Tutor reports on writing consultations are seemingly indigenous to writing center culture, yet their audiences and functions are, to borrow a phrase from Muriel Harris, "as varied as the students who stream in and out" of the center ("Talking" 27). Conversations at conferences and on the WCenter listserv, as well as writing…

Writers who do not speak English as a native language perennially have presented unique challenges to the writing center, for these writers, who study English as a second language (ESL), or even as a third or fourth foreign language (EFL), may also be unacquainted with American academic discourse. ESL/EFL writers may face unfamiliarity with…

This article proposes a taxonomy of methodologies to understand how knowledge is--and can be--made in the complex context of writing centers. The authors found it to be a powerful tool to generate critical thinking, helping to classify, critique, and retrieve knowledge. Likewise, they believe it can serve various audiences. For example, those…

Despite their experience as writing center directors (WCDs) and their knowledge of the literature on writing center administration, the authors wondered why their interactions with upper level administrators (ULAs) so often left them feeling angered or mystified. The all-too-clear evidence of their ineffectual responses to their seemingly…

This article presents the text of a speech presented at The International Writing Centers Association and the National Conference on Peer Tutoring (IWCA-NCPTW) joint conference in Baltimore, Maryland, in November 2010. It stemmed from a larger project--a collection of previously published and new essays titled "Writing Together: Collaboration in…

Michael Mattison's "Someone to Watch Over Me: Reflection and Authority in the Writing Center" explores the problem of audience for tutors' reflective writing. In Mattison's case, tutoring practices and learning are undermined because reflective writing leads consultants to feel as though they are being spied upon by the writing center director.…

Janangelo's article "The Polarities of Context in the Writing Center Conference" appeared in "WCJ" in 1988, and in that piece, one he wrote as a graduate student at New York University, Jangangelo identifies what to the author is likely the central tension in writing center work: local versus general context. While other authors have explored the…

Conferences with one's own students are always influenced by personal context. They differ from first-time tutorial encounters in that teachers have "personal knowledge" of their student writers' strengths and weaknesses--where they are with a piece of writing and where writing tutors' experience tells them they need to be in order to succeed in…

"The Function of Talk in the Writing Conference: A Study of Tutorial Conversation" is, the author thinks, an excellent example of what a well-designed analytical study of conversational narratives can reveal. People in this field have long made the claim--anecdotally, for the most part--that writing center tutors occupy a liminal space between…

In 1991 when Diana George, Ed Lotto, and the author were publishing their first issue as "WCJ" editors, this multivoiced essay struck her as a prime example of their editorial belief that writing centers could be "agents of change in the academy." As Gail Okawa and Tom Fox observe, "Most universities are inhospitable to more democratic definitions…

Everyone involved in writing centers must recognize that the educational community of the 1990s will continue to grow more diverse culturally, linguistically, scholastically. Given this diversity, students, teachers, and tutors will become more, not less, interdependent. The ready, predictable answers and assumptions that existed once in a…

Nancy Welch integrates writing center work into the business of composition studies more seamlessly and skillfully than anyone. She takes as a given the writing center as a site for transformative literacy studies. She places writers, purposefully and respectfully, at the center of her work. Yet she doesn't, ironically, make a lot of noise about…

In "Multiliteracies, Social Futures, and Writing Centers," John Trimbur outlines an enduring charge for writing centers that's not often referenced and still not realized in much of the field's scholarship, let alone the programming and staff development. Trimbur invites everyone to interrogate the literacy needs that circulate through and around…

In this article, the author mentions his experience at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) because he thinks it is fairly indicative of recent trends in writing center theory and practice to see literacy as a multimodal activity in which oral, written, and visual communication intertwine and interact. He says this notion of multiliteracies has…

Queer theory challenges what is "normal" and questions the mechanics behind individuals and their institutions' efforts to maintain "normal." Queer theory can help a person get over himself/herself, and, as a result, the words, bodies, spaces, and beliefs that he/she holds dear will be called upon to respond. Harry Denny's article instructs…