The writing center where the authors were trained and currently work emphasizes the model of non-directive, writer-based peer tutoring in which, as Jeff Brooks puts it, tutors "make the student the primary agent in the writing center session." As undergraduate peer tutors, they recognize that some students come into their writing center with goals…

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…

Over the past two decades, writing centers have steadily been expanding services and materials they offer online. The way students write and communicate about their writing continues to change, and the writing center has increasingly been looked upon as a site through which technology and writing have the ability to converge in the form of…

Uses follow-up telephone calls to writing center visitors to determine whether their level of satisfaction with writing center services had remained the same over time. Indicates that when students learned of their grades, they altered their previous perceptions of their writing sessions. Suggests a seemingly positive tutoring session can result…

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)

Presents three tutors' contributions to writing center theory. Shows how writing center theory can be enriched by including tutor voices and perspectives. Discusses the importance of including tutors in the construction of writing center theory. (SG)

Discusses general issues related to attitudes towards writing, which may be of interest to those working with English-as-a-second-language students, especially students coming from educational settings where writing is not traditionally taught. Presents the practice of the Writing Center at Central uropean University, one of the few centers in…

Examines what happens when writing center directors ask tutors to enter conversation, not just with clients, but with other writing center ractitioners--when tutors move beyond advice and into the professional discourse of writing centers. Suggests that writing centers need to consider a dialogic approach that invites tutors and their disparate…

Examines how art and design students' approaches to writing are potentially enriched by their creative approach to design. Suggests ways in which the art and design training could be exploited and used as a resource to produce strategies that work with all students. Concludes the key is to ask students about their creative preferences and build on…

Discusses work the authors did together addressing racial diversity in a writing center. Foregrounds their differences as well as their mutual vision, creating a bumpy ride for readers and interfering with modernist expectation of oherence, yet exposing the seams they think their readers need to see in order to understand how the fabrics of their…

Propose that educators use statistics to show that writing centers help to create a climate where struggling students succeed and successful students excel. Considers how to add "academic culture," something less concrete, to the bottom line. Challenges readers to think about how their writing centers enhance and advance a culture of academic…

Continues a discussion of critiquing peer tutoring groups by underscoring a typically unacknowledged component: the way in which an emphasis on "peerness" disguises the inherent aggression in tutoring relationships. Defines "peerness" as a complicated relation that involves power and aggression as well as equality. (SG)

Suggests that students and tutors resist conference summaries because they maintain a hierarchy between student and tutor. Proposes that tutors and students need to embrace the resistance that they feel toward conference summaries and rethink how tutoring sessions are "written up." Concludes that tutors must be willing to believe that students can…

Explores the ways in which mailing list technology help constitute the specific community of the Writing Center. Attempts to contribute to the practical and theoretical needs of writing centers. Concludes that understanding how these virtual spaces function as a significant part of the rhetorical context of writing centers will provide insight…

Considers if reflection on practice would be effective as ongoing training of tutors. Discusses the designing of a series of guided reflection exercises and examines the impact. Finds that it is difficult to use guided reflection to foster more reflective thinking by tutors and to change basic tutoring approaches. (SG)