Andrea, a doctoral student in education, has a demanding schedule. She has a young child, a job, a house on the market, and a spouse who travels so much that she can only see him on certain weekends. To cope with these unavoidable distractions to her research, she found the writing center and was paired with a fellow graduate student, Charisse.…

Writing center tutors play a key role in advancing L2 writers' language learning because the tutorial interaction involves the introduction of new language and vocabulary at the point of need or interest. This tutor-research case study presents a detailed, complex portrait of how a second language writer in a US writing center learned and used…

This essay presents case studies of "course-based tutoring" (CBT) and one-to-one tutorials in two sections of developmental first-year composition (FYC) at a large West Coast research university. The author's study uses a combination of rhetorical and discourse analyses and ethnographic and case study multi-methods to investigate both the scenes…

Presents three Hispanic students' experiences with the writing center. Suggests that the writing center centers students by helping them find a voice in the academy and by empowering them in ways that traditional institutional authority does not. Lists four ways in which the writing center can help Hispanic students. (SG)

Positions writing centers in the painful paradoxes of literacy work and strips away the belief in innocence to make scholar-teachers more aware of the ways that literacy practices reproduce the social order and regulate access and subjectivity. Uses two stories about writing center students to illustrate the ways writing centers are inadvertently…

Uses case studies of intensive writing courses in government, history, and computer science to explain the differences between the disciplinary contexts for writing, and to help tutors in their work with students from those disciplines. (RS)

Discusses the experiences of one student as she used her journal writing and the resources of a writing laboratory to adapt her expressive writing to the requirements of academic discourse. (RS)

Uses the metaphor of an ecosystem to describe the interactions, as revealed in a series of writing assignments, between an undergraduate being tutored at the writing center and an undergraduate writing tutor and participant in a writing workshop. (MM)

Examines a writing conference between a tutor and a student, both feminists. Discusses the conflicts expressed by the tutor and the student as they attempt to espouse feminist values within a patriarchal system. Concludes that feminism (and good tutoring) will have a chance only if students have options and the power to choose. (RS)

Summarizes womens' five basic ways of knowing: silence; received knowledge; subjective knowledge; procedural knowledge; and connected knowledge. Traces the change and growth of one writer as she moved through the five stages of intellectual development. (RS)

Argues that writing centers have the essential function of critiquing institutions and creating knowledge about writing. Explains how this function has clear implications for what tutors should know and how they should be trained. Enlists Antonio Gramsci's theory of culture to analyze traditional composition teaching and research. (HB)

Argues that any writer writes with and against a cacophony of competing voices, thus collaborating with the Otherness of their own words. Studies one student's attempt to write on an issue about which she held multiple views. Considers how the writing center might aid in providing critical distance within such a model. (HB)

Uses Michele Le Doeuff's theories about reverie, reflection, and migrant rationality to rethink the crossroads in the writing center between individual desires and disciplinary ideals. Examines the situations of four graduate students who find themselves contained or restricted by the limitations of discourse in their disciplines. Discusses how…