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 this article, the author focuses on one student, Margie, who sought to write about her experience with workplace sexual harassment but who also struggled as she wrote with competing off-stage voices. Those voices--from the conversations in her classrooms, former workplace, a campus women's group, newspapers, and the televised Anita…

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…

Composition classrooms and writing centers are spaces where negotiation of academic, social, cultural, and political identities are ubiquitous, yet research has not produced adequate theory and practice to help tutors and writers navigate identity production and its politics. This article seeks to begin conversations that might lead to better…

Many directors recognize that mentoring benefits them as much as it does their mentees, and many graduate student administrators (GSAs) appreciate the role that directors play in preparing them for their future careers. At the same time, however, these directors' good intentions don't always suffice, especially when would-be mentors juggle…

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…

During their rapid growth in the 1970s and 1980s, writing centers came to depend on "lore," what Stephen North defines as "knowledge about what to do," based on practice and inherited by one generation of practitioners from the previous one. This lore has been codified as "cherished beliefs," "default(s)," or the "bible." Codified writing center…

Writing center tutors have traditionally been trained to use indirect, dialogic methods of tutoring and to attend to global concerns such as argumentation and organization--practices based more on experience tutoring native rather than non-native speakers of English. Lately, however, tutors have also been encouraged to respond to non-native…

This article presents the author's address for the International Writing Centers Association Conference in Las Vegas. The author's argument in this talk stresses the importance of paying attention to the conceptual frames writing tutors use to understand the world, their work, and the impact of their work on the world, and this attentiveness to…

This article has been about reconsidering how writing center directors train tutors to read and respond to texts. The subject here has been new media texts. The author has asked directors to reconsider how they tutor and how they talk to students about their writing. The impetus for these evolved practices is the arrival of increasing numbers of…

The authors have discovered that working in a writing center setting within the classroom provides pre-service teachers with an opportunity not only to work with student writers one-on-one but also to experience a model of best practice in teaching writing. In this article, the authors describe a program, focusing on the partnership they have…

While writing centers and writing fellows programs have been integral components of many colleges and universities in North America, these models of student-to-student learning are starting to develop in postsecondary institutions in other parts of the world, particularly in the Arabian Gulf. In particular, there are growing number of…