This essay explores contemplative pedagogies in the writing center, a space the authors believe allows for practices of mindfulness, awareness, and reflection in organic ways, as writing center pedagogy focuses on the importance of the relational, flattening hierarchies, and a focus on the conversation between writer and tutor (or between…

This article illustrates how we incorporated discourse-based interviews (DBIs) into a mixed-methods research study informed by the heuristics of institutional ethnography (IE). As the first stage of a longitudinal study designed to understand what, where, and how "writing" means across our university, our research used DBIs in a writing…

This program profile describes the establishment and development of the English Language Learner Writing Center (ELLWC) at Miami University. The Center's mission is to help multilingual (ML) students whose first language (L1) is other than English build writing skills while improving their academic English proficiency. The ELLWC's profile details…

This paper describes the design and establishment of the first peer-staffed writing center in Thailand, including its inspiration, its planning, the tutor-training process, and its implementation up to and through the COVID-19 pandemic. As writing centers are relatively unknown in Southeast Asia, the writing center in focus was a fortunate…

Southern University's Baton Rouge campus is the flagship of the only historically Black university system in the nation. Southern University has been, like many other postsecondary institutions across the United States, facing ongoing problems of declining enrollment and retention. Reeling from a decade of recession and deep budget cuts starting…

The Writing Center at Metropolitan State University of Denver, which serves a diverse population, rejects the accommodation model, which depends upon disclosure of difference, in favor of the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which assumes difference exists and plans in advance for it. Hiring, tutoring, space design, and marketing…

Students who receive instruction in discipline-specific communication perform better in introductory and upper-level STEM courses. In this study, researchers investigate how writing center intervention can aid STEM faculty in revising assignment rubrics and conveying to students the discourse conventions and expectations for writing tasks. The…

In this article, we discuss what it means to learn troublesome "threshold concepts" about writing that cannot be adequately grappled with in a single course or assignment. Here, two faculty members and a graduate of a writing major reflect on elements of the writing curriculum, the writing center practicum, and the learning dispositions…

Labor performed by writing center consultants in sessions is inherently emotional. While writing center professionals can never alleviate fully the emotional demands placed on consultants during sessions, we can work to educate our staff about empathetic engagement with clients, and we can create structures and practices conducive to a supportive…

Writing centers provide a crucial site for multilingual writers to experience generative and productive conversation about their writing projects and for their language and cultural experiences to be appreciated as sources for meaning-making. For this to be possible, tutors must understand the phenomenon and problems of standard language ideology…

The forces of globalization and the development of English as a lingua franca have made many scholars and practitioners highlight the urgent need for foreign language literacy. The Norman M. Eberly Multilingual Writing Center (MWC) at Dickinson College addresses that need by offering peer writing tutoring in eleven languages. This profile explains…

Scholars have offered research and theory about emotional labor and the feeling of emotion in rhetoric and composition, but we have little if any such research on writing center work specifically. Drawing on data from a year-long qualitative study of writing center directors' labor, this article examines writing center directors' emotional labor…

Writing centers can be staffed wholly or partially by tutors with little training in science writing. This article suggests that an emphasis on scientific rhetoric, not content, may be most useful for training tutors and developing handouts and checklists to aid novice science writers in invention and revision. The article also suggests that a…

The one-on-one format of tutoring, which is the norm for "writing" centers, can foster the much-maligned view of a "writing center" as a fix-it shop and undermine the role of the tutor as a co-learner and facilitator of peer-to-peer interactions. The peer-interactive "writing center approach", presented here, moves…

Writing centers are like organisms, performing in and living in an educational environment: evolving, altering, adapting. Given this organic quality, a key way to understand how writing centers handle the teaching of writing is to examine them through the lens of ecocomposition. Focusing on the organic nature of writing, ecocompositionists borrow…