. You are being invited because you are a member of the writing center professional community (director, assistant/associate director, coordinator, consultant/tutor). The survey asks questions about your intersectional identity and experiences writing and/or receiving manuscript reviews (editorial or peer) for/from writing center journals. It should take you about 15 minutes to complete. All respondents will be given the opportunity to provide contact information for a follow-up interview at the end of the survey.

The results of this project will be used to further research in the field of writing center studies on reviewing practices; professional identity; professional labor; and diversity, equity, and inclusion in writing center publishing. Through your participation, the researchers hope to understand how reviewing practices for writing center journals affect professional identity and feelings of inclusion/exclusion in the field.

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 16 We hope that the results of the survey will be useful for improving publishing practices in the field and making writing center studies more equitable, diverse, and accessible. We hope to share our results by publishing in scholarly journals and presenting at academic conferences.

There are no known risks to you if you decide to participate in this survey. There is no direct benefit to you for participating in this study. The alternative would be not participating in the study. Surveys are anonymous, and the researchers will not share any information that identifies you with anyone outside the research group.

We will do our best to keep your information confidential. All data is stored in a password protected electronic format. To help protect your confidentiality, the surveys will not contain information that will personally identify you. The results of this study will be used for scholarly purposes only and may be shared with Augusta University and University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth representatives.

We hope you will take the time to complete this questionnaire; however, if you agree to complete the survey, you are not required to answer all the questions or complete it. Your participation is voluntary and there is no penalty if you do not participate. If you have any questions or concerns about completing the questionnaire, about being in this study, or to receive a summary of findings, you may contact [REDACTED].

If you have any questions or concerns about the “rights of research subjects,” you may contact the Augusta University IRB Office at (706) 721-1483.

Clicking on the “agree” button below indicates that: ●​ you have read the above information ●​ you voluntarily agree to participate ●​ you are at least 18 years of age ●​ you identify as a writing center professional (director, assistant/associate director, coordinator, consultant/tutor) ●​ you have received and/or given at least one peer or editorial review* from/for a writing center journal (Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, The Peer Review, and Southern Discourse in the Center) * review is defined as any manuscript feedback you have given for or received from a writing center journal, including editorial and peer reviews.

If you do not wish to participate in the research study, please decline participation by clicking on the "disagree" button. agree—If selected, move to Block Two disagree—If selected, move to end of survey BLOCK TWO: PROFESSIONAL POSITIONALITY 1.​ Where do you work as a writing center professional? a.​ United States—if selected, move to #2 b.​ Outside the United States—if selected, move to #3 2.​ In what US state do you currently work as a writing center professional?

3.​ In what country or region outside of the US do you currently work as a writing center professional?

4.​ What is your current professional position related to writing centers? a.​ Undergraduate peer consultant/tutor b.​ Graduate peer consultant/tutor c.​ Professional consultant/tutor d.​ Writing center assistant/associate coordinator/director e.​ Writing center coordinator/director f.​ Multi-subject tutoring center assistant/associate coordinator/director (of writing) g.​ Multi-subject tutoring center coordinator/director (of writing) h.​ Multi-subject tutoring center executive director (oversees coordinator/director of writing) i.​ Other (please specify) 5.​ How long have you worked in writing centers? a.​ Less than one year b.​ 1-4 years c.​ 5-9 years d.​ 10+ years 6.​ What best describes your status within your institution? a.​ Undergraduate student b.​ Graduate or professional student c.​ Staff d.​ Adjunct/Contingent Faculty e.​ NTT faculty f.​ TT Faculty g.​ Tenured faculty

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 17 BLOCK THREE: EXPERIENCE RECEIVING WRITING CENTER JOURNAL PEER REVIEWS 7.​ Have you received editor/peer feedback on a manuscript submission from a writing center publication (The Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, The Peer Review, Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation)? a.​ Yes—if selected, moves to question series #8-#19 b.​ No—if selected, moves to question #29 8.​ I have received one or more peer/editor reviews from The Writing Center Journal a.​ Yes b.​ No 9.​ I have received one or more peer/editor reviews from WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship a.​ Yes b.​ No 10.​ I have received one or more peer/editor reviews from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal a.​ Yes b.​ No 11.​ I have received one or more peer/editor reviews from The Peer Review a.​ Yes b.​ No 12.​ I have received one or more peer/editor reviews from Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation a.​ Yes b.​ No Please state the extent to which you agree with the following statements: 13.​ Peer/editor reviews from writing center journals largely affirm my intersectional professional identity (i.e., I feel as though the reviews acknowledge and/or value my identity). a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 14.​ Peer/editor reviews from writing center journals positively contribute to my professional development. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree

c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 15.​ Peer/editor reviews from writing center journals make me feel welcome in the field of writing center studies. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 16.​ Peer/editor reviews from writing center journals make me more likely to pursue further publications in the discipline of writing center studies. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 17.​ Receiving peer/editor reviews from writing center journals has been a positive experience. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 18.​ Peer/editor reviewers’ comments promoted the field’s values of writer-centered, process-oriented, equitable writing instruction. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 19.​ Please share any additional comments about your experiences receiving peer/editor reviews from writing center journals.

BLOCK FOUR: EXPERIENCE REVIEWING FOR WRITING CENTER JOURNALS 20.​ As an editor/peer reviewer, have you reviewed or are you currently reviewing manuscript submissions for a writing center publication (The Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, The Peer Review, Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation)? a.​ Yes—if selected, moves to question series #21-38 b.​ No—if selected, moves to question #39

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 18 21.​ I have reviewed manuscript submissions for The Writing Center Journal a.​ Yes b.​ No 22.​ I have reviewed manuscript submissions for WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship a.​ Yes b.​ No 23.​ I have reviewed manuscript submissions for Praxis: A Writing Center Journal a.​ Yes b.​ No 24.​ I have reviewed manuscript submissions for The Peer Review a.​ Yes b.​ No 25.​ I have reviewed manuscript submissions for Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation a.​ Yes b.​ No 26.​ How did you become a reviewer for a writing center publication? a.​ I was invited b.​ I requested to review c.​ Other (please specify) 27.​ How long have you been reviewing for writing center publications? a.​ Less than 1 year b.​ 1-4 years c.​ 5-9 years d.​ 10 or more years Please state the extent to which you agree with the following statements: 28.​ Reviewing for writing center journals has been important to my development of professional identity within the field of writing center studies. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 29.​ Reviewing for writing center publications fosters my sense of belonging within the field. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 30.​ Reviewing for writing center publications fosters my sense of authority within the field. a.​ Strongly agree

b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 31.​ My reviewing ethos reflects my intersectional identity. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 32.​ My reviews are writer-centered. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 33.​ My reviews are revision-focused. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 34.​ My reviews are process-oriented. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 35.​ My reviews are inclusive of writers’ backgrounds and intersectional identities. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 36.​ My reviews promote diverse representation in the discipline of writing center studies. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree 37.​ My reviews promote equitable publishing practices in the discipline of writing center studies. a.​ Strongly agree b.​ Somewhat agree c.​ Neither agree or disagree d.​ Somewhat disagree e.​ Strongly disagree

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 19 38.​ Please share any additional comments on your experiences of reviewing for writing center journals.

BLOCK FIVE: PERSONAL IDENTITY 39.​ What is your current age? a.​ 18-24 b.​ 25-34 c.​ 35-44 d.​ 45-54 e.​ 55-64 f.​ 65-74 g.​ 75+ h.​ Prefer not to state 40.​ What is your primary racial or ethnic identity? a.​ American Indian, Alaska Native or other Indigenous American b.​ Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander c.​ Black or African American d.​ Hispanic/Latino e.​ White (non-Hispanic) f.​ Multiracial (please specify) g.​ Other (please specify) h.​ Prefer not to state 41.​ What is your primary gender identity? a.​ Agender b.​ Androgyne c.​ Demigender d.​ Cisgender Man e.​ Cisgender Woman f.​ Genderqueer or Gender Fluid g.​ Questioning or unsure h.​ Trans Man i.​ Trans Woman j.​ Other gender category/identity (please specify) k.​ Prefer not to state 42.​ What is your sexual orientation? a.​ Asexual b.​ Bisexual c.​ Gay d.​ Straight (heterosexual) e.​ Lesbian f.​ Pansexual g.​ Queer h.​ Same-gender-loving i.​ Other sexual orientation not listed (please specify) j.​ Prefer not to state 43.​ Are you monolingual? a.​ Yes—if selected, move to question #44, then 47

b.​ No—if selected, move to question #45-46 44.​ What language do you speak: 45.​ What languages do you speak?

46.​ What language do you consider to be your first language or mother tongue?

47.​ Do you identify as having one or more disabilities (physical, mental, learning)? a.​ Yes—If selected, move to question #48-52 b.​ No—If selected, move to question #53 c.​ Prefer not to state—if selected, move to question #53 48.​ I have a sensory impairment (vision or hearing) a.​ Yes b.​ No c.​ Prefer not to state 49.​ I have a mobility impairment a.​ Yes b.​ No c.​ Prefer not to state 50.​ I have a learning disability (e.g. dyslexia or ADHD) a.​ Yes b.​ No c.​ Prefer not to state 51.​ I have a mental health disorder a.​ Yes b.​ No c.​ Prefer not to state 52.​ If you have a disability not listed in questions 48-51, please specify: 53.​ What is the highest degree or level of school you have completed? a.​ High school degree or equivalent b.​ Two-year/Associate’s degree c.​ Bachelor’s degree d.​ Master’s degree e.​ Doctorate f.​ Other (please specify) g.​ Prefer not to state 54.​ I identify as having a working-class background a.​ Yes b.​ No c.​ Prefer not to state 55.​ I identify as a first-generation college student a.​ Yes b.​ No c.​ Prefer not to state 56.​ I identify as a first-generation academic

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Why Do Writing Center Professionals Publish? • 20 a.​ Yes b.​ No c.​ Prefer not to state BLOCK SIX: FOLLOW-UP INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITY 57.​ Would you be interested in participating in a follow-up interview about professional identity and reviewing practices in writing center studies? a.​ Yes—If selected, move to question series #69-70 b.​ No—If selected, move to survey complete/thank you message Names and contact information are stored separately from survey data. Survey data will remain anonymous.

58. Please provide your name: 59. Please provide an email address where we can contact you to schedule a follow-up interview: Thank you for taking our survey. We appreciate your time.

Appendix B: Coding Categories ●​ Finding a scholarly voice (imposter syndrome, graduation to professional transition, confidence) ●​ Coaching (interactive, collaborative) ●​ Gentle introduction/writing center reviewer ethos ●​ Timeline (quick turnaround vs. lengthy) ●​ Learning scholarly publishing conventions ●​ Positive publishing practices ●​ Belonging ●​ Negative influences of specific mentors/instructors ●​ Heuristics and technologies of reviewing (i.e., how a journal collects/structures reviews) ●​ Reviewer training ●​ Barriers to publishing/reviewing ●​ Publishing as leverage (confidence/credibility-building) ●​ Future directions

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THE COST OF REPRESENTATION: HOW THE PUBLICATION PROCESS IMPACTS BLACK RESEARCHERS IN WRITING STUDIES Ronada Dominique Northern Virginia Community College​ rhewitt@nvcc.edu Abstract The relationship between academic journals, researchers and editors is one worthy of study to better understand the publication process. Inquiry into the dynamics between these three entities could reveal information on what is published, when, and by whom; answering questions that often fall into an academic abyss of norms no one quite understands. More specifically, it could facilitate discourse on representation in academic journals. This article explains a completed study centering academic journals specific to NCTE and evaluates if Black research is sufficiently published to effectively contribute to the epistemological processes of the composition and rhetoric field. Utilizing discourse analysis and survey and interview data from researchers and editors, this exploration includes an article review of the top journal in writing studies, College Composition and Communication, and utilizes survey and interview methods, to reveal the intricate relationship between scholars, editors, and academic journals that determine the trajectory of research focus in the field.

Introduction In James Berlin’s overview of writing instruction in American colleges from 1900 to 1985, he discusses the development of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) but omits the fact that Black scholars were not granted full membership in NCTE until the 1970s (Gilyard, 1999, p. 631). In addition to Gilyard, Perryman-Clark (2009) and Kynard (2013) also extensively research and discuss the influences of Black scholars in the field. However, the efforts of such are not included in any “History of Composition” texts written by a non person of color. This was discovered while attempting to complete a literature review for this research. Such a bifurcation is not only a physical representation of otherness, but results in a gap in research and discourse and hinders scholars and students, like myself, from learning and applying such knowledge.

Racial dynamics have infiltrated all industries, including academia. From integrating K-12 schools to

those responsible for developing first year writing programs, this gap in visible representation of Black influences on writing studies has detrimental implications. As a student, I have experienced the alienating effects of searching for research from my cultural perspective and coming up empty handed. This caused me to question where the Black people at in journals like College Composition and Communication (CCC), a flagship journal in writing studies. I argue: 1.​ Scholarship that centers the experiences of Black individuals remains underrepresented within CCC. Additionally, the historical contributions of Black scholars to the development of the composition field have often been overlooked or insufficiently acknowledged. This lack of representation not only misrepresents their contributions to the field but also perpetuates inequitable learning environments, particularly for Black students and other students of color, who may struggle to see their identities and experiences reflected in the discipline.

2.​ Just as we examine the relationship between students and their writing processes to better understand how these dynamics shape their learning, we must also explore the relationship between emerging researchers and academic professionals and their writing responsibilities that often include publication. Understanding how these interactions influence the professional growth and development of emerging researchers is essential to fostering more equitable and supportive academic environments.

For this study, I conducted a corpus analysis of College Composition and Communication (CCC), aligning cultural movements and advancements that have contributed to educational expansion. These included the Civil Rights and Black Power movements (1956–1969); linguistic justice efforts such as the ‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’ resolution, the Oakland Ebonics Resolution and Ann Arbor Decision (1972–2000); and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement

The Cost of Representation • 22 (2014–2022). By examining these distinct periods, I tracked the frequency of articles centered on the Black Experience (BE) to assess how, over the past fifty years, CCC has engaged with scholarship specific to Black communities. Framing this journal review through the lens of critical race theory, specifically the tenet of the normalization of racism, I argue that the belief in the permanence of racism has functioned as a moral and structural rationale within writing studies.

This rationale has supported discriminatory practices such as the exclusion of scholars of color from full participation in organizations like NCTE and MLA, and the deliberate marginalization of Black scholars’ voices at College Composition and Communication Conference (4Cs), while allowing white scholars to discuss Black issues.

To complement the corpus analysis, I surveyed researchers who have submitted to NCTE-affiliated journals, including College Composition and Communication, English Journal, College English, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College. I also conducted interviews with editors of these journals, most of whom represent the publications frequented by the researchers surveyed.

While my initial focus on College Composition and Communication posed challenges in participant recruitment, I expanded the scope to include other NCTE journals. I believed that the issues I identified were not specific to CCC but represented broader patterns across disciplines and journals. By engaging with additional NCTE journals, I was able to maintain an inclusive scope with correlative data sets.

The survey and interview data examined the experiences of both researchers and journal editors to address a broader inquiry: where scholars are choosing to publish their work and, more importantly, why they select journals and how they experience the submission process. Findings revealed several challenges, including extensive delays between initial manuscript submission and feedback, insufficient or conflicting reviewer comments, and confusion that left some researchers unable to complete the submission process. These difficulties were mirrored in the experiences of journal editors, who described obstacles such as difficulty securing adequate reviewers and maintaining timely review processes. The perspectives of both groups uncovered critical insights into the misconceptions and structural processes that shape the publishing process.

These findings enabled me to apply social justice frameworks, particularly those advanced by Young (1990) and Jones, Walton, and Moore (2019), to argue for a reimagining of scholarly publishing practices. By centering justice for both contributors and gatekeepers, the field has an opportunity to enact meaningful

changes that prioritize equity in more systematic and sustainable ways.

Through an analysis of College Composition and Communication publications alongside the experiences of researchers and editors, I have examined the complexities of journal submission processes: submission, peer review, acceptance, and editing, and how the process intersects with the Black Experience.

My corpus analysis revealed that “over a 50-year span, only 4% of published scholarship in CCC explicitly centered the Black experience” (Hewitt, 2024, p. 9).

This finding, supported by qualitative data from surveys and interviews, underscores systemic underrepresentation. Drawing from social justice frameworks of Jones, Walton, and Moore (2019) in technical communication, I interpret these patterns through a critical lens that highlights how normalized editorial and review practices perpetuate structural inequities. In the discussion section, I argue that CCC might reconsider its preference of distributive justice models and instead embrace restorative justice practices to dismantle exclusionary structures and empower historically marginalized voices. ​ As higher education and writing studies enters another pivotal period similar to the era of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL), the current focus on social and linguistic justice makes this an ideal moment to engage with my research and its recommendations. Editors may find this work especially relevant as they strive to improve representation, enhance the relevance of their journals, and continue shaping the legacy of academic publishing. Additionally, scholars navigating the often mystified and discouraging editorial process may find clarity and support through this research. I believe that genuine diversity does not simply integrate into existing structures, just or unjust, but instead seeks to transform those systems, fostering new frameworks where everyone’s expertise contributes to a more unified and equitable whole.

Methods and Methodology To explore the complex relationship between academic journals, researchers and editors, and the broader goals of educational justice and inclusion, I employed a mixed-methods approach (Creswell, 2014; Bryman, 2012). This allowed me to triangulate the perspectives of researchers and editors alongside data from the College Composition and Communication journal. The analysis draws on both qualitative and quantitative data, interpreted primarily through a critical race theoretical framework that centers race in examining the systems and structures perpetuating racism and inequality

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The Cost of Representation • 23 (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Solórzano, 1998). This framework is further informed by Black Feminist Standpoint Theory (Hill Collins, 1997, 1998, 2000) and theories of social justice (Walton, Moore, & Jones, 2019; Young, 1990). At the heart of this research is an inquiry into how frequently College Composition and Communication publishes work that centers the Black Experience.

I chose to examine College Composition and Communication because it is considered the flagship journal in the field of composition. Established in 1949, it was the first journal in writing studies to focus specifically on composition as a discipline, as well as on the role of first-year writing courses in addressing the growing need for effective student writing in higher education. The journal’s articles capture the evolving ideas and influences that shaped the field during its efforts to establish itself professionally. Given its historical and discipline specific significance, it was the best choice for analyzing how the field has developed.

I chose to evaluate the experiences of Black scholars because I am a Black woman conducting research about Black people. The absence of Black epistemological perspectives in my graduate coursework led me to question the visibility and inclusion of Black voices in the field of writing studies.

This concern was amplified when I struggled to complete an assignment forcing me to reflect deeply about my positionality as a Black student navigating a so-called diverse campus, yet within predominantly white classrooms.

One of the central claims of Feminist Standpoint Theory is that “marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized” (Bowell, 2011). Research shows that Black individuals are often socially conditioned to remain conscious of their racial identity and the implications it presents in predominantly white spaces. I am not alone. Many Black students and professionals in higher education report negative experiences rooted in racial disparities (Burrows, 2016; Brush, 2001; Turner, 2002; Schwartz, 2003). By centering the Black Experience in this study, I aim to counteract the historical erasure and suppression of Black voices by dominant white narratives.

This study employs a mixed-methods approach of quantitative and qualitative approaches as well as both corpus analysis and content analysis to examine the College Composition and Communication (CCC) journal from 1955 to 2023. Guided by Tunison’s (2023) framing of content analysis as both quantitative and qualitative in nature, the study utilizes a coded keyword

framework to identify, categorize, and summarize articles that engage with the Black Experience. Tunison explains that the qualitative dimension of content analysis “starts with bodies of text; sets linguistic units of analysis (e.g., words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs) and categories for those units; pores over the texts to code and categorize them; and both tallies and documents the frequency of occurrence of whatever linguistic unit was selected” (p. 86).

Discourse analysis, citation analysis, and article analysis have long been employed to measure the impact of research and to interrogate the epistemological influences that shape academic disciplines. Citation analysis, as Coffey (2006) outlines, offers a means of tracing scholarly influence and the visibility of particular bodies of knowledge, while article analysis and discourse analysis, such as those conducted by Adams and Miller (2022), McKinley and Rose (2018), and Clary-Lemon (2019), examine how language, themes, and rhetorical patterns reflect deeper ideological investments within journals. These methods are not simply descriptive but also diagnostic, helping to uncover how knowledge is developed and verified within disciplinary boundaries.

A qualitative approach was essential for this study to capture the nuanced experiences of editors and researchers in writing studies. However, the data collection process also reflects an “explanatory sequential mixed methods” design (Creswell, 2014). In this approach, the researcher first conducts quantitative research, analyzes the results, and then builds upon those findings through qualitative inquiry to gain deeper insights (Creswell, 2014, p. 44).

While surveys offered a foundational understanding of editorial patterns and submission experiences, they could not fully capture the emotional complexities such as joy, frustration, or disillusionment that were expressed by researchers and editors.

Furthermore, the initial journal review of College Composition and Communication provided valuable quantitative data but did not reveal the broader issue of representation that this study ultimately aims to address. The qualitative component was necessary to explore these deeper, often overlooked dimensions of scholarly experience.

A total of 2,047 articles spanning 50 years were reviewed. Rather than analyzing the full span of CCC publications since 1950, this study strategically selected specific years to coincide with periods of significant African American educational and sociopolitical influence, including: ●​ 1956–1969: Civil Rights and Black Power Movements

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The Cost of Representation • 24 ●​ 1972–1998: Linguistic rights activism, including the Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution, the Ann Arbor decision, and the Oakland Ebonics Resolution ●​ 2014–2023: The rise and influence of the Black Lives Matter movement The selected years were: 1956–1959, 1960–1969, 1972–1978, 1980–1988, 1990–1998, 2000–2008, 2014–2019, and 2020–2023. This approach allowed for analysis of published issues alongside peak moments of Black activism, offering a more meaningful lens to evaluate the inclusion and evolution of Black discourse within the CCC journal. The analysis began in 1956 to allow time for scholarly responses to the 1954 Brown v.

Board of Education decision and the early momentum of the Civil Rights Movement to appear in publication.

While it may be plausible to attribute the omission of early Civil Rights discourse to unfamiliarity or the slow pace of academic publishing, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the consistent lack of engagement with subsequent movements—including linguistic justice and Black Lives Matter—as mere coincidence. Rather, the pattern suggests a systemic and intentional exclusion of Black scholarship, perspectives, and issues from mainstream disciplinary discourse.

To complete the content analysis, keyword search was used to locate articles that mentioned Black people. The keywords included: ●​ African/afro American(s), ●​ Black(s), ●​ Negro(es), ●​ minority/ies/ized, ●​ urban, ●​ disadvantaged, ●​ underserved, ●​ person(s)/people of color, ●​ colored, ●​ BIPOC, ●​ poor Articles referencing Black or African American people were analyzed to determine whether they primarily focused on the Black Experience. “Primarily” refers to research that centers Black individuals and their experiences, offering new insights into the growth, development, and epistemological contributions of Black experiences within writing studies.

I focused only on the mentioning of Black or African American people within the article, excluding the racial representation of the author unless it was readily identifiable or explicitly stated in the article. I could not determine whether a particular scholar

writing about the Black Experience identified as Black or belonged to another racial group, nor would it have been appropriate to make such assumptions without explicit self-identification. Additionally, not every article that mentioned Black people or related issues was included in the analysis. In many cases, scholars cited the work of identified Black scholars in their references but made no further engagement with those scholars or their work within the body of the article. In some cases, scholars referenced the Black Experience as an illustrative example, rather than as a central focus.

For instance, Hubrig and Rosario (2020), in their article on inclusion for dis/differently-abled individuals at conferences, note that “…a Black disabled person may feel unsafe in a heavily policed conference venue,” yet make no further mention or engagement with Black experiences throughout the article. Nonetheless, an emergent pattern revealed that articles with higher frequencies of relevant keywords were more likely to center Black experiences. Additional indicators included the frequent use of specific keywords, as well as analysis of the article’s title, abstract, and in some cases, explicit references to African American populations.

I designed a survey using Qualtrics to collect data from a diverse group of participants. To be eligible for the study, participants had to meet the following criteria: (1) be at least 18 years old, (2) have submitted to or been published in an NCTE journal: College Composition and Communication, College English, English Journal, Research in the Teaching of English, or Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and (3) currently reside in the United States.

I chose to focus on publication in NCTE journals because they are peer-reviewed and consistently produce current research on pedagogy and classroom instruction. Limiting the study to NCTE publications also helped maintain a manageable scope, given the wide range of subfields within writing studies such as writing program administration, writing across the curriculum, and professional and technical communication. The breadth of NCTE's journal offerings allowed for inclusion of scholars with diverse research interests, including those beyond composition and rhetoric, as many may have published in at least one NCTE journal over the course of their careers.

Additionally, I limited participation to individuals currently residing in the United States, as international experiences introduce contextual differences that extend beyond the intended scope of this study.

Utilizing interviews allowed both researchers and editors in writing studies to share their personal experiences from distinct and valuable perspectives. I

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The Cost of Representation • 25 felt it was important not to limit the conversation to researchers’ experiences and interpretations of the submission process without also including the insights of editors, who could provide crucial context and offer their own interpretations of challenges within the process. The interviews consisted of open-ended questions that focused on editors’ roles, how they engage with researchers, and, importantly, what they perceived as the most challenging aspects of the article submission process for researchers, and the strategies they employed to help mitigate those challenges.

I reached out to editors from 6 of the 11 publications housed under NCTE and received responses from editors of College Composition and Communication, College English, English Journal, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College. The editors interviewed were either current or outgoing at the time of the study. I did not ask participants to disclose their gender or racial identity; however, based on the historical lack of Black editorial leadership across NCTE journals, it is unlikely that any would identify as Black. No further demographic information can be confirmed. Each interview lasted approximately one hour and included ten open-ended questions, covering topics such as how they became editors, their views on the most challenging aspects of submitting to their journal, and how they believe their journal is perceived within the broader writing studies community.

Researchers were invited to participate in interviews after completing the survey and providing consent. The survey yielded 22 responses: 4 participants identified as Black or African American, 11 identified as “other” (including mixed race and Asian), and 7 chose not to disclose their racial identity. These demographics presented both challenges and insights for the study. Initially, I considered limiting participation to Black scholars in writing studies; however, I anticipated recruitment difficulties given the field’s predominantly white composition. As a result, the study was opened to participants of all racial backgrounds.

Although the study aims to investigate processes affecting Black representation in writing studies, none of the Black participants opted into interviews. Consequently, I relied on the limited insights they shared in the survey and emphasized broader trends across all survey responses, integrating Black participants’ perspectives where applicable. This limitation also highlighted a critical issue: in the absence of sufficient direct data from Black scholars, the experiences of the dominant group of white scholars can sometimes serve as a proxy. As one interviewee noted, if white researchers face barriers in

the article submission process, those same barriers likely affect Black scholars to an even greater extent.

I had to critically reflect on the reasons for the limited number of Black respondents and the lack of participation in interviews. While any explanation remains speculative, several possibilities were worth considering. One is the simple reality that there may be very few Black scholars in writing studies. Currently, there is no centralized data source that tracks how many individuals have earned degrees specifically in writing studies, making it difficult to assess representation accurately. Another possibility is that many Black scholars, after long struggles for recognition within the field, have found greater success and validation in adjacent disciplines. Additionally, some may have chosen not to participate due to concerns about potential backlash, especially given that this study directly critiques the field and its flagship journal. The fear of professional repercussions may discourage open engagement, even in anonymous research contexts.

Findings and Discussion Journal Review Key Findings: Keywords Of the 2,047 articles reviewed in this study, keyword usage varied significantly. I found that the more frequently certain keywords appeared, the more likely the article was to center Black experiences in writing studies. However, there were exceptions as some articles that used few or no explicit keywords still clearly focused on the Black Experience. For example, N. J. Townsend’s 1966 article “Teaching the Disadvantaged: Methods of Motivation” uses the word “Negro” only twice, yet the inclusion of Black students is central to the article’s focus. Similarly, Aaron Ford’s 1967 piece “Improving Reading and Writing Skills of Disadvantaged College Freshmen” uses “Negro” twelve times but frames the title around the term “disadvantaged,” suggesting an interchangeable use of terms, though their meanings shift depending on context.

This analysis was important not only to track the quantity of articles engaging with Black scholarship but also to examine how scholars use language to frame their work. Understanding keyword usage is essential, especially when attempting to locate research on specific populations, as it influences how articles are discovered and classified in academic databases.

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The Cost of Representation • 26 OVERALL DATA PINPOINTS FEEDBACK AND SUPPORT Analysis of the researcher survey data revealed that feedback and support were among the most frequently cited challenges in the publishing process. Respondents emphasized concerns related to the time between submitting a draft and receiving feedback, the difficulty of interpreting that feedback, and the effort required to revise accordingly. Additionally, many researchers pointed to a lack of institutional support and limited time as significant barriers, both of which made the process of publishing substantially more difficult.

While surveyed researchers acknowledged the importance of publishing, many expressed specific concerns with the submission process for NCTE journals. One respondent noted, “Their review process was so long (9–12 months) that, if my article wasn’t accepted, I would have lost a year or more of trying to get that article placed.” Others described feeling unsupported when their work focused on antiracist scholarship. For instance, a respondent who submitted to College Composition and Communication and College English in 2006–2007 shared, “The feedback I got was not supportive of the antiracist work I was trying to do, and it suggested that I was not capable of doing it, or that it wasn't worth pursuing.”

In addition to content-based concerns, several researchers struggled with the volume and clarity of feedback received. A respondent who submitted to Research in the Teaching of English (RTE) stated, “We received feedback from five reviewers…the reviewers all had different revision requests. Mapping these requests to and with one another was incredibly difficult, especially given the sheer volume of feedback…so we gave up on the revision and submitted elsewhere (non-NCTE journal).” These experiences highlight how both procedural delays and discouraging or conflicting feedback can act as significant barriers to publication.

Findings concluded that Black researchers often encounter barriers before the submission stage even begins. While the overall survey data emphasized the need for support and constructive feedback, responses from Black participants revealed distinct challenges rooted in earlier stages of the publication process specific to article development, initial draft submission, and identifying appropriate journals for their work. When asked about the specific obstacles they face, Black respondents cited unclear submission policies, insufficient guidance on article development, limited time, and a lack of institutional support.

Notably, half of the Black participants indicated that they believed their race posed a challenge during the

submission process. Both respondents who identified race as a barrier also identified as female, while the two who did not report race as a challenge identified as male.

In addition to the general concerns around feedback shared by all survey participants, a broader issue between authors' scholarly interests and reviewers' interpretive frameworks when the work falls outside normed paradigms was also presented. One participant elaborated, stating, “Journal reviewers need to reflect the full scope of the field. Lack of representative expertise at the intersection of Writing Studies and Black Studies makes for a very whitewashed publication.”

Black respondents specifically noted that the feedback they received often included micro- and macroaggressions, making the submission process even more challenging, and white respondents also expressed frustration, reporting that reviewers did not appear to understand their research, particularly when it engaged with critical or nontraditional perspectives.

The experiences of researchers across both the survey and interview phases revealed consistent concerns regarding the extended timeline of the publication process, particularly related to receiving and responding to feedback. While all researchers noted these delays, Black researchers emphasized an additional layer of difficulty stemming from a lack of institutional support when attempting to navigate the article submission process. This underscores a growing gap in preparedness between Black and white researchers when it comes to publishing in academic journals. Beyond the prolonged wait for feedback, participants reported minimal support from both their institutions and journal editors in interpreting and responding to reviewer comments. One participant recounted, “I mean, I think the most—yeah, the feedback part was just because there was no one. It took a long time…I remember that it took like 6 months for me to get back the thing…I just had to wait, and then I would email, and I didn’t get a lot of response from the editor” (Joshua, Interview, October 23, 2023). His experience highlights a multilayered issue of editorial silence coupled with a drawn-out process. Researcher Jazlyn further complicated the picture, stating, “So I am not supported. I've never been supported in publishing in my entire career…I've actively avoided it because I've watched people get crushed through the tenure process because of what happened to them during publication processes” (Jazlyn, Interview, October 20, 2023). Her account brings into focus the long-term professional risks that marginalized scholars may face, not only as graduate

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The Cost of Representation • 27 students seeking to strengthen their CVs, but also as junior faculty navigating the high stakes demands of tenure under structurally exclusionary conditions.

EDITORS ON FEEDBACK AND SUPPORT When asked to identify the most challenging aspects of the article submission process for scholars, editors highlighted two primary concerns: (1) preparing a submission that meets the standards of the journal, particularly for early-career scholars or faculty, and (2) navigating and synthesizing feedback from multiple reviewers, especially when their comments conflict.

While editors acknowledged the complexity of managing conflicting reviews, researchers expressed deeper frustrations—not only with understanding the feedback itself but also with the emotional toll it takes, often describing feelings of confusion and hopelessness in deciding how to proceed. For Black researchers in particular, the challenges begin even earlier in the process. Their responses revealed struggles with drafting and developing articles and interpreting feedback that sometimes felt dismissive or even offensive. These difficulties were compounded by a lack of guidance and support. The editor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC) recognized the subjective nature of reviewer feedback, stating, “It doesn't mean the reviews are always right. And I mean, you can get 3 reviews and 2 of them are telling you to do something you're dead set against, but then don't do it” (TETYC Editor, Interview, October 13, 2023). This insight underscores the need for scholars to be equipped not only with writing and revision skills but also with the confidence and institutional backing to make informed decisions about how to engage with feedback critically.

The TETYC editor’s suggestion to take only the feedback that you want and to leave the rest seems like an option that researchers don’t seem to think they have—no matter their race. When pressed further on this concept of having to defer to the reviewer’s comments or risk not being published, the editor stated that the power dynamic between author and reviewer is often overstated, and that authors have more agency in the revision process than they might believe. However, they acknowledged that this perception is deeply rooted in academic culture, where the pressure to publish can make pushing back on reviewer comments feel professionally risky, especially for early-career scholars or those from underrepresented backgrounds.

In the case of College English, rejections often stem from a mismatch between the submitted article and the journal’s expectations regarding formatting, scope, and audience. While this challenge could affect

any scholar unfamiliar with the journal, it may be particularly detrimental for those without access to mentorship or institutional guidance. For Black scholars, who, according to survey data, often cited “confusing policies and procedures” as a barrier to submission—this lack of clarity can result in rejections that feel not only discouraging but isolating. Still, the editor emphasized that rejections are not issued without supportive feedback. Instead, the editorial team makes an effort to redirect authors by suggesting other journals where the work might be a better fit and offering specific revision suggestions. As the editor explained, “I think it always makes me feel better to say, I think this work…would be better suited for Journal X, Y, or Z. And…if you're going to submit…you might consider… including these scholars…extending your methods section…” (College English Editor, Interview, October 26, 2023). This approach reflects an awareness of how damaging rejections can be to a scholar’s mental and professional wellbeing and shows an effort to mitigate those effects through constructive redirection.

But sometimes, no matter the care or consideration an editor takes, acknowledging the system and how it functions to exclude is necessary to dismantle it. This system was described by the editor for CCC who plainly states that the review system is faulty no matter their best efforts: I think that the journal review system is broken. That's what I'll say, first of all, for most of the flagship journals. At journals like the Cs, really, the goal is rejection. It's not my goal, but the goal of flagship journals that get overwhelming numbers of publications. The goal has always been for it to be a gate. And I was trying to figure out how to get in a system like this and make it less of a gate. And it's a struggle and it's so much easier to just do it the way it's always been done.” (CCC editor, Interview, Oct. 2023) This candid reflection underscores the often-unspoken reality of academic publishing: that selectivity is used not only as a measure of quality but as a mechanism of exclusion. The goal is not always to cultivate scholarship but to filter it, which is an approach that disproportionately impacts emerging scholars and those whose work challenges conventional norms.

Even editors who wish to disrupt these norms find themselves constrained by institutional expectations and traditions, making meaningful change difficult.

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The Cost of Representation • 28 STRUGGLES FROM WITHIN THE SYSTEM When asked if they felt that journals were sites of racial practices, many editors reflected on their roles as gatekeepers of knowledge with significant influence operating in a system that historically privileges and has privileged white voices over other voices in the field.

That can be a hard realization but an important one to consider as editor of TETYC reflects: I'm part of NCTE. I produce that and I'm disciplining knowledge and what I produce for TETYC is the written knowledge of two-year college English. And if I'm leaving out disabled voices, black voices, Latinx voices, LGBTQ voices, which are freaking completely absent. You know, there might be queer authors, but we're not talking about queer issues or queer students, you know, so yeah, absolutely. It can totally be an organ for reproducing those things. And it's hard for it not to be based on who has the privilege to write those things. (TETYC editor, Interview, Oct. 2023) There is an acknowledgement that in TETYC that voices are absent for reasons unknown but could be the result of unconscious bias. But there exists a system that even the editor of College English understands.

The editor’s self-awareness within editorial leadership that recognizes not only the structural barriers faced by scholars of color, but also the personal complicity of individuals working within those structures. The editor’s acknowledgment that they have themselves been “an instrument of white supremacy” illustrates the depth of reflection required to begin dismantling these legacies and working toward a broader need for editors and gatekeepers to examine their roles in sustaining or challenging dominant epistemologies.

Separate from the other journals, CCC seems to be operating in more than one system that restricts its success, namely, still relying on print publications: The problem is, of course, we have 192 pages every issue. And that's not a lot. That’s five to seven articles. If I say to you today, I’m publishing your piece, it's not coming out until next year. That's because it’s print. It’s more expensive and it takes longer. And because we are limited, 192 pages. If I publish 193, the next issue is 191. Print publication limits the amount of scholarship that can circulate in our discipline and our community in a way that is detrimental for all of us. (CCC editor, Interview, Oct. 2023) The need to continue printing seems to also be tied to the issue of gatekeeping which the editor connects to

white liberalism. They describe the impact of white liberalism, especially in the 1960s and 70s when communities of color were driving major equity and justice movements. Meanwhile, white scholars largely avoided engaging directly with those issues. When they did address them, it was often through coded or indirect language, using terms like “errors and expectations.” At the same time, scholars within their own field were pushing back, as seen in the Students’ Right to Their Own Language statement. But those efforts were blocked from publication in flagship journals because the gatekeepers, often white liberal editors, believed those perspectives were wrong, even if they wouldn’t say so openly. These editors, often seen as polite and progressive, maintained control over what appeared in their journals and ensured dissenting voices were silenced, regardless of the social upheaval happening outside academia (CCC editor, Interview, Oct. 2023).

Discussion In response to the inequities present in the article submission process, many editors shared that their solution has been to diversify their reviewer pools.

Others reported that they often address these concerns by personally inviting scholars to contribute to special issues. While these efforts may appear commendable, they ultimately fall short of addressing the systemic barriers within the submission and review process itself. Inviting scholars to bypass the standard submission process through special issues does not result in structural reform; it creates temporary avenues for inclusion that may not exist when no special issue aligns with a scholar’s cultural or disciplinary expertise.

Relying on special issues to feature research on underrepresented communities risks marginalizing the work rather than integrating it into the journal’s ongoing scholarly conversation. As Young (1990) notes in her theory of the distributive paradigm, justice must include equitable access to not only wealth and material resources, but also to structural opportunities and institutional platforms. In this context, equitable representation in academic publishing cannot rely on exceptions to the norm; it must become embedded within the standard practices of journals year-round.

Ultimately, a multi-pronged approach is necessary to address the concerns of scholars and the preservation of knowledge sharing in academic journals; one that revises not only submission protocols but also reviewer guidelines and editorial responsibilities, ensuring a more just and equitable publishing system. While many theorists focus primarily on the distributive aspect of justice, Young

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The Cost of Representation • 29 critiques this narrow view, arguing that it assumes a singular model for all justice analyses: situations where individuals divide a fixed stock of goods and compare their shares…including rights, opportunities, power, and self-respect (Young, 1990, p. 16, 18). However, there can be no one-size-fits-all solution, as different groups face distinct challenges within the article submission process. Simply increasing access to one element of inequality for one group does not generate a ripple effect that grants access to all other groups or issues, especially when the exclusionary system itself remains intact. Young (1990) further contends that focusing exclusively on the distribution of material resources unduly limits the scope of justice by failing to critically evaluate social structures and institutional contexts (p. 20). Applying this critique to academic publishing, a narrow focus on distributive justice within submission processes overlooks the systemic practices that uphold exclusion. Meaningful reform requires recognizing appropriate divisions of labor, respecting cultural practices, and including marginalized scholars in decision-making roles.

Empowering scholars through such inclusion could help transform the process by addressing how reviewer feedback is managed before reaching authors.

The harm inflicted on researchers who face rejection or even multiple rounds of revision and resubmission underscores the urgent need for journals and editors to rebuild trust in the submission process.

As highlighted by the editor of College Composition and Communication, restoring researchers’ faith in the value of engaging with this process is crucial. Walton, Moore, and Jones (2019) offer a hopeful perspective through their discussion of restorative justice, which “puts social harmony at the center of justice concerns” (p.

44). Restorative justice involves collective efforts to define what justice looks like in response to harm, uplifting all parties involved through principles of care and accountability. This approach resonates with James Berlin’s revisionary history methods, which call for a broader examination of what defines the field, what has been excluded, and why, opening the door for meaningful structural change. Given the ways that submission and review procedures currently cause harm, editors must take active steps to dismantle discriminatory and oppressive practices that have become normalized within academic publishing.

Historically, academic journals have been sites of racialized practices (Clary-Lemon, 2009). However, just as the field of rhetoric has evolved over time, so too must the processes and procedures for journal submissions. This evolution includes rethinking the language used to promote journals, how calls for

papers are constructed, and the manner in which feedback is provided to researchers. Many researchers interviewed expressed feeling personally misunderstood and believed that reviewers, despite lacking comprehension of their work, were still expected to critique it. Inoue (2019) and Young (2009) emphasize the need to be aware of how language can function as a weapon in the submission and review process, often privileging certain dialects or modes of expression over others, like Black English or African American English.

To address these issues, editors must receive mentorship that prepares them to effectively engage with diverse researchers and topics, as well as to guide reviewers who may require additional support in providing appropriate feedback. Additionally, training for reviewers is essential to foster constructive, forward-thinking critiques. Because feedback is the most critical aspect of the publication process for researchers, failing to improve its quality risks perpetuating a cycle of trauma, where researchers who receive negative feedback may, in turn, replicate those harmful practices if they become reviewers themselves.

The solution to the lack of inclusion of minority voices in academic journals is not straightforward; rather, it requires a complex and nuanced assemblage of approaches tailored to different cultures, classes, ethnicities, and abilities. Walton, Moore, and Jones (2019) and Young (1990) offer extensive discussions on the concept of justice in relation to multiple forms of oppression. Although Young’s analysis primarily addresses broad economic injustices, these frameworks are applicable to the field of writing and rhetoric, specifically within the journal submission process if we view journals as systems that both reflect and respond to oppression.

In seeking solutions, the ability to identify the intersecting elements of discrimination and oppression is crucial. Young’s work reminds us that multiple, layered strategies are necessary to create a more equitable and inclusive journal submission experience for editors, peer reviewers, and researchers alike. This approach goes beyond simply asserting that marginalized researchers are welcome to submit, especially when no explicit barriers are identified.

Instead, it demands a critical evaluation and systemic transformation of the submission process to eliminate both perceived and real obstacles such as bias or editorial preferences, underrepresentation in previous publications, ineffective diversity marketing by journals, and harmful peer review experiences that continue to hinder inclusion.

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The Cost of Representation • 30 Conclusion Main Considerations for the Study: 1.​ Of the 2,047 articles reviewed in College Composition and Communication, only 4.46% (95 articles) centered on the Black Experience.

This category includes research focused on Black people’s experiences and contributions to the growth, development, and epistemological advancements within Writing Studies.

2.​ According to the editor of College Composition and Communication, one possible reason for the underrepresentation of Black scholarship is a historical pattern of “white liberalism,” where past editors and scholars exercised gatekeeping by weaponizing the submission process. This has caused harm to many researchers.

3.​ The keywords used to identify articles about the Black Experience vary widely and lack consistency, making it difficult for scholars and readers to locate such research easily. Feedback and institutional support emerged as consistent stressors in the submission process.

Researchers reported anxiety due to conflicting or overwhelming feedback from reviewers and lengthy turnaround times.

Additionally, lack of institutional support to allocate time for article development and insufficient editorial mediation complicate navigating reviewer feedback.

4.​ Black scholars specifically identified a lack of access to mentorship and institutional resources, especially during the critical stages of article development and submission.

5.​ Rejections or revise-and-resubmit decisions negatively affect researchers, particularly scholars of color, influencing whether they continue submitting to traditional journals or seek alternative venues with more efficient processes.

6.​ Editors see the greatest challenges as helping early scholars prepare publishable articles and navigate reviewer feedback. They emphasize that researchers should understand journal-specific expectations and view feedback as a dialogic negotiation, not an absolute mandate.

7.​ Editors express the hope of building more diverse reviewer pools and editorial boards to better represent the field’s diversity, though this remains a work in progress.

8.​ Many editors are committed to mentoring researchers and providing tailored feedback, including guiding them toward appropriate journals and reviewers.

9.​ Editors acknowledge their powerful role as gatekeepers and are taking intentional steps to amplify absent voices. This includes organizing special issues, direct outreach to scholars, and establishing mentorship programs to support scholars from draft through publication.

10.​ Editors face difficulties in securing reviewers, especially those with expertise in specialized or diverse subject areas.

11.​ Printing journals impose constraints on growth, article length, and publication timelines, slowing the dissemination of knowledge.

References Adams, L. & Miller, A. (2022). Mechanisms of mental-health disparities among minoritized groups: How well are the top journals in clinical psychology representing this work?” Clinical Psychological Science, 10(3), 387–416, https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026211026979.

Bowell, T. (2011). Feminist standpoint theory. In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (James Fieser & Bradley Dowden, editors).

Burrows, C. (2016). Writing while Black: The Black tax on African American graduate writers. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 14(1). https://www.praxisuwc.com/burrows-141.

Clary-Lemon, J. (2009). The racialization of composition studies: Scholarly rhetoric of race since 1990. College Composition and Communication, 61(2), W1–W17. http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url=https://www.pr oquest.com/scholarlyjournals/racialization-compo sition-studiesscholarly/docview/220715894/se-2.

Coffey, D. (2006). “A discipline’s composition: A citation analysis of composition studies.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(2), 155–165.

Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches (Fourth edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Ford, N. A. (1967). Improving reading and writing skills of disadvantaged college freshmen. College Composition and Communication, 18(2), 99–105. https://doi.org/10.2307/354292 Gilyard, K., & Banks, A. J. (2018). On African-American rhetoric (First edition). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315108636

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The Cost of Representation • 31 Hewitt, R. D. (2024). Where the Black people at: An examination of the representation of Black scholarship in composition and rhetoric. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

McKinley, J., & Rose, H. (2018). Conceptualizations of language errors, standards, norms and nativeness in English for research publication purposes: An analysis of journal submission guidelines. Journal of Second Language Writing, 42, 1–11.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2000). Racialized discourses and ethnic epistemologies. In Handbook of Qualitative Research, 257–277. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Townsend, N. J. (1966). Teaching the disadvantaged: Methods of motivation. College Composition and Communication, 17(1), 37–40. https://doi.org/10.2307/354060 Tunison, S. (2023). Content analysis. In Varieties of qualitative research methods, 85–90. Springer Texts in Education.

Walton, R., Moore, K., & Jones, N. (2019). Technical communication after the social justice turn: Building coalitions for action. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429198748 Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Print.

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MENTORING IN EDITORIAL SPACES: GRADUATE CO-EDITORS AS LITERACY BROKERS Rabail Qayyum University of Houston rqayyum@hawaii.edu Abstract As a graduate co-editor of a writing center journal, I worked with two graduates Brenna and Erin (pseudonyms) who were trying to get their manuscripts published. While the former journey was successfully completed, the latter was not. In this study, I explore these journeys individually through textual analysis of manuscript drafts, reviewer feedback documents, email correspondence, notes from authors and reviewers for the editorial board, and my own meeting notes to make sense of the eventual outcomes. My study explicates how graduate co-editors mediate texts using literacy brokering as a conceptual framework, delineating my approach and process to mentoring, what graduate co-editors can offer to writers, and what recommendations can be drawn from Brenna’s and Erin’s examples for other editors, reviewers, and novice scholars. In this way, the study adds to scholarship on editorship in writing center journals by displaying what role graduate student editorial mentoring can play in creating ongoing opportunities for emerging scholars in navigating academic publishing after finishing graduate studies.

Mentoring Writing Center Scholars in Academic Publishing Publishing can be a tension-riddled process, especially for first-time authors. What opportunities can help them navigate this process? According to a recent survey, 38% of recent graduates from Ph.D. programs in rhetoric and composition and related fields reported receiving very little or no guidance on scholarly publication (Ives & Spitzer, 2023). Even for the 60% of graduates who did receive mentorship in academic publishing during their doctoral programs, ongoing mentorship from the field could be helpful. The fact is that writing center studies is a niche specialization, and most scholars, regardless of specialty, continue to learn about publishing long after graduate school has ended.

Editorial mentorship can be one way to help novice scholars navigate academic publishing. The Peer Review (TPR) journal is endeavoring to make academic publishing more accessible by offering explicit remote mentorship from the editorial staff, a practice other journals in the field (e.g., WLN: A Journal of Writing

Center Scholarship) have also adopted. Instead of gatekeeping, the emphasis on mentoring can create a pipeline for emerging scholars by providing support as they learn publishing skills. In addition to the professional editor and managing editor, TPR also includes graduate co-editors—an uncommon feature designed to professionalize these students as future writing center professionals. As a result, apart from typical job responsibilities like exercising autonomy in carrying out decisions made with the editorial team, corresponding with authors and reviewers throughout the publication process, and ensuring both internal and external blind peer review to uphold the integrity of the journal, graduate co-editors also have the unique responsibility of holding virtual mentorship meetings with authors to offer feedback and coaching as necessary.

To date, the field has not fully explored the role of editor—graduate or professional—in writing center journals. In Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing: Editors in Writing Studies, Spooner et al. (2022) break new ground on the subject of editors’ roles, offering useful advice for editors to understand this important role in shaping the discipline and how to successfully enter into publishing in the discipline.

However, none of the chapters included in their collection were written from a student editor vantage point. Likewise, although journals such as Writing Center Journal and WLN provide commentary about their editorial process, neither journal regularly staffs student editors, meaning that the student editor perspective is missing from scholarly conversations on writing center publishing.

Sheffield (2014) offers a useful discussion on the professionalization of graduate student editors, reporting the results of a survey of 13 graduate student editors at Rhetoric Review and exploring what the graduate editors had gained from the role. These gains were the result of fulfilling responsibilities such as copyediting, formatting, updating databases, and serving as liaisons between the journal and the authors.

However, mentoring of novice scholars was not included in this list. Some explanation about this aspect of the editorial work is provided by Banville (2020) and Hashlamon (2020), former graduate co-editors at TPR.

Mentoring in Editorial Spaces • 33 Their reflective pieces provide their personal motivations related to this role and reaffirm serving their own scholarly agenda of amplifying underrepresented and marginalized voices through this role. Hashlamon (2020) in particular mentions working “with writers struggling to carve out space for themselves within writing center studies” and “mediating reviewer-author interactions.” But more information is needed to understand exactly what this mediation is, and how it can support novice scholars in academic publishing.

TPR’s Process for Graduate Editorial Mentorship Authors who receive mentorship from graduate co-editors at TPR are usually (under)graduate students with little to no experience with publishing. Sometimes it is the authors who seek out this mentorship by reaching out to the editorial board; other times it is the professional editor who, upon initial review of a submission, feels the manuscript needs additional work before it goes out for external review. In general, those seeking mentorship are first-time authors whose manuscripts require major revisions. In these cases, the support of graduate co-editors is called upon to field questions from the authors about revision (“So how do I revise this?”) and publication timeline (“So what happens next?”). Unfamiliarity with the publication process is one of the main challenges for novice scholars (Arsenault et al., 2021; Fazel, 2019), and graduate editors can help demystify this process.

Mentoring typically happens at two stages: first, before a manuscript has gone out for review; and second, after a manuscript has received (at least) one round of review. The process unfolds as follows: 1.​ I receive an email from the professional editor linking me with the author.

2.​ I send the author an email letting them know my availability for a virtual meeting. I also ask them to share any revised work in the form of MS Word document, with questions or comments in the margin using the Comment feature.

3.​ If I receive any preliminary revised work, I read through it and add my comments to it, while also responding to the author’s questions or observations.

4.​ I take meeting notes (I use the Notepad application), writing down the major points the author needs to address. I also read through the reviewers’ feedback (if available) and revise my comments and notes in light of their feedback.

5.​ I meet with the authors virtually.

6.​ Post-meeting, I share my written feedback with the authors.

In virtual meetings, which usually last an hour, we discuss any of the reviewer feedback that is troubling the authors, discuss ways to incorporate feedback, and negotiate the submission deadline. I begin by asking authors about their background (“Where do you study/work?”). I then direct them to relevant readings as either examples to obtain ideas from in terms of structure or as evidence to cite. I show them, using Zoom’s screen sharing feature, my own way of incorporating reviewer feedback to serve as one model of synthesizing feedback. I go over TPR’s guidelines for authors to navigate this complex stage.

Literacy Brokering as a Framework for Understanding Graduate Editorial Mentorship Lillis and Curry (2006) employ the term “literacy brokers” (p. 13) for editors, reviewers, academic peers, and others “who mediate text production in a number of ways” (p. 4). Therefore, the term literacy brokering situates mentoring in the context of textual changes and the author-literacy broker relationships. To differentiate between mentoring and mediating in this paper, following Orland-Barak (2014), mentoring is understood to mean mediation of professional learning, and is hence a much broader concept, whereas mediating is used in the sense of textual changes. Lillis and Curry’s (2006) approach encompassed two aspects: one, “observing the ways in which scholars gain access to brokers and the subsequent impact of brokers on text production,” and two, “theorizing the relations between brokering and authoring activity in relation to publication” (p. 13).

They acknowledge the inequities and power dynamics at work within this kind of editorial mentorship: We acknowledge that the mediation of academic texts is not a neutral enterprise but rather involves participants of unequal status and power: In many instances, literacy brokers occupy a powerful position straddling the “boundaries and peripheries” (Wenger, 1998, p. 199) between various communities, influencing opportunities for publication. (p.

13) In other words, the editor puts their mediation into circulation by adding value to the author’s work, which has inherent inequities of power dynamics.

Nevertheless, Lillis and Curry’s (2006) text-oriented, longitudinal, and ethnographic study is useful because it illustrates in broad terms the nature and extent of literacy brokering in English-medium publications and characterizes and exemplifies brokers’ different

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Mentoring in Editorial Spaces • 34 orientations. Their study is relevant to mine because I too explore the graduate co-editor’s (a type of literacy broker) role through changes across drafts. Their study helps frame graduate editors’ mentoring roles not in terms of perceptions or abstract understandings but in terms of concrete changes made to drafts. Lillis and Curry (2006) devised a heuristic listing 11 kinds of these changes, which include additions, deletions, reformulations, reshufflings, argument and positioning development, lexical or register changes, sentence-level changes or corrections, cohesion markers, publishing conventions, and visual or representation of text.

All in all, the general purpose of the literacy brokering framework is to make the various forms of changes made by different stakeholders more explicitly noticeable. The framework specifically lists editors as literacy brokers and is inherently well equipped to discover trends in mechanisms behind developing manuscript content and generating knowledge.

In the next section, I explore the impact of a graduate co-editor in the production of texts written for publication, looking specifically at the trajectories of two recent examples as case studies. These contrasting examples will shed light on the roles graduate co-editors can play and the degrees of their effectiveness, authority, and agency in the publication process. I chose these two case studies because they were comparatively recent and allowed a richer analysis with the purpose of finding deeper meanings.

At this point, I would like to offer some contextual information about my background and my positioning with respect to the authors featured in the following case studies, Brenna and Erin. I am an international doctoral student in the U.S. in second language studies. When I started writing this paper, I had worked as a graduate co-editor for over two years and had mentored authors on four different manuscripts. I had a few publications under my belt when I started this job, and in the course of working at this job, I published one research paper in a prestigious journal of my field. On the other hand, Brenna and Erin were both recent Master’s graduates. Brenna was the assistant director of a writing center at a public research university in the U.S., while Erin was a tutoring coordinator at a large public university also in the U.S. I would clarify here that my use of successful and unsuccessful labels to describe these cases is merely for their publication trajectories and is not meant as a comment on the efficacy of mentoring. I do not view successful mediation simply as getting a manuscript published nor failure as being unable to achieve this outcome. Publishing a manuscript is

certainly an important outcome, but successful mentoring, I feel, can incorporate a host of other benefits like understanding publishing norms, increasing confidence, developing a more accurate understanding of strengths and weaknesses as a writer, engendering a desire to publish again, among others.

The Case of Successful Mediation: Brenna’s Example The editorial team received an email from our managing editor asking for their thoughts on a proposal for a piece. The proposal was a 192-word paragraph about how writing centers can better support a distinct student demographic, focusing on their disciplinary identity. I found the proposal interesting and wrote back to the team that I deemed the piece “useful.” I noted that our journal had published papers in the past related to the topic but those took a broader perspective; therefore, it will “be interesting to see how this one differs and what unique resources the author can pinpoint.” In response, the professional editor assigned the manuscript to me to work with the prospective author. She also recommended a direction for the piece, observing that the proposal included almost no references to the specific disciplinary aspect the paper aimed to take.

With this directive, I reached out to the prospective author, Brenna, volunteering my assistance.

In response, she requested a meeting. Before the meeting, I read her pre-submission draft, a three-page document, two of which constituted the bibliography. I wrote eight comments on the draft, some of which were about unclear expressions or citation errors, and others which commented on the relevance of sources in the bibliography. Most importantly, her write-up was not quite focused on her studied population and the disciplinary lens she was adopting. In my meeting, I emphasized this feedback, and we negotiated a deadline for her to submit the manuscript to the journal.

When Brenna returned her manuscript a month after this meeting, it had been significantly changed. It was now a nine-page document with a new title that focused on the discipline and a new section identifying recommendations for the field broadly. In the bibliography section, Brenna had replaced 16 of her references with 19 sources that were more recent and relevant to the topic. Table 1 (see Appendix) demonstrates one example of how a graduate co-editor’s feedback was incorporated in Brenna’s write-up by situating the argument in the discipline.

The extensive changes Brenna made depict the extent of her effort. It is useful to document such

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Mentoring in Editorial Spaces • 35 efforts as novice scholars do not always have a frame of reference for the time and effort involved in revising manuscripts. Ben, an Anglophone doctoral student in language education, articulates this lack of knowledge as follows: I don’t know how much work other people do on their article. The only things I only ever see are papers after they’ve been published, so they are in their final form. They are polished.

They’re beautiful…[but] papers don’t start out perfect. Studies don’t start out perfect. (Fazel, 2019, p. 86) Once we received Brenna’s revised manuscript, it was shared with me to confirm if it was ready to be moved to the next stage. In my email response, I wrote: [Brenna’s] paper seems better aligned now in terms of title and content; however, the references are still not accurately cited in APA format. I guess they can be fixed at a later stage. In terms of fulfilling the requirements of the [particular] genre, it looks ready to be sent out to the reviewers.

These comments suggest that manuscripts can move on to the subsequent stage if major concerns are taken care of and minor corrections can be handled later.

Upon receiving this confirmation, the professional editor sent out Brenna’s manuscript to one reviewer because I had worked with Brenna. This practice is in line with the following guideline laid out in Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices document: “Editors consider whether full review by two external scholars is truly needed for revised manuscripts” (Cagle et al., 2021). In Brenna’s case it was deemed not necessary.

The reviewer returned feedback in just over seven weeks in the form of both in-line comments and a 636-word long commentary through our submission management portal. To provide perspective on how the reviewer’s feedback aligned with the mentoring mission of the journal, I analyzed the content of the in-line feedback. The analysis revealed that it was quite supportive. Out of a total of 15 comments, two were clarification questions, six were suggestions with an explanation of how incorporating those suggestions would improve the manuscript (including one suggestion for word choice), and three were critical comments that were prefaced by “This is really interesting, but…”. The remaining four comments were compliments (“Good point here!”). The lengthy overall commentary, in itself an indication that the reviewer was invested in helping the author improve the manuscript, was quite supportive and the reviewer had even shared the reference of three readings to help Brenna. To sum up, the reviewer, in accordance with

the TPR’s reviewer guidelines (The Peer Review, 2024), acted like a writing consultant.

In response, Brenna submitted a revised draft along with a feedback incorporation grid. In the grid, Brenna addressed the reviewer’s commentary and in-line feedback point-by-point. I was again asked to look through these two documents to ascertain if the manuscript was ready for the copy-editing stage. I reviewed them and said they were. The manuscript was then accepted for publication.

My Analysis of Brenna’s Case Roen et al. (1995) point out, “Success often does much to build a scholar’s confidence” (p. 241). Wells and Söderlund (2018) explain the outcome of this success: “When [novice scholars] had an article published in graduate school or just after, especially if that article was accepted fairly quickly after its submission, their confidence clearly made writing for publication afterward easier” (p. 141). Brenna’s example illustrates what support for first-time authors can look like: she received consistent mentoring to ensure transparency throughout the review process, and learned how to present her work for external review and how to revise and respond to reviewers accordingly.

Brenna’s example showcases how graduate co-editors can act as critical readers to test a piece before it goes out for external review. Their feedback can ease the sometimes painful review and revision process. In terms of literacy brokering, Brenna’s example has features in common with Lillis and Curry’s (2006) second example, where the brokering resulted in a major shift in content. In Brenna’s case, it is evident that graduate co-editor’s feedback also resulted in a major shift in content. At the first stage, the piece was given credence by the editor by deeming it worthy to be worked upon, and then the comments pinpointed the exact changes that should be made. All this resulted in significant overhauling of the content.

The Case of Failed Mediation: Erin’s Example Our professional editor put me in touch with the author, Erin, and I reached out to her suggesting my willingness for a meeting. By this point, Erin had already received her first round of reviewer feedback and she had requested mentoring assistance on her post-reviewer feedback draft. Interestingly, it was the professional editor who reminded Erin of this option when feedback was returned to her, perhaps sensing that it was needed. When Erin responded to my email to connect she noted, “I’m not too anxious about the revisions that are needed—more so interested in making sure I provide enough understanding for the

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Mentoring in Editorial Spaces • 36 intention/direction of the piece, as I feel that was slightly questioned by one Reviewer.”

To prepare myself for the meeting, I went over the reviewers’ feedback and Erin’s manuscript. Erin’s paper was a 20-page opinion-based article in which she had used vignettes from scenarios that tutors frequently encounter (e.g., unclear assignment prompts, students writing for course instructors rather than their intended audience, students’ fear of using their own voice). Reviewer 1 had provided their commentary via a 762-word MS Word document, and Reviewer 2 had sent a 218-word paragraph via email. Both reviewers separately provided in-line comments on the manuscript.

My analysis of Reviewer 1’s commentary indicated that it was predominately evaluative and lacking in writing advice. On the first page, Reviewer 1 had summarized the gist of Erin’s manuscript followed by numbered comments. After copying relevant sentences from Erin’s text, Reviewer 1 had written 10 total single sentence comments as questions (“Don’t they already?”) or critique (“This model does not appear to be new”). Four of the comments began with the word “again,” indicating that there was a persistent problem. I could not categorize any of the comments as actionable suggestions that would aid in revising the concerns Reviewer 1 identified. In terms of praise, there was none. Altogether, this feedback was not supportive and did not fulfill the mentoring mandate of the journal.

On the other hand, Reviewer 2 praised the manuscript as “a really good piece” and offered four suggestions for developing the content. For example, “Consider clumping scenarios into sections (theme based?) with a header and adding additional reflection about voice.” I would characterize this feedback as helpful but brief.

Additionally, before our meeting, Erin sent me a four-and-a-half-page introduction section that she had been revising. After reviewing all these documents, I stated in my notes: You need to clarify your context, where you are coming from. Because to a different audience these are established good writing instruction practices. So [reviewers] are like what is the value of this? How you play an intermediary role is important.

In our hour-long meeting, Erin shared how she was moving into a new writing center role after being a graduate student, perhaps hinting at her job demands.

We discussed the reviewers’ comments and potential revisions. I also shared my feedback with her in the

form of in-line comments. We agreed on a date for Erin to submit her revised manuscript.

After the meeting but before submitting her revised manuscript to the journal, Erin reached out to me to look through her submission, which was now significantly longer (30 pages). To quantify her changes, I analyzed the pre- and post-mentoring drafts using the Compare feature in MS Word. The comparison indicated 611 changes were made to the document. She had also added a word to the title, bringing slightly more clarity to the topic. Notably, the argument remained consistent, though how it was presented and framed had changed. Looking at all these changes, I gave her document a go-ahead to be moved to the next stage.

In their second round of feedback, returned in three weeks, both reviewers determined a major shortcoming in the manuscript’s innovation and originality. Reviewer 1 noted that, “The framing is better in the beginning, but I’m still left with feeling like this piece isn’t doing anything new--or isn’t very clearly articulating how what it’s doing is moving the field forward.” Reviewer 2 voiced similar concern noting that the piece did not break “new ground in the WC field.” It was apparent that the type of revision the reviewers requested would require clarity of thought, fair judgment, and significant time and effort from Erin.

The professional editor shared the full reviews with Erin, along with the following suggestions: What I notice is that you have a strong personal voice but that tying in audience and purpose of their piece at the start of the piece (perhaps at the end of para. 2) might help with some of the framing. In fact, it is OK to hammer home the exigency of your piece throughout the article: “I am writing this because XYZ personal experience AND scholarly gap,” “this piece will be useful for QRS audiences in ABC ways.”

This practice is pertinent to Cagle et al.’s (2021) Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices, which includes the following: “editors frame reviewer comments to support author revisions.” Despite this helpful advice from the professional editor, Erin decided to withdraw her manuscript. Calculating the efforts of revision versus the rewards of re-submission, I believe she felt the investment of time was not worthwhile. Another author, working under institutional obligations to publish, may have made a different calculation. Perhaps this publication was not central to Erin’s career goals at that point, or to the new professional role she was

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Mentoring in Editorial Spaces • 37 transitioning into. In her email addressed to the editorial team, she explained her decision as follows: I say this more so with concern of the revision requests promoting a direction that this paper never intended to explore, and I believe with further changes, this piece will lose my original intention with/for it and become something that I don’t align with nor am looking to explore as of now, or at this point in my level of experience.

I do appreciate Erin exercising autonomy as she was not willing to compromise her goals for the paper, lose control over her argument, or repress her personal feelings about the piece. In response to her email, I wrote: I am sorry that you made this decision, but it is one that I truly respect. I also feel responsible for the way things transpired because I believe it is my responsibility to mediate between the author’s goals for a paper and the reviewers’ expectation. There was a communication breakdown somewhere and I am feeling a sense of personal failure here. For you, I hope this experience will not discourage you from contributing to scholarship in our field.

My words conveyed a sense of emotional support as I wanted to make sure this early experience with publishing did not deter Erin’s confidence. The words also bring into focus how I perceive my role as more of a collaborator, accepting responsibility to the extent of feeling a sense of shame in letting Erin down. All in all, this correspondence illustrates my investment in the mentorship process.

My Analysis of Erin’s Case The examination of Erin’s episode points to three interrelated factors that, in my analysis, may have led to the eventual outcome of Erin pulling her piece from the review cycle: 1) reviewers’ feedback lacked support and clarity; 2) differences between author and reviewer perspectives; and 3) graduate co-editor missing reading a reviewer’s letter to the editors. I take up each of these points below.

Firstly, my analysis of the content of Reviewer 1’s first round of feedback indicated that it fell short of fulfilling the mentoring mission of the journal.

Reviewers must remember that writing reviews for a mentoring-based journal differs from a traditional one.

TPR’s guidelines are explicit about the mentorship role of reviewers, and those reviewing need to balance supporting the academic integrity of the paper with encouraging the prospective author, which can be quite

challenging. Interestingly, in the course of reviewing this case study to write this paper, I learned that Reviewer 1, in the process of reviewing the article, asked the journal for information about the author, which was not the norm. The professional editor provided Reviewer 1 with information about Erin’s academic level along with the note that Erin provided about her manuscript when she submitted her manuscript to the journal (similar to a cover letter submitted to a journal with the manuscript). This note typically goes directly to the reviewers when manuscripts are assigned to them through TPR’s submission management platform, but due to technical difficulties this information did not automatically reach the reviewers as intended. In any case, the request for this further information indicates that Reviewer 1 strived to do their job diligently. On the flip side, it highlights that Reviewer 1 had concerns about the level and background of the author and wanted to keep this in mind when reviewing. In any case, the feedback provided was given with the knowledge of Erin’s academic background details.

Furthermore, I noticed that an overall commentary was missing in Reviewer 1’s feedback.

Reviewer 1 had offered a summary of the article, but omitted their opinion of it; this perspective would have more clearly communicated Reviewer 1’s reservations about Erin’s manuscript. Conversely, Reviewer 2’s overall impression of Erin’s manuscript shifted from “a really good piece” in round 1 of feedback to not breaking “new ground in the WC field” in round 2 of review. This change illuminates how reviewers can start to notice aspects that may go unnoticed in the first round of feedback. The shift in feedback may also be due to the time-consuming nature of the review process: in Erin’s email to us about declining to move forward with the manuscript, she noted that authors tend to complete multiple rounds of revision many months apart, and the reviewer may simply not remember what was communicated earlier about a piece they read a year or more ago.

Another cause for the eventual outcome of the manuscript appears to be differing author and reviewer perspectives. It is not that Erin did not revise substantially or did not pay attention to each reviewer comment, as her feedback letter contained specific clarifications and responses to each piece of reviewer feedback. Instead, her point of view differed from the reviewer’s. Table 2 (see Appendix) provides a glimpse into how the perspectives differed.

Table 2 signifies the central issue Reviewer 1 took with Erin’s ideas and how Erin responded and engaged with this feedback. I remembered I had asked

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Mentoring in Editorial Spaces • 38 Erin in our meeting to add that even if professors do their job right, they might still be unsuccessful; hence, it was important to keep looking for more ways to remedy the situation (see my meeting notes reported in the previous section). Both Reviewer 1’s comment and Erin’s response seem polite in their tone (in my experience there has never been any incivility in such exchanges). Erin’s revised text took out the direct reference to “professors” to accommodate Reviewer 1’s concerns. Erin’s response to Reviewer 1’s comment in her letter is indicative of first-time authors lacking in skills to communicate effectively with reviewers. She rebuts an opinion with another opinion, which was perhaps a less convincing rhetorical move. In an opinion-based manuscript especially, it is essential that the opinion is conveyed effectively. Instead of authorizing her arguments on the basis of her personal professional practice and experience, she could have supported her claims with some references, succinctly connecting her ideas with an ongoing conversation in the writing center field. In her defense, perhaps she misunderstood that this was not an expectation in her piece. She could have also added examples. It is possible that Reviewer 1 was not as concerned with the value of her argument as with the grounding of her argument in personal experience. Considering the second round of feedback, it is clear that Erin did not make a compelling argument and her ideas were not quite agreed with by the reviewers.

Lastly, in reviewing this case study, I discovered that Reviewer 1 had also written a separate letter to the editors, which I had not previously come across. In this two-and-a-half page MS Word document, the reviewer first shared their summary of the manuscript, then their main criticism and questions and their recommendation. Writing a document like that was an unusual practice for TPR’s review procedures. The editorial board did not share this document with Erin for the simple reason that it was meant only for the journal editors. But, it was also not shared with me when I was first connected with Erin.

This oversight prevented me from fully realizing the gravity of the issue and understanding the expectations of Reviewer 1 in particular. Had I known the full extent of the reviewer’s concerns, perhaps I would have emphasized this more in my meeting with the author and told her to prioritize this comment in her revision.

This is a procedural issue that should be corrected in future.

With regard to Lillis and Curry’s (2006) study, who illuminated literacy brokering “in relation to the experiences of multilingual scholars who live[d] and work[ed] in periphery contexts of the non-Anglophone

center” (p. 28), this paper provides further ideas about center-periphery relations in knowledge production.

Erin’s refusal to take up reviewers’ feedback may hint at somewhat different power relations for L1 scholars writing for the center. Compared to multilingual writers based in the non-Anglophone periphery, L1 writers may not feel the same power dynamics in an Anglophone center.

Conclusion, Recommendations, and Moving Forward Using documentary evidence and personal account, this paper demonstrates how explicit remote mentoring provided by graduate co-editors can offer a supportive environment where authors’ skills and confidence in the publication process can be developed. Hence, the paper adds to scholarship on editorship in writing center journals by showing what role graduate student editorial mentoring can play in creating opportunities for emerging scholars in navigating academic publishing after graduate school has ended. It illustrates how graduate co-editors fulfill a journal’s mission of working closely with struggling but promising authors to co-construct their writing and demystify the publication process for them. The paper shows how graduate student editors can be resources writers can rely on to develop texts for publication. It also unveils the labor graduate co-editors dedicate to bringing a publication to the finish line.

In this regard, literacy brokering (Lillis & Curry, 2006) serves as a useful framework to reach some understanding about a graduate co-editor’s involvement in academic publishing by tracing textual mediation. Having access to “medium text history,” which Lillis and Curry (2006) explain as “[t]wo drafts of a text plus more than one piece of related data (e.g., interview discussion, communication or feedback from broker)” (p. 8), I was able to get some insight into this process. While the rest of the textual evidence sources were present in Lillis and Curry (2006), the editorial board’s internal communication was not. By virtue of my unique role, this editorial discourse allowed me to fruitfully use this framework to understand text development.

The description of mentoring stated here indicates that the model of mentoring I implemented is a pedagogical site, similar to tutoring in the writing center. But unlike tutoring, mentoring in the academic publishing space may hold more agency for the editor as extensive mediation in Brenna’s example shows.

Furthermore, graduate co-editors do not just help writers improve a specific text; they also have the opportunity to teach authors about the broader

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Mentoring in Editorial Spaces • 39 expectations implicit in academic publishing, leaving a lasting impact on novice scholars’ professional development.

It is clear from the two cases that student editors mediate text production in a number of ways.

Both these successful and unsuccessful examples combined emphasize the need to remain realistic about the impact of graduate co-editor’s brokering. Brenna’s example reflects contributions of graduate co-editors, while Erin’s example unearths the constraints involved.

In this way, the paper provides a balanced perspective on mentoring.

Despite being similar in approach, there was one difference between the two cases in mentoring which is worth noting. My mandate in the two cases differed on account of the different stages of the publication cycles the manuscripts were: in Brenna’s case, I worked in a more unfettered manner as I was not yet bound by reviewer feedback and could comment more openly on content development. In Erin’s case, my purpose was more focused on ensuring the reviewers’ feedback was incorporated. The greater flexibility in the first case lends support to the conclusion that mentoring depends on the stage at which it is sought. So, exposure to mentorship at an earlier stage may carry greater benefits than at a later stage. At a later stage, a graduate co-editor’s voice is added to the din, making the first-time author susceptible to being crushed under the avalanche of feedback. Based on the two cases, some practical advice for the main players in the publishing system is offered below: For Journal Editors ●​ Require reviewers share an overall commentary on the author’s work which communicates a comprehensive opinion about the piece. This benchmarking in review standards is necessary because a high-level, overall commentary can better communicate a reviewer’s impression, which may or may not be clearly captured through localized or scattered comments. ●​ Equip those tasked with mentoring (such as graduate co-editors) with as much information as possible early on so they can make informed choices. Any relevant information or additional communication from reviewers must be shared so they can understand the full picture of the mentorship situation. ●​ Provide graduate editors with resources and training on the publication process as well as mentoring strategies.

●​ Build in graduate mentoring as a typical part of the publishing process and note this explicitly on websites and communications with potential authors.

For Graduate Co-Editors ●​ Seek out information from the author in the first meeting and start the mentoring process as early as possible (for instance, even before the work goes out for review the first time). ●​ Negotiate the evaluative aspect of the work, which is implied when the revised manuscript returns to you to confirm if the work is ready to progress to the next stage. At the moment I am hesitant to exercise authority in approving an author’s work. It is this evaluation aspect which I perhaps did not adequately fulfill as the reviewers disagreed with my assessment.

This responsibility requires that editors fully comprehend the author’s skill level, the manuscript, and each piece of reviewer feedback, which takes some skill to develop. ●​ Dealing with the emotional impact of being unable to successfully see a manuscript through is a part of the job. I do not have any pearls of wisdom to offer here, though one needs to dust oneself off and get back up. In my case, not getting Erin’s manuscript further in the process sparked my desire to reflect and write this paper; the call for proposals came when I was dealing with feelings of disappointment from this case. ●​ Rely more on meetings than merely email exchanges to build and sustain relationships.

For instance, post-publication, mentees and mentors can have a follow up meeting to know more about mentees’ experiences, what aspects of mentoring they ascertained useful, and how mentoring can be made more effective (e.g., how they feel about mentor’s professional experience and expertise, whether they feel their intervention was dis/empowering, how do they conceptualize successful mentoring, among other questions). ●​ Find out what support for writing or research publication authors have at their institutions to better understand their needs. This suggestion is similar to Inman and Sewell’s (2003) recommendation for electronic mentoring of writing center professionals: “Electronic mentors and mentees should learn about the general institutional and organizational

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Mentoring in Editorial Spaces • 40 contexts associated with their professional lives, so conversations can focus on the specific needs of each individual in the mentoring relationship, rather than relying on generalities” (p. 188). This information can help the student editors to moderate their level of support because I now believe that mediation cannot be an evenly distributed activity.

For Reviewers ●​ Explicitly draw attention to any major concerns or weaknesses in the first round of review. Any big picture comments should be clearly outlined. Lacking in novelty is a major concern that should have been clearly marked in the initial adjudication of Erin’s manuscript.

Later identification of major concerns can contribute to an author’s feelings of frustration, and first-time authors may feel this more acutely. ●​ Writing reviews that fulfill a mentoring mission requires reading authors’ works from a position of support and encouragement.

Formal training is required to develop this skill set that requires reviewers to carefully function more as mentors than gate-keepers. Perhaps some reviewers can come forward and run workshops to train writing specialists in the discourses and practices of effective (mentoring-based) peer review.

For Novice Scholars ●​ Seek out mentoring early and often; ask for it if it is not offered right away. ●​ Do not be offended by editors’ feedback; think of it as an opportunity to grow. It takes sustained effort to publish, and two rounds of peer review is not unusual. The exercise eventually benefits the work. ●​ Be open to revision, but realize you still have agency over your text.

To conclude, how graduate co-editors mediate texts as literacy brokers represents only the starting point of mentoring in editorial spaces. Like any other peer mentoring system, this role has enabled me to grow, develop, and learn along with my mentees (the publication process of this article being one obvious benefit). I have deliberately not focused on this reciprocal aspect out of space limitations, though it emerges in this piece where I signal a gaining of a perspective.

As far as the broader discussion of mentoring is concerned, a host of questions remain: What does successful mentoring look like and how to measure it?

How mentoring contributes to the professionalization of graduate co-editors? How mentoring would work in case of multiple authorship? How mentoring can help in the empirical research report genre? I hope the writing center community will take up these questions to move the discussion forward. Editorial staff can start off by collectively discussing right at the outset how mentoring should be structured and what it would entail (the do’s and don’ts). Special discussion forums at IWCA conferences can be organized to not only discuss editorial mentoring but also bring student editors together.

References Arsenault, A. C., Heffernan, A., & Murphy, M. P. A. (2021). What is the role of graduate student journals in the publish-or-perish academy? Three lessons from three editors-in-chief. International Studies, 58(1), 98–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020881720981222 Banville, M. (2020). Reflection: Morgan Banville, graduate co-editor. The Peer Review, 4(4). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/issue-4-0/r eflection-morgan-banville-graduate-co-editor/ Cagle, L. E., Eble, M. F., Gonzales, L., Johnson, M. A., Johnson, N. R., Jones, N. N., Lane, L., Mckoy, T., Moore, K. R., Reynoso, R., Rose, E. J., Patterson, G., Sánchez, F., Shivers-McNair, A., Simmons, M., Stone, E. M., Tham, J., Walton, R., & Williams, M. F. (2021). Anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices: A heuristic for editors, reviewers, and authors. https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic.

Fazel, I. (2019). Writing for publication as a native speaker: The experiences of two anglophone novice scholars. In P. Habibie & K. Hyland (Eds.), Novice writers and scholarly publication: Authors, mentors, gatekeepers (pp. 79–96). Palgrave Macmillan.

Hashlamon, Y. (2020). Reflection: Yanar Hashlamon, graduate co-editor. The Peer Review, 4(4). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/issue-4-0/r eflection-yanar-hashlamon-graduate-co-editor/ Inman, J. A., & Sewell, D. N. (2003). Mentoring in electronic spaces: Using resources to sustain relationships. In M. A. Pemberton & K. Joyce (Eds.), The center will hold: Critical perspectives on writing center scholarship (pp. 177–189). Utah State University Press. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1 44

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Mentoring in Editorial Spaces • 41 Ives, L., & Spitzer, L. (2023). Student to scholar: Mentorship, recontextualization, and the threshold of scholarly publication in rhetoric and composition.

Composition Forum 51, https://compositionforum.com/issue/51/mentor ship.php Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2006). Professional academic writing by multilingual scholars: Interactions with literacy brokers in the production of English-medium texts. Written Communication, 23(1), 3–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088305283754 Roen, D. H., Villanueva, V., Brown, S., Kirsch, G., Adams, J., Wyche-Smith, S., & Helsley, S. (1995).

Revising for publication: Advice to graduate students and other junior scholars. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 25, 237–246.

Sheffield, J. P. (2014). Networking, demystifying, and connecting: How editing affects graduate student professional development. College English, 77(2), 146–152.

Spooner, M., Weisser, C., Schoen, M., & Giberson, G. (2022). Behind the curtain of scholarly publishing: Editors in writing studies. Utah State University Press.

The Peer Review. (2024). Guidelines for reviewers.

Retrieved December 28, 2024, from https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/about/guidelines-f or-reviewers/ Wells, J. M., & Söderlund, L. (2018). Preparing graduate students for academic publishing: Results from a study of published rhetoric and composition scholars.

Pedagogy, 18(1), 131–156. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/683385.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No 2 (2026) 42 Appendix Table 1 Example of Graduate Co-Editor’s Mediation

Table 2 Example of Misalignment in Reviewer and Author Perspectives

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SIS, PUT THAT PLAYLIST ON AND SIP THROUGH THE EMOTIONS OF WRITING Shewonda Leger Florida International University sleger@fiu.edu Abstract The emotional labor of writing often remains invisible to editors, readers, and institutions, yet writers still need practical ways to manage those emotions while producing work. Coffee shops have become my solution—spaces where I manage unseen emotions while writing, revising, processing feedback, and meeting institutional publication standards. In this article, I share my experiences with self-doubt while working on a chapter for an edited collection. I reflect on how choosing a comfortable workspace and attending to my emotional states allow me to define productivity on my own terms. ​ Sitting at Crema Gourmet to write this article, I ask myself: How vulnerable should I be? Rayana Jay’s “Undefeated” plays on repeat through my headphones, and its message about working “twice as hard for half the love” resonates with me. Jay wrote the song for Black women athletes, but the theme of pushing through obstacles resonates with my own experiences as a Black woman in academia. I think back to my past self, the one who wrote her first academic article, unsure of how to express her voice in scholarly spaces.

She hadn't yet realized that academic publishing wasn’t just about ideas or sharing them. It would mean defining herself, claiming space, and learning not to dwell on emotions for too long but instead processing them to put words on the page if she wanted to earn tenure.

The work ahead of me wasn’t physical, but mental. Even as I say this, I’m compartmentalizing, setting aside my body’s health needs to focus on emotional labor. My chronic conditions don’t pause for deadlines or breakthrough moments, but I’m asking them to wait anyway (we gon’ talk ’bout that another time). Let’s stick to emotions for now. This emotional labor I stay managing often goes unnoticed because it isn’t tracked or measured, and there isn’t space for it in annual self-evaluations. Yet, the unnoticed emotional effort is still a form of invisible labor. Invisible labor includes “activities that occur within the context of paid employment that workers perform in response to requirements (either implicit or explicit) from employers and that are crucial for workers to generate

income, to obtain or retain their jobs, and to further their careers, yet are often overlooked, ignored, and/or devalued” (Crain et al. 6). When I recognize how I'm feeling, I can work through the stress, anxiety, and writer's block to actually produce work. However, this emotional labor remains invisible to those who judge my productivity by my number of publications.

So, how am I supposed to manage these emotions to write, revise, process feedback, and produce work that meets the standards? Coffee shops have become my writing space. I talk about the moments when coffee shops help me push through my emotional labor and keep publishing. Discovering new coffee shops to write in creates places where I can handle the weight of academic writing without letting it shut me down. Writing in these public yet cozy and comforting spaces helps me step back from the isolating pressures of academic publishing. When stress originates from the institution, sometimes all I want is a break from campus. The coffee shops serve as what Ray Oldenburg calls third places—areas that are neither home nor work, serving the community best to the extent that they are inclusive, local (16), and accessible. Being in a coffee shop not tied to the institution but connected to my community allows me to experience and process my anxiety and fear in a calm way. I can decompress and prioritize my mental health. Still, some days it’s too much, and writing feels impossible. On those days, I just sip my coffee or tea, eat my pastry, and chat with strangers.

Writing in coffee shops can affect the writing and revision process, give emotional and creative support when we’re feeling vulnerable, and create places where we can focus on the embodied experience of writing by choosing where we work intentionally. I share my experiences as a reminder that it’s okay to acknowledge and work through your emotions while writing. We shouldn’t have to suppress our feelings.

Public spaces, especially coffee shops, become a comfortable place to process what I’m carrying. I talk about how I move through those counterproductive moments that usually end in procrastination, and how I still find ways to get back to being productive, because the pressure to publish doesn’t go away. I describe feelings of self-doubt and hesitation, and how I pushed

Sis, Put That Playlist On • 44 through them to write my first chapter in an edited collection. Being vulnerable shows that it’s okay not to have everything figured out, that finding my writing flow takes time, and it isn’t perfect. I’ve felt disappointed in myself for missing opportunities because I spent too much time on drafts and uncertainties, letting self-doubt and perfectionism hold me back. I’ve felt guilt as I’ve asked for extensions, worried that I was adding to someone else’s labor, even as I scrambled through the precarious pre-tenure expectations of constant productivity. Despite these setbacks, I’ve learned to embrace my publication process, accepting the messiness of drafts that don’t yet make sense and recognizing slow progress as enough.

Just having moments where I can notice and work through my emotions is enough.

Describing Coffee Shops Coffee shops are neutral ground for people to gather. A “place where individuals may come and go as they please, in which none are required to play host, and in which all feel at home and comfortable” (Oldenburg 46). Alternatively, when coffee shops become a workspace, in the context described throughout this article, the space is a coffice or coffee-office, “an urban labour practice of working in a coffee shop” (Droumeva 119). There is also “the notion of ‘coffitivity,’ or the kind of productivity one derives not only from the stimulation of the coffee drink itself but also from the chaotic, communal, semi-public space of the urban cafe” (Droumeva 119). This concept of coffitivity demonstrates how individuals engage in environment selecting and structuring processes, which Prior and Shipka define as “the intentional deployment of external aids and actors to shape, stabilize, and direct consciousness in the service of the task at hand” (219).

Workers deliberately choose and utilize the coffee shop's ambient noise, communal energy, and physical layout to enhance their productivity and focus. Despite the constant motion, people in these spaces can still be productive. The communal aspects lead to belonging, where diverse individuals share a neutral ground as a third space. This communal energy aligns with Stacy Pigg’s observation that “places meant to be moved through have long been important to how rhetorical scholars understand processes of generating new ideas and participating in community life” (Pigg 31). Coffee shops are exactly this kind of transitional space where people come and go. Yet this movement, which could distract me, instead generates the energy I need to write productively. The way we choose and occupy our writing spaces is important when academic writing carries so much emotional weight.

Finding Place in Public Space Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Put Your Records On” plays through my headphones as I sit on the wooden stool at Ella Cafe. My words flow onto the page as she sings out, “find yourself somewhere, somehow.” I'm calm, present in the moment, and writing. I'm here.

I inhale the freshly ground coffee beans filling the air as I reach for my matcha tea, feeling the warmth of the ceramic mug in my hands. The rustic wood around me feels like a gentle embrace, adding more warmth to my body. There are moments when I lose myself in my writing and thoughts. I occasionally pause to observe the people who come and go. I glance at the handwritten menu boards just enough to keep my people watching lowkey. The ceiling beams and track lighting cast shadows that subtly shift as the afternoon light changes. I’ve been in this space all morning, and it’s nearing closing time. After countless hours sitting on this wooden stool, what started as a simple space has gradually become something more meaningful, a place of solace, my writing space. This shift shows how we form attachments with physical places through repeated presence and practice.

Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction between “place” and “space” offers a lens for understanding how physical locations become emotionally significant through repeated embodied engagements and exchanges. Tuan describes place as a location imbued with personal meaning through repeated engagement, while space represents the abstract potential for such investment.

Ella Cafe started as a space, but my personal interactions transform it into a unique and embodied place where I am comfortable writing. Here, physical locations exist as neutral entities, but the interactions and exchanges that occur within them allow space to shift and evolve continuously.

As Ahmed argues, “space acquires ‘direction’ through how bodies inhabit it, just as bodies acquire direction in this inhabitance” (Queer Phenomenology 12).

This reciprocal relationship between bodies and space deepens Tuan’s understanding of how meaningful places emerge. While Tuan focuses on the temporal aspect of place-making through repeated engagement, Ahmed reveals the simultaneous process by which space and inhabitant mutually constitute each other.

Tuan’s observation that “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other” (3) captures the emotional dimension of this transformation, where the “direction” Ahmed describes becomes invested with feelings of security and place attachment.

The coffee shops where I choose to write are places rich with meaning, familiarity, and emotions. I’m

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Sis, Put That Playlist On • 45 aware of how my Black body moves through and occupies space and how my presence is read, observed, welcomed, or excluded. My awareness of being in public spaces connects to Sara Ahmed’s work on phenomenology and orientation, where she explores how bodies navigate spaces and how some bodies are accepted while others face discomfort. At Ella Cafe, I sense this welcome in the way the baristas remember my usual order, how the wooden stool that may be uncomfortable to others is comfortable to me, but it has become “mine,” and in the nods and smiles of recognition from other regulars who have also claimed their own place in this shared space. However, the attachment I have developed at Ella Cafe and other local coffee shops is neither automatic nor permanent.

This attachment develops through repeated visits and familiarity with the space, such as knowing which seat works best for my writing, understanding the flow of busy and quiet times, and reading the subtle cues of the environment. The comfort I find in these public spaces, which I now consider writing spots, is built through ongoing engagement with the physical and social rhythms. As someone who writes in coffee shops, my presence raises larger questions about visibility, like who has the right to occupy space, who gets to linger over a single drink for hours, and whose presence is seen as productive versus disruptive. My decision to write in coffee shops affirms that this public space can also serve as my office, a place for creative and academic work.

When I write at coffee shops, I'm not just occupying a public space but also working toward entering academic spaces—journals, conferences, conversations—that carry their own histories of who belongs. Coffee shops become places where I work through both positive and negative emotions to assert my scholarly voice, spaces where the theoretical concepts of place-making and place attachment play out in the practical work of academic writing.

Academic Labor + Emotional Labor = Counterproductive Ahmed argues that “rather than emotions being understood as coming from within and moving outward, emotions are assumed to come from without and move inward” (The Cultural Politics of Emotion 9).

The emotions we feel and experience are our reactions to external pressures, situations, people, or spaces that trigger internal responses we must confront and manage.

Academic publishing has taught me how intensely emotional and embodied the writing process is. The pressure to publish for tenure brings waves of

anxiety, self-doubt, nervousness, and vulnerability that I carry in my body. However, when my finished writing is published, those emotions shift to pride, confidence—damn girl, you did that, joy, peace, strength, and optimism for the next writing task. The constant fluctuation of negative and positive emotions not only impacts my mental health and well-being but also causes me to question my place in academic spaces and what it takes to feel like I belong. Still, I stay in academia because there’s a certain power, resistance, empowerment, and complex sense of self that comes with occupying space that was never meant to include me and shifting it into a place that now has representations of my lived experiences as a Haitian American scholar.

The college campus holds memories from my undergraduate years to now—from crying at the turtle bridge after failing organic chemistry a second time, to planning events for student organizations, to spending hours as a graduate student working on my dissertation. Now, as an assistant professor, I teach, hold office hours, and navigate the endless demands of faculty life. I've moved through these spaces without pausing to check how I'm feeling, which has led to burnout that affects my ability to write.

On days when I’m feeling burnt out, being on campus doesn’t help my writing flow. Now, when it’s time to switch into writing mode, I feel tired and overwhelmed from giving so much throughout the day.

I’m burnt out and need a different space to mentally reset. My windowless office feels stifling—my shoulders tense before I even open my laptop. I hear the air vent and the office doors opening and closing around me. The walls carry conversations from neighboring offices. I listen to meetings in the conference room down the hall and faculty conversations with students. The clicking of heels and footsteps, and the sound of the department printer.

These subtle but obvious sounds make my body feel both distracted and alert, reminding me that I am in an institutional space and I’m sitting here trying to complete another task after a long day of already checking off a long list. I may not get much writing done in my office, but it’s where I catch up with colleagues. We drop in on each other to chat, share ideas, or check in, and those moments matter.

So, what happens when a place meant for knowledge production and sharing turns into a space of exhaustion and depletion? Realizing that the campus has become a source of external pressure that drains my energy and overwhelms my emotions, I seek an alternative space to write, one with external factors that support “productive writing.”

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Sis, Put That Playlist On • 46 Yup, I’m stressed but actin’ chill. I pack up.

Put on my noise-canceling headphones. Walk across campus. I search Google Maps for coffee shops, looking for a space that can become a productive place.

Most likely, the deadline to submit my manuscript is approaching, and I’m nowhere close to finishing. I fall behind and I’m not publishing as quickly as I’m “supposed to” or meeting the expectations placed on me, as well as my own. The pressure to “fit” isn’t just intellectual—it's emotional too. To claim academic space, I have to constantly produce work that meets institutional standards while managing emotions that remain invisible.

Social Space + Cultural Space = Productivity Coffee shops function as social and cultural spaces where interactions shape how identities and cultural norms are expressed, reproduced, and challenged.

Henri Lefebvre explains that “(social) space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity – their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder” (73). Lefebvre’s explanation implies that social spaces are not static locations but are constantly shaped by the dynamic relationships between people's activities and creations within that environment. Meanwhile, cultural space develops through the complex interplay of traditions, language, and shared experiences that occur in a particular place.

In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed examines how our orientations toward objects, bodies, and spaces profoundly influence how we inhabit and navigate our surroundings. Ahmed shows that people navigate social and cultural spaces differently based on their identity and personal history, highlighting that spatial experiences vary for each individual. Similarly, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, bell hooks examines “marginal spaces” as sites of resistance and possibility, illustrating how spaces marked by intersections of race, class, and gender can transform into powerful locations of cultural production and community building. With these theoretical frameworks, coffee shops epitomize both social and cultural practices.

Coffee shops are social spaces through the diverse ways people occupy them, whether grabbing a quick coffee, working, socializing, or even on a date, while at the same time acting as cultural spaces where different communities and cultures bring their practices, languages, and traditions into dialogue with one another. Sitting at A Family: Argentinian Delicious Things, my go-to coffee shop close to home, puts into

practice Lefebvre, hooks, and Ahmed's ideas about social and cultural spaces.

Their motto, “Cooking with family love so that our delights become a balm for the soul,” perfectly captures what happens in that space. The staff creates an atmosphere that’s genuinely warm and welcoming.

They’re known for their empanadas and pastries, so I’ve made it a personal practice to learn the Spanish names of my favorite Argentinian pastries. My favorite pairing with coffee or matcha is the alfajor maizena. It’s a sandwich cookie filled with thick dulce de leche and rolled in shredded coconut.

A Family functions as both a social and cultural space through our embodied interactions. By learning to say pastry names in Spanish, I’m not just ordering food; I’m participating in a cultural exchange.

Through my interactions with the staff, the space becomes more than just a place to grab coffee and food and write; it becomes a comforting and emotionally fulfilling place. Being in a place like that, where Argentinian culture is shared so generously, creates the kind of soulful experience their motto promises. Being in that space alleviates some of the stress I usually feel when it comes to academic writing.

Whatever stressful emotions I walked into that space carrying temporarily leave, and I’m in a more relaxed mindset to write.

Calm and comfortable, I begin to put words on the page. I’m not worried about where I am in the writing process, the manuscript deadline, or how reviewer feedback has affected my emotions. Instead, I enter a space where writing shifts from academic and emotional labor into a source of fulfillment. I remember why I chose a career where I can write and share lived experiences. During these productive sessions, I feel accomplished and confident; my ideas become clearer, my arguments feel stronger, and my creativity flows. I build momentum, clear my mind, and make tangible progress toward what once felt like impossible deadlines.

I’m hyped. I'm flowin’.

The Weeknd’s song “Take My Breath” becomes my soundtrack, with its message about taking risks and feeling alive. The confident, driving beat of “Take My Breath” mirrors the self-assured momentum.

Just as the song’s steady four-on-the-floor rhythm provides a strong foundation that keeps the track moving forward, I find myself in a clear and focused mental state, which leads to a similar sense of progress.

Sis, These Emotions Keep Takin’ Over The next two experiences describe the emotions I felt while writing my chapter “UNTWINE: Navigating

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Sis, Put That Playlist On • 47 Memories through Healing and Self-Definition,” for the anthology Narrating History, Home, and Diaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat. These emotional moments I went through show how external academic pressures and internal doubts can slow down the writing process.

Self-Doubting in Paradise I was sitting in a coffee shop in Zanzibar, Tanzania, working on my chapter. I can’t remember the name of the place, but I vividly remember writing there. It was my first time returning to the project since the proposal was accepted for an edited collection. The publishers sent back feedback and set deadlines, and now it was time to submit a full chapter, my first official publication, a piece that would count toward tenure.

I remember feeling pressure to meet certain expectations when it came to publishing: the pressure to sound “academic enough” and to produce something meaningful that would be “accepted.” Not only being accepted by publishers but also by other scholars in the field. I wanted to discuss Danticat’s work in a way that continues to add to the beauty of how she portrays Haitian culture. Her work’s embodiment of Haitian oral traditions, family and community practices, spirituality, history, and politics initially drew me to her writing. It was an honor to have the chance to expand on my favorite Haitian writer’s work. That made me even more nervous to write this chapter. I also felt pressure because I’m a Haitian woman analyzing the work of another Haitian woman. I felt the weight of representation, that I needed to get it “right” not just academically, but culturally. Would other Haitians find my analysis relatable? Was I qualified to speak about our collective lived experiences? What if my interpretation didn't align with how other Haitians saw Danticat’s work?

What if I missed something crucial that someone from my own community would expect me to notice or mention? I doubted my ability to analyze Danticat’s work, and this doubt, along with the fear of not meeting expectations, slowed my writing process. That pressure was magnified by my own fears.

Even in a relaxed space filled with bright colors and the scent of freshly baked bread, self-doubt prevented me from writing effectively. I couldn’t overcome my inner criticism. Every sentence I wrote felt like it had to carry the weight of representation, my academic voice, and my cultural identity. I kept deleting sentences and paragraphs, writing sections that I knew would need significant revision, going back to reread parts of the novel Untwine for additional quotes, and

convincing myself I needed more sources before continuing to write. I stalled more than I wrote that day. There were moments when I tried to work through the emotion of self-doubt, but I just couldn’t get out of my head.

My struggle with self-doubt felt bigger than me; it grew out of academic expectations that made me feel like I always had to prove myself, and at that moment, I couldn’t. I felt that anything I published had to be perfect, without mistakes, without flaws, because I knew that any imperfection might prove that I didn’t belong. As Ahmed suggests, these feelings of self-doubt originate from external pressures within the academic publishing system itself, where editors and publishers decide which voices are heard, which stories are valued, and which scholarship gets recognized. This system can be especially harsh for scholars from underrepresented backgrounds who seek representation. Reviewer feedback can evoke strong emotions; harsh critiques can make us question our abilities, while praise can create pressure to maintain standards. Over time, these external voices become internalized, shaping how we perceive our work and our worth. The truth is, we don’t always need academia, editors, publishers, or reviewers to be tough on us; often, we assume that role ourselves, becoming our own biggest obstacle by carrying the very barriers we aim to break through.

Permission to be Slow Sitting at the Brewing Buddha Cafe, I opened the document with the editors’ feedback and saw about fifty comments scattered throughout the text. The number of comments and track changes caused anxiety. I didn’t know how to start, but I knew I had to begin the revision process, even when I was unsure of what to do or how to do it. My being overwhelmed is tied to deeper concerns about academic productivity. If it took me this long to write one chapter, how could I possibly produce enough work to earn tenure? My colleagues published multiple articles, while I struggled to finish one chapter. If other scholars could produce “article after article” while I spent hours writing two paragraphs and didn’t address as much reviewer feedback as I would have liked in one sitting, what does that say about me as a writer? This comparison increased my academic anxiety, making me worried about tackling these revisions. I need to address my academic anxiety because I was beginning to feel unproductive.

Academic anxiety involves worry, emotional responses, task-related interference, and procrastination (Hooda and Saini 808). I worried that I

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Sis, Put That Playlist On • 48 wouldn’t have enough time to address all the reviewers’ feedback by the deadline. During this anxious moment, intrusive thoughts disrupted my focus and made it difficult to work. I became tense and distracted myself by scrolling through Instagram. Before I knew it, 45 minutes had passed. I procrastinated, and I hadn’t made any progress on revising the chapter. I became unproductive, and the time I planned to spend writing was almost gone. The pressure to meet the deadline created a constant mental distraction, making it hard to concentrate on the feedback. Physical tension and racing thoughts overwhelmed me when I should have been revising. Mental distractions caused me to jump between different pieces of feedback rather than work through them systematically, leaving me feeling scattered and flustered by the amount that needed to be changed. I procrastinated more than I should have.

I caught myself avoiding the work. Procrastination helped me to temporarily escape the anxiety, but after a while, this only reduced my time to work on the chapter and increased the pressure. My body’s responses to anxiety slowed my revision process: instead of moving directly from feedback to implementation, I got stuck in worry, avoidance, and distraction.

These experiences show how anxiety makes writers process information more slowly, not because we lack the ability to write, but because our mental resources become divided. When anxiety is present, part of our brain’s capacity is used to handle worry and emotional regulation instead of focusing on the task of revision. As a result, writing and revision take longer because anxiety adds extra cognitive load to our thinking. Recognizing this helped me realize that my slower pace wasn’t a failure, but a natural response to the emotional pressures of academic work, and that working slowly can still be productive and meaningful.

My slow writing pace increased these concerns: Would my changes meet the reviewers’ expectations? Was I interpreting their feedback correctly? What if I ran out of time to address everything that needed attention?

Next to my laptop and pile of books, my cup contained lavender Earl Grey. The description of this tea states that it is floral and notably soothing, evoking relaxation—perfect for lavender lovers like myself.

The coffee shop offered something different from institutional spaces: permission to be slow. The Brewing Buddha Cafe invited presence over productivity.

Ahmed’s insight in Queer Phenomenology explains that emotions shape bodies and spaces influence not just where we can go, but how we can exist there. I could feel my shoulders gradually releasing the tension I had been carrying. My

breathing deepened to match the room’s slow-paced atmosphere. The coffee shop’s spatial design includes high tables by the window for gazing outside, no visible clocks, and instead, pictures and recipes of lattes and teas decorate the walls. This space was designed around bodies that linger rather than bodies that rush.

Whenever I felt the anxiety returning, I took moments to inhale and exhale slowly. I listened in on conversations around me. I closed my eyes and took slow sips of tea. Unlike institutional spaces, where speed and output often measure worth, the Brewing Buddha Cafe created a space that was unhurried and relaxed. It was okay to sit in stillness and process my anxiety. That day, I wasn’t able to address most of the feedback, but I was still productive despite my slow pace. I was willing to make the revisions but I need to understand these emotions because revision is just as much about self-awareness and caring for my mental health as it is about satisfying the editor’s feedback. My procrastination began to seem less like a failure and more like a necessity. It was my body’s way of telling me to slow down.

I reminded myself that there’s nothing wrong with slow, careful, deliberate writing, as it can be a sign of self-care. Slow revision isn’t necessarily a failure; it reveals ways to connect with my emotions while I engage deeply with the ideas in my chapter. I was revising at a pace that felt right. The idea that coffee shops give permission to be slow challenges assumptions about the fast-paced productivity culture in academia. What if more academic spaces focused on presence rather than productivity demands? What if academic culture made more room for the slow, careful work of thinking through complex ideas instead of constantly pressuring scholars to produce faster?

Another Sip and a Final Sentence My point isn’t that supportive writing spaces don’t exist on campus. Universities have coffee shop-style environments, writing centers have established welcoming atmospheres, and there are writing hubs on campus for collaboration. These initiatives represent an important recognition of writers’ need for social, cultural, and comfortable work environments.

However, it’s okay for academics to take a break from institutional spaces to better understand and manage their emotions. My own writing challenges have taught me that caring for my well-being is necessary, even when facing pressures and deadlines. Sometimes the most productive choice is to not be present in certain spaces while choosing to be fully present in others.

Being aware of how my emotions affect productivity and how different places influence those emotions has

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Sis, Put That Playlist On • 49 helped me develop writing habits that support my emotional needs rather than work against them.

I’m at Foxtail Coffee, listening to “Strength Courage & Wisdom” by India Arie as I finish this article. Taking a deep breath, I feel the tension in my body loosen as I type this last sentence.

Works Cited

David Russell. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2003, pp.

180–238.

Rayana Jay. “Undefeated.” Hollywood Records, 27 July 2018.

The Weeknd. “Take My Breath.” Dawn FM, XO/Republic Records, 2021.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience.

University of Minnesota Press, 1977.

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed., Edinburgh UP, 2014.

—. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.

Arie, India. “Strength Courage & Wisdom.” Acoustic Soul, Universal Motown Records, 2001.

Bailey Rae, Corinne. “Put Your Records On.” Corinne Bailey Rae, EMI, 2006.

Clarke, Rachel, et al. “Invisible Labor, Invisible Value: Unpacking Traditional Assessment of Academic Library Value.” College & Research Libraries, vol. 83, no.

6, 2022, p.

926–945, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.6.926.

Crain, Marion G., et al. Invisible Labor : Hidden Work in the Contemporary World. Edited by Marion G. Crain et al., University of California Press, 2016.

Droumeva, Milena. “The Coffee-Office: Urban Soundscapes for Creative Productivity.” BC Studies, no. 195, 2017, pp. 119–200.

Hooda, Madhuri, and Anu Saini. “Academic Anxiety: An Overview.” Educational Quest: An Int. J. of Education and Applied Social Science, vol. 8, no. 3, pp.

807–810, December 2017, doi: 10.5958/2230-7311.2017.00139.8. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics.

South End Press, 1990.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell Publishers, 1991.

Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You through the Day. 2nd ed., Marlowe & Co., 1997.

Pigg, Stacey. Transient Literacies in Action: Composing with the Mobile Surround. The WAC Clearinghouse and UP of Colorado, 2020.

Poster, Winifred, et al. Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, edited by Marion G. Crain et al., University of California Press, 2016.

Prior, Paul, and Jody Shipka. “Chronotopic Lamination: Tracing the Contours of Literate Activity.” Writing Selves, Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives, edited by Charles Bazerman and

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No 2 (2026)

FROM PERSONAL REJECTION TO SHARED SATISFACTION: THRIVING THROUGH PRINCIPLES OF RELATIONSHIP-RICH COLLABORATION Stephanie Roach​ University of Michigan-Flint​ smroach@umich.edu

Bob Barnett​ University of Michigan-Flint​ rbarnett@umich.edu

James Schirmer​ University of Michigan-Flint​ jschirm@umich.edu

Jacob Blumner​ University of Michigan-Flint​ blumner@umich.edu

Abstract This article develops a working theory of “relationship-rich” collaborative practice. Given that successful and satisfying scholarly collaboration is not always what results when two or more people work together, this article lays out principles that describe conditions and qualities necessary for collaboration that is qualitatively different and meets the roles, responsibilities, and benefits of relationship-rich engagement. Applying the framework of Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert’s principles of “relationship-rich” education, the article argues for nine principles of relationship-rich collaborative practice keyed to the four foundations in Felten and Lambert’s work: welcome, inspiration, community, and meaning. In line with this special issue of articles on rejection, the authors start with their own stories of rejection and defeat, describing the common themes and concerns that led to their past and present collaboration. They then share their story of working together, including tactics of their process, to establish the importance of relationships in driving satisfaction and productivity, ultimately offering principles for relationship-rich collaborative practice. The principles offered have both explanatory and generative power, helping to explain what is missing when collaboration is unsuccessful, unsatisfying, or unsafe. The principles benchmark what is desirable in satisfying partnerships, highlighting the importance of choice, intention, and collective wellbeing in scholarly collaboration.

Why “Relationship-Rich” Our interest in theorizing relationship-rich collaborative practice comes from our experiences of rejection and dissatisfaction. Our individual experiences of feeling undervalued, undermined, and unsupported in the scholarly publication process align with common stories of rejection we hear from our colleagues. We tell our stories in

solidarity and to establish the reasons we moved to collaboration and specific kinds of satisfying collaborative practices as scholars. Our stories help provide a context in which we argue for the values and actions of relationship-rich collaborative practice.

We have experienced painful and unsettling frustration and self-doubt in attempts to hurdle the barriers of suspicion and mixed messages within scholarly publication cycles and institutional processes assessing scholarly worth.

The four of us count ourselves fortunate that juxtaposed to experiences of being deflated or unmoored, we have, together, found personal and professional satisfaction in collaborations that are productive, supportive, and meaningful. We argue that the source of satisfaction in such collaboration is best understood in a “relationship-rich” framework. We borrow the term “relationship-rich” from Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert, and we intend this article as a way to understand and honor a “relationship-rich” framework in collaborative work.

To develop our case for a working theory of relationship-rich collaborative practice, we begin with sharing separate stories of rejection and defeat. We analyze the common themes and concerns that encouraged us to seek new ways of working toward—and feeling about—our scholarship. We then turn to our collective story of processes that have supported a shared satisfaction. Our collaborative processes leverage individual strengths in serving a common goal, leading to feelings of individual and collective worth, excitement, connectedness, and momentum. These stories create the context for better understanding the principles of collaborative work capable of generating mutual care, uplift and pride. Ultimately, we argue for a framework for collaborative practice informed by Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert’s principles of “relationship-rich” education. Relationship-rich

From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 50 education is “rooted in relentless welcome, inspired learning, webs of relationships, and meaningful questions” (40). Such principles create conditions for success such as “mutual emotional support, instrumental assistance, and intellectual engagement” (McCabe qtd. in Felten and Lambert 163).

Inspired by the categories and concepts of relationship-rich education, we offer principles of relationship-rich collaborative practice. We believe a set of such principles has both explanatory and generative power. Since we know that not all collaborative work is personally satisfying or even safe, principles of relationship-rich collaborative practice can help in analyzing why not. By describing uplifting collaborative conditions and establishing a conceptual framework for understanding how collaboration is functioning, the principles help us understand the (anti)relationship-rich roots of (in)effective and (un)productive collaborative practice. This conceptual understanding can inform choice and action in collaborative work.

How do we generate more intentionally the kind of processes where creating something that becomes truly “ours” has distinctive markers of meaning-making and felt success?

Relationship-rich principles provide an answer.

However, before delving into the details of a relationship-rich collaborative practice that has buoyed our scholarly production and sense of worth as scholars, it is important to first describe our own lived experiences with barriers to scholarly worth and associated feelings of rejection.

Our Separate Stories of Personal Rejection Stephanie’s Story Despite departmental praise for her scholarship and support from the Dean on her case for promotion and tenure in 2010, Stephanie was met with disciplinary bias and intense institutional suspicion in the form of a letter to the Provost from dissenting members of the Dean’s advisory committee voting on Stephanie’s tenure. The letter’s authors questioned her credibility, insinuating that while “Roach claims she is the second author” they were unsure of “identify[ing] her contribution” and instead of listening to the information provided by Stephanie, her co-authors, external reviewers, and her

department, they cynically dismissed her contributions. They did not recognize legitimate, rigorous peer review outside of a double-blind format, and they questioned whether in her scholarly contributions she “meets higher level intellectual standards.” Ultimately, they did not understand or value Stephanie’s contributions within the field. In the face of this rejection, Stephanie felt defeated, confused, and deeply sad.

Though the Provost and Chancellor later sided with the department and the Dean in recommending tenure, the pain of this rejection lingered. With doubt cast upon her as a forthright person and worthy intellectual, Stephanie languished in significant shame and fear, unmotivated to produce new scholarship and wary of whether her future efforts would be understood and valued.

James’s Story In James’s pre-tenure life, “revise and resubmit” seemed a hurdle he couldn’t quite get over.

Attempts to get published ultimately met with success (and a positive case for promotion and tenure in 2014), but his overall effort was marked by countless other attempts that went nowhere. As a result, he often worried that his arguments and ideas were good enough for conference presentations and social media posts but not for articles in books or journals, which contributed to a sort of research paralysis. James felt adrift in the submission process, too, with so much correspondence through the coldness of email, and he was all the more embarrassed by how consistently a draft article was said to be a “good fit” but also not “good enough.” Wracked by an inability to execute, he withdrew, isolating himself even from those colleagues who most supported him.

Bob and Jacob’s Story As the only formally trained compositionists within their respective literature-dominated departments, neither Bob nor Jacob worked in environments that understood multi-authored scholarship in 1997. Their department cultures did not include support for collaborative work; the gold standard was still a single-authored book.

Despite this, they undertook an ambitious project to collect and document partnerships between writing centers and writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs. Their colleagues did not fully

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 51 understand the work they were doing. During Bob’s two-year tenure review, the department and college-level executive committee stressed that he needed to ramp up his scholarship. Instead of mentoring or supporting Bob, two senior members of his department scoffed at his collaborative attempts, diminishing this work and discouraging him from continuing it. Jacob, meanwhile, found little room for scholarship at his teaching institution. Some scholarship was necessary to achieve tenure, but no formal support for publishing existed. Jacob felt he had no support or guidance for the scholarly work needed to earn tenure. Bob and Jacob ultimately secured a book contract, but being unsupported in work that felt meaningful left them disappointed and frustrated.

Choosing to Work Together Our experiences and feelings of rejection and frustration are what led us to choose to work together. What is critical to note in these stories are the common and relatable themes that point to disaffection in the publishing process and institutional assessments of scholarly worth. For all of us, institutional systems provided inadequate infrastructure for individual faculty success. We had guidelines, procedures, and processes for promotion to associate professor, but this constituted a meager roadmap. We also heard a clear mandate to make a national mark on our field, but to do it alone. And so we did.

But while we attempted to produce scholarship understood as valuable, we found ourselves in a variety of different collaborative connections that had satisfying layers to them.

Our administrative work as, then, deans, chairs, associate chairs, writing center and writing program directors brought us together on committees, in initiatives, and for necessary advocacy. We worked in pairs, trios, and as a quartet. Our working relationships necessitated close and frequent communications. We faced setbacks and frustrations, but we appreciated what it felt like to work together and were grateful to become closer colleagues, friends, and allies. As changes in appointments, shifts in responsibilities, and the pressures of austerity moved us out of the administrative positions that put us in collaboration, we recognized more clearly the value of working together. Even when results of our administrative efforts were too often swept

away, we liked working with one another. Fueled by collective desires for satisfaction in our work and personal desires to correct institutional narratives about our work that were still informing feelings of rejection and imposter syndrome in publishing, we chose to start writing for publication together. ​ Tactics of Shared Satisfaction In a very real sense, we are rebuilding ourselves and coming to terms with what happened in our earlier years as scholars. In Lessons from the Pandemic, Carello and Thompson remind us that, “writing and collaborating are methods of collective recovery…[that] help us recover and reimagine ourselves as educators” (4-5). We band together because of those past experiences, but we also look to the future, examining what is at the heart of our success: to rediscover, recover, and reimagine the joy and satisfaction of thinking and writing through acts of creating together.

Inspired through the simple act of exchanging ideas with like-minded and similarly enthusiastic individuals, we find creativity and camaraderie in collective inquiry. Degrees of care and thoughtfulness are foundational in this work, from respecting each other as fellow human beings to seeing the words any of us write as belonging to all of us. This highly iterative process hears and values all voices in the conversation, and we feel less alone in the daunting task of figuring out what to write about. Through this process, we create a sense of community and a clear sense of belonging and purpose. It is from these dual senses that we are able to better break down ideas and tasks into manageable parts, moving adeptly from big-picture ideas to concrete plans.

In doing so, we lean into our strengths. A series of interwoven files in Google Docs, maintained by Stephanie, ensure that we’re all figuratively and literally on the same page. These files allow us to see how an article evolves but also reveal our collective process, an initial proposal leading to article and task outlines, leading to a draft document colored by comments and suggested edits. The writing moves from “mine” and “yours” into “ours,” with a paragraph or an entire section first drafted, say, by Bob, morphing via idea influence, sentence structure, relevant citation, and word choice by Jacob, James, and Stephanie into something we all see ourselves in.

We repeat the process, switching roles and what

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 52 Sommers refers to as the “scales of concern” or different points of focus in iterative revision (Sommers 380, 386). We engage in what Wyatt et al. identify as assemblage, work that is “specifically not the sum of separately existing identities” and instead an immersion of those selves “in the collaborative task of writing in relation” (407).

And, in the writing of this and other articles, we map “the movement of affects and desire…through an assemblage as it dissolves, disassembles, and reassembles in new formations” (409). Collective accountability motivates us to contribute to the assemblage, both in the moment and online, while also providing a visible record of effort, allowing us to witness the work we do together.

Our loose, free-flowing, 90-minute meetings every other week happen in physical spaces near, but not on, campus. Whether at a downtown coffee shop, the rooftop bar at the local farmers market, or on a backyard deck, we reference past notes, read aloud new contributions, brainstorm and record ideas, and address concerns and questions as they arise.

Typically, the first of us to raise the question of meeting leadership is the one to lead a given meeting. Leading typically means driving us into specific parts of a draft to take turns reading aloud new contributions or comments. Reading aloud helps us hear each other and identify twisty turns of phrase as well as open up conversations about purpose. All questions are good questions–and we can trust Jacob to ask a lot of them. Addressing concerns in the moment allows the work to always move forward. In these ways, then, we are similarly engaged in what Ede and Lunsford observe to be dialectic, acknowledging that “this talking, in fact, seemed to be a necessary part of co-authoring, one that made our writing more productive and efficient” (153).

We motivate each other to write by assigning each person specific tasks to complete before our next meeting. Concluding notes from prior meetings inform the effort still ahead. By creating a highly structured shared notes document, we are able to see the piece of writing evolve, but our notes also reveal our collective process. Through it all, we believe and trust in each other and the work, finding ourselves eager to return to both again and again. Before, during, and after these meetings, we also have the opportunity to simply hang out together and enjoy

each other’s company. It is in these moments that we communicate about our other obligations, personal, professional, and otherwise, and look to support each other.

We trust each other and support each other every step of the way, and know that unequal effort is still equal contribution. Everyone lifts, but we look for who has capacity for more: “who doesn’t have a giant batch of papers this week? Who is especially overwhelmed? Who has an idea they want to run with?” and we hold each other accountable between meetings, asking, “how much do you have written?” or “have you done your assignment yet?” in curiosity and without pressure. Oftentimes we do our writing together in the same space, another way to hold each other accountable, but in a shared, caring way. And so what if somebody was unable to finish their writing task between meetings? No problem. We communicate and try to support each other, trusting we will get the work done. And we do.

The joy and satisfaction of working together makes us feel like we belong and reaffirms our understanding of each other and our field. When nurtured and supported through Stephanie’s push for purposeful organization and careful record-keeping; Bob’s inspiring, high-level perspective and can-do attitude; Jacob’s spot-on questions and focused, reinforcing practice; and James’s careful curation of resources and eye for the so what, our collective capacity is great. Our collaborative approach provides strong encouragement, even when other incentives are lacking, to produce more and seek scholarly opportunities for our collective voice.

Our writing together stands in stark contrast to our pre-tenure years when we felt the weight of isolation, the mixed messages of the peer review process, and disappointments that threatened how we defined ourselves as writers.

This particular article marks our third time electing to work together on scholarly publications in the last 18 months. Through each collaborative instance, we see an ongoing effort to discover the pieces missing from separate experiences of dissatisfaction: a welcoming culture, an inspiring environment, webs of support, and a depth of meaning. All of this is what we cultivate and pursue through what we understand to be “relationship-rich” collaborative practice.

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 53 Theorizing “Relationship-Rich”: New Applications for the Work of Felten and Lambert Our individual stories of defeat and our collective story of felt success signal the importance of certain kinds of intentional collaborative practices where relationships are at the core. In Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert argue that relationships are “the foundation of learning, belonging, and achieving in college” (5). Their argument establishes specific factors that they claim contribute to student success, noting parenthetically, “(and, we suspect, faculty and staff success, too)” (163). Our argument takes up the promise of that parenthetical: “relationship-rich” frameworks for student retention and success are equally powerful for understanding faculty persistence, productivity, and satisfaction.

Felten and Lambert argue that there are four principles of relationship-rich education: 1) the need for “genuine welcome and deep care,” 2) the importance of relationships as “a powerful means to inspire,” 3) the value of “webs of significant relationships,” and 4) the role of relationships in creating meaning as trusted relationships “help” and “challenge” us in examining “big questions” (17-18). Their call, then, is for institutions to build student experiences “rooted in relentless welcome, inspired learning, webs of relationships, and meaningful questions” (40), because relationships are “a primary factor in learning, belonging, and persistence” resulting in deeper engagement and sense of accomplishment (2). With relationships at the core of success in the aforementioned four ways—shaping belonging, generating persistence through a real excitement about ideas, shaping one’s place among and value for multiple perspectives, and encouraging a wider and personally meaningful field of vision for what matters—Felten and Lambert are arguing for the conditions of support and engagement that have been proven to bolster student success, and that, in their view and ours, could equally be understood to underpin faculty and scholarly success.

We see the lessons of relationship-rich education for creating welcome, inspiration, community, and meaning as applicable, and critical, to understanding collaborative practices

that instill confidence and are richly positive and productive. In times of austerity thinking, waning agency, increased isolation, overwhelming workloads, and the undervaluing of service and expertise—what Lee Gardner calls the “existential threats” stemming from “more competition for students, tighter budgets, shifting student needs and wants, and a polarized citizenry that may agree only on its skepticism about the worth of college”—there can be painful and deep-reaching rejection. We need levers for faculty and scholarly satisfaction, and relationship-rich practices are capable of generating “mutual emotional support, instrumental assistance, and intellectual engagement” that lead to satisfaction (McCabe qtd. in Felten and Lambert 163). Thus, we see “relationship-rich” concepts at the core of why some faculty collaborations thrive.

Proposed Principles of Relationship-Rich Collaborative Practice Given the significant impact of “relationship-rich” practices for productive and satisfying collaboration, we offer a set of nine relationship-rich principles categorized under Felten and Lambert’s relationship-rich conditions of welcome, inspiration, community, and meaning.

These principles establish a working theory of relationship-rich collaborative practice. The numbering of the principles for ease of reading does not indicate a hierarchical order.

Principles of WELCOME: 1.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice relies on and enacts trust 2.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice requires caring for the humans involved Principles of INSPIRATION: 3.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice values intellectual engagement 4.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice is attuned to the affective 5.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice is sensitive to time Principles of COMMUNITY: 6.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice values multiple perspectives 7.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice encourages members to lean into their strengths Principles of MEANING: 8.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice produces products with collaborative

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 54 ownership 9.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice understands and attends to collective history A guiding assumption in developing these principles is that relationship-rich collaboration does not simply mean two or more people work together. There can be collaboration that is not relationship-rich. These nine principles we’ve developed lay out the conditions and qualities necessary for collaboration that is qualitatively different and can be understood as meeting the roles, responsibilities, and benefits of relationship-rich engagement.

Principles of WELCOME 1.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice relies on and enacts trust 2.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice requires caring for the humans involved The foundational condition of relationship-rich collaborative practices is what Felten and Lambert call “genuine welcome and deep care,” or what David Scobey calls “relentless welcome” (14). To experience welcome, each person must feel valued and cared for. Genuine welcome begins with trust and care and is developed with intentionality over time. Felten and Lambert describe how tutors in the Brown University Writing Center greet writers: it begins with a fundamental question of how things are going (21). For relationship-rich work, this question is not about the day or the current project, but it is asked of an individual with the opportunity to open up into a discussion of the person behind the project. As the writing tutors at Brown and Felten and Lambert know, it is difficult, if not impossible, for people to do meaningful, collaborative work unless they feel valued and cared for by their collaborators and institution. Genuine welcome and deep care are foundational conditions of relationship-rich collaboration.

We propose two principles of welcome.

The first is RELATIONSHIP-RICH COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE RELIES ON AND ENACTS TRUST. This principle begins with a fundamental trust that all of the collaborators come to the intellectual project with value and have something valuable to contribute.

Trust is not something that must be earned through a job title, years of service, rites of

passage, or the number of publications on a CV. Collaborators are welcomed with trust that everyone will do their best, has valuable contributions, but most importantly is a valuable person. This trust opens collaborative possibilities because collaborators don’t feel external pressure to perform, and can instead work in the ways they are already capable. Ronald Hallet et al, in “Facilitating a Sense of Belonging for Students with Multiple Identities,” describes the qualities that give students a sense of belonging, and a foundational one is trust-building. Students, and we extrapolate to faculty, need to feel trusted to feel they belong. This trust should be built through communication and acceptance because, as Annemarie Vaccaro and Barbara Newman write, “Belonging as a developmental process is rooted in basic human needs to be safe and respected and to comfortably fit in as our authentic selves” (4). Faculty need to be comfortable with their collaborators and trust that they, as humans, scholars, and teachers, are accepted. They need to believe their work will be valued and that the collaborators will understand they have lives beyond the academic work that can and will impact their professional work. They also need to trust that if they fall short in part of the process, they will still be accepted and uplifted to continue the work.

Connected closely to trust is the second principle central to welcome: RELATIONSHIP-RICH COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE REQUIRES CARING FOR THE HUMANS INVOLVED. Kami Day and Michele Eodice write in (First Person)2, “Successful co-authoring…involves relationships based on trust, respect, and care” (Day and Eodice 5).

Without those qualities, co-authoring and collaborating can be challenging and less productive. Lack of care can also have negative consequences for work and personal relationships.

Care as a key to genuine welcome ensures all involved feel and believe they belong as part of the work. Just as the writing center tutors at Brown understand that care is the best way to begin tutoring, care is also the best way to begin work with fellow scholars. Care is important when welcoming collaborators into a project because it helps set an appropriate tone and serves as a central component of team building. Each time collaborators meet and welcome each other, it is

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 55 important to reaffirm the care they have for each other.

Writing about the negative impacts of isolation and imposter syndrome, Felton and Lambert draw from what Claude Steele termed stereotype threat, or how a person’s performance is affected by “identity contingencies” (43). So, how does one’s demographics, political affiliations, and possibly most poignant to this discussion, one’s placement within the academic institution affect performance? Stereotype threat amplifies isolation and imposter syndrome, but relentless welcome can mitigate or alleviate the challenge of overcoming such feelings. Relentless welcome focuses on bringing together and caring for real people with real and complex emotions and ideas.

Phyllis Thompson and Janice Carello write in their introductory chapter to Lessons from the Pandemic on the importance of this peopled view: “Experience is often relegated to a marginalized and secondary space in current institutional models, but those models undervalue a person-first, embodied, albeit messy, human and humanizing approach” (4). In the same book, Bosca et al. define what it means to be a compassion-centric educator as “being inclusive, sensitive and mindful about the experiences of others you are working with” (134).

These same qualities contribute to a relationship-rich collaboration. Beyond individual benefits, Bosca et. al. argue, “care, understanding, and compassion can elicit a cultural shift within complex educational organizations” (134). Thus, care is a key starting point for relationship-rich collaborative activities and can be an integral piece in creating positive work environments that counter narratives that devalue human experience.

Given how academic institutions often devalue and demoralize marginalized groups, the imperative to start from relentless welcome and principles of trust and care is especially profound.

Principles of INSPIRATION 3.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice values intellectual engagement 4.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice is attuned to the affective 5.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice is sensitive to time Felten and Lambert argue that relationship-rich environments steeped in welcome further promote intellectual engagement and inspiration. They argue that for satisfaction

and thriving, a person “must be inspired to learn,” and that relationships are critical to “transform learning and motivation” (17). In Felten and Lambert’s argument and in scholarship on a sense of belonging (see Bentrim and Henning) positive affiliation with others is understood to work as a motivator.

Relationship-rich practices of inspiration work in combination with relationship-rich practices of welcome. When one feels they are an authentic self who matters and can be heard among others who want to hear what they have to say, there is encouragement not just to express ideas in a welcoming space but to dig into those ideas, especially among others invested in the very pursuit of generating and finding meaning in ideas. In a relationship-rich approach to inspiring learning, collaborators “show genuine interest,” “share” in the passions of others, “spark” learning through dialogue, and “create communities” that are expressly about developing expertise through challenge and support (Felten and Lambert 17, 88).

We offer three principles of relationship-rich collaborative practice based in ideas of inspiration. The first principle of inspiration is RELATIONSHIP-RICH COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE VALUES INTELLECTUAL ENGAGEMENT. In How Friendship Networks Matter for Academic and Social Success, Janice M. McCabe cites intellectual engagement as the number one factor underpinning relationships that lead to satisfying and productive cognitive outputs (in Felten and Lambert 163). In this and other scholarship, she reminds readers that there is a long tradition of emphasizing often only in social terms the important role of one’s peers (see “Friends with Academic Benefits”). For McCabe, however, the function of relationships on “academic motivation” is paramount as one’s relationship “network structure” directly helps or hinders intellectual pursuits (23, 24). In fact, she argues that for students, peer behavior becomes “quite contagious within tight-knit networks” (26). In her study applying social science network analysis, peer influence on intellectual engagement is shown to have direct impacts on graduation rates (26).

While her study focuses on students, the lessons of relationships on motivation and support are generalizable. Those who feel their networks directly motivate and support intellectual

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 56 work, thrive in that work because they are inspired to return to it, and the relationship-network feeds the work in breadth and depth, leading to a mutually reinforcing cycle. A relationship-rich valuing of intellectual engagement, then, supports collaborative processes wherein the purpose of intellectual engagement itself is more important than the products it might produce. Specific products in output may still be a goal or a result, but the prime focus of relationship-rich collaborative practice that values intellectual engagement is not what to produce but how to create the intellectual conditions that make products possible. The point of relationship-rich collaborative practice is to be involved in intellectual engagement that matters and that stimulates. Such engagement is achieved by being people in the relationship network who feel they themselves matter, who help others feel they matter equally, and who demonstrate their investment in ideas and intellectual work as interesting and fulfilling, in and of themselves worthy of dedicated time and sustained attention.

And just as McCabe found that peer influence on intellectual engagement is shown to have direct impacts on student persistence, arguably the same can hold true for tenure and promotion cases and faculty persistence.

In short, how collaborators engage and support each other as people matters as much as how they engage and support ideas. Thus, the second principle of inspiration is RELATIONSHIP-RICH COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE IS ATTUNED TO THE AFFECTIVE. Felten and Lambert as well as McCabe argue for the critical role of “mutual emotional support” (163). For collaborative practice to be relationship-rich and to inspire, it must take emotion head on. How are we feeling today? How are we feeling in the work? How are we feeling about a task ahead? These questions are real and substantive.

Relationship-rich collaborators will check in on emotions related to the work but will also be attuned to emotions outside of the work. Relationship-rich collaborators are not afraid to acknowledge the ways that the affective impacts intellectual work.

Most importantly, relationship-rich collaborators must find ways to make it safe to share emotion and be vulnerable. Attending to the affective involves direct invitation to be people who feel things, opening specific space for the affective,

and choosing always to negotiate the work with and through emotions collaborators have about the work and in their lives. Being attuned does not mean always “getting it,” but it does mean attempting to stay aware and alert, using knowledge about a person’s concerns and situation to anticipate, to listen well, and to respond with empathy and in solidarity. Relationship-rich collaborators attuned to the affective are willing to forgive beforehand if something doesn’t get done, because a true value in relationship-rich collaboration is in the engagement itself.

Relationship-rich collaborators do not need to apologize for or to hide emotions. Humans who care and who feel don’t care any less or feel any less when working on an “important” project. In fact, the true engagement of ideas in a mutually supportive network of inspiration may mean collaborators feel more.

Since both intellectual engagement and attention to the affective are not just labors of love but labors of time, the third principle under inspiration is that RELATIONSHIP-RICH COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE IS SENSITIVE TO TIME. At a logistical level, relationship-rich collaborators need to be sensitive to realistic views of time. Is it reasonable to accomplish this task before next week? Is it reasonable for you (given another commitment, given an upcoming family event) to accomplish this task? Demands on time need to be sensitive to what time is available and what use of time entails.

Relationship-rich collaborators need to be realistic about time as a limited resource, but also sensitive to time as a powerful and necessary expression of identity and values. Use of time is not a neutral expression.

Moreover, relationship-rich collaborative practice needs to recognize the elemental truth that to be relationship-rich, the work will take more time. Relationship-rich collaborative practice requires intentional time to grapple with process, to lay out assignments, tasks, and individual directions for work, as well as setting aside consistent time in regular intervals to work together. But more fundamentally, collaboration in general requires more time because collaboration, especially that which is relationship-rich, requires more labor. Period. Any notion that because one is sharing the load, someone else therefore has “less” to do is fundamentally false. A load may feel significantly “lighter” because one is more

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 57 satisfied in the collective work, but the effort to produce “our” words, not just “my” words, is unequivocally more. Collaboration done well as a relationship-rich practice requires negotiation, output of effort, substantial regrouping, compromise for common cause, and effort on everyone’s part to deliver a singular product. All of this work requires time.

Sensitivity to time is related to the other relationship-rich principles associated with inspiration. In line with inspiration through relationship-rich intellectual engagement, there is a need for intentional time to let ideas wander wherever they go before dialing them back. As one of the subjects in McCabe’s study noted, “sometimes you can afford to get distracted” (27).

Time needs to be afforded to seemingly unproductive efforts in order to maximize effort in time on task. Also, in line with inspiration through mutual emotional support, relationship-rich collaboration needs intentional time to value and experience the affective elements that influence and shape work together.

Relationship-rich collaboration requires a significant and undeniable investment of time, but the results make the investment worth it.

Principles of COMMUNITY 6.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice values multiple perspectives 7.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice encourages members to lean into their strengths A sense of welcome through relationships built on trust and care, and inspiration through relationship-driven intellectual engagement that trusts the affective and invests itself in time, is supported through the challenges and rewards of community that put a premium on multiple perspectives and are informed by assets-based thinking. According to Felten and Lambert, developing a web of significant relationships brings a sense of belonging, a feeling of value, and an understanding that work does not happen in isolation or disconnect from broader contexts.

Establishing institutional pathways for faculty to build personal and professional relationships is important as Felten and Lambert argue (17-18), but even in the absence of clear pathways, “individual faculty can still be powerful forces” in developing partnerships with other like-minded colleagues across the institution

(Felten and Lambert 16). To better understand how one builds a web of meaningful relationships, we offer two relationship-rich principles of community. The first principle of community is that RELATIONSHIP-RICH COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE VALUES MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES. Kathleen Fitzpatrick relies on a concept called “generous thinking” to help explain the transformative results of bringing multiple perspectives to bear on solving problems. She articulates “generous thinking” as ”the ability not only to articulate and value your own perspectives but also to ‘care for the quite different concerns of others’” (qtd. in Felten and Lambert 97). In this sense, relationship-rich collaborations value all voices and challenge individuals to bring their views to bear on the larger conversation, while welcoming and respecting the other voices in that conversation. As Timothy Eatman reminds us, those who “develop healthy and inspiring relationships” with their colleagues “will thrive” (qtd. in Felten and Lambert 70).

The health of those relationships and their ability to inspire can be measured by the extent to which multiple perspectives are sought, valued, and negotiated into the processes and products of collaboration. In this way, radical welcome is reinforced but there is also more opportunity for the kind of mutual instrumental assistance that McCabe and Felten and Lambert see as supporting success. Building friendships into a web of meaningful relationships supports this instrumental assistance wherein collaborators help each other ‘figure out how to get things done’ (qtd. in Felten and Lambert 163). Getting things done assumes that everyone brings their perspectives to the conversation while also understanding that one might know and see things that others do not and that all contributions are valuable. Collaborative practice that takes in multiple perspectives, even as a singular voice in text is crafted, has the opportunity to be more open, aware, and responsible, which are key hallmarks of the habits of mind understood to orient and signal success in all writing beyond high school (see Council of Writing Program Administrators “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing”).

The second relationship-rich principle that respects and encourages community is that RELATIONSHIP-RICH COLLABORATIVE

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 58 PRACTICE ENCOURAGES MEMBERS TO LEAN INTO THEIR STRENGTHS. A critical foundation of mutual instrumental assistance is that no one has to feel less-than because of gaps in knowledge. Rather, faculty can lean into their strengths to help foster collaborative relationships, affording the others the space to do the same.

Acknowledging that collaborators are not all good at something while appreciating the things others bring strengthens the entire project. Collaborators should be encouraged to embrace what they do well without fear or embarrassment or suggesting lack of knowledge or skill. Starting from a strength-based perspective allows partners to operationalize McCabe’s advice to “help each other figure it out.”

Relationship-rich collaborators come together as partners because “we share ideologies and interests, friendships, complementary areas of expertise, and a common vision” (Day and Eodice 65). A foundation of trust seen in the principles of welcome helps encourage one another to bring the strengths of individual knowledge and expertise and unique talents to the collaborative process, leading to high quality work and meaningful relationships that grow stronger with time.

Everyone is well positioned to teach and to learn, to leverage individual strengths for a common goal. Finding ways to nurture and complement one another allows reinforcement, as Day and Eodice argue, of “feelings of trust and respect, and friendship” and significantly, “focus on the appreciation of cognitive gains” (Day and Eodice 65).

Principles of MEANING 8.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice produces products with collaborative ownership 9.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice understands and attends to collective history Felten and Lambert argue that integral to relationship-rich environments are opportunities to address worthwhile questions of meaning and purpose. They suggest that within a demanding yet supportive learning environment, one which necessitates “positive interdependence” (92) alongside individual accountability, collaborators are better able to take on well-defined, rotating roles, find time to cohere as a group, and tackle open-ended challenges that require collaboration

(93). Two meaning-centered principles, then, are that RELATIONSHIP-RICH COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE PRODUCES PRODUCTS WITH COLLABORATIVE OWNERSHIP and RELATIONSHIP-RICH COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE UNDERSTANDS AND ATTENDS TO COLLECTIVE HISTORY. Relationship-rich practices of co-ownership work in combination with relationship-rich practices of history to promote and reinforce meaning and purpose.

Each principle builds upon the other. Having a sense of shared ownership, and therefore purpose, encourages an understanding of mutual history and therefore meaning.

Shared ownership allows letting go of persistent questions about individual efforts and solo contributions, leaving collaborators better able to dismiss first-author concerns and instead be more strategic about representing effort.

Compositionists may have a uniquely special interest here, too, given the complexity of written processes essentially flattening what is recognizably “mine,” to become something more fully voiced as “ours.” Though it remains possible to track individual contributions on digital platforms for writing, the accountability becomes communal on the visible page. The words appearing there belong to everyone. And because of mutually reinforcing relationships, there is little concern about any one partner “getting it wrong.”

The text is collective and cumulative. An issue raised by one quickly becomes something for all to address and work through. Partners share in the ultimate success of collective solutions.

According to Felten and Lambert, “isolation begets isolation” (48), as doubts about belonging and feelings of imposter syndrome discourage us from seeking help and building relationships. But relationship-rich principles of co-ownership and mutual history work against feelings of isolation by providing shared space and agreed-upon truths. Each meeting is an opportunity to reinforce and reiterate the meaning of the work. Co-ownership counters isolation because it necessitates being together and it lessens the sense of imposter syndrome through making the work that of all, dissolving individual self-doubt through the shouldering of collective responsibility.

Relationship-rich collaborative practice further understands and attends to history, of one

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 59 another and corresponding relationships, of interests and objects, of the places and spaces of effort. Despite potentially competing narratives, there is instead a focus on what all share, what all have a stake in, what can be similarly recalled. The shared history, the acknowledgement and awareness of it, stands among the motivating factors for persisting in the work. In this way, a cultivated and sustained narrative is a form of subversion, persisting when administrators and institutions dismiss or devalue the work. There is the institutional narrative, one informed by austerity or fetishes of single authorship and rigor, etc., and then there is the narrative informed by intentional relationship-rich collaboration. Artifact visibility ensures that second narrative endures amid administrative shifts and institutional changes that disregard, threaten, or sweep away faculty effort. There is a privileged freedom in this form of subtle subversion, and it is worth seizing the power and satisfaction, meaning and purpose, in doing the work anyway. In joyful defiance of individual expectations, of institutional overreach, of governmental dissolution, meaning can be found on the communal page/screen.

Relationship-rich collaborative practice is productive with identifiable endpoints, drawing on established iterative ways of working while also cultivating new ones dependent on the work at hand. Relationship-rich collaborative practice produces artifacts through collective ownership, resulting in not just an outcome in the form of a scholarly article but, prior to that, a schedule, an outline, multiple drafts and the comments and suggestions on them, indicators and reminders throughout the process of what works and what’s to be retained or let go. Similarly, in describing a “collaboratories” model of working with others in online workspaces, which involves shared inquiry, intentionality, active participation, and boundary-crossing, Karen J. Lunsford and Bertram C. Bruce observe that such work “reflects the history of a community (e.g., the shared resources, completed projects, older documents)” (55). Through the active and sustained demonstration of how collaborators pursue, plan, and complete projects, including how ideas derive or grow from initial seeds, writerly groups end up with many documents, ultimately modeling “how different genres of writing…work together to support and literally compose a research project” (55). And past models function as examples for

future collaborative efforts. In this way, shared history contains multiple overlapping narratives that are mutually reinforcing, not only about self and institution but also fields of interest and inquiry alongside physical and virtual spaces of comfort and productivity.

Another way of considering the principles of co-ownership and history is through Felten and Lambert’s highlighting of ePortfolios as a way for students to engage in worthwhile questions of meaning and purpose. The thinking engendered by ePortfolios also prompts productive reflection on questions of becoming and identity, of who and how writers understand themselves to be.

Through acts of relationship-rich collaboration, practitioners engage in similar questions, reflecting who they are in relation to each other amid the active work and, perhaps more importantly, who they are becoming together through that work.

Evidence of such self-reflective and self-reflexive practice appears in the record of the work as well as in the product that is the culmination of that shared history, again providing in some instances a narrative that runs counter to administrative and/or institutional portrayals of faculty effort.

Through the purposeful production of scholarship with others, it is possible to shrug off the problems of previous unsatisfying projects. The persistent and reiterative practice of relationship-rich collaboration holds the promise of setting the record straight.

The Nine Principles In total, relationship-rich collaborative practice uses the power of relationships to drive satisfaction and productivity.

Through relationships, collaborators create welcome, foster inspiration, invest in community, and seek meaning: 1.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice relies on and enacts trust 2.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice requires caring for the humans involved 3.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice values intellectual engagement 4.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice is attuned to the affective 5.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice is sensitive to time 6.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice values multiple perspectives

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 60 7.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice encourages members to lean into their strengths 8.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice produces products with collaborative ownership 9.​ Relationship-rich collaborative practice understands and attends to collective history Hallmarks of relationship-rich work enacted through these principles can be seen in the products and processes of collaboration.

Conclusions about Intentional Relationship-Rich Collaboration Having described our lived experiences with feelings of rejection and barriers to scholarship, shared process elements and effects of our collaborative practice, and argued for core principles of relationship-rich collaborative practice, this article is a product of and a testament to relationship-rich practices. We chose to uplift each other, welcoming, inspiring, and caring for one another while seeking deeper meaning in the work we can do together. This collective choice originated out of negative individual and isolating experiences but, more importantly, opened up the occasion to choose, articulate, and theorize better conditions for scholarly collaboration.

We argue the central tenet of better conditions for collaboration is relationship-rich engagement. This article, therefore, theorizes the roles, responsibilities, and benefits of such relationship-rich engagements. We share our stories of rejection to show their affective impacts and to signal what we value in relationship-rich collaboration. The stories establish common ground as a springboard into theoretical considerations keyed to Felten and Lambert’s ideas of the relationship-rich. Relationship-rich principles of collaborative practice can help other scholars understand features of satisfying and disaffecting collaboration and inform choices in local conditions. In short, the relationship-rich principles we developed in line with Felten and Lambert establish markers of satisfaction that can be analyzed and made intentional goals.

While concepts of scholarly wellbeing may seem suggestive, Martin P. Seligman reminds us that relationships, and concepts like welcome,

inspiration, and meaning, can have tangible markers of success: Positive relationships, meaning, and accomplishment have both objective and subjective components: not just how you feel about your relationships, but how these people feel about you; not just your sense of meaning (you could be deluded), but the degree to which you actually belong to and actually serve something larger than you are; not just your pride in what you have done, but whether you have actually met your goals, and where these goals stand in their impact on the people you care about and the world.

(239) Fostering positive relationships, positive feelings, and positive progress are the goals of relationship-rich collaboration. The principles of this practice function as a balm to devaluation, undermining, and rejection. The principles established here set benchmarks for satisfying collaboration, and can help highlight what is missing when collaboration is unsuccessful, unsatisfying, or unsafe.

Recent scholarship on faculty motivation finds that faculty are most “motivated by a desire to make meaningful contributions in the world” (Dewey et al.), and that a significant contributor to a sense of meaning is “intellectual stimulation/engagement,” which itself is found in data to be the “most motivating factor for pursuing academia” (528) in the first place. The twinned desire for intellectual engagement and to be a meaningful contributor is proven to be why faculty do what they do as scholars and love what they do as teachers. It is important to acknowledge that while the desire to be a meaningful contributor is a great motivator, there are forces at work within higher education and publishing that can test, flatten, and erase that desire. Dewey et al. stress: “recognizing that motivations and passion can only go so far if the larger, systemic issues causing faculty burnout and resignation are not addressed is essential” (534). We fully concur.

Institutions and systems need to change, especially those that oppress, discriminate, and exclude.

Unfortunately, positive change is slow. It is small but not insignificant that intentional partners can turn to and choose the kinds of scholarly interactions that uplift us, even knowing that there will still be frustration and failure. We can lean

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From Personal Rejection to Shared Satisfaction • 61 into frameworks of welcome, inspiration, community, and meaning. There is pain in rejection, but there is promise in relationship-rich collaborative practice.

Core motivations to inspire/be inspired and to make meaning/be meaningful can be fed by using the power of relationships to support inspiration and productivity in the context of welcome and care for one another. It is possible to shape action through the lens of the relationship-rich. Felten and Lambert provide a list of questions mentors might ask themselves as guides to and reminders for relationship-rich student advising (146). With almost no modifications, their questions thoughtfully guide relationship-rich collaboration: ●​ Am I using formal and informal moments to meaningfully engage with others? ●​ Am I really listening to what I am hearing, listening to understand rather than respond? ●​ Am I taking the time to offer practical knowledge and guidance, or encouragement and support, to those who need it? . . . . ●​ Am I helping to create structures . . . that will ensure more [engagement]? ●​ What am I learning about myself from these relationships? (146) As collaborators, the four of us hope to live up to the promise of such inquiries; we continue to experience the saving graces of trying.

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ASSESSING THE FIELD: ESTABLISHING THE ETHOS OF WRITING CENTER PUBLICATIONS Joseph Cheatle Oxford College of Emory University​ joseph.james.nefcy.cheatle@emory.edu Abstract This study examines four journals in writing center studies—WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Writing Center Journal, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and The Peer Review—to establish their distinct profiles and ethos within the field. Through IRB-approved methods, including a rhetorical analysis of journal websites, systematic review of articles published, and written interviews with editors, this work identifies how each journal positions itself for different audiences and purposes. Findings reveal significant variation in article length requirements, research methodologies, and accessibility for emerging scholars.

While WCJ emphasizes rigorous social sciences research, WLN prioritizes practical applications, Praxis focuses on practitioner voices, and TPR supports collaborative mentorship. This analysis provides guidance for practitioners and researchers seeking appropriate venues for reading and publication while illuminating broader trends in writing center scholarship.

Administrators, tutors, practitioners—from novice to expert—often want to know what they should read and where they should publish in the field of writing center studies. New practitioners may want to know where they should start reading about writing centers, including understanding more about the audience, practices, and policies of the journals in the field. Some journals feature more accessible works (in terms of length, previous knowledge of the field, and modality) than others. Meanwhile, researchers may want to determine the best avenue for the publication of their work. While all avenues of publication are open to all researchers, some publications are better suited to specific research and writing than other publications, as each journal has carved out a unique approach to the field. Therefore, this work reflects on the journals in writing center studies to determine their profile and ethos.

Reflecting back on the work of a journal (and the field) is not new. In fact, there are others who have done this type of work as a way to learn more about a specific journal or the field of writing center studies.

For a journal, it often occurs when there is a change of

editors, to answer a specific question about a journal, or to examine a series of articles from different journals on the same subject. In fact, some of these types of reflections appear in the journals reviewed in this article, including Dana Driscoll and Sherry Perdue’s (2012) “Theory, Lore, and More: An Analysis of RAD Research in The Writing Center Journal, 1980-2009” published in Writing Center Journal; Yanar Hashlamon’s (2018) “Aligning the Center: How We Elicit Tutee Perspectives in Writing Center Scholarship” in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal; the reflections of the outgoing editors of The Peer Review in 2020; and Havva Zorluel Ozer and Jing Zhang’s (2021) “The Response to the Call for RAD Research: A Review of Articles in The Writing Center Journal, 2007-2018” in Writing Center Journal. There are a lot of benefits from looking back at journal articles—these studies help tell us how journals were oriented in the past, including what type of articles they publish and the type of research they focus on. Furthermore, reviewing journals help us identify patterns and trends in the field that are important to practitioners and scholars alike.

This article elects to study the primary journals of writing center studies, including WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship (frequently referred to as WLN and previously known as the Writing Lab Newsletter); The Writing Center Journal (also known as Writing Center Journal or WCJ); Praxis: A Writing Center Journal (frequently referred to as Praxis); and The Peer Review: A Journal of Writing Center Practitioners (also known as TPR). The goal of this work is not to pass judgment on the quality, practices, policies, and publications of each journal but, rather, to discern how each journal positions itself in the field. To help ascertain the profile and ethos of each journal, this work looks at public-facing aspects of the journal (like the website), previous issues (like the founding issue or other seminal works in their history), written interviews with journal editors, and a review of previously published articles. In the next section, I provide an overview of the research methods used in this work. I then individually examine each of the four journals included in this work in order of the year they were founded (WLN, WCJ, Praxis, and then TPR). I provide

Assessing the Field • 63 an overview and analysis of each journal, as well as research on the articles published from a recent ten-year period in order to determine what types of work are published in each journal. In the conclusion, I put these journals in conversation with each other and offer areas of future research and study. Collectively, these journals highlight the broad variety of publications in the field and how each caters to different audiences and readers while also highlighting different types of research and writing.

Methods This study uses IRB approved research procedures, including a rhetorical analysis of the website of each journal, a systematic analysis of articles, and written interviews with an editor from each journal. I first conducted a rhetorical analysis of the website for each journal to determine how the journal is publicly positioned and how documents provided by the journal (like a mission statement, reviewer instructions, or submission guidelines, among others) contribute to its ethos. I originally examined each journal’s website before June 2025, and they may have changed since that time. In my examination of recent publications, I focus on journal articles because they form a common denominator among the four journals. While each journal publishes other genres of writing (e.g. TPR publishes “Conversation Shapers,” WLN publishes a “Tutors’ Column,” Writing Center Journal publishes “Provocations,” and Praxis publishes “Columns”), each features scholarly articles. Furthermore, articles are frequently peer reviewed rather than selected only by the editor(s). And, articles comprise the largest component of each publication, taking up the most space in each issue.

Each journal is systematically analyzed over a ten-year period for just the articles they published—rather than other types of work unique to each journal. For WLN, WCJ, and Praxis, I looked at 2015-2024; meanwhile, for TPR, I looked at 2016-2025.

The reason TPR is not looked at over the same years as the other journals is because it did not publish any articles in 2015 and 2016. In a systematic way, I attempted to answer the following questions about each journal: ●​ Are articles primarily individually authored or co-authored? ●​ What kinds of work is published? Is it based on qualitative or quantitative research methods? Mixed methods? Or does it not use a research method? ●​ What is the frequency of publication?

I used coding to determine whether an article’s author(s) used quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods. I examined abstracts where available, then introductions, and finally, if it was still unclear, I reviewed the work looking for methods or other indications about the research. It was important when coding to define key terms: ●​ Quantitative: Refers to the exploration of numerical data from simple to sophisticated.

This form of research can aggregate the data, show relationships among the data, or compare across aggregated data (Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, 2014). Data collection methods include questionnaires, observations, sampling, coding (of structured observations, interviews, etc.), documents, and more. Quantitative research often provides a breadth of information as opposed to in-depth examination of a few instances (Cheatle, 2024). ●​ Qualitative: Refers to the exploration of people and things in their natural settings and the attempt to make sense of those things (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). This type of research is often referred to as ethnographic or interpretive. Data collection methods include observation, interviews, case studies, and more. Qualitative research often provides a depth of information about a few instances (Cheatle, 2024). ●​ Mixed Methods: Refers to the use of both qualitative and quantitative research methods in a single study or work.

In this work, I make a distinction between research that follows more closely social sciences research versus humanistic inquiry. When reviewing the methods employed by the studies, it was important to consider the intentionality of the author’s use of research methods. Oftentimes, author(s) would use narrative and personal experience, which would not be categorized as a social sciences research method for the purposes of this work. For example, Paula Rawlins and Amanda Arp’s (2023) WLN article “Taking Up Space and Time: How Writing Center Administrators Can Better Support Fat (and All) Tutors” draws on personal narrative but does not frame their work as research or as autoethnographic; therefore, it is not categorized as drawing on a social sciences research method.

Meanwhile, some do not state a method in the title, nor do they contain a traditionally titled methods section, like Bethany Mannon’s (2016) “What do Graduate Students want from the Writing Center? Tutoring Practices to Support Dissertation and Thesis Writers.”

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Assessing the Field • 64 Further investigation found that the author used both surveys and interviews of graduate students in their work, the research was IRB approved, and the author discussed their methods; therefore, this article was considered a mixed-methods study in social sciences research.

In addition to a systematic review of articles published over a ten year period for each journal, I completed an asynchronous written interview with an editor from each journal. Editors were asked about publishing numbers, editorial issues, and supporting documents (see Appendix A). One editor from each journal responded in writing to interview questions. It was important that each journal was represented and that a voice from each journal was heard. In the next four sections, I provide an examination of each individual journal before moving to the conclusion.

Writing Lab Newsletter / WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship Basic Information Founded: 1977 Types of Publications: ​ ●​ Articles—Generally 3,000 words and are peer-reviewed. ●​ Tutor Columns—1,500 words and are not peer-reviewed. These highlight the voices of high school, undergraduate, graduate, professional, and faculty tutors. ●​ WLN also publishes Digital Edited Collections (not a part of the journal, these are book-length works that are edited by guest editors) and a blog (WLNConnect, which is managed by a separate editorial team).

Editorial Board: There are six editors who are writing center professionals representing a variety of different institution types and stages of their careers. There is no set duration for an editorial position and these positions rotate off as needed. New editors are found through a call for editors.

WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, has played a circuitous journey in writing center studies. It originally started out as the Writing Lab Newsletter before becoming a journal in 2015 with Issue 40, numbers 1-2. The Writing Lab Newsletter, first published in 1977, was the first attempt to create a community of practice among writing center practitioners. Well before the internet, the original issues were typed and then mailed to members of the writing center community.

The newsletter reflects the nascent nature of the field of writing centers. According to the publication, the newsletter solicited “questions, announcements, news,

evaluations of some materials you use, suggestions for the format, content, and title of the newsletter, offers to take on projects, requests for some particular bit of information, etc. Our intention is to keep the newsletter brief, useful, and informal” (Harris, 1977, 1).

Early issues were concerned, primarily, with announcements and compiling lists of writing center practitioners. The second issue included two evaluation sheets used in the Purdue Writing Lab which asks instructors to evaluate students who have used the lab’s services. As more issues were published, the Writing Lab Newsletter quickly settled on a general format, moving from connecting community to featuring articles.

The shift from a newsletter to WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship in 2015 (Volume 40, Issue 1-2) reflects the growth and evolution of the publication over time. According to the longtime editor Muriel Harris (also the founding editor), in her “Letter from the Editor,” she writes that this issue “launches our new name, new format, and the new direction in the history of this publication—and perhaps in writing center history as well” (Harris, 2015, 1). For Harris, the new name, format, and direction highlights the new nature of writing centers. When originally conceived, the newsletter started a community from scratch. Now, there is the International Writing Centers Association, conferences and institutes, the internet, and other ways to keep the community connected. With this new reality, Harris felt that the newsletter needed to match it as a journal. However, the journal does keep many of the same characteristics of the newsletter: articles are only 3,000 words while Tutors’ Columns are limited to 1,500 words. The journal is also focused on creating community by inviting “submissions from newcomers, experienced scholars, and tutors from all over the globe. All voices are important in our collaborative world” (“Submission Guidelines”). This is an intentionally global approach that is reflected in the other types of publications sponsored by WLN, including a blog titled “Connecting Writing Centers Across Borders” and digital edited collections.

Up until recently, WLN published five issues per year, each featuring 2-3 articles. More recently, it has published fewer issues each year while still publishing around 3-4 articles per issue. It is a generally standard form of publication that includes an Editor’s Note, articles, and the Tutors’ Column. Every once-in-a-while there may be another type of work published, like a book review or column written by a director. But, overall, there is a consistency of form unmatched in other publications. The journal is hosted on the WAC Clearinghouse website.

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Assessing the Field • 65 Figure 1 (see Appendix B) shows articles published by WLN over a recent ten year period (2015-2024) in order to help determine the modern ethos of the journal.

WLN is very consistent, publishing five times a year until recently, in 2023, it shifted to publishing four times a year. Each issue contains two to three articles. There was about an equal number of co-authored (50.37%) and single authored works (49.43%), highlighting the parity between the two groups. The majority of the articles (57.89%) did not utilize a social sciences research method; meanwhile, 42.11% used quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods research. Of those that used social sciences research methods, 20.30% used quantitative methods, 16.55% used qualitative methods, and 5.26% used mixed methods research. The total amount drawing on quantitative methods is 25.56% while the total amount drawing on qualitative methods is 21.80%. The journal primarily features humanistic inquiry rather than social sciences research. ​ The short length of articles (3,000 words maximum), the use of Tutor Columns, and the high number of articles that either do not draw on social sciences research or any research at all makes WLN a good journal for novice and emergent authors and readers. These works often require very little prior knowledge of the field and are generally accessible for all readers. According to an editor, “We are open to all topics; however, we do ask for practical takeaways as our readership is often looking for strategies, ideas, or initiatives they can apply to their own centers.” This focus on practical takeaways is important because it builds on the historical ethos of the journal. The WLN editor noted that the historical ethos has “always been to provide a practical resource for writing center professionals and to help build community and conversation within the field.” Despite moves towards supporting authors (through a multi-step peer review process) and addressing important issues in the field (such as disability justice, multilingualism, and integrating reading into writing center pedagogy), the journal maintains an historical focus on the practical tools of tutoring and administration while maintaining accessibility for all writing center practitioners. ​ WLN operates with an ethos rooted in accessibility, practical application, and inclusive community building within writing center scholarship.

The journal maintains an approach that welcomes all voices—from newcomers to experienced scholars to tutors at all levels—reflecting the journal founder’s

belief that writing knowledge emerges from community rather than hierarchical expertise. This inclusive ethos is operationalized through intentionally accessible publishing practices: articles are capped at 3,000 words, many works require minimal prior field knowledge to read, and the journal explicitly prioritizes “practical takeaways” that practitioners can immediately implement in their own centers. While WLN has evolved from its origins as a grassroots newsletter to a more formalized journal, it has consciously preserved its foundation of serving as a practical resource that connects writing center professionals and tutors across institutional contexts.

The journal’s research profile—with nearly 58% of articles employing humanistic inquiry rather than social sciences research methods—further reinforces its commitment to valuing experiential knowledge and reflective practice alongside traditional academic scholarship.

Writing Center Journal Basic Information Founded: 1980 Types of Publications: ​ ●​ Front Matter—Documents include submission guidelines, names of reviewers, and an introduction from the editors. ●​ Articles—6,000-10,000 words. ●​ Provocations—2,000-3,000 words in length, these works are meant to provoke the audience to think more about a specific topic and start a dialogue in the field. ●​ Book Reviews—Short reports about recently published works in the field. ●​ Back Matter—Announcements and other information.

Editorial Board: During the past four editorial teams, there have been three editors per team. The editors tend to be tenured faculty, although there have been junior faculty and administrative/professional editors in the past. Editors are generally active members in the field with a history of publishing. Editorial teams change every 3-5 years.

The Writing Center Journal was launched in 1980

by Lil Brannon and Stephen North and remains the flagship journal in the field of writing centers, and one of two journals sponsored by the International Writing Centers Association. It was the second publication founded, after the Writing Lab Newsletter, meant to connect the writing center community. It was also created as a way to professionalize the field and align it more closely with the broader field of composition; the

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Assessing the Field • 66 journal is a culmination of the maturation process of writing centers and recognition that writing centers have become part of the academic establishment and an important service to students, faculty, and staff.

The “Editorial Policy” of the first issue published lays out the broad scope of the journal. The policy states that, “The Writing Center Journal publishes articles dealing with all aspects of writing center instruction from pedagogical theory to administration, from formal research to practical tutor training.” The original editors, Lil Bannon and Stephen North, envisioned the journal as focusing on three types of work. The first is essays that are primarily theoretical, that “explore or explain the ways of writing center instruction” (Brannon and North, 2). The second is articles connecting theory with practice. And the third is essays that draw upon experience in writing center teaching and administration and offer insights that others in the field can use. Within this same issue, the editors note that the third type of work—those based on personal experience—were the bulk of articles they were receiving for submission and wanted to change that to focus on more theoretical works and those connecting theory with practice.

Brannon and North envisioned the journal filling a gap in the field of composition while also connected to the broader field of composition. They write, As scholars, as teachers and researchers in composition, we recognize in writing center teaching the absolute frontier of our discipline.

It is in writing centers that the two seminal ideas of our reborn profession operate most freely: the student-centered curriculum, and a central concern for composition as a process.

And it is in these centers that great new discoveries will be, are being, made: ways of teaching composition, intervening in it, changing it. Writing centers provide, in short, opportunities for teaching and research that classrooms simply cannot offer. The Writing Center Journal fills the need for a forum that can report on and stimulate such work.

(Brannon and North, 1) By positioning the journal on the frontier of the field of composition, Brannon and North claim to be on the cutting edge of innovation and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in composition. Furthermore, they view the journal, and the field, as student-centered and addressing composition as a process (and not just as a product).

A current editor situates the ethos of the Writing Center Journal within their view of it as the

flagship journal of the International Writing Centers Association. The editor quotes from the WCJ website to point to the modern ethos of the journal, This academic peer-reviewed journal of scholarship intersects with writing centers in a wide-range of institutional contexts. WCJ values innovative research from a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches, and it seeks to publish emerging voices that challenge the status quo and that represent the plurality of identities and languages that happens in and around writing centers, whether at research universities and colleges, 2-year colleges, HBCUs, HSIs, tribal colleges, trade and professional schools, or community-based literacy and writing projects.

The editor noted that while the current editorial team still adheres to the traditional ethos of the journal—“to publish strong research in writing centers to advocate for the rich work that happens in these spaces”—they are also committed to publishing new voices and broadening the readership of the journal. Additionally, the editor cited the fact they recently moved the journal to open-access and online as a way to create more opportunities for people to access and read the journal. The editor also wrote on the future of the journal, stating, “I believe the journal will continue to publish rich and innovative scholarship that challenges the field to think about the work they do in their spaces and inspires us; I also believe new voices and a more diverse group of thinkers/scholars are contributing to writing centers, making the work stronger.” As the editor notes, the future of the journal is in building upon the historical ethos of the journal while recognizing the importance of including more diverse scholars. ​ Figure 2 (see Appendix B) shows articles published by Writing Center Journal over a recent ten-year period (2015-2024) in order to help determine the modern ethos of the journal.

There are an equal number of articles published featuring solo authors and co-authored. The use of social sciences research methods in published articles was high for the Writing Center Journal. Of the articles published, nearly two-thirds (66.17%) used either quantitative, qualitative, or mixed research methods. Meanwhile, 33.83% either did not utilize research methods in their work or drew on humanistic inquiry. One finding of note is that more articles not using social science research methods were published in the last few years. Among those featuring social science research methods, 45.59% were quantitative while 39.70% were qualitative.

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Assessing the Field • 67 Because it features a high number of articles based on social sciences research, the Writing Center Journal may serve as a barrier for tutors or early career scholars who may not have the knowledge or time to conduct extensive social sciences research-based articles for publication. But, WCJ is mostly opaque in terms of their supporting documents for authors, which can create a sense of mystery for those looking to publish in the venue. For example, they don’t provide significant guidance to authors for navigating the peer review and publication process, which may be an assumption that authors are already familiar with those processes. However, it has recently transitioned to open-access, which allows more readers. While the original editors were concerned that they were receiving too many works based on personal experience, time has shown how the journal has moved from publishing on personal experience to publishing more social science research studies.

The Writing Center Journal sees itself as a prestigious publication in the writing center field, aiming to make writing center work look serious and scholarly to the broader academic world. Founded with the explicit goal of professionalizing the field, the journal maintains an aspirational ethos that views writing centers as “the absolute frontier” of composition, emphasizing innovation, theoretical sophistication, and methodological diversity in its approach to scholarship. The journal strongly values high-quality social sciences research more than personal experience or practical tips. With articles that are, on average, much longer than other journals (over 6,000-10,000 words), it can be more challenging for newer scholars or tutors to publish there. However, the journal is also trying to evolve by including more diverse voices and perspectives, recently making articles free to access online, and welcoming scholarship from a wide variety of institutional and professional contexts.

Unlike publications focused on immediate practical application, WCJ prioritizes theoretical contributions and rigorous social sciences research methods, positioning writing center work as a legitimate academic discipline worthy of serious scholarly attention. This creates a journal that serves primarily as a venue for established scholars to share complex research rather than a practical resource for everyday writing center practitioners.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Basic Information Founded: 2003 Types of Publications: ​

●​ Focus Articles—Described on the website as “scholarly essays (“focus articles”) on writing-center consulting, researching, administration and training. Focus article submissions may be based on theoretical and critical approaches, applied practices, or empirical research (quantitative or qualitative).

Focus article submissions are sent out to our national editorial board for blind review.” The recommended length is 5000-8000 words. ●​ Column Essays—Can be responses to previous articles but can also be less researched, and more heavily autoethnographic or reflective on tutoring.

These submissions do not go through the peer-review process and are under 1,500 words. ●​ Book Reviews—Reviews of recently published books in writing center studies that do not go through the peer-review process. Book reviews are generally under 1,500 words in length. ●​ Praxis also published Axis blog posts on their website, which are low-stakes publishing opportunities that undergo internal review and copyediting. These are shorter than an article at 1,500 words and are more autoethnographic or narrative. Posts do not undergo peer review.

Editorial Board: There are three journal editors, including one Executive Editor (the Director of the University Writing Center at the University of Texas) and two Managing Editors who are always graduate students at the University of Texas. The Executive Editor features little turnover while the Managing Editors typically serve for two years. ​ Praxis: A Writing Center Journal (more informally known as just Praxis) is published by the University Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Founded in 2003, Praxis has been published as a peer-reviewed journal since Fall 2011. Praxis is the third major journal established in the field of writing center studies (after WLN and WCJ) and is centered around the tangible practice of the writing center. This is central to the journal’s identity and is embodied even by its name: “praxis” means “practice, as distinguished from theory.” An examination of the publication’s “Policies,” “Instructions for Authors,” and the articles that its editors choose to publish all reveal its dedication to the actual work done in writing centers, as opposed to more theoretical writings.

The inaugural issue—Volume I, Issue I—sets the tone for the publication. In their “From the Editors,” journal editors write that this is “a new

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Assessing the Field • 68 publication devoted to the interests of writing consultants” indicating that they are interested in labor issues, writing center news, training, consultant initiatives, and scholarships (The Editorial Collective 2003). They go on to note that, “We aspire to provide a forum for the voices and concerns of writing center practitioners across the county.” The focus of the journal, they write, is on the practitioner. They state about their name that, Our title, the Greek word praxis, is typically translated as “practice,” which for writing center consultants denotes both our work with writers and the training we do to prepare for it.

Praxis resonates all the more because it connotes practice inextricably entwined with theory—the daily concerns of writing center practitioners. The term, championed by both ancient Greek and contemporary rhetoricians, makes explicit our connection with the field of rhetoric, the basis for much of how we think about writing.

There are a few things to note in their claim. The first is that praxis (practice) is entwined in theory, putting theory into action. Because it is focused on practice, it opens up who can publish in Praxis to a wide variety of practitioners. The second is that the journal is less concerned about the perspectives of theoreticians and administrators outside of practice—it does not make explicit mention of these two groups.

This focus on practitioners—widely defined—is reinforced in the journal’s supporting documents found on its website. Under the sub header “Focus and Scope” on the Praxis “Policies” page, they write, “As a forum for writing-center practitioners, Praxis welcomes articles from writing-center consultants, administrators, and others concerned with issues related to writing-center practices […]” (“Policies”). As a scholarly journal, Praxis does not limit itself to submissions from “traditional” scholars; instead, it encourages works from a wide variety of those involved in the actual day-to-day work of writing centers. Praxis, as a reflection to their welcoming policies, practices an open-access policy, which is important because it lowers the barrier to accessing the journals works—all can access it regardless of their institutions’ ability to subscribe to journals behind a paywall. It also demonstrates the journal’s commitment to increasing accessibility to writing center studies.

Figure 3 (see Appendix B) shows articles published by Praxis over a recent ten-year period (2015-2024) in order to help determine the modern ethos of the journal.

There were fewer co-authored articles (40.91%) than articles published by a solo author (59.09%). Among the published articles, 57.79% utilized social sciences research methods while 42.21% did not utilize any research methods or drew on humanistic inquiry. In total, 39.61% drew on quantitative methods while 31.17% drew on qualitative methods. The number of articles published, and the preferred methods, differed each year without a discernible pattern.

According to a Praxis editor, they view the ethos of the journal as “focused on accessible, participatory, and community-focused knowledge making.” Having graduate students as editors allows them, as the editor says, to attend to transparency and issues of labor. This opens up the avenue of publication in Praxis to additional tutors and scholars.

There are also pages on the website that help demystify the publishing process and function as resources for authors, including “Policies” and “Instructions for Authors.” The editor goes on to note that, in more recent publication cycles, “[we] received more qualitative and narrative articles than quantitative research. This is reflected in our recently published issues, but not due to editorial preferences regarding type of submission” and “We receive a lot of practice and story-based submissions, followed by lore and theory.” Despite receiving many submissions based on practice, story, lore, and theory, the journal still publishes more articles based on social sciences research.

Praxis operates with an ethos centered on making writing center scholarship accessible and welcoming to everyone doing the work in writing centers, not just traditional academics. The journal’s practitioner-focused approach is reflected in the journal’s name and in the commitment to publishing work that connects real-world writing center experiences with broader ideas. The journal deliberately lowers barriers to publication by providing clear guidance for new authors and making all articles free to read online. While Praxis does publish social sciences-based research articles, it equally values personal stories, reflective essays, and practice-based insights that don’t require formal social sciences research methods. The journal sees itself as a community space where writing center workers can share what they have learned, ask questions, and connect with others doing similar work in the field.

Praxis values transparency, accessibility, and the everyday wisdom that comes from working directly with writers. This creates a publication that is an

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Assessing the Field • 69 approachable place for tutors and newer scholars to share their voices and experiences.

The Peer Review: A Journal for Writing Center Practitioners

Basic Information Founded: 2015 Types of Publications: ​ ●​ Articles—7,000-10,000 words in length that undergo peer review. ●​ Conversation Shapers—Projects that help shape the future of writing center research.

These projects are a 500-word framing statement that introduces a topic followed by a curated bibliography of 20-25 sources. These works are peer-reviewed. ●​ Tools Demos and Other Multimodal Pieces—These works highlight tools and multimodal pieces reflecting areas of tutoring, learning, and administration in writing centers.

These works go through the peer review process. ●​ Book Reviews—Reviews of currently published books in the field of writing center studies. These are not peer reviewed.

Editorial Board: The board features a Professional Editor, Managing Editor, and Web Editor. There are also two to three graduate student editors. Editors change every three years and replacements are found through a call for editors. ​ The Peer Review was founded by editors Rebecca Hallman and Sherry Wynn Perdue in 2015 and began publishing peer reviewed articles in 2017. According to the founding editors in Issue 0, their vision for the journal was “a peer reviewed, open access, fully online, and multimodal journal to showcase the best scholarship of our field” (Hallman and Perdue 2015).

At the time, TPR was the second journal to be fully digital and open access (after Praxis); WLN and WCJ both still included subscription print journals. It was important for the journal to be open-access to intentionally “showcase the work of graduate, undergraduate, and secondary tutors engaged in writing center research” in a way that allows all people to access it (“Submit”). In a description of what they want to publish, the editors note that they want works grounded in theory, framed by the extant literature, supported with data, and presented in a medium that best represents the work. Uniquely, TPR does include multimodal scholarship and research; rather than only

accept traditional texts, the journal publishes multimodal works, including demonstrations of technology and software.

The journal focuses frequently on the idea of collaboration, both in the works that it accepts as well as through the peer review process. According to the founding editors, “By placing collaboration at the center of this publication, by modeling it in the editorial structure, and by showcasing it in most contributions to Issue Zero, we seek to challenge the primacy of the single author study penned by a scholar who creates art and science in isolation” (Hallman and Perdue 2015). All but one of the works published in Issue 0 feature multiple authors, and one work is Hixson-Bowles and Paz’s (2015) “Perspectives on Collaborative Scholarship” which lays out an argument for why we do, and should, collaborate. Furthermore, the peer review process is focused on collaboration.

Each article that goes out for peer review is assigned a graduate student mentor and reviewers are provided a “Guidelines for Reviewers” that states that reviewers offer “feedback that allows the author(s) to grow and develop throughout the review process” which means that the “goal is to get just about every pertinent submission to publication.” This mentoring model signifies that the journal is looking to publish as many works submitted as possible, electing to work with authors to improve their works rather than rejecting them outright.

TPR’s website includes numerous pages and documents meant to help readers, authors, and reviewers alike. Among the pages and documents are a style guide, accessibility guide, anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices, a guideline for reviewers, a guideline for authors who have gotten feedback, and a policy on author and reviewer use of AI. These pages and documents help to demystify the writing process and reflect the journal’s commitment to publishing undergraduate students, graduate students, and early career scholars who may not have as much experience publishing in an academic journal. ​ Figure 4 (see Appendix B) shows articles published by The Peer Review over a recent ten year period (2016-2025) in order to help determine the modern ethos of the journal The Peer Review published 150 articles in nine years. Despite being founded in 2015, in 2015 and 2016 there were no articles published as the journal elected to publish an issue featuring a series of works highlighting the philosophy and principles of the journal. Of the articles published from 2016-2025, over half (59.33%) were co-authored while 40.33% were solo authored. Most articles, 66.67%, did not utilize

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Assessing the Field • 70 quantitative or qualitative methods in their work.

Meanwhile, 12.00% used quantitative methods, 14.67% used qualitative methods, and 6.00% were mixed methods. A total of 18.00% were based on quantitative methods while 20.67% were based on qualitative methods. In total, 32.67% of the articles were based on social sciences research while 67.33% were based on humanistic inquiry.

According to one editor, TPR was established to be an alternative journal to those currently established in the field, focusing specifically on students, those new to the field, and emergent scholars.

Over time, the editor thinks the journal is “moving more into an established period where we publish pieces not only by newcomers to the field but researchers established and cowriting with undergrads and grads.” There is also a uniqueness about TPR in its incorporation of multimodal and digital works. While the newest journal among those examined for this work, it is open-access, supported by the International Writing Center organization, and increasingly a prominent voice in writing center studies. For those looking to publish, TPR appears to be a supportive journal to authors, particularly because of the resources—like their “Guideline for Reviewers” and “You’ve Gotten Feedback, Now What”—which helps to demystify the peer review and publication process.

Additionally, TPR publishes many works that do not draw on social sciences research methods—or that might have been rejected by other journals in the field for being too controversial, as one editor notes—while welcoming a wide variety of works. ​ TPR operates with an ethos of collaborative mentorship and inclusive innovation, designed specifically to welcome newcomers and emerging scholars into writing center research while pushing the boundaries of what academic publishing can look like.

The journal actively works to break down barriers that often exclude students, early-career scholars, and non-traditional researchers from sharing their work.

This supportive approach is evidenced in the journal’s mentoring based peer review process, where the goal is to help almost every submission reach publication rather than rejecting work outright, and in the extensive collection of resources that guide authors through every step of the peer review process. TPR is unique for its embrace of digital and multimodal scholarship, allowing authors to present their work through videos, interactive tools, and other forms of technology. The journal values accessibility by making content open-access, providing clear guidance for new authors, and welcoming a broad variety of works. This creates a publication that feels more like a supportive learning

community where the focus is on growing the field by nurturing new voices.

Conclusion While it is important to consider what the output of each journal says about that journal, it is also helpful to put the data from each journal into relation with each other. Figure 5 (see Appendix B) features the aggregated data from each journal in order to compare them with each other as well as look at larger trends in the field.

The first finding that stands out is the number of co-authored publications compared to single-authored publications. As noted in another work that tracked collaborative publications in the Writing Center Journal, “Collaborative Publishing and Multivalent Research: Writing Center Journal Scholarship from 2001 to 2020,” there was a large increase in co-authored works from 2001-2010 to 2011-2020; in fact, there was a 73.91% increase in co-authored works between those times (Cheatle, 2024). Previous research on Writing Center Journal articles highlights a shift from single-authored to co-authored works over time, which tracks with the increase of social sciences research methods. In viewing the combined data above, co-authored works are published around the same level across journals. While Praxis features the least co-authored publications at 40.91%, The Peer Review published the most co-authored works at 59.33%.

Meanwhile, co-authored publications for both the Writing Center Journal and WLN were around 50% of works. The near-parity between single-authored and co-authored articles reflects the collaborative nature of much of writing center work.

The second finding that stands out is the use of social sciences research methods versus no research methods or humanistic inquiry in articles by journal.

Writing Center Journal publishes more articles that use social sciences methodologies (90 or 66.17%) while Praxis publishes the second most (89 or 57.79%).

Meanwhile, The Peer Review and WLN publish the least number and percentage of social sciences research-based articles, at 49 (32.67%) and 56 (42.11%) respectively. There is almost a parity across the journals balancing social sciences research methodologies with works based on humanistic inquiry or not utilizing any research methods. The lack of social sciences research methods in many articles across journals speaks to the continued focus on personal experience, lore, and observation in the field.

The third finding that stands out is that Writing Center Journal and Praxis publish the most quantitative-based articles at around 26% of works.

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Assessing the Field • 71 They also published the highest percentage of qualitative-based articles, at 20.58% and 18.18% respectively. And, they published the highest percentage of mixed methods works at 19.12% for Writing Center Journal and 12.99% for Praxis. Meanwhile, The Peer Review and WLN published the fewest percentage of articles based on quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies. The Peer Review and WLN published a significantly lower number of quantitative-based articles at 12.00% and 20.30%.

When the journals are combined, this data helps us think about the field collectively, particularly what research is done in writing centers, what type of scholarly works are valued, and potential barriers to publishing.

While this work provides a profile of four major journals in the field of writing center studies, it functions only as a starting point to future research projects on the topic of writing center journals and their identity/ethos. Future researchers could look at changes to the journals, individually and collectively, over a longer period of time. There are also opportunities to research the topics the journals published on to see how they changed over time or are unique to each journal. Additionally, because the websites and submission portals of each journal changes over time and across editors, researchers can examine these changes and how they reflect the changing journal landscape. And, researchers may want to include additional journals in the field to this study, including the Dangling Modifier and SDC: A Journal of Writing Center Studies. There may even be opportunities to use a corpus analysis of titles or even texts as a further avenue of study. Considering the amount of research still to be done in this area, I encourage others to explore these rich, and important, topics.

References Bannon, Lil and North, Stephen. 1980. “From the Editors.” Writing Center Journal 1(1): 1-3.

Cheatle, Joseph. 2024. “Collaborative Publishing and Multivalent Research: Writing Center Journal Scholarship from 2001 to 2020.” Writing Center Journal 42(3): 50-73.

Coghlan, D., & Brydon-Miller, M. 2014. The Sage Encyclopedia of Action Research. Sage Publications.

Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. 2005. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. SAGE. Driscoll, Dana Lynn and Perdue, Sherry Wynn. 2012.

“Theory, Lore, and More: An Analysis of

RAD Research in The Writing Center Journal, 1980-2009,” Writing Center Journal: (32)2: 11-39.

“Editorial Policy.” 1980. Writing Center Journal 1(1).

“Guidelines for Reviewers.” Nd. The Peer Review. https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/about/guideli nes-for-reviewers/ Hallman, Rebecca and Perdue, Sherry Wynn. 2015.

“Editors’ Introduction.” The Peer Review.

Harris, Muriel. 1977. “We Are Launched!” Writing Lab Newsletter (1)1: 1.

----. 2015. “Letter from the Editor.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship 40(1-2): 1-3.

Hashlamon, Yanar. 2018. “Aligning With the Center: How We Elicit Tutee Perspectives in Writing Center Scholarship.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 16(1).

Mannon, Bethany. 2016. “What do Graduate Students Want from the Writing Center? Tutoring Practices to Support Dissertation and Thesis Writers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 13(2).

Ozer, Havva Zorluel, and Jing Zhang. 2021. “The Response to the Call for RAD Research: A Review of Articles in The Writing Center Journal, 2007–2018.” The Writing Center Journal (39)1-2: 233–60.

“Policies.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. https://www.praxisuwc.com/policies Praxis Editorial Collective. 2003. “From the Editors.”

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal.

Rawlins, Paula, and Arp, Amanda. 2023. “Taking Up Space and Time: How Writing Center Administrators Can Better Support Fat (and All) Tutors.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship 47(3): 19-26.

“Submission Guidelines.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. https://wac.colostate.edu/wln/submission-gui delines/ “Submit.” 2015. The Peer Review.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No 2 (2026) Appendix A: Interview Questions for Journal Editors Topic: Publishing Works ●​ What types of works (tutors column, conversation shaper, book reviews) are published? Please describe each briefly. ●​ What are the general ranks (undergraduate student tutor, graduate tutor, professional, administrator, tenure-track, etc.) of the authors published? (if that can be determined) ●​ What types of articles are generally accepted for submission? (quantitative, narrative, qualitative, etc.). ●​ Is there a preferred topic (theory, practice, lore, stories, etc.) of article submission? If so, what is it?

Topic: Editorial Issues ●​ How many editors are there for the journal? ●​ What is the makeup of the editors? ●​ Is there an advisory board? ●​ Are there any other supporting personnel? ●​ How often do editors change at the journal? ●​ What is the process for changing editors?

Topic: Supporting Documents ●​ What supporting documents does the journal website provide (ie. mission statement, formatting guide, rules for reviewers, etc.)? How do you decide which documents to include?

Topic: Ethos ●​ What do you believe is the historical ethos of the journal? ●​ Has the ethos of the journal changed over time? If so, how? ●​ What is the current ethos of the journal? ●​ What do you believe is the future of the journal?

Assessing the Field • 73 Appendix B: Figures 1-5 Figure 1 WLN articles from 2015-2024.

Figure 2 WCJ articles from 2015-2024.

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Assessing the Field • 74 Figure 3 Praxis articles from 2015-2024

Figure 4 TPR articles from 2016-2025

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Assessing the Field • 75 Figure 5 Combined data from WLN, WCJ, Praxis, and TPR

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THE RESEARCH TAX: THE HIDDEN COSTS OF PUBLISHING UNDERREPRESENTED KNOWLEDGE Sarah Rewega University of Guelph​ srewega@uoguelph.ca

Waed Hasan University of Guelph​ whasan@uoguelph.ca

Abstract This article introduces the concept of the research tax to describe the additional intellectual, emotional, and institutional labour imposed on marginalized scholars within academic publishing. Building on Cedric Burrows’ “Black tax” and Sara Ahmed’s critique of performative diversity, we examine how Calls for Papers (CFPs) operate as gatekeeping texts that gesture toward inclusion while reproducing exclusion. Drawing on our positionalities as women with invisible disabilities, English as an additional language users, and scholars working in feminist, decolonial, refugee, and transnational frameworks, we conduct a critical discourse analysis of seven CFPs. Our findings reveal recurring patterns of topic omission, epistemic assimilation, limited structural support, and the containment of marginalized scholarship within special issues. We argue that these practices disproportionately burden graduate, precarious, Global South, refugee, and transnational scholars. The article concludes with recommendations for editorial accountability and structural change aimed at moving academic publishing beyond symbolic inclusion toward material equity.

memory and decolonial struggle. These identities are not background details but part of our method: they shape how we read CFPs, what silences we notice, and how we understand exclusion in academic publishing.

After several years in academia—submitting to journals that deemed our work as “unfit,” receiving silence as a response to our proposals, and reshaping our research to meet invisible standards—we began to feel the weight of this tax personally. We had arrived at an impasse: how do we continue to write, research, and publish in spaces that did not make room for us? This paper extends the concept of the “Black tax,” borrowing from Burrows’ initial framing and expanding it to articulate the lived experiences of many graduate students and others in academic circles. We name this the “research tax,” a systemic barrier imposed on marginalized scholars whose work challenges dominant academic norms. The research tax also manifests through structural exclusion, limited publication opportunities, and the emotional labour required to navigate biased systems. This paper is based on a research study that uses a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Calls for Papers (CFPs). We detail our methods, selection criteria, and findings in later sections, but in this next section, we foreground how this analysis demonstrates that academic publications—especially in writing-focused fields—often perform commitments to diversity and equity while structurally withholding them, a contradiction especially visible in relation to feminist, decolonial, and transnational research. While our audit offers a structural analysis of CFPs, it is not neutral; it is shaped by our positionalities as researchers, which influences what we notice, what silences we register, and how we interpret exclusion.

In his article, “Writing While Black: The Black Tax on African American Graduate Writers,” Cedric Burrows coined the term “Black tax” to describe how Black students experience a charge “to enter and participate in white spaces,” one of which is academic institutions. Clarifying further, Burrows argues that African Americans have to work twice as hard to “rise above their situation” while remaining silent about racism to simply gain the same rights that white individuals already have (Burrows). Similarly, Alexandria Lockett’s article, “Why I Call It the Academic Ghetto: A Critical Examination of Race, Place, and Writing Centers,” expands on this tax, suggesting that it should be “broadly interpreted to include all sorts of ways people pay for their historical disenfranchisement” (24). As co-authors, we write from distinct but connected positionalities: both of us are women with invisible disabilities who use English as an additional language. One of us is white and a feminist scholar of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, while the other is a third-generation Palestinian refugee whose research engages refugee

Positionality Waed Hasan: My Experience Searching for a Place in Academia Reading these CFPs, I did not just analyze them. I scanned for signals: Would I be allowed to speak in my voice? Could I name Palestine? Would writing about refugee memory be seen as “relevant” or too “specific”? As a third-generation Palestinian refugee, an EAL speaker, and a woman with an invisible disability,

The Research Tax • 77 my relationship to academic publishing is anything but neutral. I am always aware that I enter these spaces already read through a lens of difference or expected to represent the Palestinian diaspora. My work often focuses on refugee experience, Palestine, and BIPOC resistance, but in the context of most CFPs, that makes me a theme, not a scholar. These calls often tell me I am welcome, but only if I can fit my research and perspective into Western norms. Words like “global,” “equity,” or “community” do not register as open doors but as an invitation to assimilate into what is expected. I know this because I have done it. I have revised refugee narratives to sound less “political.” I have replaced “Palestine” with euphemisms. I have had colleagues warn me that naming settler colonialism might “limit my publication options.” This is the research tax. It is not just intellectual for me, it is emotional. It is the exhaustion of filtering my voice through expectations that were never made for me.

What I am asked to “fit” into is not simply the language of global belonging but the assimilationist frameworks of Western scholarship, which consistently flatten refugee epistemologies into case studies rather than theories in their own right.

A concrete example of this tax appeared in the CFP for Global Crises Cultures: Representing Refugees in the 21st Century, where my chapter on refugee writing was accepted. Even though I was thankful for the opportunity to be heard, I experienced an increased sense of anxiety in deciding whether I should submit my work at all. The call referenced “refugee fictions, poetry, film, literary journalism, and life writing” but never named Palestine, settler colonialism, or Arab diasporas. Instead, it emphasized broad “global” contexts—Ukraine, Sudan, Venezuela—without acknowledging that some of the most protracted and structurally erased refugee conditions exist within these categories. Submitting to that volume required me to weigh every word: Should I say “Israeli occupation” or leave it unsaid? Should I quote BIPOC Palestinian writers who are rarely cited in academia, or stick to theorists already recognized in Western scholarship?

Even in a collection about refugees, it felt like Palestine had to be smuggled in.

As a graduate student working to publish, I have had to rely on themed special issues because my area of interest, refugee poetics, is nearly impossible to locate within general CFPs. While my research insists that refugee writing must not be limited to a Western, humanitarian, or postcolonial lens, I find these are often the only frameworks general academic publications allow. Refugee work is made legible only when flattened. Similarly, when I read CFPs that

reference “marginalized voices” but never name who they mean or cite such voices, I feel a double erasure: first, as a writer who is supposedly included, and second, as someone whose community is invisible even in the language of inclusion. I have never seen a general CFP that names Palestinian scholars or that invites refugee epistemologies as more than a case study. Even when refugee issues align with themes such as migration, precarity, and violence, they are not mentioned. And that omission speaks loudly.

Sarah Rewega: When Posing the Problem Made Me the Problem What happens when your writing and research are met with silence? Like Waed, I found that doubt begins to creep in. You start to feel like you are potentially getting in the way or doing something wrong when your submissions are not acknowledged. For the past two years, I have been studying how feminist protest images, particularly from the MENA region, circulate online and generate conversations that push back against dominant narratives. My work explores how these digital spaces create room for voices that are often silenced or dismissed, and how images can become vessels for collective memory, resistance, and feminist solidarity.

But as I have tried to share this research through CFPs and submissions, I have often been met with silence. After sending follow-up after follow-up, with most disappearing into nothing, I walked into my mentor’s office, emotionally exhausted. She reminded me that feminism may have made its way into the academy, but not all forms of feminism are welcomed equally. In her experience, she had witnessed the disregard of feminisms that decenter Western contexts or that speak truths unsettling to dominant narratives.

That moment reminded me of Sara Ahmed’s point in Living a Feminist Life: when you pose a problem, you then become the problem. In my case, the problem and I are inseparable: my research on transnational feminist protest is read as disruptive precisely because it refuses to center Western contexts, and so the critique attaches to me as much as to the work itself.

These refusals are not empty. As Cheryl Glenn reminds us, “rhetorical power is not limited to words alone, and for this reason, the study of silence has much to offer to the powerful and disempowered alike.

Every rhetorical situation offers participants an opportunity to readjust or maintain relations of power” (23). The silence I encountered from journals was not absence but a rhetorical act, one that reinforced the boundaries of what kinds of feminism are welcomed into academic publishing. While this is one way the

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The Research Tax • 78 research tax has shaped my experience, thereby limiting my ability to speak openly about the injustices faced by women in the MENA region, what feels equally disheartening is the lack of special thematic issues that directly address these concerns. In my experience, CFPs on feminism and decoloniality tend to fall into two broad categories: (1) those centered on colonial violence and diasporic experiences, often with a broad or historical lens, and (2) those focused on Western feminist issues, primarily situated in the U.S. For instance, one CFP we audited focuses on body image and menstruation, framing it as “largely metaphorical and often downright shameful” (Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Peitho, Summer 2025). This is undeniably an important topic, and I do not mean to diminish its relevance. But the absence of thematic issues that center urgent feminist struggles outside of the West, like the safety and resistance of Iranian women protesting in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s death, raises important questions. Where do these stories belong? And what does it say about the boundaries of inclusion when there is no clear space for them?

This is another way that the research tax is imposed: waiting for journals to create space, bending and squeezing into frameworks that were not made for you. Themed issues, then, are double-edged: while they provide crucial and sometimes the only spaces where research like mine can be provisionally welcomed, they also risk confining marginalized scholarship to temporary “special” venues instead of integrating it into the ongoing core of disciplinary knowledge.

Recognizing both their necessity and their limits is part of what it means to map the research tax.

Conceptual Framework In the United States (U.S.) and across global academic contexts, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives are under sustained political and institutional assault. Recently, U.S. federal directives have sought to dismantle DEI policies across agencies and universities.

For instance, a recent Reuters article explains that in January 2025, a new executive order directed federal agencies and contractors to remove outright ‘(DEI) policies’ not only in government agencies but also in private and academic sectors (Kimathi, 1). Meanwhile, new laws in states like Ohio and Florida have banned DEI offices, training sessions, DEI-linked hiring practices, and cultural centers. Despite being essential support spaces for marginalized students, they are now being shut down entirely (The Washington Post). In a time when it is imperative to keep DEI alive, this article turns to Sara Ahmed’s critique of performative diversity and Cedric Burrows’ articulation of the “Black

tax” to theorize the additional intellectual, emotional, and institutional labour required of marginalized scholars navigating academic spaces under siege.

Building on their critiques and considering an intersectional feminist framework to further understand the labour and structural inequalities experienced by marginalized scholars, we develop the notion of the “research tax,” a conceptual lens that captures how this labour is extracted, making the very presence and critique of marginalized scholars burdensome. Intersectionality, first defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, highlights how overlapping social categories such as race, gender, and class intersect to produce unique experiences of marginalization and oppression (Crenshaw). Similarly, in Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed discusses what intersectionality means in application: “This is what intersectionality can mean in practice: being stopped because of how you can be seen in relation to some categories (not white, Aboriginal; not middle class)” (Ahmed 119). By framing the research tax within these perspectives, we show how marginalized scholars face compounded labour pressures when engaging with scholarly systems such as CFPs and institutional gatekeeping, which often prioritize dominant norms and voices.

In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed interrogates the term “diversity” through an ethnographic exploration of how it is used in academic institutions. She looks at what diversity does as a practice, showing how it is often used to protect and enhance an institution’s reputation rather than to address the inequalities it claims to remedy. Ahmed notes, “the shift to the language of diversity could thus be understood in market terms; diversity has a commercial value and can be used as a way not only of marketing the university but of making the university into a marketplace” (53).

Ahmed asks, “What does diversity actually do?” and “What are we doing when we use the language of diversity?” This paper follows her line of thinking and borrows from her idea of diversity as performative to examine how diversity appears in CFPs. Both what we are calling the “research tax” and Ahmed’s work on diversity share a central concern: institutions rely on marginalized people to represent and speak to structural inequalities while refusing to address the structural barriers that create them. This mirrors one of Cedric Burrows’ key arguments about the “Black tax,” which he defines as the extra labour African American graduate writers must perform to participate in white academic spaces. Burrows argues that one way the “Black tax” occurs is by expecting these marginalized groups to represent their race. He

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The Research Tax • 79 states that “when the African American pays the tax to enter white society, they will not be seen as a person.

Instead, as a representative for the race, they hold the responsibility for speaking about issues that affect African Americans, for behaving in ways that are considered appropriate and non-threatening, and for being an outstanding student: in essence, they hold all the responsibilities of an ambassador charged with representing a sovereign nation” (Burrows).

Hence, borrowing from both Burrows and Ahmed, we propose the “research tax” as a way to theorize the ongoing institutional demands placed on marginalized graduate scholars, particularly those whose work critiques dominant academic norms (E.g., decolonizing practices). We aim to highlight how systemic inequalities shape which research is valued, recognized, or even allowed to enter scholarly conversations. While Burrows identifies how Black graduate writers are taxed to conform and represent within predominantly white institutions, and Ahmed explores how “diversity” work is both demanded of and contained by marginalized figures, the research tax builds on both concepts by naming a specific cost extracted through scholarly publication processes. In doing so, we draw attention to “institutional gatekeeping,” revealing how CFPs selectively legitimize certain research while burdening and ignoring those who challenge academic norms. The metaphor of a “tax” also points to the emotional and intellectual labour involved in navigating these academic spaces. As Ahmed notes, the labour of diversity work often falls on those whom the institution marginalizes. Similarly, the research tax demands an extra level of emotional resilience, interpretive self-censorship, and rhetorical adaptation simply to have their work considered. This paper, then, offers a conceptual and experiential account of how academic institutions perform commitments to diversity and equity while structurally ignoring the inequalities, particularly concerning feminist, decolonial, and transnational research.

Methods In this paper, we employ a critical discourse analysis (CDA) that bridges our lived experiences of navigating academic publication and the research tax through the audit and close reading of seven CFPs, including feminist, decolonial, writing center, and transnational writing studies journals. We use this method to trace how inclusion is constructed in CFPs and how language contributes to the research tax experienced by marginalized writers or writers centring marginalized research. We frame this audit as a counter-hegemony practice.

As Laurie Adkin defines it,

“counter-hegemony refers to the efforts of social and political actors that challenge the cultural and institutional foundations of hegemony. They call into question the structures, beliefs and norms that underline the economic, social, and political order, and attempt to show that alternatives to the status quo exist, are needed, and are achievable” (Adkin). This framing emphasizes that our work is not neutral, but a critical and political intervention into how publishing structures shape knowledge, access, and legitimacy.

We use CDA to examine how CFPs structure normativity and legitimacy through language. CDA helps reveal how institutional power is embedded in genre, tone, and rhetorical framing, not just in what is said, but how it is said. In Language and Power, Norman Fairclough notes, “What comes to be common sense is... determined by who exercises power and domination in a society or social institution” (113).

This framing allows us to trace how certain scholarly voices are constructed as standard, while others, particularly feminist, refugee, or Global South epistemologies, are marked as marginal or exceptional.

CFPs, we argue, operate as gatekeeping texts, shaping the very conditions of who is publishable. Our audit method uncovers the disconnect between performative inclusion and material support. Finally, it provides the groundwork for our analysis of topic exclusion, authorial barriers, and the research tax.

CFPs are not passive documents; they are manifestations of institutional power that reflect and enforce expectations about who is allowed to publish and on what terms. Fairclough explains that “Having the power to determine... which linguistic and communicative norms are legitimate... is an important aspect of social and ideological power” (110–11). As direct reflections of institutional demands and expectations, CFPs do not simply invite submissions; they communicate whose knowledge “fits” and whose does not. This power often appears neutral or inclusive, but as Fairclough indicates, it operates through “hidden power” that produces an “unequal social distribution of access” to language and discourse itself (83). While Fairclough grounds this analysis in CDA, we extend his framework by foregrounding our positionality as scholars who directly navigate these exclusions. Our subjectivity is not separate from CDA but an essential component of how we interpret the “hidden power” encoded in CFPs. In this way, our CDA is strengthened by making explicit how our standpoint shapes our interpretation. Our audit aims to expose these patterns of how diversity is used performatively, while structural support remains absent.

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The Research Tax • 80 We conducted a critical audit of seven CFPs (2023–2026), each from a different venue: The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics (“Composing at the Intersections: Queer, Transgender, and Feminist Approaches to Multimodal Rhetorics”); Peitho (“Girlhood and Menstruation”); MENA Writing Studies Journal (Inaugural issue, “On Our Own Terms: Engaging Conversations about Writing Studies in the Middle East and North Africa”); Peitho – Cluster Conversation (“(Re)Writing our Histories, (Re)Building Feminist Worlds: Working Toward Hope in the Archives”); CWCA/ACCR 2025 conference CFP (“Precarity and Agency in Writing Centres”); WLN Digital Edited Collection (“The Future of Writing Centers”); and ECWCA Journal 2026 issue (“Connections & Conversations: Building and Sustaining Community in Writing Centers”). In addition to these special issues and themed CFPs, we also reviewed the standing “Submit” sections and regular submission guidelines of each journal. This comparative step allowed us to see whether inclusionary language and equity gestures were unique to special calls or reflected in ongoing publishing policies.

These CFPs came from issues or collections in feminist, decolonial, writing center, and transnational writing studies journals. Each was chosen because of its stated investment in diversity, intersectionality, or transformation, making them ideal sites to examine how institutional gatekeeping persists even within “inclusive” spaces. For instance, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics framed its issue as one that sought to “engage intersectional multimodal composing as actionable and disruptive practices to the material and ideological structures of heterosexist, white supremacist systems.” Similarly, Peitho’s call for its Girlhood and Menstruation issue argued that “feminist scholarship like that found in Peitho, focusing on subjectivities that are often marginalized and ignored via traditional and non-traditional texts, is the perfect place to take lived menstruation experiences seriously (Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Peitho, Summer 2025).” Meanwhile, the inaugural issue of the MENA Writing Studies Journal made clear its intent to “push against the parachuting of methods while championing local, individual approaches to terminology and praxis (MENA Writing Studies Journal).” Finally, the Cluster Conversation on Feminist Archives grounded its call in an explicitly intersectional and justice-oriented frame, explaining that “overlapping forms of oppression require a rigorously intersectional framework for cultivating hope (Cluster Conversation on Feminist Archives).” As the audit findings will show, these excerpts illustrate the ways calls deploy the language of

inclusion and transformation to attract submissions, while also revealing how inclusion is often structured within narrow or U.S.-centric logics. This audit highlights the discrepancy between what CFPs claim to welcome thematically and what they structurally enable, revealing how gestures toward inclusion often mask enduring exclusions in authorship, access, and epistemic legitimacy.

Using a CDA, we coded each CFP across five categories: topic inclusion, authorial inclusion, structural awareness, methodological flexibility, and trans/nonbinary inclusion. These categories emerged inductively as recurring sites where CFPs signal (or fail to signal) commitments to equity. Moreover, we identified these particular categories based on our own experiences navigating academic publishing from marginalized positions, which sensitized us to patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the CFPs. By “topic inclusion,” we refer to whether the CFP thematically engages marginalized or global perspectives beyond dominant U.S. contexts. “Authorial inclusion” captures whether calls explicitly invite contributions from precarious, early-career, community-based, or non-institutionalized writers. “Structural awareness” identifies if a CFP acknowledges the material barriers of publishing—such as access, mentoring, or editorial support. “Methodological flexibility” considers whether the CFP makes space for diverse or nontraditional research genres, creative modes, or participatory/community-led practices.

Finally, “trans/nonbinary inclusion” codes for explicit recognition of gender diversity and trans or nonbinary scholarship, moving beyond generic references to ‘diversity’ or ‘LGBTQ+.’ Meeting these standards meant that a CFP directly named or provided support for these forms of inclusion, rather than assuming them implicitly.

Audit Findings While all the CFPs selected use inclusive language— for example, the MENA Writing Studies Journal frames its call around “terms that are clearly originating from the needs and concerns of this social, cultural, and political context”—and appear inviting to all writers, they ultimately reproduce structural barriers under the guise of openness (MENA Writing Studies Journal). They perform the rhetoric of an aesthetics of diversity while preserving systems of exclusion. Ahmed uses the concept of the “non-performative” to explain how institutional speech acts “name” but “[do] not bring into effect” the very things they name. She writes, “the failure of the speech act to do what it says is not a failure of intent or even circumstance but is actually

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The Research Tax • 81 what the speech act is doing” (Ahmed 117).

Institutions can use inclusive language while enacting the opposite by performing diversity in language while maintaining exclusion in practice. This disjunction between what is said and done is central to how CFPs work.

One area we focused on is topic inclusion gaps. Even though the selected CFPs use inclusive language like “global,” “community,” and “precarity,” they all fail to mention refugees, the Global South, and decolonial frameworks in explicit or sustained ways.

These broad categories may appear open-ended, but they are not neutral: they often signal U.S.-centric or Western academic frameworks rather than making space for specific epistemologies. For instance, when “global” is used without naming refugee conditions or Global South contexts, it functions as an abstraction that assimilates difference into dominant terms rather than centring marginalized realities. Similarly, “community” tends to presume institutional or national communities, while “precarity” is framed largely in relation to academic labour in the West, leaving migrant or stateless precarity unnamed. As summarized in Table 1 (see Appendix), the degrees of inclusion and omission vary across CFPs, with some offering gestural references but none providing sustained engagement. In terms of the writing centre CFPs, five out of five completely exclude migration or non-Western scholarship and methodologies. One CFP, for example, uses “intersectional multimodal composing” without addressing displacement, diaspora, or colonial legacies. Even the MENA Writing Studies CFP, while regionally focused, does not include mention of refugees or diasporic communities, despite claiming to reject limited Western pedagogies. Similarly, writing center CFPs do not engage in refugee literacy, migration, or postcolonial realities even when focusing on labour, precarity, or equity.

There are two key ideas to take into consideration. First, publications cannot assume that all writers, especially marginalized writers, will feel welcome to share their work, particularly if addressing controversial political topics. These exclusions, or abstract gestures like “global,” produce a form of epistemic research tax. For instance, Ahmed indicates that people of colour “embody diversity by providing an institution of whiteness with colour” (4). However, this embodiment is a burden because the institution gives people of colour the job of diversity while remaining systematically unchanged. Marginalized authors often feel like they must reshape their work into recognizable/acceptable Western frameworks to be legible. This process may involve muting cultural

specificity, softening political critique, or adopting disciplinary norms that erase lived context. As Sara Ahmed reminds us in Living a Feminist Life, citation itself is a feminist and political practice: “Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow” (15). When CFPs overwhelmingly cite U.S.-based scholars, they implicitly discipline contributors into reproducing those same frameworks rather than citing Global South, Indigenous, or refugee scholars. For example, Palestinian writers such as Ghassan Kanafani or refugee theorists like Edward Said remain largely absent, even when CFP themes align with their work.

This absence is not only about citation but also about what kinds of authorial voices are positioned as legitimate, which links directly to questions of “authorial inclusion.” For example, the multimodal rhetoric CFP asks for “intersectional” and “community-led” work but centers U.S. activist contexts and cites primarily American scholars, effectively requiring non-U.S. contributors to translate their work into that framework. While it is true that some research can productively fit within those frameworks, and doing so is not inherently harmful, the research tax lies in the disproportionate labour marginalized scholars must perform to make their work legible within them, rather than being welcomed on their own terms. For instance, work on intersectionality by scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty or on community-led rhetorical traditions by decolonial thinkers like Linda Tuhiwai Smith could have been acknowledged, but instead the call draws almost exclusively from U.S. activist and academic contexts. To engage intersectional and community-led work more equitably, CFPs and the scholars responding to them must cite a wider range of voices.

In turn, doing so helps avoid the further marginalization or erasure of previously silenced perspectives. We therefore treat citation politics as part of authorial inclusion, since whose work is cited both signals which authors are invited into the conversation and shapes whose epistemic authority is recognized as legitimate.

Second, the lack of specificity assumes a type of assimilation and universalization that ignores structural and geopolitical differences. For example, the Multimodal Rhetorics CFP calls for “intersectional” and “community-led” work but illustrates these terms almost exclusively through U.S. activist contexts, such as the Combahee River Collective or chalk-walk demonstrations. By framing intersectionality through

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The Research Tax • 82 American histories while omitting refugee realities or Global South epistemologies, the CFP positions contributors from outside the U.S. as needing to translate their work into U.S.-centric frameworks in order to be legible. In this way, CFPs reproduce colonial logics of inclusion: welcoming “diverse” voices only if they conform to fit dominant norms. Ahmed describes the emotional labour this entails as “banging your head against a brick wall” (175). She elaborates, “The feeling of doing diversity work is the feeling of coming up against something that does not move, something solid and tangible” (26). This example highlights how the rhetoric of inclusion operates as assimilation: marginalized scholars are invited in only if they adapt their knowledge to dominant categories.

This metaphor captures how institutional resistance comes at an emotional and material cost. Even as marginalized scholars try to engage in academia, their contributions are limited by the boundaries of what kinds of knowledge and critique institutions are willing to absorb without internal change.

Topics that deal with feminist, transnational work, the Global South, and migration are relegated to special issues and themed calls. This pattern was central to our analysis: all of the CFPs we reviewed were drawn from such special issues, which signals both the field’s recognition of these topics and its tendency to segregate them. While these issues do allow for visibility, they also function as containment zones, offering temporary platforms while keeping essential marginalized voices and experiences outside the spectrum of the field. In this sense, special issues are double-edged: they bring much-needed attention to underrepresented areas, but they also mark them as exceptional rather than central. As Ahmed writes, “Diversity can allow organizations to retain their good idea of themselves,” even if they continue to affirm inequalities beneath the surface (71). Institutions showcase conditional moments of inclusion as proof of progress while keeping structural norms intact. Thus, special issues are not simply “good” or “bad.” They are valuable in spotlighting overlooked concerns, but they risk reifying the very marginalization they aim to disrupt by placing feminist, transnational, and Global South scholarship inside categories rather than within the field’s ongoing core conversations.

This trend is particularly gendered: feminist and trans or queer scholarship is welcomed only within narrow thematic confines but not treated as foundational or field-shaping. For instance, the Peitho CFP on Girlhood and Menstruation reflects a form of white feminism: it situates menstruation primarily as a metaphorical and cultural concern of (implicitly

Western) girlhood, while failing to engage the material realities of reproductive justice, refugee health, or Global South perspectives. Likewise, the MENA Writing Studies Journal CFP frames itself as resisting “parachuted” Western methods and emphasizing local terms and praxis, yet it does not name refugee, migrant, or stateless populations that are central to the region’s realities. This pattern suggests that feminist and queer scholarship is positioned as valuable only when tied to a special theme, rather than integrated into the ongoing methodological and theoretical core of the field. This is another form of institutional research tax where the labour of producing radical or situated scholarship is acknowledged only thematically and on editorial terms.

To assess how academic publications approach marginalization, we had to review a majority of special issues. On one hand, this can be read as editors realizing the need to encourage scholarship in areas that are not typically forthcoming. Special issues also collect different perspectives on a topic in one place, enhancing the visibility of authors whose work might otherwise go unnoticed. Yet, none of the CFPs suggests that this work belongs in the general or ongoing issues of the journals. The Peitho CFP on girlhood and menstruation, for example, explicitly frames its topic as a “special issue,” despite exploring foundational questions of bodily regulation and trans inclusion, effectively signalling that such work is not part of the core journal's mission. This limitation to special issues sends a clear message that certain pieces of knowledge are exceptional, but not foundational.

Similarly, CFPs perform inclusion without offering structural support. This approach to publication assumes equal access and reinforces barriers for precarious, early-career, graduate, differently-abled, and marginalized scholars. Ahmed calls this “diversity work.” She argues that “diversity work is hard because it can involve doing within institutions what would not otherwise be done by them” (Ahmed 25). In terms of the non writing center CFPs, none mention mentorship and accessibility accommodations directly. Some CFPs accept multimodal work but do not explain how less-resourced authors can access tools or navigate the review process. Following the categories outlined in our methods section, we coded this gap under “structural support” rather than “methodological flexibility.” While “methodological flexibility” indicates that journals are open to diverse genres, “structural support” refers to whether they provide the resources (such as guidance, mentorship, or technical access) that make such submissions possible. Without that support,

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The Research Tax • 83 the invitation to multimodality risks being more symbolic than substantive. WLN’s digital edition calls for multimodal submissions but provides no information on technical support or assistance, placing the burden on contributors to figure out format, tools, and platforms. While this gap reflects a lack of structural support for contributors, it also raises questions of labour justice: to what extent can journals—often operating on volunteer editorial labour within an underfunded higher education system—realistically provide such resources? This tension highlights how the politics of inclusion in CFPs are intertwined with broader labour crises in academia, where both contributors and editors are asked to do “diversity work” without adequate institutional backing.

Alternatively, writing center CFPs show some effort in the structural support area but still show evidence of structural exclusion. For instance, the CWCA CFP allows for anonymous submissions, which can reduce vulnerability for precarious or early-career scholars. However, it does not explicitly address how refugee or racialized scholars—who face additional barriers—might be supported. WLN, in its call for multimodal submissions, assumes contributors have technological access and skills, yet it provides no accompanying guidance, training opportunities, or resource-sharing to ensure less-resourced authors can fully participate. Similarly, ECWCA relies on conference participation, effectively excluding Global South authors and students without funding. Even when CFPs like ECWCA’s encourage “community engagement,” they frame community primarily through writing center stakeholders such as students, staff, faculty, and local organizations. This emphasis on local, campus-based, and regional partnerships reflects a U.S.-centric scope and does not address how international or Global South scholars might participate. While the CFP briefly acknowledges multilingual and international students, it does so within the framework of U.S. writing centers rather than expanding community to include non-Western institutions or authors. In this way, calls for “community engagement” reproduce structural exclusion by centring Western-based institutional relationships. This reflects how structural exclusion operates not just through what is said, but what is omitted: the logistics of access. The lack of logistics, such as language access, makes inclusion symbolic. It effectively says, “You are welcome to submit, so long as you need no help to get here.” These gaps impose institutional and affective burdens on contributors to bridge the divide on their own.

Even at the level of language, CFPs use inclusion performatively while requiring marginalized scholars to do additional interpretive, linguistic, and emotional labour. Four out of five of the general CFPs invoke progressive terms like “equity” or “intersectionality” without clarifying how these values shape review criteria or editorial decisions (a problem of structural support). This vagueness places the burden of interpretation on authors, who must anticipate what counts as “appropriate” within unstated institutional norms. In this sense, progressive language functions less as a guarantee of equity and more as a way of preserving editorial authority without redistribution.

Additionally, the CFPs’ lack of explicit accessibility accommodations underscores how inclusion remains rhetorical rather than structural. For example, writing center CFPs frequently highlight “community” and “diversity” but offer no framework for supporting multilingual or refugee scholars — whether through translation, mentorship, or alternate submission formats. This gap belongs squarely in the category of accessibility, since it reflects the absence of proactive accommodations. None of the CFPs mention translation, language diversity policies, or support for non-native English speakers. To ensure these absences were not merely omissions in the CFPs, we also reviewed the submission guidelines on each journal’s website. Across those sections as well, we found no provisions for multilingual submission, translation, or accommodations for authors working in languages other than standardized English. Even journals that emphasize “inclusive pedagogy” in their thematic framing assume fluency in English and offer no alternative formats. In this way, linguistic and infrastructural labour is offloaded onto the contributor, while institutions retain the appearance of equity.

Recommendations Our audit and lived experiences reveal that inclusion in academic publishing is often symbolic, but rarely supported structurally. To ease the research tax, we must move from symbolic inclusion to systemic change. Some journals have adopted important practices in this direction. For example, The Peer Review has adopted anti-racist reviewer approaches, and long-standing feminist journals such as Feminist Studies, Hypatia, and Women’s Studies Quarterly have created space for intersectional and transnational feminist work.

While these journals were not part of our dataset, we reference them here to demonstrate that alternative publishing practices are both possible and already underway. These efforts matter, but they remain the

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The Research Tax • 84 exception. Our recommendations build on these models while arguing that such practices must be normalized across the publishing landscape, rather than confined to explicitly progressive journals or special issues.

First, we must diversify editorial boards; not because of how it looks, but because everyone deserves to be represented and understood. Calls for diversity must move beyond symbolic gestures. It is not enough to include “women” or “international scholars” in name only. Editorial boards must reflect the epistemologies they claim to welcome. Journals like The Peer Review and Feminist Studies offer initial models, but even these must expand to include trans scholars, Black and Indigenous thinkers, and refugee or stateless writers from the Global South. Without meaningful inclusion of those directly impacted by structural exclusions, editorial boards risk reproducing the very barriers they claim to dismantle.

Second, academic publications should increase transparency in publishing metrics. We propose that academic journals regularly publish transparent data on submissions, acceptances, reviewer demographics, and reasons for rejection, broken down by race, gender, region, language, and methodology. Such transparency would make visible the systemic exclusions currently hidden behind invisible editorial processes. It would also provide a baseline for accountability, helping to track progress (or lack thereof) in diversifying publication practices. Moreover, there should be public accountability for equity statements. If a journal claims to be “committed to diversity,” we ask: how, and how often, is that commitment evaluated? We recommend that journals publish annual or biennial reports showing how equity and anti-racist policies are enacted and assessed. This should include concrete changes in editorial practices, reviewer recruitment, and support for non-normative methodologies, not just statements of good intention. Without assessment, “diversity” remains an institutional performance, not a practice.

Moreover, this invites journals to move beyond symbolic commitments by embedding anti-racist practices throughout their publishing structures.

Building on Cedric Burrows’ call for structural reform, we argue that journals must explicitly define what counts as racialized bias (e.g., demanding “neutrality” from refugee scholars, or questioning the “relevance” of feminist and decolonial frameworks). These standards should not remain abstract commitments; they must be embedded in the very processes that determine what research is considered “fit to publish.”

In addition, we advocate for journals to actively encourage and prioritize collective or

co-authored submissions. We recognize, however, that institutional reward structures often devalue collaborative work, privileging single-authored articles even though collaboration can involve more labour.

Precisely because of these institutional constraints, journal practices can intervene by affirming relational, community-based knowledge production as legitimate and valued. Encouraging collaboration through flexible submission guidelines and clear policies for shared authorship credit would begin to shift publishing norms, even if academic evaluation structures lag behind. We also acknowledge that some journals in writing studies and writing centre studies have offered pre-submission workshops or mentoring sessions at conferences. While these are valuable, they remain insufficient, since conference participation often requires significant financial resources that many precarious or marginalized scholars cannot access.

Expanding these initiatives into accessible, online mentorship programs—including peer-review workshops, feedback literacy training, and editorial coaching—would allow journals to support authors equitably. This proposal draws from and extends Burrows’ call for equity-building interventions across the publishing pipeline.

Importantly, journals should be cautious not to limit refugee, feminist, and transnational scholarship to special issues alone. While themed volumes are vital for visibility, they can also risk functioning as containment strategies if general calls do not make space for such work. Instead, general CFPs must explicitly name the epistemologies they seek to include—refugee theory, trans or queer critique, Indigenous frameworks, decolonial methods, and translation. Vague references to “diverse voices,” such as the CWCA CFP’s invitation that “welcomes proposals [...] related topics through diverse perspectives and methodologies,” place the burden on the author to self-identify as marginal while leaving epistemological frameworks unnamed.

Naming is not exclusionary; it is what genuine inclusion requires.

Finally, we again acknowledge the increasing legislative attacks on DEI in parts of North America.

However, even within restrictions, there are possibilities. Journals might relocate certain equity initiatives under “ethics” or partner with international institutions for review processes. Where possible, they can publish anonymized reflection pieces from authors experiencing structural exclusion, creating space for testimony when policy language fails. In short, resistance must be both imaginative and strategic.

Underlying all these proposals is a belief that journals can be restructured not simply to include marginalized

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The Research Tax • 85 scholarship, but to be shaped by it. This shift requires more than invitations; it demands that institutions ask what conditions are required for publishing to be possible. Inclusion is not just about who is let in, but who shapes the room. Until refugee and Global South scholars are present in decision-making, not only as contributors but as editors and reviewers, inclusion will remain aspirational. The time for symbolic gestures is over; structural change is not only possible, it is overdue. ​ At a moment when DEI initiatives are under escalating pressure, this project’s urgency becomes even clearer. Naming and challenging the research tax is not just a diagnosis of existing inequities but a vital act of institutional and collective defense. By sharing our lived experiences, we hope others, too, might feel emboldened to resist and speak truth to power—because when journals and institutions commit to tangible, accountable actions that center marginalized voices in decision-making and editorial processes, the research tax rebate begins.

Fairclough, Norman. In Language and Power. 2nd ed., Longman, 2001.

Glenn, Cheryl. Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence. Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

Kimathi, Sharon. “Sustainable Switch: Challenges to Trump’s War on Diversity.” Reuters, 13 Aug. 2025 Lockett, Alexandria. “Why I Call It the Academic Ghetto: A Critical Examination of Race, Place, and Writing Centers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 2019.

Works Cited “Anti DEI Efforts Shutter Cultural Centres That College Students Call Lifelines.” The Washington Post, 14 Aug. 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/202 5/08/14/multicultural-centers-universities-closing /.

Adkin, Laurie. “Hegemony & Counter-Hegemony.”

Showing Theory to Know Theory: Understanding Social Science Concepts through Illustrative Vignettes, edited by P. Ballamingie and D. Szanto, Showing Theory Press, 2022. Ecumenical Campus Press. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/showingt heory/chapter/hegemony-and-counter-hegemony /.

Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.

Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.

Burrows, Cedric. “Writing While Black: The Black Tax on African American Graduate Writers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, 2016.

Crenshaw, Kimberle, and Anne Phillips.

“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” Feminism And Politics, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Ettorre, Elizabeth. Autoethnography as Feminist Method: Sensitising the Feminist “I.” Routledge, 2017.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No 2 (2026) Appendix A: Tables Table 1 Comparison table of four journals—The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Peitho, MENAWriting Studies Journal, and Peitho Cluster Conversation—across five categories: topic inclusion, authorial inclusion, structural awareness, methodological flexibility, and trans/nonbinary inclusion. The table summarizes how each journal includes or omits areas such as disability, migration, precarious scholars, decolonial methods, and trans perspectives, noting recurring limits like lack of structural support and reliance on symbolic diversity.

The Research Tax • 87 Table 2 Comparison table of three journals—The Canadian Writing Centres Association, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, and The East Central Writing Centers Association (ECWCA)—evaluating five categories: topic inclusion, authorial inclusion, structural awareness, methodological flexibility, and trans/nonbinary inclusion. Each cell lists strengths and omissions, highlighting gaps such as lack of mentoring, limited support for marginalized voices, and insufficient attention to queer/trans perspectives.

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QUANTITY OVER QUALITY? DEFINING EDUCATOR FLEXIBILITY THROUGH TUTOR STRATEGY USE AND SESSION ENGAGEMENT Genie N. Giaimo Hofstra University​ genie.n.giaimo@hofstra.edu

Sam Turner University of Texas–Austin​ turnersam@utexas.edu

Abstract This article examines how writing educators—specifically, writing tutors—respond to their training in pursuit of developing “flexible” pedagogies. We offer strategies and assessment plans for writing center and writing program administrators to learn more about how their staff uptake training in their pedagogy, paying special attention to the need for inquiry and assessment measures of local context activity-based writing instruction.

study to offer an “assessment of the tutoring situation and what strategies would have been appropriate for use in that situation.” This feedback, in particular, hurt because of its finality; you can’t redesign and carry out a study several years later at an institution where you no longer work.

The study and subsequent article was undertaken in response to what we perceived as a gap in our field, hoping to move beyond a “how to” study on one-off training approaches that was in line with Mackiewicz and Thompson’s research. Our study tried to understand what tutors do in their sessions; to evaluate why tutors do what they do is an even more complex and difficult task. While we hoped for the happy accident of our research answering both of these questions, we realized that our study was a starting point and that our findings would be site-specific and require replication elsewhere. Despite one reviewer’s recommendation to “accept with revision,” our article was rejected for a second time.

We then submitted our article to yet another prominent flagship journal. One year later, we received positive reviews; both reviewers accepted our piece, recommending only minor revisions, which the editor asked us to complete as quickly as possible. We thought we had succeeded...

The reviewers wrote: Reviewer 1: Thank you, authors, for this thoughtful piece on writing center pedagogy and tutor flexibility.

At this time, I am recommending this article be accepted for publication on condition that some minor concerns be addressed.

Reviewer 2: I am grateful to the authors for their work, which I enjoyed as a reader and learned from as a writing center administrator. I recommend accepting this work with revisions that reframe the audience for this piece as more broadly in the field of composition. I hope to see this research in [Flagship Journal] in the near future.

The editor wrote: You will see that they are advising that you revise your manuscript. I find myself in agreement with Reviewer 1. I think this piece is really good, and is clearly aimed at a Writing Center audience. For publication in [Flagship Journal], I’d like to see you also address a broader [Flagship Journal] audience. This shouldn’t

Coda This is the story of the maddening experience of two authors who tried to bring the article below to publication.

This story starts nine years ago (!) when Sam and Genie–that’s us–first began collaborating on what would become an award-winning article on session notes and tutor professionalization. To say we’re far from where we started is an understatement. Since beginning this work, we’ve both made multiple geographical changes as our academic careers have advanced: Genie moved positions from Ohio State University to Middlebury College to Hofstra University; and after obtaining her undergraduate degree, Sam moved from Ohio State to Carnegie Mellon University, and then to the University of Texas at Austin. We both managed personal challenges and successes and even took time off from academia.

Throughout it all, the article that follows lingered in review limbo.

The article, “Quantity Over Quality? Defining Educator Flexibility Through Tutor Strategy Use and Session Engagement,” sat for over a year at one flagship journal with completed reviews unshared with us during that time. We re-wrote the piece multiple times based on the editorial feedback we eventually received, but decided to move on to another journal … that told us it was now too lengthy to publish. After that, we submitted it to a journal that was not accepting submissions, then to another journal that had previously published similar research. One reviewer favorably reviewed the article and recommended it for publication with minor revision; another rejected it because they contested the self-reported data we analyzed was invalid, and because they wanted our

Quantity Over Quality? • 88 take a lot of work but it is important. While I know why scholarship important to Writing Centers is significant to the broader [Flagship Journal] community, not all readers have that flexibility of mind. Making that argument, especially as part of the flexibility you’re arguing for within the Writing Center environment, will make this piece even stronger. I hope to see this piece again, and quickly!

We obliged—and our article sat with reviewers for another year. Despite the first reviewers recommending acceptance of our article with minor revision, our piece passed through half a dozen more reviewers, all of whom had different ideas about how we should revise. We were left disappointed and unsure how to proceed. Had any of these new reviewers read the revision letters and prior drafts we dutifully resubmitted with each new revision?

One balmy spring day, we were informed that our article was being rejected. We were given no rationale, nor any additional feedback. To us, this was not a meaningful rejection but an insult after a long slog through years of revisions. We knew the editorial team was undergoing transition at the time, but it felt like they were simply clearing their desks.

How could the initial reviews, which were favorable and asked for minimal field-foregrounding of writing center work for compositionists, result in several rounds of R&R and then a rejection?

We don’t have the answers.

Past experiences with hyper-revision–a practice in academic writing that demands several extensive revisions to submitted manuscripts–have shown us that if an author can hang on long enough, there will eventually be a sort of war of attrition where the reviewers (and/or editors) run out of revision feedback. From there, the article or chapter is finally published.

Situations like ours are not reflective of the experience most have with peer review. But what we outline here shows how authors often have to navigate convoluted and labyrinthine publication processes for peer-reviewed journals in our field. This model is damaging. It slows down publication even further in a field that already publishes infrequently compared to other disciplines; it stalls career progress for non-tenure track workers and graduate student workers; and it forestalls meaningful, innovative, challenging, and novel scholarship from reaching its audience.

In total, we revised our article more than eleven times for five different journals.

To say we were given the runaround is polite.

To say that this protracted process caused deep trauma

in us is accurate. Looking back on this experience, we feel like a process that should welcome novel research into the world became an adjudication on our findings and how we visualized them (which seemed to make several of our reviewers uncomfortable, given their feedback). Yet this article was vetted to the nines; we consulted data scientists and writing studies scholars on our study design, methods, and findings. It was still rejected.

When all this began, Genie was a staff member at Ohio State who wanted to publish in prominent journals and contribute to our field novel findings, research methods, and data visualizations.

Sam, who went from undergraduate to doctoral candidate over the course of this process, was excited to grow as a researcher, explore academic publishing, and better understand how the writing center could be a home for her academic and professional goals.

“Quantity Over Quality?” was one of our many collaborations; we still collaborate. Yet the frustrating, humiliating, and disorganized path to seeing this paper in print made us question whether we wanted to publish in this field at all, and even whether this field is “for us.”

Nine years later, Genie has published four books (with more on the way) and is the outgoing professional editor of TPR: The Peer Review, a journal that nurtures under-represented voices in writing center scholarship and publishes risky and innovative work (Hallman Martini, 2020). Sam is nearing the end of her PhD program, during which she has held numerous research positions, developed and taught composition courses for undergraduate students and incarcerated adults, and served as a managing editor for Praxis. We’ve both been profoundly shaped by this years’ long publication experience. We’re happy to see this article out in the world, but we are tired. There are other authors in this issue who share similar experiences and who have been brave enough to write about them. Given the number of “hyper-revision” stories we’ve heard from others, there are likely hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cases like ours. Yet we are the lucky ones who ultimately found a venue for publication and our careers were not derailed by this experience.

Guidance for Better and More Ethical Publication Practices As authors and editors of peer-reviewed journals, we offer guidance for publication practices.

Editors, trust your readers to find out more information if they need it, to figure out research methods and data visualization, and to make

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Quantity Over Quality? • 89 connections across sub-areas, including writing center studies. Reviewers, if you do not understand empirical research–as one early reviewer noted in their feedback to us–then recuse yourself from reviewing the article.

Scholars, do more primary research across sub-disciplines. Wellness research, for example, is widely published in writing center studies, yet only one article in a special issue of Composition Studies cited writing center research (Miller-Cochran & Cochran, 2022); we need more citational cross-talk across sub-disciplines of writing and rhetoric studies. We ask editors to bring authors to publication, reigning in preference-based feedback that slows down the process for little scholarly gain.

Scholarship in our field should have a space for failure, for preliminary findings, for novel and creative ideas that kick off sub-disciplines. As editors and reviewers, we should approach scholarship with generosity and grace. There will always be opportunity for rebuttal. Scholars can use publication platforms to challenge previously published findings, which is common in other disciplines and leads to more public and generative intellectual debates. Less gatekeeping will help our field produce more vibrant scholarship.

Finally, we also need more replicability in our field and deeper citation of the work that has come before.

How many voices have we lost to disorganized and even hostile review processes over the years? We can do better.

Introduction With all the movement and change that occurs in the administration and staffing at many writing centers, the behaviors and practices that occur in a center during its transitional moments are ripe for exploration. At the same time, these transitions, including the general transience of tutors, make studying behavior and practice in this research site more complicated. Because of these factors, we designed a natural experiment that assessed writing center tutors’ pedagogical development over time. Given that writing centers and writing programs often have similar challenges—employee turnover, varying levels of worker expertise, and a focus on instructional development—our empirical study can be generalizable to scholars interested in assessing writing pedagogy beyond writing centers. More importantly, however, we hope this study will inspire others to explore the concept of flexibility and what we can do, through training and support, to prepare our writing tutors and teachers for the work that they do. Our findings can inform how we train and assess writing instructors in formal (credit-bearing courses) and informal (e.g., writing centers, fellows programs, writing groups)

educational settings, as well as how writing program administrators (WPAs) conceive of approaches to training and pedagogical development. To that end, in the conclusion, we offer a set of ways to bring such a study—and its findings—into a training program, although the institutional context for the assessment, as well as its structure, will also need to be considered.

The current study began with an inquiry into how post-session reflective notes in writing centers can help us better understand how tutors professionally develop over time. The authors of this paper (then a new undergraduate tutor and writing center director) initially gave little thought to the common practice of filling out session notes. Unsure of what these forms were supposed to do rhetorically or pedagogically, we developed a longitudinal assessment that applied discourse analysis to session notes to trace how different cohorts of tutors reported engagement with their professionalization. From our analysis, we found that after a couple of semesters (and with intensive training), most tutors—undergraduate and graduate, alike—converged on similar behaviors in-session as well as similar note taking practices (Giaimo and Turner, 2019).

These findings were heartening as they seemed to indicate that our training—and the reflective opportunities that post-session notes provide—was working insofar as it brought some consistency to tutoring practice across a mixed cohort of tutors who had widely different teaching and tutoring experiences.

At the same time, however, our tutors were requesting more training and more strategies to teach their writers.

These requests were often specific (i.e., “more training on sentence diagramming”) and occasionally emotionally laden (i.e., “more training on how to address student wellness in the writing center” or “more training on how to work through difficult feedback with a writer”), reflecting a common anxiety among new and even experienced tutors that they did not have enough tools to respond to the variety of writers and needs they were encountering. So, we expanded our training modules and doubled down on our activity-based approach to tutor training, which, at the time, seemed to be working well from past assessment. We trained tutors to identify a writer’s needs and strategically apply specific activities, such as concept mapping (Al-Shaer), goal setting (Silvia), scaffolding (Thompson), and point predict (Block), among many others. These advanced training offerings were separate from the “nuts and bolts” of tutor training (i.e., agenda setting, university policies, institutional resources, logistics of day-to-day center functioning) offered at the beginning of each semester

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Quantity Over Quality? • 90 and throughout a semester-long undergraduate course.

As our training plans grew to some 50 activities that we rotated through annually, we wondered if and how tutors were using these activities in their tutoring work and if the request for specialized training and variety was being met through this model.

Across writing programs, it is difficult to measure how educators take up their professional development. Lillge notes that “not enough is known about whether and how English teachers learn from and apply their professional development” (340), while Zuidema and Fredricksen note that few studies exist on what and how writing teachers “get taught” (13). In writing centers, a tutoring session can be a black box; a tutor goes into it and does something, but what they do is hard to measure unless the sessions are recorded or observed. Even then, there are limitations to how many tutorials a research team can assess—particularly at a center that conducts over 10,000 tutorials annually.

Couple this with common challenges in writing programs of all kinds (e.g., worker turnover, crisis response work, last-minute budget and other report requests, etc.) and measuring training uptake and impact becomes even more complicated but necessary work.

Unlike writing teachers—who likely work with the same students, teach a bounded set of texts through planned lessons, and assess assignments according to a shared syllabus—writing tutors (and their administrators) face unique on-the-job variability.

At our center, we employed both emerging and advanced tutors from undergraduate students taking on their first tutoring roles to graduate students with years of professional teaching and tutoring experience.

These tutors were trained to work with anyone who had a writing need across the university community; in a single shift, a tutor may have seen a multilingual first-year composition student, a staff member working on an article for publication, or a graduate engineering student writing an NSF grant proposal. Basic center-wide training—at our WC and others—then feel like opportunities to get our staff “caught up” to a shared standard of tutoring writing and administrative tasks attendant to writing center work (i.e., filling out session notes, entering timesheets, managing open hours, the “genre” of a tutoring session, etc.) rather than drilling into more specified and complex tutoring methods and approaches. Like WPAs, however, we shared the challenge of working with a large staff with regular turnover which made it seem like were treading the same paths over and over, yet we knew little about how our staff enacted the training we offered.

So, as we built our assessment of training uptake, we conducted a kind of institutional ethnography on our center (Miley). In weekly mentorship groups, we heard our tutors mostly sharing the “same old same old” in terms of how they responded to different writers’ needs and projects. In informal conversations around the center, tutors discussed going back to similar “wells” of tutoring strategies or activities across genres and assignments.

In our professional observations of tutors, we noticed a consistent trend of tutors reading papers aloud—despite this being a discouraged practice in our center because of accessibility issues with this method, among other reasons. And, in corpus analysis of tutor session notes (Giaimo et al.), we found that tutors relied heavily upon reading and talk-based strategies in their tutoring work, despite our attempts to broaden tutoring practice to include several other competencies (such as writing, meta-cognitive, and kinesthetic strategies).

At the same time, we regularly fielded requests from our tutors for more and novel training in response to feelings of unpreparedness. This kind of anxiety is present across educational contexts, and our tutors consistently reasoned they needed more training so they could be more “flexible” in their sessions (language they often called upon to describe their need). We were not, however, only responding to our tutors’ requests or affective states; we were also responding to our field’s argument that administrators should prepare tutors to be flexible in their work. As we discuss in the literature review, flexibility is frequently alluded to but infrequently defined in our field’s scholarship. As we thought through our training plans and assessment needs, we realized we were taking for granted a shared definition of flexibility, with impacts across all levels of center functioning, from high-level training to on-the-ground tutorial work.

We wanted to get closer to understanding what “flexibility” meant in the Ohio State University (OSU) Writing Center, specifically, which included examining how tutors were using the training we developed in response to their calls for 1. increased training, and 2. access to strategies they reasoned would result in “flexible” tutoring practices. We assessed training uptake by conducting discourse analysis and frequency analysis on session notes, a form of passively collected data in many writing centers. Our study asked the following questions: ●​ How many and what kinds of strategies do tutors report using? ●​ Does strategy-use change over the course of a tutor's career?

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Quantity Over Quality? • 91 ●​ What can analysis of strategy use and training uptake tell us about flexibility?

Measuring perceived flexibility in informal writing education settings can give us deep insight into applications for teachers and administrators of formal writing education settings. It can also clear up the anxiety that educators might feel to include more and varied pedagogical approaches that may not suit them individually and/or the learning situation. Yet, flexibility is a common shorthand in many pedagogical spaces, though it can be murky in its enactment. The Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) identifies flexibility—“the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands”—as one of the habits of mind necessary for student success in postsecondary writing (1). This framework encourages writing teachers to foster flexibility by practicing different writing tasks and doing reflective work with students (8). Unsurprisingly, CWPA’s guidelines closely align with best practices in writing center tutorials mapped out in guides like the Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring.

Teacher training in this instance looks a lot like tutor training and praxis, though both can be difficult to measure.

Little is known about how writing tutors apply flexibility to their tutoring pedagogy. To understand tutors’ behavior, we turn to Boquet who describes tutoring work as “…improvisation [that] is largely about repetition, repetition, repetition. It is also a consequence of expertise, of mastery, and of risk” (76).

Like Boquet, we found that tutors developed expertise and mastery of particular strategies; however, they did not take risks (the last of Boquet’s improvisation trifecta) as we had hoped they would through implementing novel tutoring strategies. Instead, they repeated a bounded set of tutoring practices, hitting the same few notes repeatedly (76). Our hypothesis—built from our tutors’ attitudes towards training and reading in our field’s scholarship—that a “more is better” approach to tutor training was complicated by our findings that across the whole of tutors’ careers, they use a small number of similar strategies (4–7, on average) and roughly two and a half strategies per 45-minute session. Furthermore, tutors had bounded tutoring repertoires which we coded into four different groups—the readers, talkers, grammarians, and wild cards. Flexibility, then, might be found in group-level rather than individual level praxis.

This study is an exploratory foray into examining tutor pedagogical practice around adoption and application of learning strategies that foster writing development. We hope scholars at other institutions replicate our study—even its most basic elements, such

as asking workers to report on the number and types of strategies/activities they use in their writing pedagogy—and think with us about how flexibility is enacted in different writing education spaces, especially considering how ubiquitous flexibility is in how educators (emerging and experienced) talk about their work. Our assessment model can also be adapted for writing programs, which share many similarities with writing centers in terms of learning goals, hiring practices, pedagogical approaches, and training programs.

Literature Review Questions around flexible pedagogies and classroom practices are especially visible in an educational landscape shaped by a global pandemic (Johnson-Eilola), as shifting learning environments mean “flexibility” has been taken up by educators and support staff across disciplines in response to digital and distance learning (Campbell-Gibson, et al.; Johnson-Eilola and Selber; Kirkpatrick). However, education researchers have been seeking definitions and applications of teacher flexibility since before the new millennium, often in response to the development of digital spaces and pedagogical implications of the internet (Kirkpatrick; Dennis). In writing classrooms, even pre-pandemic, composition scholars have been preoccupied with thinking about flexibility in relationship to how students use technology and tools in the writing classroom to facilitate their learning (Gierdowski). Writing centers, too, have talked about digital pedagogy for decades (Closser; Hobson) and frequently provide online writing support alongside in-person tutorials.

However, in writing center studies, research around flexibility has been seemingly lacking, despite being studied broadly across disciplines (including music and arts, business, social sciences, and education). One educational studies scholar, Burge calls to interrogate the intent and practical application of the term “flexible” within educational spaces: “The word flexibility and its adjective root, flexible, have gained such popularity in higher-education discourse and marketing strategies over the past few decades that it is time to dig into these words anew, with reflective and critical intent” (1). Likewise, Kirkpatrick asks “How can we provide flexibility without complexity and create minimal confusion for our students and staff ?

How much choice is too much?” (Kirkpatrick 20; emphasis added). Much like we do in our work, these scholars recognize that flexibility is more than just digital learning pedagogy or multimodality, yet they too struggle to come up with assessable approaches to

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Quantity Over Quality? • 92 identifying and defining this term as it relates to teacher development.

For our study, we did a keyword analysis on the term “flexibility” (and derivatives of it, like a broadly defined “flexible” approach to tutoring) in writing center and writing classroom scholarship. From this, we found that “flexibility” encompasses far too many attitudes, practices, and standards to be easily enacted by teaching and support staff. And, sometimes, when it is enacted, it might not necessarily be productive (think here about new tutors doing things to see what “sticks to the wall”). Furthermore, concepts of flexibility as expansive and wide-ranging contradict research on teacher development, which often points towards specialization—rather than broadening—of one’s pedagogical skillset as a sign of expertise (Sun et al.; Li).

Training manuals, such as The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring (Gillespie and Lerner), identify tutor flexibility as a primary development goal: “Our goal...is for you to develop...flexibility” (48). To manage educational outcomes and content of a tutorial, the guide advises “flexibility and control” (Gillespie and Lerner 55). They write, “The important thing is to approach a session with a curious and open mind, and to develop...the flexibility to know what's working in a session and what adjustments you need to make” (59).

While training materials often extol flexibility, tutors—at least in our writing center—reported struggling with being flexible but also deliberate in their sessions. So, we responded to tutors’ requests for support and training focused on flexibility but then we also conducted assessment to see what might be going on in-session with how tutors approach their work.

In the field, flexibility is described as “the hallmark of good teaching and tutoring” (Blau et al. 38) and is held in contrast to writing center “orthodoxy” as a best practice (Gill 172). Irene Clark argues “for the necessity of developing a flexible approach to the issue of tutor directiveness and… differences in students’ learning styles” (46). Malcolm Hayward understands flexibility as a tutoring strategy in and of itself that is primarily enacted to support writers and faculty (8).

Ashton-Jones echoes Hayward, and advises “tutors to remain flexible and responsive to tutees’ needs, however and whenever they are presented” (33; emphasis added). Still others (Blau et al.; Hitt) declare writing centers to be spaces with “flexible pedagogies” (Hitt 3). Especially in earlier writing center scholarship, tutor flexibility seems aspirational rather than fully enacted, which might speak to the challenges that North describes in his set of seminal pieces on writing centers (North, “The Idea of a Writing Center”; North,

“Revisiting ‘The Idea of a Writing Center’”). Because of their service role in the institution and frequent connection to writing curriculum, writing centers are frequently placed in the impossible position of being everything to everyone. In this kind of service model, it is no wonder that flexibility becomes a stand-in for what might be more appropriately termed responsiveness. In placing the burden of flexibility onto the tutor (and leaving it largely undefined except in relation to the needs of faculty and writers), these pieces do not deeply examine or describe what tutors need to do to become flexible beyond asking them to respond to others’ needs.

There are, however, a couple of studies that explore how flexibility impacts tutor professionalization and pedagogical growth. David Healy argues that writing centers are rushing to catch up with their own growth and development in terms of professionalization; therefore, many of the roles that tutors play are not explicitly articulated or supported in writing center work. Shifting between roles in writing center work can lead to “role conflict” in which a “tutee’s expectations conflict with [the tutor’s] own preferred style or with their assessment of the best role to adopt in a given tutorial session or at a given tutorial moment” (Healy 46). Tutors mitigate role conflict by adopting rigid or flexible tutoring stances. However, these stances are not net positive and net negative roles: “…one might assume that flexible coping strategies are inherently and necessarily superior to rigid ones. But in the tutorial context, rigidity may at times be advantageous” (Healy 47). In attempting to be “all things to all people,” flexible tutors may lack effectiveness, while rigid tutors may have a “keener recognition of institutional reality,” and are therefore better prepared to support writers who are facing performance pressures in their courses (Healy 47).

Flexibility, then, is related to the professional context in which tutors labor.

Flexibility is also mentioned frequently in recent scholarship (Henning; Thompson et al.; Silvey; Van Waes et al.; Trosset et al.), though it is often undefined and disconnected from specific tutor pedagogical practice. However, Nancy Grimm, like Healy, centers tutor professional (and personal) identity when discussing flexibility. Grimm notes: In a writing center that embraces a concept of multiliteracies, effective tutors learn to engage with difference in open-minded, flexible, and non-dogmatic ways. Effective tutors learn to shift perspective, to question their assumptions, to seek alternative viewpoints… to determine where necessary knowledge might be missing, and they

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Quantity Over Quality? • 93 develop strategies for supplying that knowledge. (21; emphasis added) In articulating a vision for how tutors can employ flexible tutoring effectively through the development of responsive pedagogy, Grimm identifies the tutor’s role as an interpreter and communicator. Because tutors encounter heterogeneity in the academic, social, and professional spaces that make up writing centers, flexibility is a process that hinges upon communication strategies, inquisitiveness, awareness of identity roles, and the development and adoption of culturally responsive and anti-racist tutoring strategies. Flexibility, then, is rooted in tutor identity and pedagogical behavior (as well as educational context), not in response to broadly conceived faculty or student need.

Our review of the literature found that flexibility is used as a catch-all term for pedagogical work in and around writing centers. In contrast, our IRB-approved study—inspired by Grimm’s argument that effective tutors develop a multiplicity of tutoring strategies to respond to writers’ needs—examines the rich and varied tutoring strategies that tutors employ to uncover flexible (or otherwise defined) response pedagogies. We conducted a longitudinal study on strategy use among tutors in the OSU Writing Center, and found that tutors—despite echoing the “language of flexibility” so commonly found in our field—utilized far more bounded and patterned sets of strategies than were made available to them. This study, then, begs the question of what a flexible writing tutor-educator looks like and whether we might benefit from understanding writing centers/programs—rather than individuals within them—as flexible. Another possibility is that flexibility need to be more fully interrogated through both localized and field-wide inquiry into its meaning and application by our tutors and administrators alike.

Method This IRB-approved study was conducted at the writing center of a large, Midwestern, land grant institution, where writing center staff (n = 50) hosted over 10,000 appointments annually. Tutorials were almost evenly split between undergraduate and graduate clientele with faculty, staff, and postdocs comprising ~10% of clientele.

Subject Participants We randomly selected notes from 34 undergraduate and graduate tutors from a larger pool of 78 tutors.

Tutors had at least 2 semesters of experience, with a range of 2–6 semesters (Table 1; see Appendix A).

Semesters of experience were roughly even between undergraduate (~3) and graduate tutors (~3.2).

All tutors attended training weekly, monthly, and semesterly for a total of ~55 hours of training annually. Undergraduate tutors also enrolled in a semester-long full credit tutor training course, while most graduate tutors had prior writing center experience and pedagogical training. The turnover rate at the writing center was roughly 45% each year, meaning approximately 23 tutors graduated or moved on from their tutoring positions. On average, undergraduates were employed by the writing center for 1.7 years (4 terms), while graduate students were employed by the writing center for 2.2 years or 6 terms.

Materials We collected 1,110 session notes from WCOnline. The form (Fig. 1; see Appendix A) includes open-ended and checkbox questions. 10 session notes were collected from each tutor for each semester that they worked. Tutor candidates and their notes were identified for coding using a random number generator (Excel).

Data Coding and Rubric Development The two researchers engaged in four distinct rounds of note coding, discussion, and rubric development. After determining which questions to analyze (all but number 5), identifying coding categories, and measuring interrater reliability (~95% agreement) on a subset of the dataset (n=150), all notes were fully coded in Excel. We coded each note for 12 variables (Fig. 2; see Appendix A), including demographic data (tutor ID, rank, semester, year), session context, and tutor behavior in individual sessions (whether they shared handouts, the number and type of strategies used).

The researchers further coded the 37 most frequently reported strategies that tutors reported utilizing in-session and classified these into groupings (Appendix B). Most of these strategies were derived from the OSU WC training modules (~55 hours annually) (Appendix B). The researchers also coded a few organically developed strategies that tutors reported using, including dictation and direct grammar instruction. Strategies were grouped together based on common, stemmed language. For example, tutors reported “concept mapping,” “concept maps,” and “mind maps,” all of which were grouped together under “concept mapping” or “CM.” After stemming, 37 strategies were identified, including an “Other” category for strategies that the researchers were unable to identify or classify due to lack of a clear description

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Quantity Over Quality? • 94 in the tutor’s note. Shorthand codes were assigned to each strategy so that scaffolding was denoted as “Sc,” pre-writing was indicated as “Pre,” brainstorming as “B,” etc. Individual strategies were further coded into functional groups of similar strategies (Appendix B).

Analysis To measure how different variables affect the number of strategies that tutors used per session, we ran an ANOVA with blocking on the independent variable of strategy number used by a tutor within an individual session in relation to the following predictors: tutor ID (subject participant; block), tutor rank (undergraduate/graduate), semesters of experience (of tutors in the writing center), handout use (whether or not handouts were used by tutors in writing center sessions), and session context (if the client brought in course-based/assigned writing or personal writing). All variables were initially coded in Excel and then selected variables were analyzed in RStudio using nlme package version 3.1-137 (Pinheiro et al.).

Since not all tutors had the same number of notes or used the same number of strategies, we normalized our data, in Excel, by calculating the frequency with which a tutor used a strategy. We then created a heatmap (Hung et al.) that uses a hierarchical clustering technique to group tutors by most frequently used strategies in R Studio using gplots package version 3.1.0 (Gu et al.).

Results Overview of Findings Tutors are a highly individualistic population, though their practices are significantly impacted by their semesters of experience by rank as well as by session context (Table 2; see Appendix A) (Figs. 4–6). There is high variation (standard deviation = .83) in the number of overall strategies tutors utilize in-session ranging from 1–5 strategies, with an average of 2.26 strategies per 45-minute session and a lot of individuality in the different strategies that tutors utilize (standard deviation = .44–1 strategy) (Fig. 3; see Appendix A).

Tutors ranged in their use of single strategies from frequently (~50) to almost never (~1). The heatmap (Fig. 7) shows the frequency with which individual tutors utilized strategies, with some strategies (e.g., read aloud and talking strategies) used often and others (e.g., motivational scaffolding) used infrequently.

Significance by p value (p<0.05 (*), p<0.01 (**), or p<0.001 (***) and effect size (F statistic) was determined for the results of the ANOVA. Of the predictors, tutor ID (F 1,33 = 12, p<0.001) and tutor ID by semesters of experience (F 1,33 = 2.42,

p<0.001) were both highly significant, although there was a low effect size on tutor ID by semesters of experience. Tutor rank by handout use (F 1,33 = 4.50, p < 0.05), tutor rank by session context (F= 5.20, p < 0.05), and tutor rank by semesters of experience (F 1,33 = 4.13, p < 0.05) were all significant with high effect size (Table 2; see Appendix A).

Interpreting ANOVA Analysis of variance (ANOVA), a set of statistical tests that compares group mean differences in an experimental dataset, was used to measure how different variables affect the number of strategies that tutors used per session. In this analysis, several variables were compared and the means that were significantly different (P value and F value) were identified (see Table 2) and interpreted (see Figures 4–6). Review this link for more details about ANOVA (analysis of variance) and F tests.

Findings from ANOVA of Strategy Use by Variable Results suggest that tutors are largely individualistic (F 1,33 = 12, p<0.001) in the number of strategies they utilize per session (Table 2), and that while semesters of experience affect an individual tutor’s use of strategies (F 1,33 = 2.42, p<0.001), the low effect size indicates a lot of variation around that trend with some tutors changing more than others. This indicates the number of strategies tutors use is affected by not only the number of semesters they worked in the writing center but also their individual starting points and movement towards an optimum. Undergraduates increase the number of strategies they use in their sessions as they work more semesters in the writing center, while graduate tutors remain consistent in their strategy use regardless of their semesters of experience working in the writing center (Fig. 4; see Appendix A).

Tutors’ use of strategies is also affected by their rank in specific contexts related to circumstances surrounding tutoring sessions, such as the kind of writing a client brings to their session, and whether or not handouts are shared, in-session. While rank is not a significant predictor of behavior on its own, it is significant when considering tutors’ semesters of experience (Fig. 4), the number of strategies used in tutoring sessions focused on writing assigned by a course (Fig. 5), as well as sessions in which handouts are shared (Fig. 6), with undergraduates changing their behavior in all of these circumstances.

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Quantity Over Quality? • 95 Heatmap of Tutors by Strategies by Semesters of Experience A heatmap that shows hierarchical clustering (Fig. 7) was created to track how often tutors engaged in specific tutoring strategies. Darker colors (such as black and dark grey) indicate low usage or no usage of specific strategies while brighter colors (white, light grey) indicate frequent use of specific strategies.

Interpreting the Heatmap The key components of the heatmap include the individual squares that comprise the map, as well as the labeling along the bottom edge. The letters along the bottom of the heatmap denote the 37 most frequently used strategies, all of which tutors were trained to use.

Starting from the bottom left, we see “TS.Dis,” which was the researchers’ shorthand for “Talking Strategy, Discussion.” In this format, “Talking Strategy” refers to the “family” code—a related group of activities that individual strategies were coded under—while “Discussion” is the individual strategy that tutors reported utilizing. Likewise, the rightmost label, “WS.O,” stands for “Writing Strategy, Outline,” again indicating both the “family” of activities (writing strategies) and the individual strategy (outlining). See Appendix C for the full list of strategy groupings and acronyms.

Heatmap Findings The heatmap (Fig. 7; see Appendix A) displays findings by strategy (columns) but also by individual tutor (rows), listed by random identification numbers along the right edge of the heatmap. To see what strategies a given tutor uses, follow the tutor ID horizontally across the heatmap (for example, we can see that Tutor 10 is one of the only tutors to report very frequently using “GS.R,” the grammar revision strategy).

Likewise, if you start at the bottom and follow an individual strategy vertically up to the top of the map, you can see how often a given strategy was used by all tutors. The columns (especially on the left side of the heatmap) show significant variation amongst individual tutors, while the horizontal lines denoting groups A-D highlight tutors’ patterned strategy usage. Because each row of the heatmap represents a different tutor, each square in each column represents a unique strategy used by a unique tutor.

Out of the 37 most common strategies that tutors identified using, and keeping in mind that tutors used, on average, 2.26 activities per session, tutors often reported utilizing between 2–4 common strategies across multiple sessions, though a subset of tutors utilized a more diverse array of strategies. See

Appendix C for a full list of strategies, including those most commonly used by tutors in their sessions.

From reviewing the heatmap, four groupings of tutors by strategy use were identified, post-hoc: ●​ Group A (the readers): used writing and reading strategies, such as free writing and read aloud with heaviest focus on the read aloud strategy (RS.RA), which they reported using during about 25%-30% of the sessions they conduct. ●​ Group B (the grammarians): used grammar-focused strategies such as direct instruction and modeling, with heaviest focus on revision (GS.R) and brainstorming (TS.B), which, between both of these strategies, they reported using in about 50% of the sessions they conducted. ●​ Group C (the talkers): used talking strategies such as discussion, read aloud, and brainstorming with heaviest focus on the discussion strategy, which they reported using in about 30% to 40% of the sessions they conducted. ●​ Group D (the wild cards): used a wide range of strategies, including discussion, but also kinesthetic and meta-cognitive approaches, such as concept mapping and threshold concepts that were not commonly utilized by the other tutors. They are highly individualized and experiment across many different strategies though many of them had a go-to set of 4–9 strategies that they used most often in their sessions.

Discussion The differences in tutoring practices between undergraduate and graduate tutors (Fig. 8; see Appendix A) beg the question of whether variation in strategy usage is synonymous with flexibility. Whereas graduate tutors remained largely consistent in this element of their tutoring practice throughout their tenure, undergraduate tutors had significant change in the average number of activities that they utilized; by the third semester of employment, they moved in-line with graduate students’ activity use, and by the fifth semester they used roughly half a strategy more per session than their graduate tutor counterparts (2.9 and 2.5, respectively) (Fig. 4). The initial difference between these two group’s behaviors might be due to the different ways in which they were trained and recruited into the writing center (undergraduates through a course, graduates through a summer workshop). Yet, a previous study found that tutors—irrespective of

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Quantity Over Quality? • 96 rank—begin to coalesce in the ways they describe, evaluate, and reflect upon their tutoring sessions, which suggests that time, rather than rank, is an important driver of change (Giaimo and Turner, 2019).

Considering our previous findings that undergraduate and graduate tutors utilized similar amounts of strategies after a few semesters of work, we believe that there is a cohort effect that takes place where tutors of different ranks and training backgrounds learned from each other and developed shared practices (irrespective of flexibility). One takeaway for WPAs and WCDs is that there are a lot of potential positive outcomes surrounding pedagogical development that arise from mixed rank tutor-educator training models.

Flexibility, however, cannot be identified through our grouped analysis of undergraduate and graduate tutor practices because it fails to capture how individuals coalesce into different and mixed-rank groups composed of relatively similar numbers of undergraduate and graduate tutors. Therefore, turning to the heatmap (Fig. 7) might help us to further articulate a theory of flexibility for writing center pedagogy that moves beyond understanding group differences as indicators of flexibility.

The heatmap shows four distinct groups of tutors who utilized strategies in ways that are like those in their group. Group A (the “readers”) used a broader range of strategies with frequent use of strategies in reading and writing domains. Group B (the “grammarians”) was similar in scope to group A but used more grammar strategies and fewer writing and reading strategies. Group C (the “talkers”)—a smaller cohort of tutors—relied on talking strategies (discussion in particular) more than any other group and utilized reading strategies similarly to group B. Group D (the “wild cards”) was the smallest cohort of tutors. This group did not rely heavily on any one strategy or type but instead used a wide range of the more popular strategies, including talking, reading, writing. Group D also used otherwise under-utilized strategies that were included in training by tutors’ requests, including kinesthetic and meta-cognitive approaches, such as concept mapping and threshold concepts, more than the other groups. WPAs and WCDs should assess the pedagogical practices of writing tutor-educators for patterns of bounded strategies/practices, especially as they relate to site-specific training models.

While tutors’ use of strategies fell into general categories, there was still variation among individual tutors. Tutors in most groups relied on a specific strategy between 25% and 40% of the time that they tutored, yet they showed individuality in the strategies they utilized the rest of the time in their sessions.

These findings suggest that tutor behavior was far more complex than an upward or downward trajectory with regards to strategy use. The implications of this finding for WCDs and WPAs is that tutors rely on bounded yet patterned sets of learning strategies that do not necessarily scale up or change from educational context-to-context. This “less is more” finding suggests that we ought to re-think our professional development training models and goals.

Is Variety the Spice of Life? Tutoring Practice as Individualistic and Bounded ​ Our hypothesis about flexibility—that tutors who are trained to use more and different types of strategies will do so—does not pan out. While groups A–D are composed of tutors that behaved similarly to those in their groups, there was still a lot of variation at the individual level. Additionally, some groups (A and C) relied on a more bounded and commonly shared set of strategies, whereas others (B and D) utilized a wider range of strategies. In different groups, tutors ranged from utilizing one type of strategy in 25% of their sessions (Group D), to 35% (Group A), to 40% (Group C). This suggests that tutors had varying levels of comfort or interest in deploying different strategies; however, we are hesitant to label one group of tutors more flexible than another given the wide range of variation at the individual tutor level, as well as the clear reliance on single strategies among most tutors in most groups.

Additionally, the range (1–5) of strategies that tutors used per session suggests that there might be upper and lower limits on the number of activities a tutor felt comfortable utilizing in a 45-minute tutoring session. Therefore, any assumptions about a “more is better” approach—a sentiment tutors echoed in their requests for more and varied training—to tutoring being synonymous with flexibility needs to be interrogated given the inherent time constraints on most tutoring sessions. A final takeaway, then, is that we ought to interrogate the learning context (i.e., single sessions, condensed semesters, trimesters, etc.) of individual writing programs and centers in concert with educational strategy use in order to determine tutor-educator behavior and efficacy.

Study Limitations Analyzing passive data, such as session notes, has limitations such that reporters may fail to include all pertinent information in their records of their tutoring practice or underreport the number of strategies that they use in-session. Tutors may, for example, leave out rudimentary strategies (such as agenda setting—a mainstay in tutoring sessions), as well as ones they attempted but failed to deploy. Likewise, tutors may

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Quantity Over Quality? • 97 not have the language to describe or report using strategies they haven’t been trained to enact. However, this model gives us insight into the primacy that tutors placed on specific strategies and what information they privileged and thus chose to include in their notes.

Furthermore, analyzing session notes allows us to examine far more sessions than physical observations or recordings of sessions.

Future Research This is an initial foray into exploring some of the ways in which we might observe and define how tutor-educators engage “flexible” writing pedagogies through empirical modeling. We hope that future studies aim to replicate our study and follow-up with selected participants to interview them directly (Worthy et al.) or conduct cross-institutional research. Because this was a naturalistic experiment, we also hope that researchers amend our study to suit their local context.

Should a cross-institutional study on this subject take place, variables such as staffing models, instructor demographics, and training models would need to be streamlined (or controlled for) across institutions to avoid inconsistencies in data and to make fair and consistent comparisons of strategy use across several institutions.

Conclusion From our assessment, we realized that tutors relied upon particular pedagogical strategies in uneven yet patterned ways. Despite consistent, center-wide training that encouraged tutors to experiment with multiple dozens of strategies, tutors were limited in their uptake regardless of their rank or experience.

There are, however, commonly shared strategies that all groups of tutors utilized to some extent, such as point predict, free writing, reverse outlining, grammar modeling, and outlining. However, most tutors over-relied on one strategy and utilized it often in their tutoring sessions.

Our study demonstrates that while the field encourages tutors to be flexible, and tutors indicate a similar desire in their feedback, individual tutors do rely on a limited number of strategies that fit into a repertoire. Variability alone, then, does not indicate flexibility. It may simply indicate tutor imprecision or amiability (i.e., “let’s try this and see what happens” or “well you asked for X so let me give you X”).

Therefore, we do not believe that flexibility can be identified, as we initially hypothesized, by the average number of strategies that tutors used per session, or by tutor engagement with unique strategies throughout their tenure at the center. Instead, it might be measured

through how individual tutors align by groups of strategies as our study shows.

If we were still at the Ohio State Writing Center (we have both left the institution), we would share these findings with tutors—along with the grouped strategies—as a springboard into discussion where tutors are invited into their data and offered the opportunity to do “self-work” around their tutoring practices (what strategies they use often, which ones they do not use, and ways to develop responsive pedagogy). We would not, however, encourage one group of strategies over another but provide space for exploration and reflection. This kind of assessment-informed training would emphasize curiosity and multiplicity in not only learning new strategies but, also, learning more about situations where tutors feel more or less confidence in their pedagogical training, which, we ultimately think, drove much of the conversation around flexibility in our former center. Using findings from our empirical research, then, one can build an intentional educational model that offers tutors entry into the data, such as the bounded sets of strategies, which they can learn and apply to their work but, also, space to reflect on confidence, anxiety, and preparation for the work.

More research can help us understand how and why writing tutor-educators develop and eventually settle on their pedagogical repertoires, as well as some of the challenges tutors face in novel settings, which has implications for how administrators responsively and holistically prepare their staff for the job. While providing robust training is critical for developing one’s pedagogical approach, there are likely many other factors (e.g., preference, comfort, convenience, resources) that impact the decisions that tutor-educators make about their pedagogical approaches. Labor concerns also heavily factor into how they engage in their work. For the moment, however, this connection between precarity and praxis has not yet been studied, nor has how paraprofessionals developed their pedagogy and applied their training in different educational contexts (e.g., applying tutor praxis in course instruction and vice versa). We know that training does have an impact—tutors are, after all, breaking down into groups that use consistently patterned combinations of strategies and many report anecdotally to us years later that their training helped them in their careers, especially in teaching work—but we believe that there are other external factors that influence their practices that need to examined further.

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Quantity Over Quality? • 98 The Praxis-Specific Upshot of our Findings Our study found that the field needs to further define and assess what is meant by tutor-educator flexibility.

One possibility is to move away from the concept of flexibility altogether as this approach might signal a non-deliberate process that disallows tutor-educators from making intentional choices about their pedagogy in favor of placing primacy on learner need and comfort. While tutoring ought to be collaborative, as Harris noted many years ago (1985), the tutor’s identity and pedagogical praxis should, as Grimm notes, also be considered. For example, perhaps tutors over-relied on specific and limited tutoring strategies because of the sheer volume of tutoring work they were conducting annually (~300–450 hour-long appointments) in addition to other academic and personal obligations. In other words, despite best intentions, they had little bandwidth to add “another thing” to their repertoire.

Well-meaning and pedagogically up-to-date training models, then, might not be effective for all populations of writing tutor-educators, particularly time-strapped and under-resourced graduates and other contingent workers. Instead of a lock-step training model, then, we ought to encourage tutors to find their unique (though patterned) educational practices through more curated and modest professional development that is scaffolded and perhaps lingered over (e.g., spending a year on contemplative practices).

We also suggest a set of interventions for practitioners and writing program administrators to support further discussion and exploration on the topic of flexibility and its relationship to pedagogical identity and approach. For practitioners, engaging in reflective practice can encourage deliberate exploration of one’s personal tutoring and teaching practices.

Below are a set of questions for guided self-exploration: ●​ Which strategies or pedagogical approaches do I find myself returning to regularly ●​ What is one strategy or practice I have not yet tried? ●​ What prevents me from experimenting with different pedagogies in my sessions/courses? ●​ How might my program support me in trying a new strategy or practice? ●​ After trying something new in the classroom or writing center, how did it go? ●​ What were some outcomes for learners? What were some outcomes for me? ●​ Think back throughout your career—what has influenced your tutoring/teaching practice?

Writing Center and Writing Program Administrators can engage the topic of teacher praxis and flexibility by enacting some of the following programmatic interventions: ●​ Create and distribute pre-and-post personality-type surveys about educational strategy preferences to help tutor-educators conceptualize their practices and how they may align or diverge from training recommendations and program-wide values ●​ Dedicate time to working with your tutors/instructors to create (and revise) their teaching philosophies (and whether or how notions of flexibility factor into them). ●​ Clarify expectations around specific educational practices and priorities through training materials and professional development meetings. ●​ Assess—through interviews, surveys, artifact collection—the most meaningful educational approaches for tutor-educators in your program. ●​ Ask your tutor-educators to do a “strategies swap” where they share a learning strategy and how to apply it in specific educational contexts. ●​ Bring tutor-educators into programmatic decision making by collaboratively revising shared assignments, assessments, learning goals, mission and values statements. ●​ Offer compensation to writing tutor-educators for course re-design, attending pedagogy workshops and conferences, and for books and materials. ●​ Change the review process for merit and promotion to encourage pedagogical experimentation.

Writing administration work so often happens at a distance, especially in large programs, yet it is vitally important to know what our tutor-educators are (and aren’t) doing in their work. This is not for surveillance purposes, but rather for labor-centered care-taking and professional development purposes.

Feelings of inefficacy, cynicism, and physical/emotional exhaustion in the workplace can lead to burnout (Sanchez-Reilly et al.), which can, in turn, lead to any number of personal and professional issues, including work-related stress and attrition. Understanding how our tutor-educators engage with training, and how they experience their work, can be part of a responsible and supportive workplace ecology. Therefore, exploring

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Quantity Over Quality? • 99 with your tutors and instructors how they understand, define, and enact flexibility can mitigate a lot of the anxiety over “getting it right” that many experience. It also signals a community-based care system where the expectation is that they have agency in their pedagogical practices and are not only responding to the needs of those around them but, also, to satisfying their intellectual curiosity, their creativity, and their capacity for playfulness and experimentation through their work.

We encourage writing administrators to re-examine their professional development models for their tutors and instructors. Writing Center Directors might start to track and measure the complex processes of strategy selection that tutors navigate.

WPAs may review how often the concepts and scholarship they bring to teacher education is taken up through conducting corpus analysis on instructor syllabi and course evaluation forms. And, of course, all writing administrators can simply ask their tutor-educators to reflect on the development of their pedagogical approaches. Are writing tutor-educators “flexible” or are they responsive? Do they take pedagogical risks, and, if not, why? Specifically naming and defining what happens in formal and informal writing education spaces is critical here as this can lead to discussions about revamping professional development models, offering course development compensation, and reimagining evaluation and promotion standards.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No 2 (2026) Appendix A: Tables and Figures Table 1 Participant Experience by Semester

Figure 1 Image reflecting a blank session note/questions tutors responded to after each tutorial at the OSU Writing Center.

Quantity Over Quality? • 102 Figure 2 Image of a sample coded session note (variables coded for at left, coded data at right).

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Quantity Over Quality? • 103 Figure 3 Each individual tutor’s average number of strategies used per session pictured below. Each tutor has a corresponding error bar that shows the standard error of strategies each tutor uses in their sessions. Some tutors vary more widely than others in how many strategies they use per session.

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Quantity Over Quality? • 104 Table 2 Results of ANOVA with blocking using number of strategies as the criterion. The ANOVA statistics demonstrate the significance of the variables whereas Figs. 4–6 show the relationships between significant variables.

Figure 4 Average strategy use by tutor rank by semesters of experience.

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Quantity Over Quality? • 105 Figure 5 Results of strategy use by the session context—clients who seek support on writing that is course-based or non-course-based (writing of a personal nature)—and by tutor rank.

Figure 6 Results of strategy use by tutor rank and by whether or not the tutor chose to share a handout in each of their tutoring sessions or not.

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Quantity Over Quality? • 106 Figure 7 Color heatmap showing a breakdown of tutors’ strategy selection by frequency of use with darker squares indicating frequently used strategies and light or faint squares indicating strategies used infrequently or never.

Figure 8 Study results simplified by rank What graduate tutors do

What undergraduate tutors do

●​ Remain consistent in the # of activities they use per session over time ●​ Respond similar to course-based or non-course-based tutoring scenarios ●​ Remain consistent in the circumstances in which they share handouts

●​ Shift how many strategies they use in-session over time ●​ Respond differently to course-based or non-course-based tutoring scenarios ●​ Vary in whether or not they choose to share handouts with writers

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Quantity Over Quality? • 107 Appendix B Family (Grouped) Codes by Individual Strategy Type *Indicates strategies that fall into multiple classifications Bold indicates strategies most frequently used across tutor groups Consultant Strategies List Reading Strategies (RS): Read Aloud (RA) Read Silently (RS) Point Predict (PP) Talking Strategies (TS): Dictation (D) Discussion (Dis) Brainstorming (B) Non-Directive (ND)/questioning Motivational Scaffolding (MS)* Reverse Outlining (RO)* Translingual (L1) Writing Strategies (WS): Pre-Writing (Pre) Free Writing (FW) Outlining (O) Sentence Diagramming (SD)* Paragraph Tracking (PT)* Revision (R) Note Taking (NT) Reverse Outlining (RO)* Kinesthetic Strategies (KS): Concept Mapping (CM) Whiteboard (drawings) Visual strategies (VIS) such as (post-it note strategy or color coding writing, etc.)

Paragraph Tracking (PT)* Grammar Strategies (GS): Patterns of Error (PoE) Sentence Diagramming (SD) Direct Instruction (DI) Revision (R) Modeling (M)

Meta-cognitive Strategies (MC): Knowledge Transference (KT) Threshold Concepts (TC) Cognitive Scaffolding (CS) Audience Awareness (AA) Skills teaching (i.e., how to take notes) (ST) Motivational Scaffolding (MS)* Other Strategies (OS): Unclear strategy application Appendix C Semesterly Training Topics Spring 2019 ●​ Newbie Training (University Policies, On-Boarding to Writing Center space and practices) ●​ Accountability and Goal Setting with Clients ●​ Client Report Form Training ●​ Emergency Management ●​ Finding and Developing your Tutoring Practice ●​ Case Studies/Mock Tutorials ●​ Tutoring in specific spaces/media: Walk-in, Synchronous and Asynchronous Online, Writing Groups, High School Community Writing Center ●​ Writing Center “Spiel” Review for Workshops and In-Class Visits ●​ Emotional Negotiation ●​ Code Switching ●​ Libraries/BEAM ●​ Working with Graduate Student Writing ●​ Working with Multilanguage Writers ●​ Working with Instructor Feedback ●​ Wellness and Self-Care in the WC ●​ Conducting Research in the WC ●​ Strategy of the Month (including concept mapping, outlining, point predict) ●​ Tutoring 3000: Additional Tutoring Methods (e.g., concept mapping, scaffolding, grammar, revision strategies like reverse outlining, etc.)

Planning and Goal Setting Strategies (PS): Agenda Setting (AS) Revision Plan (RP) Planning (P)

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REJECTED: CO-AUTHORING WITH UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS Erin B. Jensen Midwestern State University​ erinjensen@bac.edu Abstract During my time as a composition faculty member at a small liberal arts college, I wanted to provide opportunities for students to pursue publication opportunities. In all of the composition courses I taught, I included discussions and readings focused on the benefits of undergraduate research and publication.

I also decided to pursue co-authoring with students about their experiences in learning about and pursuing such publication opportunities. This article focuses on the experience of co-authoring with fifteen undergraduate students and the highs and lows of initial acceptance, lengthy edits, rejections, and resubmissions before finally being accepted for publication.

conferences or mentor students to submit their own essays to undergraduate research journals).

I want to focus on the experience with my most recent co-authored article with fifteen undergraduate co-authors. From the time the article was originally submitted until it was published, it took five years as it was rejected from four different publications, and went through over ten extensive revisions and numerous smaller revisions. The undergraduate co-authors depended on me to help guide them through the excitement of initial writing, the revisions, the rejections, the waning motivation to keep re-submitting or finding a new publication option, and all the other emotions that happen in the publishing process.

Introduction As a rhetoric and composition faculty member at small colleges with little emphasis on publishing, I have created opportunities for undergraduate students to co-author and then publish with me. I want to give students opportunities to write about their experiences, be mentored by me through the revision process, and ultimately see that what they write is published in an academic journal. I have been involved in co-authoring with undergraduate students for two different articles and both articles required a lot of revisions and rejections before being accepted for publication. I found students often struggled with the motivation necessary to keep editing and revising after being rejected or from being overwhelmed when faced with extensive feedback. I found that my role was co-author but also motivational speaker and emotional success coach as I helped students to find the motivation and support to keep going until our efforts were accepted and our articles were published.

As an early career tenure track professor and someone that wanted to mentor undergraduate students to be inspired in research opportunities, I found these experiences incredibly labor-intensive while also being worthwhile after the publication was finally accomplished. If I had the ability to give myself advice before either of these long-term projects occurred, I would have recommended either waiting until I was tenured or putting more of my focus on mentoring students with their smaller projects instead (ie mentor students to present at undergraduate

Literature Review The research on mentoring undergraduate students through co-authoring with professors has focused on the benefits to both undergraduate students and the professors as well as some of the struggles that occur in these situations. Much of the research on co-authoring with undergraduate students does not focus on what happens when the article is rejected or detail the longer-term efforts in getting a rejected article to publication.

Research on encouraging undergraduate research cites many benefits for both the students and mentors involved. Taylor and Jensen found “involvement in undergraduate research and undergraduate research programs increases students’ academic achievement and retention rates” (2). Other researchers found that students involved in undergraduate research develop better critical thinking and writing skills (Brown et al.; Ervin; Morales et al.) and develop more academic skills related to study skills, time management, connecting with professors, and creating support networks (Burks and Chumchal; Jensen et al.; Plakhotnik; Taylor and Jensen).

The benefits to professors are also documented in the research (Ervin; Giuliano; Jensen et al.; Morales et al.). As Traci Giuliano, a psychology professor, writes “Publishing with students is truly my favorite part of being a professor—the thrill I get upon seeing a student’s name in print (especially in the lead position) is often greater than the thrill I get from seeing my own name.” I would agree with her that I

Rejected: Co-authoring With Undergraduate Students • 109 enjoy seeing my students being involved in research and being published.

Mentoring undergraduate students through the publishing process has many benefits to everyone involved. However, there are challenges to the publishing process that can be more unique to coauthoring with students. One such challenge is the time requirement and the scheduling of time for both the professor and the students (Burks and Chumcal; Jensen et al.; Mina et al). Burks and Chumchal, in their article encouraging co-authorship between faculty and undergraduate students, acknowledge the considerable amount of effort for such an undertaking could be both “time intensive” and “daunting.” Mina et al. makes the argument that, “Without exceptional incentives and compensation for faculty members, mentoring undergraduate research becomes an exhausting, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and unrewarding experience.” In my own experience, I found that I had more time to write in the summer months or over the winter break, but my students would often not be available during this time as they would be taking a break or spending time with family (Jensen et al.). The time I had planned to use to collaborate and co-author did not end up being a good time for my students. Most of the collaboration and co-authoring time ended up happening during the semester when students were more focused on academic experiences.

Another challenge is specific to early career or untenured faculty. Burks and Chumchal specifically mention early career professors as they argue, “Consequently, faculty members (particularly untenured ones) should consider a number of factors before deciding whether publishing with undergraduates represents the best career move.

Publishing papers with undergraduates takes more time than if the faculty member wrote the paper alone (our conservative estimate would be 4 times as much time).”

As an early career professional that has co-authored two very time-intensive publications, I echo their thoughts of the immense time commitment this requires. My first attempt at co-authoring included my meeting individually with each of the eight undergraduate co-authors and then meeting with each several times each semester. Just having all these individual meetings took a huge amount of time, not to mention all the writing and revising time that was necessary to have the article published (Jensen et al.).

The amount of time it took to publish with co-authors could be an obstacle to early career professionals.

Article rejection is part of the publishing process but less research has focused on how to handle

rejection when co-authoring with undergraduate students. Lettner-Rust details the feelings of being “disappointed, despondent, even despairing” (233) when receiving a rejection for a project or article. Her advice is to turn to mentors and communities of supportive people to help yourself handle the rejection and figure out a plan on moving forward. Owens discusses how to deal with the emotional part of working hard on an article and then being rejected for her efforts. As she writes, “rejection is more common than acceptance…I’ve found it slightly less ego-crushing to know how common this is” (305).

After re-assuring herself that most people experience rejection, she reminds herself that “The publication merry-go-round is there, going around and around, waiting for you to jump back on” (305). I found that I had to have lots of conversations with my students about rejection and how being rejected did not mean that their writing wasn’t good enough or that they weren’t good enough. I tried to emphasize that rejection just meant that we needed to revise and improve the article and that we would eventually find a journal that would publish our article. I did find that some students really struggled with having our collaborative article get rejected so many times and I found that many students stopped replying to my emails letting them know that we needed to revise the article again. Helping students better understand rejection is a skill that I need to work on as I want to co-author with students again.

Case Study: Co-Authoring with 15 Undergrads I would like to highlight my experience of being an early career pre-tenure professor that co-authored with fifteen undergraduate students on an article that took over five years before finally getting published. I am grateful that after all our efforts that the article was finally published, but I would advise other early career professors to consider the time commitment before engaging in such a project. I wish that I had approached the project with a better understanding of the massive time commitment that I was committing to. The positives of having the article published and that allowed students an opportunity to be published, do outweigh the negatives. However, I think I may need at least a couple of years before I attempt another co-authored article with undergraduate students.

The article that took five years to get published started with my reading an email about a journal that wanted articles focused on co-authoring with undergraduate students majoring in the humanities. As I was an Assistant Professor of English, I thought this seemed like it might be a good fit for my

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Rejected: Co-authoring With Undergraduate Students • 110 own goals surrounding encouraging undergraduate students to co-author with me. I thought it would be interesting to have students write about their experience of co-authoring while actually writing the co-authored article, but knew that this might not be what the editors were looking for, so I emailed the editors to check and both replied that this sounded like an interesting way to structure an article on co-authorship. With this encouragement, I emailed several students to see if they would be interested in co-authoring with me and three responded back. I wrote the initial proposal as there was a very short deadline to meet, but included their names as co-authors. We were all thrilled when the proposal was accepted and we were given a few months to write the article.

Previous to engaging in this project, I had co-authored another article with eight freshman student-athletes and so had some experience in co-authoring. That experience had helped me understand that co-writing works out better if everyone can meet and discuss the topic and what we wanted to write about. I followed that same pattern and asked for everyone’s schedules and worked out a time that all four of us could meet and discuss the project and our goals. Before that meeting, I sent out the original CFP and asked students to re-read what the editors were looking for. We met and discussed our goals and tentative timeline for the writing of the article. We discussed how we wanted to organize the article and then each of us (faculty member and three undergrads) picked a section of the article to write.

Students planned to write first-person narratives of their experience and I had agreed to write the theory section and to help with connecting the first-person narratives together. The students were so excited and all turned in their portions before the agreed upon deadline. They also mentioned this article to their friends and I had several more students email to request to participate. I thought that having more students might be helpful and I wanted to give students an opportunity to co-author, but wanted the permission of the original three co-authors. They agreed that more students would help to add more student perspectives and so I invited an additional five students to participate. They also submitted their portions to the shared Google doc and I worked on melding the various portions into a more cohesive article. By the time we met to revise, there were eight undergraduate co-authors helping with the article.

The first editing session was a chaotic experience as some of the students just wanted to grammar edit, others wanted to have a discussion

about every sentence, and others read over the draft and declared it “perfect” and ready to submit. Looking back on the experience, I have to smile at how naïve we all were in thinking that what we had created was what the editors wanted. I had some concerns about “flow” as the draft did sound like nine different people had written it and I tried to add in revision suggestions to help with the different sections connecting better to each other. But I didn’t want to lose the voice of my students and so I mainly tried to help with the flow of the paragraphs and sections and did not do much editing of the personal reflections from students.

We met several times to revise and some of us kept revising on our own within the Google doc. Three more students had requested to join the project and with the approval from the co-authors, I added them to the project. That brought our numbers up to one professor and eleven undergraduate students. After extensive revising from all co-authors, we thought the article was ready to submit. I thought we would receive extensive feedback with the comment that it sounded like multiple people had written it and so prepped everyone with the knowledge that we could get rejected from the journal or that we would need to make extensive changes. The co-authors thought the article was great and thought we would mainly get some comments, while I thought that while the topic was good, there were some issues with how we had written the article. With these thoughts, I went ahead and submitted the article to the editors.

About three months later, we received extensive feedback with both a 3-page letter and individual comments on the document. They provided feedback that did request that we make substantial changes, but even these extensive changes seemed manageable as most of the comments focused on improving the theory section and changing how personal narratives were included. One of their chief comments was our use of individual names for various sections of the article. Sometimes I would be writing about my part of the process and other times, individual students would write about their part of the process. One of the comments from the editors was, “We were delighted to receive a draft with 13 undergraduates listed as coauthors. But we’re puzzled that everyone is referred to in the 3rd person throughout the essay. In many ways, your work in this draft could lend itself to a powerful interrogation of what ‘counts’ as coauthorship for an undergraduate.

What work must an undergraduate do to receive authorial credit or a byline?”

This comment helped all of us realize that we needed to form a more cohesive “we” in our writing

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Rejected: Co-authoring With Undergraduate Students • 111 and not try to have so many individually authored sections. Other helpful feedback included these statements: Readers will want to hear about how the 14 of you accomplished this work, given 14 authors is a lot, but especially with 13 of them as undergrads!

Mentoring students to publish or present their own work is a lot of work for faculty.

But actually coauthoring with undergrads is EVEN more work for faculty.

The comments and requests for change were mainly positive and we were all optimistic that we could make these changes and submit an article that they would be interested in publishing. The editors also wanted us to delete anything that wasn’t tied directly to co-authoring. The students were so excited at this stage of the process and would come to my office hours to talk about how exciting it was to write something, email it to the editors, receive feedback and then submit it again. Most of the students felt confident that the editors would like the revised version and accept it for publication. I was cautiously optimistic as well as I thought we had revised and addressed all the changes the editors had requested we make. These changes resulted in the article looking very different from the article that we had submitted the first time. With some optimism, I emailed our revised chapter.

The second round of feedback only took a few days and the tone of the feedback had changed to being much more negative. The editors didn’t like our changes and now thought the use of a collective “we” sounded too generic, our literature review was weak, and I specifically got the comment: “do you understand the concept of co-authoring because it does not seem that you do?” I will admit to feeling defensive and internally thinking about how a professor and fifteen undergraduate students all writing an article together about the experience of coauthoring, could be accused of not understanding the concept of coauthoring, but I kept my frustrations to myself. I did not think letting students know how much the negative feedback bothered me was going to be helpful. I tried to put a positive spin on the feedback and reminded students that part of the writing process is that the writing has to go through main revisions before it is ready to be published.

We were given a week to make these extensive edits and it was during midterm week when all the undergraduate students were busy studying and taking tests. This meant that I ended up making most of the revisions. I had hoped that the revisions would be acceptable and that we had finally written the way the

editors wanted us to be writing. I was disappointed to receive an email from the editors that our article still did not meet their standards and so they were rejecting the article. Similar to the previous comments, the main issue the editors had was that we did not “fully understand what coauthoring means.” I sent back a polite email letting the editors know that we appreciate their efforts and feedback and then sent another email to my co-authors, letting them know that I also appreciated their efforts and that I would find another journal to submit this article to.

Students were understandably disappointed as the article represented a lot of time and effort of writing about our experiences with coauthoring. I re-assured everyone that we could find a different option for publication.

Second Journal Submission I spent time going through various CFP’s and eventually found another journal that I thought would be a good fit for our article. I decided to go ahead and submit a similar proposal to this journal that I had used for the previous one. The editors let me know that they thought our proposal sounded interesting and they would like to see an article. I ended up submitting the article that had been rejected from the previous journal. While I realize that was a risk, I thought that version was the best version of the article that we had created and the new journal had similar requirements to the previous journal.

Within a month of submitting the article, we received a “revise and resubmit” and several pages of comments that were critical of our “voice.” Some of those comments included such statements as the article “sounded like undergraduate students had written it” and that the tone of the chapter was “inappropriate and juvenile.” I emailed the editors and thanked them for the comments and then emailed students that we needed to revise the article again. By this point, more than a year had passed and fewer and fewer of my co-authors were responding to my emails. The three original students had graduated and moved on to other things in their lives.

The students that were still participating helped me in revising the article, with the comments helping to lead those revisions. Students still had hope but this last round of comments seemed particularly mean and students were complaining about why their thoughts and experiences were not being valued by the editors. I tried to calm everyone down and remind them of how much I appreciated their help in the writing and revising of the chapter. We continued to revise and submitted a heavily edited version that I

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Rejected: Co-authoring With Undergraduate Students • 112 thought had lost the unique voices of the individual students as we revised the article to use a united “we.”

We received another round of revision requests including more comments about the “juvenile writing styles” of the authors and the need to eliminate any “first person stories” as these “did not add to the knowledge that everyone already knows.” Our chapter went through four more intense revisions and feedback loops where we made every requested change and yet the feedback kept coming. The final version of the article did not resemble the original and as I read each version, I kept thinking how sad I was that this journal did not really want to hear the actual experiences of students, but instead wanted something else.

After seven intense revisions cycles and where I thought we had finally achieved an article that they would accept, I received the heartbreaking rejection letter from the editors that we had not achieved the level of academic prose that they required for us to be published in their journal. They also suggested that this article was not written in a way that any journal would be interested in.

The results of this rejection were devastating to students. I invited everyone to my office as I wanted to deliver the news in person and when I let them know that all their efforts at revising and changing their stories to meet the desires of faceless editors was in vain. Several students started to cry after I told them the news and several others rushed to comfort the crying students. This was a devastating blow to all of us after three intense years of revision and re-writing.

I always tell students in my classes that when you submit something for publication, the worst thing that could happen would be to be rejected, but if you don’t submit, you will still be rejected. However, watching half my co-authors sitting on the floor sobbing while the other co-authors tried to hug them and comfort them, just about broke my heart and made me realize that rejection can feel even worse than inaction.

Seeing students crying and feeling so dejected just increased my resolve to get this article published. I doubled my efforts to find a journal that I thought would be a good fit for including undergraduate student voices.

Third Journal Submission I found another journal that I thought would be a good fit for our article. I used an earlier version of the article that still contained more of my students’ voices and individual experiences as I thought that some of the versions had been edited too much.

The article made it through the first round and was sent to reviewers. We received extensive and in-depth feedback on what we needed to change to be able to be accepted by the journal. At this point, several more of the fifteen co-authors had graduated and several more stopped responding to my emails or texts. Only two students helped me make these edits and changes to the article. I re-submitted and hoped for the best. Unfortunately, the article was rejected for similar reasoning as the first journal editors had rejected us, “the writing feels juvenile” and “this article isn’t written at the level we have come to expect from our journal.”

I didn’t even tell students the article had been rejected. I didn’t want to see the dejection and sadness in their faces again. I finally decided that I would try one more time as I very much felt the expectations of the fifteen co-authors weighing on me.

Fourth Journal Submission I felt the weight of fifteen co-authors’ expectations that I would help them get published and that all the work that they had put into this project would result in a publication. I very much wanted students to be published and that goal is what kept me searching for another opportunity for our article.

I eventually found a journal that I thought might be a good fit. I wanted to make sure to get the editors approval before submitting the article and so emailed the editor and asked if our topic sounded like a good fit. A couple of days later, he responded and replied that he would be interested in seeing the article.

I made the executive decision to use the same version I had used for the third journal, as I thought that if this article was finally going to be published, I wanted my students’ voices to be centered.

Without consulting any of my co-authors, I submitted the article to the editors. I made the executive decision to only contact students to tell them if the article was accepted. Within a month, I received an email that the article was a “revise and re-submit.”

The readers suggested a few changes, but also expressed that they appreciated the inclusion of fifteen undergraduates writing about their experiences in the publishing process. This time, the journal appreciated the use of individual voices writing about their experiences.

I made the suggested changes and submitted the article. The reviewers and editors liked the changes and agreed to publish the article. Finally! It only took five years, four journals, and lots of revisions to finally have our article published. I let students know and all students eventually emailed me to let me know how

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Rejected: Co-authoring With Undergraduate Students • 113 excited they were to be part of this project that resulted in a publication.

I wanted to take a moment to honor my undergraduate co-authors and all of their experiences in this long process. Thanks to the efforts of Morgan Lanzo, Rebecca Spurgeon, Lauren Denhard, Danashia Tucker, Andrea Antezana, Robin Wiley, Reagan Cullen, Joy Dygowski, Anna Li, Ronald Klein, Emily Nagle, Seth Farris, Katherine Scifers, Jose Hernandez, and Lauren Harper. Also thanks to the journal, NETSOL: New Trends in Social & Liberal Sciences, for accepting our article for publication and giving us an opportunity to share our experiences with co-authoring.

Conclusion As an early career pre-tenure professor having now successfully co-authored with fifteen undergraduate students, I am glad that the project was ultimately worth the stress and time commitment. Students were also glad to finally be able to read the article and see their experiences be published. I would encourage faculty to pursue co-authoring opportunities, but would encourage people to be aware of some of the struggles of the process.

As I reflect back on the experience, I have a better sense of what changes I would like to make to the process and what may be helpful when thinking about future opportunities. As much as I appreciate all students involved, fifteen co-authors is a lot and I would not recommend this number in future opportunities. Trying to manage fifteen undergraduate students' schedules is chaotic enough without attempting to plan, write, revise and try to give equitable access to the document and involvement. I plan to have a more specific topic to write about. I think our efforts to write about co-authoring by co-authoring was too vague and this focus did not help in making sure all ideas connected together. I also found that having students write their own individual narratives and then combine them into one narrative led to a lot of problems and probably the critique that the writing was juvenile. In the future, I would recommend more of a cohesive voice and not individually focusing on sections.

I found this experience to be a learning opportunity about what “scholarly work” is defined as.

As our experiences suggest, there are journals that view scholarly work as needing to have a certain writing style and tone and that undergraduate student writing styles were described as being “juvenile.” I didn’t want to lose the voices of my students and wanted to give them a forum to share their opinions. In the future, I need to

look more for journals that appreciate student voices and experiences.

In writing this article, I went back and talked to all fifteen students about their experiences. All of them mentioned the crushing blow of being rejected from the first and second journals as both of these journals required a lot of revisions and back and forth conversations with the editors. Students mainly found the constant rejections to be very difficult to deal with and most said that the only reason they kept responding to my emails is because I kept the hope alive that the article would be published. Just like I was relying on them to continue to motivate me to pursue publication, they looked to me to continue and motivate them. I appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with the students and get published. I look forward to pursuing other opportunities for such collaboration and publishing.

Works Cited Brown, Renee, et al. “Taking on Turnitin: Tutors Advocating Change.” The Writing Center Journal, vol.

27, no. 1, 2007, pp. 7–28. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43442823.

Burks, Romi L., and Matthew M. Chumchal. “To Co-author or Not to Co-author: How to Write, Publish, and Negotiate Issues of Authorship with Undergraduate Research Students.” Science Signaling, vol. 2, no. 94, 2009.

Ervin, Christopher. “The Peer Perspective and Undergraduate Writing Tutor Research.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 12, no. 2, 2016.

Giuliano, Traci A. “Guiding Undergraduates Through the Process of First Authorship.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 10, 2019, pp. 857–867.

Jensen, Erin B., et al. “Coauthoring with Undergraduate Students.” NETSOL: New Trends in Social & Liberal Sciences, vol. 9, no. 1, 2024.

Jensen, Erin B., et al. “Engaging Undergraduate Student-athletes in Research and Publication Opportunities.” The Sport Journal, vol. 24, 2022.

Lettner-Rust, Heather. “Rejection: It’s Not the Last Step.” Explanation Points: Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition, edited by J.R. Gallagher & D.N. DeVoss, University of Colorado University Press, 2019, pp. 233–235 Mina, Lilian, et al. “Class-based Research in the English Composition Class.” Perspectives on Undergraduate Research and Mentoring, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013.

Morales, D. X., et al. “Faculty Motivation to Mentor Students Through Undergraduate Research Programs: A study of Enabling and Constraining

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Rejected: Co-authoring With Undergraduate Students • 114 Factors.” Research in Higher Education, vol. 58, no. 5, 2017, pp. 520–544.

Owens, Kim Hensely. “Your Book Has Arrived: Now What?.” Explanation Points: Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition, edited by J.R. Gallagher & D.N. DeVoss, University of Colorado University Press, 2019, pp. 303–305.

Plakhotnik, Maria S. “Co‐authoring with Undergraduate Students: An Emerging Process from the Semi‐periphery of the World of Science.”

Learned Publishing, vol. 35, no. 3, 2022, pp. 332–340.

Taylor, Megan, and Kathrine Jensen. “Engaging and Supporting a University Press Scholarly Community.” Publications, vol. 6, no. 2, 2018, pp.

13–17.

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EXHAUSTED: THE TOLL OF HYPER-REVISION ON A WRITING CENTER ADMINISTRATOR Andrea Efthymiou Queens College, City University of New York​ andrea.efthymiou@qc.cuny.edu Foreword I spent the better part of seven years working on the article that follows this foreword, previously titled “Writing Center as Public: Public Pedagogy and the Work of Undergraduate Writing Tutors.” Years ago, I viewed this article as the culminating piece from the dissertation I defended in 2015. Within a year of that defense, I was in a tenure-track job and felt very committed to getting this final piece of doctoral research into the world. I was proud of my main claim: that writing center work offers undergraduate tutors the unique experience of practicing and honing rhetorical skills with an authentic public and in supported ways. I saw tutors transferring their rhetorical skills among and between writing center and civic spaces in ways that felt kairotic to name. Prior to the publication of this special issue of Praxis devoted to the struggles of academic publishing, this article hasn’t seen the light of day. This foreword tells my story of hyper-revision of this piece.

I titled the first iteration of this piece “Public/Counterpublic: Writing Center Tutors as Rhetorical Actors” and submitted it to Community Literacy Journal in 2018. This early version began with an excerpt of field notes from my dissertation research in 2013–2014, where I described attending a Modern Orthodox Jewish prayer group facilitated by two undergraduate tutors who, at the time, worked at the writing center where I was the associate director. This early draft attempted to make the case that tutors transferred rhetorical skills from institutional spaces, like the writing center, to civic spaces, like communal prayer gatherings. I saw a connection between the pedagogical work tutors were doing in the writing center and the civic work they were doing in their lives beyond the institution. I was excited by the data collected through ten interviews I had done for my dissertation, but in that early attempt to publish the results, my argument was scattered and my evidence needed refining to strengthen my claims. This first submission resulted in a “desk reject,” never making it to anonymous reviewers because, according to CLJ editors, my piece was not a good fit for their journal.

I decided to revise, seeking feedback from one dissertation mentor and my peers in writing centers and writing studies. Rather than foreground field notes, the next draft of the article started traditionally, in

academic terms, with a literature review focused on situating my key terms. I eliminated much of the narrative evidence that was in the earlier draft, focusing on two tutors’ interviews as case studies, and decided to submit the work to Praxis: A Writing Center Journal in 2019. My work improved enough by academic standards to merit being sent out to two reviewers, but alas, both decided to decline publication. Reviewer one commented, “It was very difficult for me to grasp the clear facets of your argument, so much would need to be done in order to create those connections so the readers would be able to understand.” And reviewer two advised me to focus on “peer-ness,” foregoing my claim about tutors’ rhetorical development. While discouraging, this more substantive feedback from an audience of anonymous peers taught me that what I intended to communicate with this research was still not clear outside of my own head.

Recommitting myself to revision, I continued to hone my presentation and analysis of evidence with the goal of submitting to Writing Center Journal in 2020.

Focusing deeply on one case study, I refined my discussion of research methods in an effort to explain the richness I saw in one tutor’s interactions with students and fellow tutors in the writing center and in civic spaces beyond the institution. This close focus, I thought, allowed me to punctuate tutors’ learning transfer more intentionally and take the time to expand on how writing center work could be conceived as public pedagogy. Reviewers directed me to revise and resubmit, and I communicated with editors about ways to parse some divergent reviewer feedback. I felt good about the effort I was putting into these revisions vis-a-vis how my writing was being received. I made changes based on reviewers’ and editors’ feedback and received an ambiguous response in the second round of anonymous review. One reviewer deemed the piece ready for publication with minor revisions, but reviewer two—notorious reviewer two—was even harsher this second time around, taking issue with what they saw as flaws in my methodology. Following the long pattern already so familiar with this article, WCJ decided the piece was not ready for publication.

While this stream of rejections was exhausting, the piece that I had revised by 2021 represented important thinking about writing center work, specifically how tutors’ rhetorical skills may be much

Exhausted: The Toll of Hyper-revision on a Writing Center Administrator • 116 more sophisticated than writing center scholars had named in our research up to that point. I decided to aim high, in my view, and submit the piece to College Composition and Communication (CCC). I remember feeling intimidated by the journal, whose quality of work I had admired, and hoped that maybe I’d get a round of refreshing feedback from a new audience. My experience with CCC lived up to that expectation; reviewers saw what I was trying to say and directed me to moments in my writing that both highlighted and muddled my claims. I finally felt seen, that my argument was worth making, and that I could publish this work. One round of revisions turned into a second directive to revise and resubmit. Two of the reviewers were positive. The first stated, “You improved this article significantly - due to a sharper focus on public pedagogies and especially the implications for writing center spaces to be sites for more authentic public engagement that is not tied to school-based notions of writing or tutoring.” Another reviewer noted that, as a writing center director, they viewed my research as “another reminder of how overlooked the work conducted by tutors in the center can be.” But again, yet another reviewer took issue with my methods, as well as with how I was defining “public”: “The distinction is that public rhetoric is out in the community. It is not campus based. You frame public rhetoric as work beyond the classroom, but I think that isn't accurate—it is work beyond the campus.” This is good feedback to have, but so many years into this project, I was tired.

By the time the editors of CCC requested this second round of revision in 2022, I had survived a global pandemic, earned tenure, was starting a new role in my college’s dean’s office, straddling the administrative life of a writing center director and director of academic planning and first-year programs.

I was preparing to make a mid-career move to a new job at a different institution and decided to pull my piece from the publication pipeline. In short, the toll of hyper-revision had worn me out. I no longer felt connected to the work and was ready to move on.

In looking back at this article from where I am now in my career, I feel both satisfaction and disillusionment. On the one hand, I ultimately developed a research agenda drawing predominantly on my administrative work, writing mostly about how identity circulates in writing centers and how to mentor undergraduate research in our spaces. I am proud of this work, which has informed my service to my students, department, and the field. On the other hand, this article was an attempt to articulate core theoretical principles at work in writing centers that I believe are

important but that, as a pre-tenure faculty member, I was not able to share publicly with my peers. Taking an even longer view, this journey demonstrates how the praxis-oriented work of producing texts about administrative organization is valued over the inductive, inquiry-driven work that I tried, for years, to get into the world. That I was able to publish texts about how to administrate bodies in writing centers says something about the labor-based economy that writing centers are necessarily a part of. We are, whether we like or not, implicated in neo-liberal higher education, organizing bodies in the interest of capital, retention, and persistence to degree. I leveraged our field’s desire for how-to publications in a way that earned me tenure at the expense of other ideas that also really mattered to me but would take years to develop. Reflecting on this publication process has me thinking of increasing course loads, growing portfolios of administrative responsibilities, and tightening budgets for conference attendance. The demands of the modern American university increasingly are at odds with offering emergent scholars the time to think, write, and revise.

Further, editors in our field—and I speak as one—likewise feel strained as our own labor structures, administrative loads, and tenuous course releases do not support the time necessary to truly serve writing studies as a field. So while the work of producing and supporting scholarship is some of the most meaningful of my career, the time needed to do the work well is simply not built into higher education today. As I rejoice in finally placing this long-fought article in the world, I wonder what the next decade of publishing in higher education will look like and worry that deeply inquiry-driven scholarship will become devalued in our increasingly high-paced, outcomes-oriented, techo-driven world.

The Writing Center as Public: Public Pedagogy and the Work of Undergraduate Writing Tutors Writing center administrators and researchers devote ample attention to identifying the myriad ways undergraduate tutors support their peers in writing for college courses. However, less common in conversations about the value of writing center work is the idea that peer tutoring also supports undergraduate tutors’ own rhetorical development. Using a case study of one tutor’s reflection on her own enactment of writing center pedagogy, combined with a reading of writing she shared that reflects her values in writing center work, I argue here that writing center pedagogy necessarily involves public pedagogy. In conceiving of writing center work in this way, I reposition the work

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Exhausted: The Toll of Hyper-revision on a Writing Center Administrator • 117 of undergraduate tutors to directly connect tutoring pedagogy to the development of transferable knowledge as public rhetors.

Specifically, undergraduate tutors practice skills as public rhetors within their writing center sessions and transfer these rhetorical skills to their own writing and activism beyond the writing center.

Where Does Public Pedagogy Live? A Revised Definition of Publics and Public Pedagogy Before its application in composition studies, public pedagogy as a theory emerged from work in the broader field of education. Sandlin, O’Malley, and Burdick review 420 scholarly sources published between 1894-2010 that identify “public pedagogy” as a key term, mapping its use in defining citizenship, popular culture, informal institutions and public space, dominant cultural discourses, and activism. Their work, along with that of Henry Giroux’s, amplifies the tension that arises between formal classroom education and non-institutionalized work by public intellectuals committed to resistance. Building on this tradition of understanding the place of public pedagogy as existing somewhere between classrooms and the world beyond schools, I consider public pedagogy’s role in writing centers as creating a liminal space that serves as a site of resistance between the school and non-school spheres.

This liminality calls into question the kinds of rhetorical activity that constitute publics. Specifically, writing studies has worked to define the limits of how the field views publics and public pedagogy as existing predominantly within first-year writing courses or squarely in classroom-based spaces like service-learning courses. In their introduction to The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement, John Ackerman and David Coogan describe how publics have been figured within the discipline of English, the big tent that contains rhetoric and composition, claiming that “the public” is “a landing pad for students, a literate place where they can test what we have taught them with imaginary audiences. What this suggests to us is that our disciplinary achievements have not been earned through everyday contact with publics, but through a hard-earned insularity from them” (2). Ackerman and Coogan’s critique of composition studies’ view of publics here puts the public at a distance from the institution, something aspirational, and indeed only imagined by students and faculty in English, composition, or rhetoric classrooms.

Furthering this critique of the isolation of the writing classroom, David Fleming argues for the relevance of

publics in response to historical critiques of formal schooling. Fleming identifies rhetorical scholarship that positions writing for school as “discourse in which any authentic purpose is an illusion” (213). In other words, as a field, we have a tendency to lay claim to a public with whom we never actually engage.

There have been attempts to upset this binary of writing in the classroom versus writing in the world in theorizing public pedagogy. Brian Gogan defines public pedagogy as a way “to avoid this situational binary” through his revisioning of the letter-to-the-editor assignment; however, such definition only reifies the classroom as one option for a space where public work can happen. In taking up the letter-to-the-editor genre, Gogan argues that it is possible for a writing teacher to authentically constitute a public through this genre because the teacher legitimizes an actual, not imagined, audience. This concept of authenticity-as-legitimation suggests that an assignment authorizes participation from an audience, thereby constituting a public for student writers, even within the confines of a classroom. While Gogan reframes the value of the letter-to-the-editor assignment, his notion of publics still remains securely situated inside an English composition classroom, not so much avoiding a binary as re-inscribing one.

In my vision of public pedagogy and the constituting of authentic publics, school and non-school spaces need not necessarily function as binaries to create sites of resistance that serve an educational role. Nancy Grimm, consistent with Fleming and Gogan, notes that many of the opportunities for collaboration and community-practice for undergraduate students are highly orchestrated and inauthentic. Grimm identifies that the writing center resituates this reality of undergraduate education: “One place where undergraduates are able to participate in an authentic practice of community is in a writing center where they contribute to the teaching mission of the institution” (97). Grimm’s notion that writing centers are communities of practice differs from Geller, et. al.’s landmark text Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice in that Grimm envisions the work of tutoring as potentially and intentionally in communication with institutional mission. In Grimm’s view, the writing center is more than a space where tutors support writers, although that is always implicit in any understanding of writing center work; instead, the writing center is a rhetorical location, one of action in the “authentic practice of community” where undergraduate tutors, in particular, enact public discourse through assessing the exigency of the

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Exhausted: The Toll of Hyper-revision on a Writing Center Administrator • 118 rhetorical situation each tutoring session presents.

Further, if we understand, as Grimm does, that tutoring is a way for those undergraduate students who do such work to participate in “the teaching mission of the institution,” tutors’ work necessarily enacts public pedagogy, one not taught exclusively through classroom learning, nor wholly service oriented; the work of tutoring—for undergraduate tutors themselves—is a public activity that both involves them in institutional missions directed towards teaching and towards cultivating civic awareness and responsibility during their undergraduate lives.

Writing center scholarship comes close to considering the civic implications of writing center work, inasmuch as our scholarship addresses community writing centers (CWCs), but there is still work to be done in naming and theorizing how peer tutoring can be defined as public pedagogy. CWCs actively promote cross-cultural and inter-cultural relations beyond college campuses as part of their missions to serve a broad community, particularly communities lacking resources for job placement and public services (Rousculp 26). As Rousculp reflects, scholarship on CWCs focuses on the civic impact these centers have on people in the community outside of the institution and structural or programming concerns in sustaining a CWC. While Rousculp briefly considers how the work of “student writing assistants’”—like undergraduate tutors—enhances these students’ abilities for collaboration, little attention is paid to the complex pedagogical and rhetorical work undergraduate tutors enact in CWCs or traditional, student-serving writing centers. I argue here that, regardless of a center’s location or specific mission, peer tutors create spaces for underrepresented viewpoints in their writing center sessions and such acts of resistance prepare tutors to do similar advocacy work in their public lives outside of the writing center.

In defining the writing center as a space to nurture public pedagogy, analogous to first-year writing and service-learning courses, I acknowledge that writing centers offer tutors sustained practice as public rhetors; peer tutoring then cultivates, for undergraduate writing tutors, agency within the center that they can transfer into their academic writing, extracurricular activities, and civic lives. While writing classrooms aim for highly designed and controlled interactions, writing centers enact a pedagogy that is more authentically public, where rhetor and audience—or tutor and writer—interactions move “away from the classroom and towards community” (Fleming 214). Using theories of public pedagogy alongside writing center scholarship then helps us name moments when writing

center tutors communicate in ways that move talk away from the college writing assignment into the sphere of tutors’ and students’ public, communal lives.

Going Public: An Undergraduate Tutor Enacts Interpretive Pedagogy In response to our field’s limited vision of publics, I turn to my case study of Charlotte1 to show how the writing center offers a space for authentic public engagement. I interviewed “Charlotte,” who chose her own pseudonym, along with nine additional participants who had been undergraduate writing center tutors at a private, women’s college with a religious-driven mission informed by Jewish Orthodoxy. This interview data was collected as part of an ethnographic study of one college writing center, examining how the religious-driven mission influenced writing center work. The mission was built into the college’s curriculum in that all undergraduate students were required to enroll in a specified number of credits towards Jewish Studies courses. In addition to two faculty tutors and three administrators who worked in this writing center, all peer tutors in this center were exclusively undergraduate women, reflecting the general undergraduate student body at this women’s college. As “peer tutors are, and by definition must be, students” (Efthymiou and Fitzgerald, 2016, p. 182), the unique perspectives of undergraduate tutors are crucial to understanding literacy and rhetorical practices of the larger student population.

In the case of the writing center where this study took place, as in many university and secondary school writing centers, the center was not operating as or with a community partner; therefore, there was no community-driven imperative. As a result, the writing center did not have a civic or public engagement curriculum in place for tutor education. I note these details to make clear that there was no explicit directive from writing center administrators motivating tutors to “go public.” In contrast to courses or programs with “service learning” or “civic engagement” designations, writing centers, although not classroom spaces, are not easily defined as spaces beyond their institutions where students can form new, extra-institutional relationships, as a student would when working with a community partner like a immigrant resource center or shelter beyond campus. Regardless of this absence of an official civic engagement designation, my research reveals that tutors consistently employ practices of public pedagogy in their writing center work. So whether or not an undergraduate writing center is explicitly civic-driven—or religious-driven—I argue that writing centers are complex spaces that offer

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Exhausted: The Toll of Hyper-revision on a Writing Center Administrator • 119 opportunities to explore how public pedagogies are enacted by tutors.

In marking the space between classrooms and communities, Elenore Long theorizes interpretive pedagogies to “stress that students take public action when they venture somewhere new to build working relationships with others” (158). Although not a location “off ” campus, a writing center provides a non-classroom space for both students and tutors to form relationships outside of their affinity groups.

Long’s conception of interpretive pedagogy, then, is useful in defining how undergraduate students who work as writing center tutors constitute publics and enact public pedagogies. Tutors affect their local publics by working with stakeholders, in particular student peers, to confront and revise familiar stereotypes within their communities, creating a liminal space of resistance central to my definition of public pedagogy.

Charlotte described a rhetorical exchange within the writing center that demonstrates how peer tutoring in writing employs interpretive pedagogy to constitute publics through actions that revise familiar stereotypes that circulate within the institution and the community. In the writing center session Charlotte described, a student came to the center because she struggled with an art history assignment that asked the student to describe a nude statue. According to Charlotte, the art history assignment involved visiting a local art museum and choosing a statue from a list of options designated by the professor to describe in writing. During the writing center session, Charlotte soon realized that this particular assignment presented challenges because the student felt that describing a nude statue was in direct conflict with her level of religious observance. Charlotte indicated that the student felt the assignment was not tsnias, a Hebrew term the student used that Charlotte defined as referring to the Orthodox Jewish concept of “sexual modesty.” As a woman who also identifies as Modern Jewish Orthodox, Charlotte’s literacy of the student’s discourse community allowed her to understand—although not necessarily agree with—the student’s interpretation of the assignment. Because of their shared knowledge of the word tsnias, Charlotte understood the implication that this student, too, felt immodest writing about a nude statue. Charlotte used her own knowledge of the student’s discourse community to create a space for listening to the student, offering options that helped the student see alternative ways of situating the course assignment within a particular framework of religious observance.

Charlotte’s knowledge of the art history student’s discourse community positions her to both empathize with the student’s discomfort as well as offer alternative ways of understanding the assignment so the student could negotiate her own rhetorical positioning in relationship to the context of the assignment, the professor’s expectations, and the student’s own religious beliefs. Charlotte’s continued reflection on this session demonstrates that she is not attempting to necessarily align or deviate from the student’s level of religious observance; instead, Charlotte used her shared identity with the student to move talk away from the writing assignment to talk about the student’s life, thereby constructing a “community that supports dialogue across difference” (Flower 21). Charlotte said: The session ended up turning into a conversation about how [the student] had asked her rabbi if she was allowed to take the course to begin with. [The rabbi] said, ‘yes, you should take certain steps to ensure that you’re not overstepping the bounds of modesty.’ [But the student] was very uncomfortable with the subject matter and was considering switching into music. I was trying very much to just convey her options to her and just support whatever she wanted to do.

It is tempting to understand this reflection as a description of friendly banter, something a tutor does to establish trust with a writer. And indeed, this trust is one part of tutoring. But what is easy to gloss as casual talk is also a rhetorical move that is distinctly communal in nature. For Charlotte’s session to move forward, she employed interpretive pedagogy to recognize and validate a student’s literacy practices and subsequent agency in light of those practices. While Charlotte’s session, on the surface, appears to be specific to the religious-driven mission of the institution where the session took place, the work of recognizing a student’s literacy practices and discourse community is crucial to writing center tutoring broadly, and also consistent with theories of public pedagogy.

Interpretive pedagogies “support authentic, rigorous rhetorical engagement with others across difference” (Long 106), and tutors, like Charlotte, often draw upon their shared knowledge of students’ discourses to do this work well. Linguist James Paul Gee reminds us that “discourses are ways of being world” (6), a constellation of interactions extending beyond simply talk to reveal the implicit understandings of communities based on literacy practices, shared knowledge, and common belief systems.

Undergraduate writing tutors’ discursive practices

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Exhausted: The Toll of Hyper-revision on a Writing Center Administrator • 120 represent findings that have been explored across disciplinary contexts, yet have not been closely considered in writing center studies, such as the importance of shared cultural experiences and written and spoken discourse in rhetorical performance (Fine; Moss).

Charlotte’s writing center tutoring shows how she gains authentic experiences negotiating dominant discourse and resistance to norms within the writing center, which more closely represent public engagement between school and non-school than would occur within a college classroom. Although Charlotte called the student’s art history assignment “an innocuous thing” in our interview, her shared understanding of the student’s relationship with a religious principal—again, tsnias, or sexual modesty—allowed Charlotte to authorize a kind of public engagement, albeit one between the student herself, an assignment, and a professor—that the student previously viewed as off-limits. Charlotte casually describes how she offered the student choices for revision: “I told her ‘Use the word bicep. Use the word chest.’” Seemingly mundane, these suggestions for specific language to describe the form of the statue for the art history class, combined with Charlotte’s positioning of options for the student to revise her own understanding of religious observance within the broader context of an academic discipline, offered the student possibilities which could help the student see outside of a singular context. Because Charlotte moved talk with this student-writer “away from the classroom and toward community” (Fleming 214), Charlotte enacted public pedagogy, authorizing public communication that was previously unfamiliar to her undergraduate peer.

Charlotte enacts interpretive public pedagogy by circulating new insights through interactions between a writer, a reader, and the situated context in which the student’s text was constructed, highlighting the tutor’s rhetorical savvy, illuminating the roles of rhetor and audience that both the tutor and the student occupy at different times. Charlotte’s method of creating space for questioning and listening allows her to engage with the student both as a sophisticated rhetor and as an attentive audience. Charlotte also serves as a literacy sponsor (Brandt) for the student to begin developing these same rhetorical skills as she engages with Charlotte in the micro-public of the writing center, learning about her options for institutional life.

While writing studies continues to identify the limitations of a writing classroom as insulated from actual publics, the writing center is a material space

where public pedagogy is actively at work. Rosa Eberly highlights the fluid line between private and public, identifying that we understand private conversations as drafts for public discourse. Eberly uses the term protopublic to name work in writing classrooms “because writing classrooms are in many senses prefab–the group has come together for institutional more than overtly political purposes–and because the instructor has a different position than the students vis a vis institutional power” (172). These protopublics are spaces for invention, process, drafting of publics because students think, write, and create drafts of public discourse but not for an authentic public.

Charlotte’s work tutoring a student writer extends the classroom protopublic into a more developed and authentic public constituted through the writing center session. Although the art history assignment will never truly “get out into the world,” Charlotte’s conversation with the student writer does. Charlotte’s talk in this writing center session extends beyond the art history assignment to potentially affect the student’s curricular choices, for this student’s decision to remain (or not) in her art history class was certainly influenced by her writing center session with Charlotte. Likewise, Charlotte’s pedagogy responds to the exigence of the situation to draw on her shared knowledge of the student’s religious life and present options for the student-writer.

Charlotte’s description of her session demonstrates that she is a tutor-rhetor who modeled possibilities for revised public engagement. Charlotte’s rhetorical moves, her choices as a tutor situated in a specific context, convey options that challenge her student’s conception of religious modesty and perform a pedagogy that Brian Gogan would describe as constitutive of a public: When publicity is understood as an activity, pedagogy assumes the power to authorize publicness. Understood as an activity, publicity signifies the process by which a rhetor seeks, engages and widens the attention of publics. […] Thus, this pedagogy teaches that rhetoric is constitutive of publics and emphasizes the processes through which student rhetors might make publics and public knowledge.

(539) Following Gogan’s imperative to understand publicity as rhetorical activity, Charlotte’s expansion of options for her student is an act of creating knowledge together. From the simple suggestions for language—bicep and chest—that normalized talk around an object of study to the deeply situated discussion of a student’s religious belief and rabbinical

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Exhausted: The Toll of Hyper-revision on a Writing Center Administrator • 121 advice, Charlotte engages in a complex interaction that authentically invoked the student and tutor as audience and rhetor at different times. This exchange of rhetorical roles constitutes public activity, while identifying peer tutoring in these terms names a tutor’s work with her students as a public rhetorical process.

Writing center tutoring, as evidenced by Charlotte’s description of her session with the art history student, offered Charlotte experience using her shared identity to form alternative public interactions, ones not presented by a faculty instructor nor by, in this case, a religious leader in the student’s discourse community. Charlotte’s interactions in this writing center session, as in many tutors’ sessions, reveal how undergraduate tutors enact public pedagogy in the extracurricular space of the writing center, enabling authentic public engagement that contrasts with the experience of a traditional college writing assignment or classroom.

Extending Public Pedagogy to Consider the Possibility of Transfer The subtlety of Charlotte’s resistance to discursive norms within her writing center cannot be overlooked, and in fact, may have also informed this tutor’s rhetorical and pedagogical engagement beyond the writing center and the institution. Charlotte connected her writing center work to her larger civic life, saying she was interested in “egalitarian forms of Judaism.”

When I asked Charlotte to share a sample of her writing that reflects this egalitarianism that is connected to her writing center work, she shared an article she published in her college newspaper, written earlier in that same year of our interview.2 Charlotte’s article reflected her viewpoint on gender and sexuality as related to Jewish Modern Orthodox principles of modesty that she claimed ran counter to dominant discourse within in her religious community. Her writing, which echoes some of the kinds of resistance she asserted in her tutoring session described earlier, was disseminated in print and on the web at the college newspaper’s site, as well as being shared widely on social media.

Charlotte’s facility with confronting familiar cultural stereotypes with students within the writing center was a skill she extended beyond the center through her writing. Charlotte’s article critiqued a popular book taught in Jewish Orthodox high schools that encouraged students to observe the imperative of shomer negiah, or the prohibition of “physical contact with members of the opposite sex” before marriage (Birnbaum). In her article, Charlotte disrupts the status quo by claiming that such prohibition promotes a

culture of fear around human sexuality and unfair judgement about a person’s level of religious observance. Further, Charlotte’s article argues that the culture surrounding teaching religious tenets on physical contact dehumanizes both men and women, reinforcing negative stereotypes of each. Charlotte’s article claims that the book she critiques frames women as “used goods” and men as “pigs.” Charlotte’s article creates a counter discourse to dominant views in Modern Jewish Orthodoxy by advocating against the use of the book in question in Jewish schools. By highlighting that such texts reinforce fear and negative gender stereotypes, Charlotte mobilizes towards mutual respect between and among the sexes.

Like her work in the tutoring session with the art history student, Charlotte’s writing creates a liminal space of resistance between school and non-school spheres. Charlotte contextualizes her public writing within a culturally specific socio-historical context, offering her audience a first-hand account of her own experience as a young student who felt shame and fear around certain interpretations of modesty within her discourse community. The normative discourse to which Charlotte responds is evident both in the book she critiques, as well as in a public response she received from the book’s author. The book’s author, whose response was also published in the college newspaper, framed physical touch as an “error” that is “committed” and worthy of redemption, a redemption the author compares to a hypothetical American slave trader who would later become a voice of anti-slavery.

Such charged discourse—which essentially equates a young woman who has decided not to have physical contact with her boyfriend as a converted slave-owner—is evidence of just how progressive Charlotte’s views could be understood within her community.

This exchange between Charlotte and the author she critiques—all published in her college’s newspaper as articles in dialogue with each other—performs the kind of resistance that defines public pedagogy. Charlotte’s argument functions as an intervention into religious education that has a history within Jewish Modern Orthodoxy and is relevant to her audience. Charlotte further contextualizes her argument within the cultural politics of her local community in that she calls out specific Jewish Orthodox youth organizations and prominent religious leaders who advocate for prohibiting touch through the use of fear tactics and negative stereotypes. Long calls attention to the combination of rhetorical activity and context specific history in identifying how students go public in courses: “these two features—a

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Exhausted: The Toll of Hyper-revision on a Writing Center Administrator • 122 countervalent rhetorical force and a highly charged historical narrative—infuse both the distinct ways students go public in such courses and the ways teachers support students’ efforts to do so” (171, my emphasis).

Unlike Long’s configuration, however, Charlotte’s self-sponsored writing (Roozen; Rosinski) for her college paper, like the rhetorical action she takes in her writing center sessions, exists beyond the curriculum.

Charlotte’s acts of going public are not orchestrated by specific teachers or assignments; they are part and parcel of writing center work.

Charlotte’s interview and writing sample taken together lead me to wonder about the degree to which writing center work and civic engagement interanimate each other. I am tempted to read Charlotte’s public writing as an extension of the public pedagogy she enacted in her sessions, suggesting that this writing may be informed by the rhetorical skills she practiced and developed in the writing center. But because this study only asked participants to submit writing after the interviews, it is difficult to know to what extent tutoring helps undergraduate peer tutors transfer learning and rhetorical skills from the center to their self-sponsored public writing. Future research that extends the work I have begun with Charlotte might take up Engel et al.’s model of expansive framing, which deliberately moves across contexts and authorship roles to study and promote the transfer of learning.

These snapshots of Charlotte’s tutoring alongside her civic engagement evinces that “writing transfer success and challenges cannot be understood without exploring how individual learners are processing prior and new knowledge or without attention to learners' social-cultural spaces, including the standards and curricula that shape them” (Moore 7). Dana Driscoll’s research on transfer in writing centers argues for intentionally constructing peer-tutoring curricula that involves metacognitive reflection, an intervention that could have productively added to the findings from Charlotte’s interview and writing sample. The field’s history of considering learning transfer and writing center work often focuses exclusively on tutoring sessions. The Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (Hughes, et. al.) has pointed in the direction of tutor transfer beyond the writing center, and Bonnie Devet’s work begins to consider the benefit of peer tutor labor on tutors themselves.

and a student-writer who writes for a public audience.

How can we—writing teachers and writing center administrators—help set an educational scene so more students do what Charlotte has done? Over past fifteen years, college campuses in the United States have engaged in civic engagement around black lives, equity for trans people, awareness of sexual assault, and activism around decolonization; yet past work on rhetorical education and civic engagement demonstrates that students rarely, if ever, attribute their rhetorical education to learning in composition classrooms (Alexander and Jarrett). In my view of writing centers as fertile ground for public pedagogy, creating and negotiating sites of resistance, I suggest building centers with an eye towards researching and understanding how tutoring writing provides potential for peer tutor transfer beyond the university.

Charlotte’s reflection on tutoring, paired with her writing for the college newspaper, offer a fruitful beginning to consider what dispositions, or habits of mind (Devet), promote transfer for tutors between writing centers and wider publics. Charlotte’s case compliments what research has recently shown about the value of encouraging undergraduates to learn through cultivating a personal connection to their writing: “students find writing projects meaningful when they have opportunities to connect their writing to peers, family, and community members important to them” (Eodice, Geller, and Lerner 331). These personal connections should not be exclusive from writing center work. Writing center pedagogies may support the development of public rhetorics through building on peer tutors’ personal connections, be that gender equity and religious egalitarianism, as in Charlotte’s case, or otherwise. Taking the time and creating the space for tutors to articulate their personal connection to tutoring and considering how those values and interests exist in tutors’ civic lives could contribute to students’ rhetorical education in impactful ways.

Notes 1.​ The data presented here was collected as part of IRB-approved study #398211-1.

2.​ In an effort to preserve Charlotte’s anonymity, I do not offer the title of her article here or any other identifying information. I use direct quotations minimally and paraphrase whenever possible.

Writing Center Pedagogy as Public Pedagogy Charlotte is an exemplar: a writing center tutor who employs public pedagogy by creating sites of resistance Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 23, No 2 (2026) www.praxisuwc.com

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