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…

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…

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.…

Through the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP), the authors have set out to explore and document what peer tutors take with them from their training and experience. The Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project has made it possible for the authors to sample and analyze more systematically the reflections of 126 former tutors from…

In this article, the author offers cautionary advice to help avoid some tempting morasses to unwittingly fall into as well as some more solid ground to stroll along when composing institutional prose. Ultimately, drawing on concepts from the fields of business, linguistics, social psychology, and professional writing, the author wishes to…

One of the virtues of writing centers is that they compensate for the alienation of writing. If the canonical literate encounter is one where writer and reader meet only through the medium of the text, then the writing center consultation restores immediacy to written communication. Like an author-attended rehearsal, writing center consultation…

Writing centers are places not only of practices and policies but also of inquiry. Increasingly, research conducted in writing centers is informing the theoretical bases as well as the day-to-day goings-on in our various local contexts. In turn, the situated daily activity of each writing center as well as the theory or principles behind it…

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…

Tutoring and conferencing have assumed important instructional roles as composition theory and practice have shifted from product-centered to process-centered approaches. The benefits of conferencing (Reigstad), of peer tutoring (Bruffee), of professional tutoring (Franke), and of group collaboration (Nystrand) have been presented and supported.…

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…