22.3 Voicing Writing Center Experiences

VOL. 22, NO. 3 (2025): VOICING

WRITING CENTER EXPERIENCES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS

Editors’ Introduction: Voicing Writing Center Experiences

Alexandra Gunnells and Samantha Turner

FOCUS ARTICLES

Mapping It Out: Rhizomatic Learning of Peer Embedded Tutors for Composition Classes – A Case Study

Iwona Ionescu

Untapped Potentials: Leveraging Disciplinary Expertise for Graduate Writing Consultant Education

Vicki R. Kennell, Ashley Garla, and Genevieve Gray

“How I Speak Doesn’t Really Matter, What I Speak About Does”: BIPOC Tutor Voices on Linguistic Justice in the Writing Center

Chloe Ray and Erin Goldin

Reexamining “Attitudes of Resistance”: A Survey-based Investigation of Mandatory Writing Center Appointments

Chris Borntrager and Taylor Weeks

Coming to Terms: A Quantitative Analysis of Naming Conventions and of U.S. Writing Centers

Abraham Romney

Evolving Perceptions of GenAI Writing Tools: Why Writing Centers Should Be GenAI Pioneers

Nathan Lindberg

BOOK REVIEWS

Review of Critical Thinking in Academic Writing: A Cultural Perspective

Jonathan Faerber

Review of The Creative Argument: Rhetoric in the Real World

Alex (Oleksiy) Ostaltev

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Iwona Ionescu earned an MA degree in English Philology from Warsaw University, Poland, and an MEd from the University of New Orleans. She is currently a PhD candidate in Composition and Applied Linguistics at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Iwona works at Rider University where she teaches first year-composition (FYC) and has coordinated composition tutoring. She has also worked as an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor, a professional writing tutor, and a high school English teacher. Iwona’s academic interests include writing centers, FYC pedagogies, L2 writers, and students’ development of their writing voices in the era of AI.

Vicki R. Kennell, PhD, is an associate director for graduate and multilingual education at the Purdue OWL. She has mentored graduate writers and graduate consultants for over a decade. Her research focuses primarily on graduate writing and the administration of programs to support it.

Ashley Garla holds an MS in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and is an SLP clinical fellow. During graduate school, she worked as a generalist writing consultant at the Purdue OWL.

Genvieve Gray holds an MS in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and is an SLP clinical fellow. During graduate school, she worked as a generalist writing consultant at the Purdue OWL.

Chloe Ray is the Assistant Director of the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College. Her research interests include the development and practical implementation of anti -racist and justiceinformed pedagogy, writing center administration and tutor training, Mixed-Critical Race Theory, and environmental rhetoric.

Erin Goldin is Director of the University Writing Center at University of California, Merced. She is a board member of the Northern California Writing Centers Association. Her scholarly activity is centered on examining the complex, multi-faceted nature of academic literacy development and work that contributes to effective, inclusive practices that meet the needs of diverse student populations.

Chris Borntrager is the Writing Studio Coordinator at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Oriented around questions posed from within discourse studies, his research agenda focuses on the teaching of writing and its role in social life, focusing on literacy studies, media ideologies, critical discourse analysis, and critical analyses of educational practices.

Taylor Weeks is an instructor at the University of Arkansas, emphasis in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy. His research interests include writing center pedagogy, military student veteran services/support, first-year writing, labeling theory, technical communication and professional writing, and curriculum design, program administration, and digital content creation.

Abraham Romney is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Idaho State University. He studies the history of rhetoric in Latin America and contemporary approaches to rhetoric and the teaching and administration of writing. Before coming to Idaho State University, where he has served as Interim Director of Composition, he worked at Michigan Technological University as the Director of their Composition Program and as director of the Michigan Tech Multiliteracies Center.

Nathan Lindberg is a Senior Lecturer for the English Language Support Office (ELSO) at Cornell University and Director of ELSO’s Writing & Presenting Tutoring Service. This spring, he’s teaching a new class called Strategies for Writing with AI and writing a blog about it the URL is in his article’s Works Cited.

Johnathan Faerber has worked as a writing tutor and instructor at five institutions over the past decade and is currently an Academic Writing Specialist at Royal Roads University, located on the traditional lands of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples in present day Victoria, British Columbia.

Alex (Oleksiy) Ostaltev is a PhD Candidate at University of Texas at Austin (Comparative Literature). He is currently working on his dissertation dedicated to the problem of representation of a person in literary texts of Classical, Medieval and Modern periods. In 2020 he received an M.A. degree in British and American Literature. His primary sphere of interest is classical texts of national European traditions (Russian, British, French, German). Alex is the author of two books of short stories.

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: VOICING WRITING CENTER EXPERIENCES

Alexandra Gunnells

University of Texas – Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com

Throughout our Summer 2025 issue, authors highlight the roles and perspectives of those engaged in the daily work of the writing center across institutional contexts and from various angles. Furthermore, the calls to action across this issue are as varied as the methods employed, reminding us that what we often call “the” writing center is actually composed of abundant complexity and diverse voices.

This issue begins with “Mapping it Out: Rhizomatic Learning of Peer Embedded Tutors for Composition Classes A Case Study” by Iwona Ionescu, who applies the theoretical framework of rhizomatic learning to investigate the diverse experiences of how course-embedded tutors develop their expertise outside of formal training. Ten years after the 2014 Praxis special issue on course-embedded tutoring, Ionescu’s article invites both reflection and innovation as the work of training embedded tutors continues.

Next, Vicki R. Kennell, Ashley Garla, and Genevieve Gray offer “Untapped Potentials: Leveraging Disciplinary Expertise for Graduate Writing Consultant Education,” which examines the intersections between the disciplinary homes of generalist graduate consultants and their writing center work and highlights the untapped potential of the theory and pedagogy of consultants’ home disciplines in developing effective consultant training programs.

Responding to the call for more attention on the perspectives and practices of tutors who employ equitable, inclusive, and anti-racist pedagogies, Chloe Ray and Erin Goldin’s “‘How I Speak Doesn't Really Matter; What I Speak About Does’: BIPOC Tutor Voices on Linguistic Justice in the Writing Center” highlights the factors that impact how tutors at a Hispanic Serving Institution understand and enact linguistic justice in their writing center practices.

Chris Borntrager and Taylor Weeks “Reexamining ‘Attitudes of Resistance’: A Survey-based Investigation of Mandatory Writing Center Appointments,” which “arose out of a need to better understand what happens in writing center appointments that are incentivized or mandated by instructors.” Borntrager and Weeks’ findings encourage future studies into how the field may inhabit a more

Samantha Turner

University of Texas – Austin

praxisuwc@gmail.com

welcoming stance toward the writers who visit WCs at the behest of their instructors.

Next, Abraham Romney takes up the issue of naming in “Coming to Terms: A Quantitative Analysis of Naming Conventions in and of U.S. Writing Centers.” Romney assesses workplace and worker naming conventions across nearly 600 US-based writing centers and builds upon conversations that attempt to define the work we do in the midst of a “complex academic landscape of multiple literacies and modes.”

In the last of this issue’s focus articles, Nathan Lindberg contributes to on-going conversations around artificial intelligence by suggesting how writing centers may be well-positioned to explore the affordances of artificial intelligence writing tools. In “Evolving Perceptions of GenAI Writing Tools: Why Writing Centers Should be GenAI Pioneers,” Lindberg reports findings from interviews with students who were “early adopters” of generative AI in order to argue for a future of field-wide engagement with generative AI writing tools.

Finally, this issue ends with two reviews: Shi Pu’s Critical Thinking in Academic Writing: A Cultural Perspective (2023), reviewed by Jonathan Faerber, and Thomas Girshin’s The Creative Argument: Rhetoric in the Real World (2024), reviewed by Alex (Oleksiy) Ostaltsev.

We here at Praxis remain deeply grateful to the reviewers, authors, and copy-editors that helped make this issue a reality. We especially want to thank our brilliant undergraduate intern, Audrey Fife, who provided invaluable assistance (during her summer break!) as we prepared this issue for publication. We close this editors’ introduction with an announcement regarding a change in Praxis’s leadership. Ali Gunnells will be stepping down as co-managing editor to pursue other opportunities, but she would like to express her heartfelt thanks to her co-managing editor Sam Turner and all those involved in Praxis for their continued work and dedication. Though we are sad to say goodbye to Ali, Praxis is excited to welcome Mary Fons to the team this fall as the new co-managing editor.

MAPPING IT OUT: RHIZOMATIC LEARNING OF PEER EMBEDDED TUTORS FOR COMPOSITION CLASSES – A CASE STUDY

Iwona Ionescu Indiana University of Pennsylvania iionescu@rider.edu

Abstract

This article contributes to the writing center scholarship in three ways. First, it revisits and further develops the discussion on courseembedded writing support programs; in particular, it builds on Kelly Webster and Jake Hansen’s “recursive reflection about courseembedded tutoring” and responds to Mary Tetreault et al.’s call for utilizing archival research as a resource for tutor education. Second, it takes a unique approach to tutor education by exploring how embedded tutors for first-year composition classes develop their expertise outside of the formal training sessions. Third, it applies the theoretical framework of rhizomatic learning that has not been previously utilized to investigate the diverse experiences embedded tutors undergo as they acquire and refine their tutoring skills. The qualitative data for this case study were obtained from the Coordinator of Composition Tutoring’s reflective journal as well as session logs and reflections completed by course-embedded peer tutors for composition courses at a four-year Northeastern institution over the period of four semesters. The analysis of the data reveals the rhizomatic character of embedded tutors’ learning, where elements of the learning processes are interconnected and everexpanding (Deleuze and Guattari; Grellier). The discussion includes a set of questions designed to encourage tutors to reflect on their learning processes. Writing center administrators can use these questions to gather data on how tutors develop their skills within their specific contexts.

“Course-embedded tutoring is uniquely complicated and uniquely powerful, and (…) reflective scrutiny is crucial if writing centers hope to realize its potential ” (Webster and Hansen)

Ten years ago, Praxis published a special issue on course-embedded writing support programs, featuring articles on tutoring models for writing intensive or writing across curriculum (WAC) classes, their institutional contexts, elements responsible for their successes, and tutors’ identities. One article concluded with an implicit call for writing fellows program administrators to engage in “recursive reflection” (Webster and Hansen). At that time, I was neither involved in an embedded tutoring program nor familiar with Praxis. Years later, I worked with an embedded tutor (ET) and eventually became the Coordinator of Composition Tutoring (CCT), overseeing the embedded tutoring program for composition classes at the college where I also taught composition as an adjunct. Only then did I come across Praxis and the 2014 special issue. On the tenth anniversary of that issue, striving to ensure the program benefits both students and ETs, I reflect recursively on

the various ways ETs learn their craft outside of training sessions.

When I started my work as CCT, I had experience tutoring at my university’s Writing Studio (WS) and teaching first-year composition (FYC) but no formal background in composition or writing centers. My task was to train twelve peer tutors who would support composition classes, primarily through group workshops. While I found resources for one-on-one tutoring on various websites and received helpful advice from colleagues, I struggled to locate materials for training ETs in group workshop settings. I envisioned ETs’ learning process in a linear, top-down fashion: I would train ETs, and they would apply what they have learned to their work with students (fig. 1). This model reflected Paulo Freire’s banking concept of education, or transmission teaching, where teaching is viewed as “an individual act with casual correspondence” (Strom and Martin 113). This model is echoed by Francesca Gentile: “We train our tutors, we oversee their work with students (to varying degrees), and we hope that something sticks when they move into the classroom or workplace.”

Figure 1. My initial mental representation of ETs’ learning process.

This orderly model was a comfortable starting point, but, as the first semester unfolded, it proved too simplistic. ETs were not blank slates: some had already tutored writing or other subjects; others had taken a course on theories of writing and tutoring offered by another faculty member at our institution; still others studied to become teachers, eager to transfer their teaching skills to a tutoring context. ETs would also work with professors who varied in teaching style, expectations, and understanding of ETs’ roles. These inconsistencies brought to mind Gaelen Hall’s statement: “Every meeting presents unique variables and challenges” (26). Hall uses the expression “navigating chaos” to capture the unpredictable nature of writing conferences and the need to embrace this unpredictability. “Navigating chaos” seemed to describe my experience as well, as each semester worked with unique teams of ETs, who tutored unique cohorts of students, and formed unique dynamics with professors whose classes they supported.

Other writing center (WC) administrators seemed to share my experience. Nicole Caswell et al. cite directors who felt unprepared in their roles, many wishing they had been told how “it’s really done” (15). One director described a situation much like mine: “depending on what populations are, depending on what issues we have from semester to semester, I can’t say that our training will translate to exactly the same for everyone at this place in level 2” (53). New administrators, authors note, had to navigate their unique local variables alone. Similarly, when I spoke with a local Writing Tutor Administrator group, I learned that no two embedded tutoring programs were alike.

The embedded tutoring program for composition classes at my institution operates under the WS, managed by the Assistant Director of Academic Tutoring. The CCT, however, reports directly to the Director of the Academic Success Center. Our program shares many features with the first writing fellows program developed at Brown University in the 1980s, which emphasized collaborative learning (HaringSmith). Our goal is to promote writing as a collaborative, social activity. We support FYC courses and we work with all writers in those classes, regardless of skill level. While not all embedded tutoring programs include mandatory group workshops, ours does. These noncredit bearing workshops are placed on students’ schedules, and students are required to attend eight sessions each semester. Over time, we have built strong partnerships with many faculty members, and each semester, the program supports approximately 25 sections–about half of all the composition sections.

Our ETs are high-achieving undergraduate students selected through faculty recommendations, and they represent a range of majors, such as education, political science, musical theatre, English, and psychology. Their responsibilities include attending their assigned class once a week, planning and facilitating group writing workshops outside of class, meeting with the course instructors, attending weekly training, holding individual appointments, and providing asynchronous feedback on papers.

In the next section, I review scholarship on embedded tutoring that supports writing and present the theoretical lens I use to map ETs’ learning.

Literature Review

Course-embedded writing support

In course-embedded writing support, tutors are assigned to specific courses to help students improve their writing and reading skills while serving as peer role models. These tutors offer course- and instructorspecific support for writing-intensive, WAC, or Writing in the Disciplines (WID) courses. The goal is to improve students’ reading and writing skills, modeling successful student behavior, fostering collaborative learning, and strengthening student and faculty engagement with the WC (Webster and Hansen).

Scholars have documented the effectiveness of course-embedded peer tutoring across disciplines. Tori Haring-Smith argues that peer feedback “helps writers retain authority over their own texts” (124) and it encourages students to revise their work before submission. Kevin Dvorak et al. report that research students who worked with writing fellows “produced significantly stronger writings at the end of the semester.” Mitchel Colver and Trevor Fry indicate that first-generation students, in particular, benefit from embedded tutoring. ETs not only positively influence students' writing but also impact their mindset (Miller), and faculty find embedded tutoring beneficial (Bleakney et al.). Embedded tutoring yields positive results in online contexts as well. Dayra Fallad Mendoza and Elizabeth Kerl report that undergraduate students who were enrolled in online English, history, and economics courses and worked with an ET felt more supported in those courses, were more comfortable participating in class, displayed higher levels of engagement in their learning, and felt a stronger connection to their class. Embedded tutoring has also been found to reduce feelings of loneliness in online courses (Reimers).

Course-embedded tutor learning

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Training is essential in any writing fellows program (DeLoach et al.; Macdonald). Ross MacDonald notes that the combination of tutoring and tutor training is the most significant factor linked to the academic success of developmental education students, and training for ETs needs to be tailored to their specific support role as working with small groups of students requires learning additional skills, i.e., ensuring all tutees participate actively in a workshop.

A review of scholarship from the past decade, specifically in Praxis, Writing Center Journal, and WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, reveals limited attention to training course-embedded writing tutors. Ben Ristow and Hannah Dickinson stress the need for specific training due to the high level of scrutiny ETs face in their work with faculty and students with respect to their reading, writing, and thinking skills. Tara Parmiter and William Morgan highlight the importance of supporting tutors as they develop disciplinary expertise over time. Danielle Pierce and Aolani Robinson explore the use of an online platform with fiction games to enhance problem-solving skills training for course-embedded tutors. Amanda Greenwell provides ideas for training that focus on strengthening tutor reading skills and on strategies designed to support students’ reading in one-on-one and course-embedded contexts. Finally, Kelly Webster and Jake Hansen suggest that course-embedded programs should offer tutors a chance to undergo a potentially transformative "developmental experience" that will shape their future roles as both tutors and writers. In the current study, I contribute to the scholarship on ET by using the rhizomatic lens to examine the multiplicity of ways in which ETs develop as, or become, tutors at my institution, specifically outside of their formal weekly training sessions.

Rhizomatic Approach to Learning

In rhizomatics, a philosophy developed by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari, processes or phenomena are seen as networks of interconnected, ever-expanding elements. These networks have no central points, similar to the structure of plants such as ginger or turmeric, which have underground horizontal rhizomes, with nodes from which roots and shoots grow (fig. 2). In Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics, traditional power dynamics are undermined, as various elements–nodes or points of connection–are linked by lines with no specific direction, referred to as lines of flight

Deleuze and Guattari postulated that the world is in a constant state of flux, with individuals continually becoming new versions of themselves in relation to societal roles such as gender, family, or profession. Another key rhizomatic concept is assemblage: the coming together of various elements to form a complex network. Scanlon et al. define it as “all spaces and elements related to learning and teaching” (3). Here, I adjust this definition to all spaces and elements related to the development of ETs’ craft, which I present in the findings.

Scholars have applied rhizomatics to the learning of English as a Second Language. For example, Miso Kim and Suresh Canagarajah apply the rhizomatic approach to map out the human (e.g. teachers, peers) and non-human (e.g. Internet, laptop, podcast) elements that shape language learning and usage of Korean

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professionals. Doris Dippold et al. argue for the use of rhizomatics to understand students’ becoming graduate students. Rhizomatics has also informed research on teachers’ professional development and the process of becoming a teacher (Charteris and Smardon; Hordvik; Scanlon et al.; Sherman and Teemant; Strom and Martin), the writing process (Samson et al.), and firstyear college students’ and tutors’ experience (Grellier). Yet, the rhizomatic approach has not been previously applied to map out elements contributing to tutor learning.

Methodology

The primary objective of this case study is to engage in recursive reflection (Webster and Hansen), to make visible the various ways through which ETs developed skills outside of their formal weekly training sessions. The data, collected over four semesters at my institution, spans the start of my work as the CCT and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyzed archived records and my own reflective journal to find whether the program provided meaningful learning experiences for ETs. This process allowed me to revisit and learn from our local practices. The current study captures ETs’ learning experiences and reactions to these experiences that may otherwise have gone unnoticed, offering insights for future program planning and for other WC administrators in charge of embedded tutoring programs.

This research was guided by the following questions:

1. How did ETs develop knowledge and skills outside of formal training? In other words, what experiences contributed to ETs’ development of their craft?

2. Were these experiences beneficial for the ETs?

3. How can the findings inform future training design and planning learning experiences for ETs? Or, in Molly Tetreault et al.’s words, “How can knowledge of the past inform the present?”

To answer these questions, I used qualitative data collected as part of my regular record keeping and assessment of the ET program during the course of four semesters, between September 2020 and May 2022. Following Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis, I read 1,716 tutor log responses filled out after each weekly group workshop by 92 unique ETs. Next, I coded each response, focusing on how and what ETs reported learning through a particular experience. I also coded 85 end-of-semester evaluations of the program, where ETs responded to questions

about the most important skills they learned from one another, the professors they worked with, their tutees, and CCT. I also drew from my reflexive journal, where I recorded informal conversations with ETs during that period. Rather than counting responses, I aimed to capture the diversity of unique experiences, as my aim is to highlight the diversity of those experiences, not their frequency.

I obtained Institutional Review Board approval. This research was conducted in accordance with the institution’s human research guidelines.

Findings: Assemblage of elements through which ETs develop their craft

To present my findings, I draw on Jane Grellier’s method of organizing findings into nodes–elements contributing to ETs’ learning and points of connection in the network of ETs’ learning experiences. Grellier argues that this approach allows for a blending of academic and reflective voices and bringing to the surface the voices of underrepresented groups, such as first-year students. Similarly, here, I use nodes to mix academic tone with my reflective one and bring to the surface the voices of the ETs. Using nodes instead of themes aligns more closely with the rhizomatic metaphor. Themes tend to categorize experiences, which may imply that they are separate and fixed. Nodes, on the other hand, are points in a web of experiences, connected in multiple directions. This encourages mapping relationships between experiences rather than isolating or ranking individual experiences. Like Grellier, I do not number the nodes to emphasize the fact that each learning opportunity is equally important and there is no starting point. Each node begins with a quote from an ET, and all names are pseudonyms.

Node: Tutee for a day

“When I was stuck, the tutor asked me to talk about my idea, so I did that. Then he said: ‘Good. Write that down.’ It was as simple as that, but it worked!”

Since many ETs had never been tutored themselves, I believed it was important for them to experience what Elizabeth Buck calls an “uncomfortable active position” and Mary Pigliacelli describes as “the vulnerable position of student writer.” I encouraged each ET to book an appointment with an experienced tutor in the WS and work on a writing assignment for any of their classes. Kate, for instance, met with a professional tutor and the following semester applied a strategy she learned (quoted above) during that session while tutoring a novice ET in a “tutee for a day”

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activity. She mentioned this informally to me, and I later read about it in a reflection written by the novice ET. That moment showed me the program’s potential to foster collective knowledge building (Cormier). It also shifted my understanding of my role, from a trainer and transmitter of knowledge to a “context creator” and a liaison between ETs. My task became less about directing and more about being present with ETs and documenting their learning.

Node: Weekly group workshops

“Every group that I have had so far have wanted something different from my sessions and I have had to adapt. Some students are more visual learners, others like to do things themselves and it can be kind of difficult trying to incorporate different learning styles into one session, but I have slowly been able to figure it out.”

Weekly group workshops offered tutees structured support for writing and reading while giving ETs, many of whom were aspiring teachers, space to develop instructional skills. Rebecca Cruz and Katie Galahan reported that tutors believed conducting workshops required a different approach from holding one-on-one sessions and that tutoring and managing groups resembled teaching. Indeed, in our context, ETs often began their workshops with a mini-lesson, followed by tasks where tutees applied the learned skills However, ETs often needed to adjust their session plans, depending on who attended the workshop. One of our ETs designed and led a training session, where she described various realistic group workshop scenarios. She asked ETs to consider what they would do if, for example, they came to a session planning to engage students in peer review work and five students showed up to the session–each at a different stage of the writing process and each needing a different kind of support. Other issues that arose during workshops were giving equal focus to individuals and the group as a whole (Titus et al.); tutees being disengaged; one student dominating a session; or, very rarely, a student disrupting a session. ETs shared and discussed these experiences and offered ideas on how to address them.

ETs noted that a successful session depended on establishing rapport with tutees and learning to read tutees’ energy and responding with greater empathy and flexibility. ETs also learned to guide rather than direct. As one of them put it, “I learned the importance of asking ‘why.’”Another reflected, “I did feel like I still have to get a bit better at leading the students to the answers instead of giving them the answers, but I have more time to get to that point. I'll learn.” Last, but not least, ETs gained insight into their tutees’ writing processes, which in turn deepened their

awareness of their own writing: “I continued to learn that I need to vary how I am integrating sources in my paper.”

Node: Tandem workshops

“Holding a workshop together is so much fun: from prepping for it to actually holding it. It was also much more relaxing for me as I knew I could rely on Anna if something goes wrong. The students seemed to like it a lot, too, and they were more active in the session.”

Two ETs, Melanie and Anna, decided to hold a group workshop together. Melanie noted that holding a workshop alongside another tutor provided an example of effective collaboration for the students, who witnessed how the ETs bounced ideas off each other. The ETs noticed that during that particular session, students became more engaged than usual and opened up to the ETs. This “tandem workshop,” as they called it, allowed Melanie and Anna to split the group in two, offering the tutees choices as to how they would like to spend their time in the workshop and allowed the ETs to provide more individualized assistance. Having learned how successful the tandem session was, I tried to encourage other ETs to prepare and hold sessions together; however, only one more pair of ETs tried that approach during the study period.

Node: Peer observations

“One suggestion Beth had was to include more visuals to help keep the focus and understanding. Another observation she shared was that we tend to put a lot of decision making onto the students both for what to do as well as for speaking up and answering a question which cause some long pauses or indecisiveness at times, so next time I would like to try to be more assertive and direct with instructions/calling on people.”

Julia Bleakney notes that “peer observations are the second most common type of tutor education.” In our program, observations were conducted using session recordings, documented as a valuable resource for tutor learning (Funt and Esposito; Pigliacelli). ETs recorded two workshops per semester and received feedback on at least one. Initially, I tried to review all the recordings by myself, but I quickly realized that watching 50-minute sessions from 25 ETs per semester, about 40 hours of recordings, was unrealistic. Instead, I invited experienced ETs to provide feedback. This approach created a reciprocal learning opportunity: the observed ET received constructive feedback, while the observer gained insight into how their peers approached group tutoring and what techniques they used.

Node: ETs’ coursework

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“Previously, [a student] was almost too willing to take my feedback. I decided to give her a music analogy. I said your voice as a writer is a classical orchestra. My voice is a rock band. If you accept everything I say, you'll lose your sound as an orchestra and you'll let my rock and roll self overpower you, and we don't want that. We want to hear your beautiful sound. Once I was done explaining this to her, she began challenging my comments. This not only helped make her paper more uniquely hers, but it also helped me to think about what I was saying to her and other students.”

Cruz and Galahan observed that tutors frequently draw on their own classroom experiences when leading workshops. For example, in her publishing course, one ET learned that a writer should not easily accept what an editor suggests; instead, both writer and editor should engage in a negotiation of meaning. Using a music analogy, the ET started encouraging her tutees to question her suggestions. She turned what she learned in one of her classes into a tutoring strategy and thus created “connections between contexts” (Driscoll and Harcourt 2).

Similarly, another ET, a film and television major, connected revising essays with editing interviews she practiced in her documentary class. She guided tutees to cut unnecessary content as part of an effective revision.

Node: ETs’ other employment

“I definitely drew a lot of connections as a dance teacher. I apply teaching techniques that I use as a tutor to my dance students, and I’ve found myself becoming better in that field now, too.”

“The connections that I can make would be my coaching job. They are both helping students just in different ways since this is a writing program and I coach gymnastics. They both involve improving the student’s ability.”

In their reflections and casual conversations, some ETs stated that their outside jobs, such as teaching dance or coaching gymnastics, informed their tutoring and vice versa. One ET recalled how during a campus orientation, where she worked as a peer leader, she made sure she communicated information clearly with a family. She even compiled a written list of the key points, ensuring the information is as accessible as possible, drawing directly from her tutoring strategies. These connections illustrate the value of encouraging tutors to bridge their work with other experiences (Driscoll and Harcourt).

Node: Conferences

“I remembered from a MAWCA conference how music helps to inspire writing, so I tried to put on music that was magic-inspired to help students with their creativity.”

Attending conferences may offer tutors transferable skills such as public speaking or opportunities to turn presentation topics into research projects. Bleakney reports that some programs include attending and presenting at conferences as part of tutor education. During the period analyzed here, six ETs presented at one local and two national conferences. Some designed, conducted, and analyzed surveys, and all shared their reflections with other ETs during our training sessions. These experiences also shaped our program. One team of presenters emphasized the need for ETs to be taught about empathy more explicitly, leading us to revise our tutor logs to include a question: “How did you show empathy during this session?” One ET later noted that the question prompted her to be more intentional about practicing empathy when working with students.

Node: Mentor groups

“Pauline was my assigned peer ET and I have learned so much from her (even outside of just tutoring stuff). For example, she shared a couple of really great ice breakers I can use with my students. But I think one of my biggest takeaways overall from her and all of the different ETs is the fact that we all have really similar experiences with students. This makes me feel not alone in my struggles and they serve as a really good resource for us to learn from.”

Mentorship is one of “the important aspects of generally-accepted writing center pedagogy” (Aikens). Bonnie Devet emphasizes the importance of creating spaces for novice tutors to learn from experienced consultants, and Holly Ryan notes that peer mentorship can support supervisors in providing feedback. Following these insights, I introduced mentor groups, where novice ETs were paired with veteran ETs to exchange experiences, share knowledge, support one another, and build community. Since most ETs work independently outside of weekly training, these groups offered space for collaboration.

Node: Composition instructors

“My professor was a wonderful example of how to command a room of students while being very personable and individualized to students. Working with her also improved my communication and collaboration skills.”

“Before tutoring for this class, I was unsure of how to write an abstract. Now, I am able to write an abstract, thanks to the professor.”

Megan Titus discusses the importance of instructor-ET collaboration and describes how she gradually gave her ET more responsibility to design and lead class workshops. Ideally, ETs in our program would work with professors whose class they had taken before, but scheduling made this difficult. As a result, ETs sometimes worked with instructors whose teaching styles were unfamiliar to them. In the classroom, ETs’ roles varied: some observed quietly and took notes, while others joined discussions, presented material, or led peer review sessions. Through these experiences, ETs reported learning key professional skills: taking responsibility, expecting the unexpected, staying positive, and managing a classroom. One ET shared that working with his assigned professor inspired him to change his plans after graduation: he decided to pursue an academic career.

Node: Tutees

“I learned about other aspects of what makes a story! The students shared some ideas that originally had not crossed my mind!”

De-emphasizing the traditional hierarchy, where experts pass down their knowledge to novices, repositions tutors as co-learners (Trimbur). One ET reflected on this shift: “It was interesting because both the student and I were confused when figuring out how to structure the essay. The requirements in the assignment itself were a little difficult to work with, so we had a good discussion. We threw ideas back and forth talking about what might work and what might not work. Eventually, the student reached something that worked for them.” Recognizing that they, too, are students, helped ETs feel less pressure to act as experts. Instead, they understood their role as peers, modeling their own approaches to learning and problem solving. In these moments, ETs “co-construct[ed] collaborative sessions with students” (Pigliacelli).

Node: Inventory of strategies

“Sitting Questions: Don't get anxious when the students in your workshop don't respond to questions right away or at all. Let your

question sit before prompting them to respond again. Consider typing the question into the chat so that they actually see it and read it.”

Tutors often build on materials created by other tutors and scholars suggest revising these materials periodically and making them available for other tutors (Cruz and Galahan). The entry above comes from our “Inventory of Strategies,” a living document of strategies ETs have used in their sessions. I began compiling it while viewing workshop recordings, then I invited a group of ETs to revise the document and name each strategy. Arranged alphabetically, these strategies are authentic activities our ETs have used. Each semester, we update and reshare the “Inventory,” connecting ETs across semesters. The document functions as a record of our collective knowledge, a resource that transcends time and space, allowing ETs to learn from one another, reuse strategies, and contribute new ones.

Discussion

In response to the first research question (How did ETs develop knowledge and skills outside of formal training?), the findings reveal that ET learning is far more complex than the two-element vertical depiction I initially created as a novice CCT (fig. 1). To better represent this complexity, I developed a new rhizomatic model (fig. 3), which is an assemblage of nodes (learning experiences) and lines of flight (non-hierarchical connections between the nodes). Seeing tutors’ learning as rhizomatic and composed of interconnected nodes reframes their development as non-linear, collaborative, and continually evolving. It helps us better understand how flexible and messy tutor learning is. It shifts the focus from “What should I teach my ETs?” to “What kinds of experiences, connections, and reflections help ETs become effective tutors?” At the core of this model are reflection and idea sharing, essential to both individual learning and collective knowledge construction.

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Figure 3. My current rhizomatic model of developing ETs’ craft.

The figure above illustrates the many elements of ETs’ learning assemblage. The nodes discussed in the Findings section are part of a broader web of experiences that also includes other elements such as weekly training sessions, guest trainers, or textbooks. Each node contributes to ETs’ learning and connects, often unpredictably, to other nodes. Empty boxes represent possible, still undefined future experiences. The nodes unfold non-linearly as ETs immersed themselves in the learning processes following their unique paths, shaped by the uniqueness of each semester, sequence of activities, ETs’ individual choices of activities, pace of task completion, and interactions with students, professors, and other ETs. The node metaphor represents not only one element that connects to other elements, but also the potential for new connections and growth. It contains the idea of multiplicity of possibilities as well as equality since all nodes are of equal importance. While Grellier posits that the rhizomatic paradigm emphasizes the disruption of hierarchies, this may be less true in our context. Although working with students in a classroom impacts the sense of authority shared between the instructor and tutor (Spigelman and Grobman), ETs, especially the new ones, still associated authority with CCT and the instructor whose class they supported.

Kathryn Strom and Adrian Martin advocate using rhizomes not just as a metaphor but also as

“analytic tools that provide a more complex, nuanced interpretation of the multiplicity and composition of elements that constitute the nature of teaching” (7). In this sense, the above assemblage of nodes serves both as an analytic tool to understand how the ETs at our institution learned, and a way to record and further archive ETs’ learning experiences. Like a reverse outline, the assemblage maps the learning experiences the program offered to ETs. It consists of human (fellow ETs, tutees, CCT) and non-human elements (video recordings, inventory of strategies) interacting with one another across time (several semesters) and space (in-person: classroom, WS; remote: a dorm room.) Always incomplete, with nodes constantly being added, removed, or replaced, this rhizomatic assemblage captures the richness and messiness of ETs’ development.

To illustrate how a rhizomatic diagram can be used as an analytical tool, Figure 4 maps the relationship between selected nodes and their connecting lines of flight, using the “Tutee for A Day” activity as an example. The entry point is a training session, during which ETs were asked to book a tutoring appointment to receive feedback on their writing. This was followed by an actual tutoring session with a tutor, after which each ET wrote their reflection and shared it with the CCT. The following semester, this activity was repeated. A novice ET met with a writing consultant, also a veteran ET, who completed the activity the previous semester. The

novice ET shared her reflection with the CCT. She described the strategy the writing consultant used: it was the same strategy the veteran ET had learned when she was tutored. In the subsequent training session, ETs

shared their experiences and reflections. The transfer of this strategy across semesters highlights how learning flows across time and individuals.

4. An example of elements involved in the “Tutee for a Day” learning experience.

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Rhizomatics invites us to see not only the multiplicity of experiences but also their numerous versions. As each ET engaged with training and learning moments differently, they created their unique versions of those experiences and they were also constantly becoming new versions of themselves. This perspective allows WC administrators to view ET learning as complex and unpredictable. While it is important to design core principles and provide training sessions for ETs, it is equally vital to create space for agency, discovery, and co-constructing knowledge, often outside of the supervisor’s presence and control. In fact, much of the ETs’ craft developed when the CCT was not present.

ETs’ responses on the end-of-semester evaluations suggest that they found their learning experiences meaningful, which addresses the second research question (Were these experiences beneficial for the ETs?). Since not all ETs engaged in the same experiences, I facilitated knowledge exchange during our training sessions, where ETs shared their experiences, asked questions, and learned from each other. Organizing tutor learning in this flexible way, where the training content is co-created by ETs, is beneficial as predetermined curricula may foster passivity (Cormier). Viewing ET learning as a rhizomatic process where ETs take an active part in co-creating knowledge encourages agency, discovery, and motivation. WC administrators should be open to embracing the “playful, exploratory and collaborative learning, whose outcome may be unpredictable and difficult to determine in advance, but whose whole may be greater than the sum of its parts'' (Schoenborn and Reel). Positive learning experiences for the ETs may have also contributed to the positive outcomes of our ET program. During the study period, students who utilized the embedded tutoring support earned higher grades than the students who did not attend ET sessions.

In response to the third research question (“How can the findings inform planning learning experiences for ETs?”), the findings support continuing the rhizomatic approach to ET learning and CCT’s practice of recursive reflection. Similar programs may benefit from identifying and mapping the elements that contribute to the development of tutor craft within their own contexts. To support this process, WC administrators can embed reflective prompts into tutor logs or reflexive activities, such as:

• How was this session a learning experience for you?

• What is something valuable you learned from a fellow ET this semester?

• What is something valuable you learned from your tutees this semester?

• What is something valuable you learned from the professor whose class you supported this semester?

• What insights from your courses and outside experiences informed your tutoring?

• How did different modalities (remote, asynchronous, in-person) shape your learning and you as a tutor?

• What did you discover about your own writing process?

• What kind of tutor have you become?

• What has shaped you as a tutor?

Alongside reflective writing, with the help of ETs, WC administrators can observe sessions, keep reflective journals, document authentic strategies used in their local contexts, and facilitate knowledge sharing among tutors. Together, these practices foster the kind of recursive, networked learning central to a rhizomatic model.

Conclusion

As course-embedded writing tutoring programs take diverse forms across college campuses, more research is needed into how tutors in these settings develop their craft, particularly since their work differs from that of traditional WC writing consultants, who tutor students individually. The study allowed me to capture ETs’ learning experiences and reactions to these experiences that would have gone unnoticed without revisiting the archived data. The rhizomatic model helps visualize ETs’ learning processes by capturing the nonhierarchical, interconnected assemblage of multiple human and non-human elements that shape tutor learning beyond formal training sessions.

The findings offer guidance for planning future learning opportunities, regardless of the constraints affecting WCs. Other WC administrators may adapt this model and adjust the nodes to suit their unique local contexts, considering factors such as program size, supervisor’s availability, budget constraints, and tutors’ strengths and interests. For instance, instead of requiring every ET to observe another ET’s session, which is a time- and resource-intensive task, supervisors might use a recorded session for collective discussion during training. Even with a reduced budget and frequency of training sessions (e.g., to bi-weekly or monthly), the rhizomatic approach may still be effective.

In any context, WC administrators may think of elements that contribute to ET learning as nodes, each serving as a potential starting point or a new connection. ETs should be encouraged to choose their areas of growth, build their own inventories of strategies, and chart their own learning paths. WC administrators should foster spaces for tutors to collaborate, share resources, and reflect on their learning. What matters most is maintaining the rhizomatic mindset: valuing non-linearity over hierarchy, promoting co-constructed knowledge, and embracing flexibility, connection, and the idea of ETs’ constant evolving or becoming. Like Hall, WC administrators and ETs should learn to embrace the “chaos” of the learning process and recognize the opportunities it creates for ET programs to uncover their own “forms of magic.”

Is our rhizomatic map the ultimate representation of ETs’ learning? Definitely not. Each semester reveals new layers of work, connections, and interpretations of what it means to become an ET. As ETs grow into their roles, they become unique versions of the idea of an ET, thus creating an ever-expanding network of tutors learning from a variety of experiences. As one ET reflected: “Each semester will be a new learning experience. You'll get new batches of students each semester, and it's a process of adjusting your sessions and style to what they need. It requires patience, but also you must trust in your abilities and your training as a tutor.”

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Dana Driscoll for providing feedback on an early draft of this paper, Dr. Curtis Porter for his feedback on a later draft, and Courtney James, a former ET with whom I worked on a previous version of this paper.

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UNTAPPED POTENTIALS: LEVERAGING

DISCIPLINARY

EXPERTISE FOR GRADUATE WRITING CONSULTANT EDUCATION

Vicki R. Kennell Purdue University vkennell@purdue.edu

Abstract

Ashley Garla Purdue University ashley.garla1@gmail.com

Reflecting on the experiences of two graduate students from speechlanguage pathology (SLP) who became generalist writing consultants, this article examines the intersections between the academic homes of generalist graduate consultants and their writing center education and work and analyzes what these intersections tell us about consultant education. We briefly introduce SLP and identify the specific ways that both fields address writing. We then explore how the disciplinary intersections enhance or hinder the work that graduate students do in either field. Based on this foundation, we propose a four-step process for educating graduate consultants that promotes an awareness of how similarities enhance work in either field, how differences can hinder the work, and how bidirectional transference between fields can benefit graduate students as both consultants and as academics in their home discipline. Ultimately, this paper highlights the untapped potential of the theory and pedagogy of consultants’ home disciplines for effective generalist consultant education.

Introduction

A common topic that arises in conversations among graduate communications scholars is the importance of specialist feedback for graduate writers (e.g., some writers prefer content-knowledgeable consultants; Phillips 163). From a writing center perspective, such conversations presuppose a certain context having the resources for a graduate-only writing center a situation in which many writing centers do not find themselves. For most writing centers, graduate writers, if allowed at all, must be folded into the customary peer-tutoring model, where consultants work with writers from all disciplines, but the consulting staff may not possess that disciplinary variety. The need to work with writers across disciplines has led to writing center discussions similar to graduate communications scholars’ conversations about specialist feedback, but with a tendency to favor generalist options. In 1998, Kristin Walker proposed genre theory as a way to fashion a middle ground between generalist and specialist consulting. Layne Gordon revived this theme in 2014, the same year that Sue Dinitz and Susanmarie Harrington’s research clarified the role (and value) of disciplinary expertise in consultations. In 2017, Tomoyo Okuda explored the varying usefulness of generalist strategies, noting a need for improved training of generalist consultants. More recently, in 2021, several chapters of Megan Swihart

Genevieve Gray Purdue University genevieve.gray505@gmail.com

Jewell and Joseph Cheatle’s book Redefining Roles explored issues related to hiring graduate consultants from across campus, including discussions of how to train them, but also raising once again the generalist versus specialist dichotomy.

Centering the generalist-specialist conversation around what is best for writers excludes issues that affect writing centers generally or consultants specifically. Scholars have noted that the logistics of hiring enough consultants for precise disciplinary matches are problematic for writing centers (Dinitz and Harrington 95). Even where specialist matches are possible, assuming that consultants arrive at the writing center with existing expertise in disciplinary expectations around writing is problematic; even graduate consultants (GTAs) may still be in the process of becoming enculturated into their field of study and may not possess a fully formed or confident expertise. Focusing on content specialization also does not take into account graduate students’ wide-ranging concerns around writing. Graduate writers tend to be savvy about developing feedback networks to address that range. For instance, they may reserve their advisor’s time for dissertations and seek consultant help with more general concerns such as funding applications or sentence-level issues (Mannon). Generalist consultants can also offer value as fellow graduate students; they are familiar with academic research and project management and able to commiserate over the more emotional aspects of writing such as lack of confidence and a tendency to procrastinate. The shared experiences of graduate school contribute to generalist graduate consultants being well positioned to offer valuable writing support regardless of disciplinary match.

Focusing the generalist-specialist conversation on what each type of consultant offers also leaves open the question of what each might need from their writing center education and professional development experiences and, in particular, what graduate consultants might need. In 2019, Katrina Bell noted that very little advice about preparing students to work as consultants specifically addresses the preparation of graduate consultants. Consultant education often focuses on types of writers (e.g., anxious writers, multilingual writers), types of documents (e.g., literature analyses, lab

reports), and types of situations (e.g., unresponsive or antagonistic writers) in addition to covering session protocols and the writing process (as an example, see Ryan and Zimmerelli). Such a broad range of material related to consulting with writers can be useful, regardless of whether a consultant is an undergraduate or graduate or is hired as a specialist or generalist. However, just as the generalist-specialist discussion tends to ignore consultants’ needs, so material on educating consultants tends to ignore graduate consultants’ need to successfully integrate work in their home disciplines with work in the writing center. Discussions of home disciplines often focus on the outcomes for writers when consultants share their disciplinary background (e.g., benefits of shared background versus too-directive tutoring; Dinitz and Harrington 89-90). In this article, we focus on what has often been left out of the generalist-specialist and consultant education conversations as it relates to graduate consultants themselves: the specific intersections between the academic homes of generalist graduate consultants and their writing center training and work, and, in particular, what these intersections might tell us about consultant education.1

In recent years, the Purdue OWL has experimented with hiring and educating graduate students from outside English to work as generalist writing consultants. During the 2023-24 academic year, we hired four graduate consultants from outside of English: a doctoral student from math education, a doctoral student from counseling psychology, and two master’s students from speech-language pathology (SLP). Two factors contributed to the specific formation of this first cohort. At Purdue, master’s students tend to be less well funded than doctoral students, making them a common source of applicants. Also, while departments may allow doctoral students to work outside the department when departmental funding has contracted, they generally prefer to have students take assistantships in the department when possible. In fact, we lost one of our doctoral consultants during the fall semester when funding tied to her field of study became available. Our experiment filled the consultants’ need for funding and the OWL’s need to expand the potential pool of GTA applicants due to institutional shifts that particularly affected the humanities. For this first cohort from outside English, new GTA education was only slightly changed from previous years.

As the cohort discussed their experiences of being trained as generalist writing consultants, it became obvious that their home disciplines allowed them to bring expertise to their role that had not been considered when planning the training curriculum and,

as a result, was not leveraged to develop them as confident, skilled consultants. In order to illustrate the effects of the intersections between the two forms of expertise, we will focus our discussion on SLP, the home discipline of co-authors Ashley and Genevieve, two of the graduate hires at that time.2 Their training as writing consultants, and hence much of our discussion about disciplinary intersections, was overseen by Vicki, an associate director in the writing center and the other author of this article.

When we first began this project, Ashley and Genevieve were graduate students in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences who were training to be SLPs. They sought employment at the writing center during their first year in their program because of interest in and experience with writing. The vast majority of the writers and documents they worked with fell outside their academic field, so they operated as generalist consultants. However, they also found that their specialist SLP training provided a unique perspective that supported their work with writers. In this paper, we outline the ways in which writing center work and SLP work intersect, beginning with the specific way that both fields address writing and progressing to broader interactions between the fields. In particular, we explore how disciplinary intersections can enhance or hinder the work that graduate students do in either field. We will end by presenting recommendations for writing center administrators seeking to train graduate consultants from academic fields outside of English.

First, a note about terminology. Looking at the intersections of two fields means that we must introduce multiple characters who occupy sometimes-similar roles. For clarity, we will use the following terms to describe our identities as well as those of the people with whom we work: consultant for our role in the writing center; clinician for our role in providing speech therapy services; writers for those we work with in the writing center; and patients for those we work with in the SLP clinic. In discussions pertaining to both consultants and clinicians, we will refer to this collective group as practitioners; and in discussions pertaining to both writers and patients, we will refer to this collective group as clients

SLP and Written Language

To those outside the field, SLPs are commonly known as the people who help children with their /r/ and /s/ sounds; however, speech is only one aspect of what SLPs are trained to treat. More broadly, SLPs treat language disorders, which range from children

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struggling to learn and implement the rules of grammar (e.g., omitting -ed for past-tense verbs) to adults with acquired brain injuries relearning sentence structure and parts of speech. Especially pertinent to our discussion, SLPs also address patients’ writing. The reciprocal relationship between oral and written language has been well-documented, building the basis for the SLP’s scope of practice to include both modes of communication (Summy and Farquharson). Children with developmental communication disorders and adults with acquired language disorders often demonstrate difficulty in some aspects of written language as well as spoken language. SLPs therefore diagnose disorders of reading and writing, including dyslexia; establish collaborative relationships with educators to foster students’ written language; and work to prevent academic difficulties that result from difficulties with written language (“Written Language Disorders”). For both written and spoken language, SLPs aim to empower patients to effectively communicate their needs and wants regardless of modality.

Intersections between SLP and Writing Centers

While the overlap between the SLP and writing center fields is most salient in the way that both disciplines deal with written language, intersections extend beyond this explicitly common ground. For any given consultant in our case those from SLP three potential intersections may occur between their home discipline and the writing center:

1. both fields may approach an aspect of working with writers in a similar manner,

2. both fields may differ (and likely conflict), or 3. the work in one of the fields may unexpectedly transfer to and enhance the other.

When both fields have a similar approach, the new consultant may experience increased confidence in consulting with writers, comfort with writing center work, and an easy transition from clinician (in the case of SLP) to consultant. When fields conflict, it can create unease and decrease confidence in working with writers. Differences do not necessarily have to mean conflict, however. When consultants either bring something from their home discipline to their writing center work or carry something from the writing center to their home discipline, the field on the receiving end benefits from an infusion of new ideas, methods, or potential areas for research. Exploring and leveraging these similarities and opportunities for transfer between fields during training and beyond can help facilitate a more effective and time-efficient transition from clinician to consultant.

Similarities

Several similarities between SLP work and writing center work allowed us to transition fairly seamlessly from one to the other. Both fields value professional development of their staff, offering training that combines theories and pedagogies of the field with supervised client interaction. For instance, SLP students gain hands-on practice in education and healthcare settings where they assess and treat patients and apply evidence-based strategies to real-world scenarios, while new writing consultants observe and co-tutor live sessions. In both fields, training requires openness to feedback and emphasizes personal reflection. Our training also involved being observed during a session by a more senior practitioner (writing center administrator or clinical supervisor) and receiving feedback on strengths and areas for improvement. Additionally, reflecting on sessions to process them and think through next steps was an essential element of developing our ability to self-assess our effectiveness as we continued to engage with clients in both fields. The fields also share similar approaches to writing and to supporting writers. Both understand writing as a process from pre-writing through revising, although the terminology varies. For instance, while SLP distinguishes between “process” (e.g., developing ideas, planning, organizing) and “product” (e.g., written form, syntax, effectiveness of intended communication) (“Written Language Disorders”), the writing center views addressing grammar as part of the writing process. In addition, both fields share methods of supporting writers, such as scaffolding to help clients learn to recognize their own errors (patients) or areas for revision (writers) without our input. Clinicians might help a patient with difficulty swallowing to better understand the link between their actions and their body’s response through biofeedback methods such as visualizations of muscle activation (Archer et al. 282). Consultants might move a writer from depending on consultant input for correctly formatting citations to referencing style guides independently. As with approaches to writing, although the strategy may be similar across fields, the terminology varies. While writing centers commonly talk about scaffolding (e.g., I do, we do, you do), SLP divides that into specific strategies like modeling (e.g., demonstrating the correct production of a speech sound) and cueing (e.g., reminding the patient to pay attention to their tongue when attempting the sound). In both cases, however, the strategies are geared toward helping clients acquire, practice, and gain independence with their ability to communicate.

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These similarities in both professional development and approaches to writing arise naturally because the underlying focus of both fields centers the client while working toward the overall goal of skill and knowledge transference (writing centers; e.g., see Devet’s transference primer) or generalization (SLP). For instance, writing center consultations help writers think about their own writing and also about disciplinary writing, topics that Elizabeth Wardle suggests are necessary for transfer to occur (82). In both fields, clients ideally receive writing instruction from other sources, and our role is to provide scaffolding to what happens outside our space. SLP pull-out programs allow for individualization and focus on specific skills in ways that still coordinate with classroom instruction (“School-Based Service Delivery”). Consultants collaborate with instructors implicitly, by encouraging writers to share materials such as instructor feedback and assignment sheets. Despite the implicit presence of other educators, the aim of sessions in either field is not to tailor strategies to specific features of an assignment or educator expectations but rather to provide input that aligns with the current assignment while also encouraging writers to develop meta-awareness about writing. In our case, the presence of similarities around approaches to working with clients and around writing more generally allowed a relatively smooth transition from clinician to consultant; however, the positive result was serendipitous rather than planned. Overtly focusing on the similarities during early training might have allowed us to gloss over the basics more quickly, leaving time to explore other aspects of writing center theory and pedagogy more deeply.

Differences

While similarities between the fields helped us effectively engage with clients at the writing center and in the clinic, unexplored differences created moments of difficulty. One of the most immediate differences was the expected amount of preparation prior to a session. When we were told not to extensively prepare for a writing center session, we felt uneasy. As health professionals, we are expected to thoroughly prepare beforehand in order to achieve the best results. The clinician is held accountable for the patient’s progress by schools, healthcare facilities, and other oversight bodies. Failure to prepare could lead to reprimands from supervisors and conflict with clients. As new consultants, we did not yet understand or have the opportunity to discuss how this little-to-no-prep policy can actually help facilitate a more collaborative and writer-led session. Discussing this difference during

training would have reduced our early discomfort while simultaneously enhancing our ability to create highly collaborative sessions with writers.

Most of the differences that interfered with our work resulted from different understandings of the practitioner’s role. In SLP, we were expected to act as an expert, giving feedback that is fundamentally assertive (e.g., “Round your lips more while saying the sh sound”) and evaluative (e.g., “When you said red your r sounded more like a w”). In the writing center, we were encouraged to serve as peers and, in particular, as generalist peers. This contrast in how the practitioner is positioned with respect to the client resulted in an unexpected lack of confidence when relating to writers in a one-on-one setting. Because we were accustomed to a similar one-on-one context in SLP, we found the differences in power dynamics between the two fields disconcerting. In our expert SLP role, we determine the trajectory of a patient’s treatment, including the number of sessions, while both measuring and assuming responsibility for the outcomes. In contrast, in our peer consultant role, our work is much more dictated by the writer’s goals and how they feel about the session, regardless of how incremental their progress might seem to us.

Due to the shared people-facing and one-onone interaction contexts of the two settings, we did not discuss the differences in style of interaction in our training. As we became increasingly aware of similarities between the fields and leaned into those, it was easy to make assumptions about what else may carry over. This lack of focus on differences between fields resulted in missteps in both settings. As consultants, we periodically found ourselves second-guessing how much expertise we should claim. For example, Genevieve felt afraid to be too direct with writers, which led to long moments of silence while she pondered how to provide feedback without taking away writer agency. Similar problems occurred with our SLP work. During the first semester of Ashley’s graduate program, a clinical supervisor told her that she needed to be more assertive in therapy sessions, leading her to realize she was approaching therapy like a writing consultation. While discomfort is often unavoidable when learning something new, discussing differences during training would have helped identify the why behind our unease, leading to quicker resolution. In addition, explicit focus on differences would have allowed us to move between the different roles consciously, taking up or leaving behind particular styles or methods in context-appropriate ways.

Bidirectional Transference

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When we think about intersections between fields of study, it is worth considering both what the consultant brings to their writing center work from their home discipline and also how the writing center work can affect the home discipline in return. Writing centers staffed primarily by English graduate students often consider themselves an integral part of those students’ professional development, as GTAs may first work in the writing center before teaching composition. This career trajectory will not be the same for GTAs from outside English, but the principle still holds: The work the consultants do in the writing center should benefit their future careers. In turn, the knowledge and experience that GTAs bring from their home discipline can enhance writing center theory and pedagogy.

From SLP. As SLPs, Ashley and Genevieve brought to the writing center more than just the similar experiences with one-on-one sessions or methods like scaffolding. Even though generalist tutoring encourages moving away from a focus on the individual consultant’s academic background, one of the specific contributions that a consultant from outside of composition brings to writing center work is a potential breadth of knowledge across multiple fields. For instance, SLPs must know not only about diagnosing and treating communication disorders but also have a foundation in areas like psychology and linguistics. Similarly, consultants from disciplines such as engineering might have a breadth of knowledge across fields like math and physics. The broad academic background of those outside the composition field leads to comfort and familiarity with content and writing conventions across multiple related but distinct fields, potentially lending a specialist quality to their generalist consultations with writers from a variety of backgrounds beyond their own.

In addition to content knowledge, SLPs have an awareness of individuals that can enhance writing center pedagogies. As SLPs, we are aware that an approach may be extremely effective for one client, but completely disruptive to another. SLPs are taught to pay attention to the patient’s needs as both a member of a specific population (e.g., patients with aphasia benefiting from shorter, less complex statements) and as an individual (e.g., a patient’s preference for a high-energy or lowenergy environment). While the populations and individual needs of writing center clients do not align directly with those in the SLP setting, this awareness allowed us to embrace rather than fear the potentially inconsistent nature of consultations.

For writing centers, perhaps the most valuable aspect of the SLP’s awareness of individual needs is the way in which it positions them to challenge practices

that allow consultants to remain in their own comfort zone at the expense of clients. For example, reading a writer’s document aloud is a common writing center practice because it can be extremely helpful for identifying places that need work. It can be disconcerting for consultants when a writer rejects the practice. Similarly, consultants might expect writers to behave and communicate in certain ways, to make eye contact or use nonverbals to show they understand what we are saying and to demonstrate engagement. When expectations are not met, consultants tend to feel uncomfortable, and the session can derail quickly. This is a circumstance which SLP training is perfectly situated to address.

SLP clinical training taught us that a session's goals can be achieved even if the methods look unconventional because communication comes in many forms and does not look the same for everyone. This perspective has informed our writing center work. Because we see communicative variety exhibited in real life through our work with patients, we are attuned specifically to the interpersonal communication needs of our clients in either field. We also understand that there can be many co-existing factors that influence a patient’s ability and willingness to express themselves, whether that be a diagnosed condition (e.g., ADHD, dyslexia, ASD) or patient preferences. Experience working with patients who have different ways of communicating and who often exhibit frustration with their ability to communicate has given us a perspective that not only benefits our own consultations with writers but can also be shared with other consultants. An SLP focus on meeting patients where they are in terms of oral communication combines with the writing center's concern for meeting writers where they are in terms of written expression, creating an enhanced experience for both client and consultant.

A final potential area of transference from SLP to writing center work can be found in relationships with faculty as well as students. For writing centers which offer faculty-requested workshops or who administer (or aspire to administer) a writing fellows program, consultants from SLP bring a unique perspective on interprofessional collaboration. SLPs are increasingly expected to work closely with teachers and classroom staff within the general education classroom or to provide coaching to relevant educators on how to promote specific skills (Archibald). This background of collaborating closely with other educators might transfer nicely to a writing fellows situation where the consultant needs to work collaboratively with a faculty member to meet course writing goals while occasionally redirecting

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an instructor’s misplaced enthusiasm for how such a program best operates.

From Writing Centers. While leveraging existing strengths affects how we might educate new consultants, an equally important issue to consider is what they learn from us that might benefit their alternate academic life. One direct benefit that we derived from the writing center was experience talking and thinking about writing strategies. Genevieve found her SLP literacy class less intimidating because working in the writing center had introduced her to writing best practices and provided experience talking with a wide range of writers. As we worked with writers, we also gained practice with concepts that helped our own writing as students and future professionals. Working as consultants gave us a better understanding of the importance of considering the intended audience, which helped greatly as we wrote final research papers for our program. We were better able to adjust disciplinespecific information to be more accessible for colleagues.

In addition to technical ability, we further developed our interpersonal skills. Our experience making writers feel comfortable has translated into being better equipped to support patients during times of vulnerability or doubt. In learning to provide feedback to writers in a supportive yet helpful manner, we have further refined our ability to offer compassionate and clinically effective feedback to the patients we serve. For example, two semesters after Ashley was instructed to be more assertive in a clinical setting, a different supervisor encouraged her to be less assertive and to use more “I wonder” phrases. Due to her familiarity with this exact phrasing while consulting with writers, she was able to easily adapt to this change in feedback style while in the clinic.

One of the differences we talked about earlier as causing unease led to eventual gain. While going into writing center sessions without a designated plan was daunting at first, practice doing so fostered an ability to improvise that has increased our flexibility during SLP sessions. Our clinical training conditions us to view a successful session as one that begins with a perfectly crafted lesson plan and follows that through, which does not always reflect reality. Our time at the writing center showed us that even when things do not go as planned, we have experience and techniques we can rely on to help us recalibrate and problem-solve. Experience responding to writer needs as they emerge and making effective decisions in the moment have helped us realize that some of the best sessions arise from changing course. In clinical sessions, this translated to remaining calm and adjusting rather than freezing during

unexpected bumps. Being able to change course effectively and intentionally has not only served us as clinicians but also highlights the larger point that transference between fields, while it may contribute initially to practitioner unease, has the capacity to enhance the work of both fields.

Implications for Graduate Consultant Education

The intersections we have identified between SLP and writing center work will not map precisely across all fields; however, they do point to important considerations when educating graduate students in the role of generalist consultant. Students like Ashley and Genevieve do not enter the writing center space as blank slates when it comes to writing or talking about writing, but neither do they automatically possess confidence in their own experiences and abilities. In addition, we are essentially asking them to regularly switch between the theories and pedagogies of two very different fields, to, as Christopher LeCluyse and Sue Mendelsohn point out, “take on the persona and responsibilities of a confident professional” in each role (103). As we consider how best to develop them as confident, successful consultants in the writing center, it is important to see the process as a two-way mentorship. The experiences and education that graduate consultants bring from their home discipline have ramifications for the work they do in the writing center, but the reverse is also true. What they learn during their time in the writing center has potential ramifications for the work they do in their home discipline as well. The professional development we offer in the writing center should follow Bell’s definition: “not only to meet current institutional and individual needs, but also to move participants toward their professional goals.” As such, writing center professional development should consist of acknowledging the tools already at graduate students’ disposal from their home disciplines while simultaneously adding to rather than replacing them. What and how we teach should leverage similarities for increased confidence in both fields, identify differences in order to circumvent potential conflicts between fields, and enable graduate consultants to shift between roles smoothly and appropriately. We propose a fourstep process for educating consultants from outside the writing center field: awareness, discussion, reflection, and dissemination. Although pedagogies such as discussion and reflection are common within writing center education (e.g., Julia Bleakney notes that “reflection is a touchstone of ongoing tutor education”), each step here involves a closer look at the three

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potential intersections between fields we identified earlier.

The first step, awareness, can occur even before the consultant is hired. In our writing center, GTAs must apply and be interviewed before being hired. Vicki commonly includes questions in that interview that ask applicants to think about their current position with respect to writing and mentoring students but also to explain how working for the writing center fits into their academic studies or career development. Potential questions focus on topics such as their own transition from undergraduate to graduate writing, what they like best about writing, and how they would support a writer who asked a question to which they did not know the answer. These topics can provide insight into how

applicants think about writing, mentoring, and their own abilities. Table 1 provides a more detailed breakdown of the types of questions that might be asked. Answers to questions such as these offer valuable insight to the one doing the hiring, but they also nudge the applicant to consider potential intersections between their home field and the writing center. Talking about differences in academic writing across disciplines, for instance, opens the door to realizing that other forms of similarity and difference might exist. The awareness raised by these early questions is the first step toward paying explicit attention to how the two academic domains might interact.

Table 1. Pre-Hire Questions for Awareness of Disciplinary Similarities and Differences

Describe your transition from undergraduate to graduate writing. Explain your writing process. How do you approach writing tasks?

What do you like best about writing? What do you struggle with? How do you overcome things you struggle with?

Describe what you know about differences in academic writing across the disciplines. What is your area of specialization in your field of study? How would you describe the writing that you do?

How have you worked with students/writers? What do you anticipate will be different between what you have been doing and what you could do in writing tutoring?

Mentoring

Intersections between fields

If a student asked you a question to which you did not know the answer, how would you handle the situation?

What are your strengths/weaknesses when working with students?

How does tutoring fit into your academic studies or career plan?

The second step, discussion, occurs during orientation and early training. In our case, initial professional development took place the week prior to and during the first five weeks of the semester. Explicitly exploring the similarities and differences between fields serves as a useful way to bolster consultants’ confidence in the abilities they already possess and in their ability to acquire new expertise while also helping them avoid assumptions that might hinder their success as consultants. For Ashley and Genevieve, openly exploring the similarities between SLP and writing centers, such as protocols for one-on-one sessions, helped them adjust their understanding of their starting point from “knows nothing about writing consultations,” a position that undermined confidence, to “has experience with one-on-one sessions with clients,” a position that restored confidence. Similarly, discussing differences such as power dynamics, time constraints, or the regularity of sessions would have made the differences less likely to create roadblocks to success in either setting. Discussion of topics related to interpersonal interactions, goals for sessions, methods of practice, and context allows for immediate application of home discipline experiences to the new setting, avoidance of potential hindrances, and the transference of useful material from one field to the other.

As an example, we might think about relational aspects such as power dynamics between practitioner and client as one area of overlap. In fields such as math education (teacher-student) or counseling psychology (therapist-patient), thinking of relational interactions as an area of overlap makes immediate and obvious sense. If the graduate consultant comes from a field without such obvious practitioner-client relationships, discussing relational aspects is still important; many fields will require researcher-subject interactions, and most will involve some amount of expert-novice interaction. Some will involve co-authoring interactions. Any of these relational aspects of a field may result in the sorts of similarities or differences explored by the

questions we have listed in table 2. Without explicit discussion, the introduction to writing center theory and pedagogy may be subverted by unexplored aspects carried over from the home discipline or may itself compromise the consultants’ work in that other discipline.

The third step, reflection, should be ongoing for the duration of a consultant’s employment with the writing center and should encourage them to analyze the significance of similarities and differences while considering whether material from one field might transfer to the other. Asking consultants to reflect regularly on disciplinary intersections allows a responsiveness to changes arising in the home discipline that may also affect their thinking about intersections between the fields. For instance, Genevieve would have found it difficult to consider the similarities in how writing was approached in both fields when she first started working in the writing center because she had not yet taken her department’s literacy class. Ongoing reflection should center around how and when to switch between writing center practitioner and, in our case, SLP practitioner. Much like writing center administrators ask consultants from composition fields to think through the similarities and differences between teaching or creative writing workshopping and consulting, consultants from non-English fields can be encouraged to think critically about their two roles and to consider what might be imported from their home discipline that furthers writing center goals and what might need to be left at the door each time they move between fields. Analysis might focus on similarities that can lead to assumptions, on differences highlighting strategies that still need to be acquired, or on aspects that might transfer from one field to the other, i.e., how work in the home discipline might be different if writing center principles were applied there. The discussion could cover a broad range of issues such as we have explored here and have itemized in table 3.

Table

2.

Post-Hire Questions for Discussion

Who are clients in the home discipline (e.g., students, research subjects? What is their motivation for being there?

Is there a hierarchy or power differential between a field’s practitioners (e.g., instructor, clinician) and its clients (e.g., novices)?

Interpersonal interactions

Goals or expected outcomes of sessions

What do home discipline clients already possess intellectually, emotionally, socially, etc.? How/to what extent does their internal/emotional experience affect interactions with practitioners?

What strategies do practitioners in the field commonly use to interact with novices?

How is expertise within the field understood? Who possess it?

What are the roles of practitioners and clients with respect to one another?

What are the goals or expected outcomes of interactions between practitioners and clients or between two collaborating practitioners?

How important to practitioners are the ideas of generalization, maintenance, transference, or the client’s eventual independence?

What are the potential negative outcomes if practitioners do a poor job?

What methods are used to teach new skills? In what order or combination?

Methods of practice

Context

What is the role of writing in the field for practitioners? For clients? Is it taught? How is it used? How is it understood (e.g., as a way of thinking through what you know, as a way of sharing existing truth)?

What is the structure of interactions between practitioner and client? What is a typical location for these interactions? How much attention does the practitioner pay to the ways that structure/location affect individual needs?

What sort of interprofessional collaboration occurs or is required of practitioners?

What is a normal client-to-practitioner ratio?

What resources are available to practitioners?

What are the time constraints of interactions between practitioners and clients? Do they meet once or multiple times? For how long?

Table

3.

Post-Hire Questions for Analysis and Reflection

Do the similarities you identified tend to coalesce into certain categories?

Similarities

Differences

Transfer from the home field

What other things might you assume are similar?

How might that assumption lead you astray?

What identified differences require you to change roles entirely as you move between fields and which ones might you use to enhance your work in the other field?

What skills or strategies do you need to acquire in order to transition seamlessly between fields?

What skills and experiences from your home discipline do you draw upon in your daily work at the writing center?

How do you think your tutoring would be different without these experiences?

How can you share these with other consultants?

How can you leverage your experience that you gain in the writing center to enhance your home discipline work?

Transfer to the home field

What kind of skills are you acquiring (e.g., technical, interpersonal) and how do they interact with the roles you play in your home discipline?

How do you think your work in your home discipline would be different if you applied these skills from the writing center?

The final step, dissemination, asks consultants to deepen their participation in writing center culture beyond simply supporting writers. Megan Boeshart Burelle and Meagan Thompson’s heuristics for graduate consultant training suggest that encouraging GTAs to teach other consultants helps them understand their position as one of personal professional development (250). As we have discussed, the knowledge and experiences graduate consultants bring from their home discipline can be valuable to other writing center practitioners. In considering how to use consultant education to enable GTAs to share what they know with other consultants, we not only address Burelle and Thompson’s heuristic but also position GTAs in the role that Kristin Messuri invites them to occupy, that of “disciplinary ambassador” (217). While Messuri focuses primarily on sharing disciplinary aspects of writing, we suggest that ambassadorship might move beyond just writing knowledge. Encouraging graduate consultants to also share what they know about interpersonal interactions and methods of practice with fellow consultants or through conference presentations both consolidates their own understanding of what they possess and also passes it on to other writing center practitioners.

Here, too, consultants will be considering questions of transference, of what sort of crosspollination between fields might benefit them both. For instance, consultants from SLP might lead a staff

meeting to share strategies for approaching sessions with writers who do not display their engagement in expected ways. In addition, what consultants from outside the field bring to their consulting might stretch the boundaries of writing center scholarship. From SLP, for instance, we might be encouraged to take a closer look at consultants’ roles vis-à-vis their clients: For whom and under what circumstances might it be beneficial to act as an expert rather than a peer? How does each role benefit or hinder a writer? Writing center scholarship about disability might also benefit from an approach that borrows from the SLP lens. For instance, what techniques (e.g., using shorter, less complex sentences) might consultants borrow for any session where communication with a writer seems difficult? Disseminating what they have discovered about the similarities, differences, and transference between their two fields bolsters the GTAs’ development as consultants, as practitioners in their home field, and as academics more generally.

Conclusion

We began this article by labeling Ashley and Genevieve’s cohort an experiment in training graduate consultants from outside English. Such a label implies an element of evaluation: How well did the experiment work? From Vicki’s administrative standpoint, it worked extraordinarily well, despite the serendipity of cross-

disciplinary connections occurring without advance planning. The consultants were there because they chose to be rather than because working at the writing center was the expected next step in their funding. Unlike English GTAs from previous years, consultants were thoroughly vetted through the application process rather than placed in the writing center because they needed to gain necessary skills or professionalism before entering the classroom. And, as we have explored here, the consultants brought additional, unanticipated value to their work, as well as doing an excellent job as consultants.

From the consultants’ standpoint, Ashley and Genevieve have no regret about having stepped outside their department for funding. They found working at the writing center to be creative, interpersonal work that complemented their graduate studies and allowed them to develop personal mentoring and teaching styles. Working with staff and with writers from across campus helped them expand their professional and personal connections beyond the immediate circle of their graduate program. They were exposed to new disciplines and writing conventions, and they were afforded professional opportunities (e.g., significant experience mentoring undergraduates with writing) and personal mentorship (e.g., presenting at conferences) that the introductory undergraduate course assistantships in their department would likely not have provided. In short, they found the experience of working at the writing center to be helpful with developing broad, non-disciplinary skills.

In the introduction to Re/Writing the Center, Susan Lawrence and Terry Myers Zawacki explain their purpose as helping writing center practitioners “rethink and revise the principles and practices that have been definitional to [their] theory and pedagogy” (9). Although the book focuses primarily on writers and writing, the idea of rethinking our professional practices resonated as we explored the intersections that may occur between fields. Ashley and Genevieve were forced to rethink their own SLP practices as they shifted between roles, but they were also able to challenge definitional writing center practices such as reading aloud.

If we see writing as not only words on the page but also process, thought, communication, collaboration, general yet discipline specific, and a host of other descriptors; if we see writing centers not only as places of teaching, learning, researching, and mentoring but also as places that operate “across the curriculum” and “in the disciplines,” then perhaps we should not be thinking of ourselves as belonging primarily to English nor limited by discipline when

hiring GTAs. Perhaps how we hire and how we educate graduate consultants is yet another aspect of Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s call to question our orthodoxies. A wealth of possibility exists if we open our GTA hiring process beyond English, as we have discussed here, but with that wealth comes great responsibility. As we plan to educate GTAs from beyond English, we will want to consider what they need from that education in order to truly develop as cross-disciplinary professionals.

Vicki tells our new GTAs that being a good consultant does not involve particular strategies applied in correct ways; instead, what defines a good consultant is doing something for a reason, paying attention to how well it works, and adjusting as necessary. In other words, consultants must learn to be self-aware and to modulate their interactions with writers appropriately, as Ashley did when navigating the conflicting advice of SLP and writing center supervisors. Hiring GTAs from beyond English brings this need for appropriate modulation to the foreground, and professional development for this group thus requires an attention to both disciplines the new writing center world but also the familiar home discipline. The result for consultants and writing centers alike will be positive.

In discussing our experience navigating the conflicts and overlaps between Ashley and Genevieve’s academic training in SLP and their work in the writing center, our hope is that our reflections can offer insight to writing center administrators hiring graduate consultants from varied fields. Having an understanding of both the similarities and differences that exist between a consultant’s academic field and writing center theory and pedagogy can help to promote success while also avoiding interference with the best practices of either domain, while paying attention to the possibility of transference between disciplines ensures that potentials do not go untapped.

Notes

1. When we use the term "intersections,” we are not invoking the theory of intersectionality but rather applying a more conventional usage meaning simply where two things meet. We appreciate other theoretical usages of the term, but they did not guide our work here.

2. While we wrote this article collaboratively, we will name ourselves in the moments where we must refer to something individually experienced.

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Phillips, Talinn. “Writing Center Support for Graduate Students: An Integrated Model.” Supporting Graduate Student Writers, edited by Steve Simpson, Nigel A. Caplan, Michelle Cox, and Talinn Phillips, University of Michigan Press, 2016, pp. 159-170. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8772400.

Ryan, Leigh, and Lisa Zimmerelli. The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors. 6th ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

“School-Based Service Delivery in Speech-Language Pathology.” American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, www.asha.org/slp/schools/schoolbased-service-delivery-in-speech-languagepathology/ Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.

Summy, Rebecca, and Kelly Farquharson. "Examining Graduate Training in Written Language and the Impact on Speech-Language Pathologists' Practice: Perspectives from Faculty and Clinicians." American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, vol 33, no.1, 2024, pp. 189-202. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_AJSLP-2200327.

Walker, Kristin. “The Debate Over Generalist and Specialist Tutors: Genre Theory’s Contribution.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, 1998, pp. 27-46. https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1399.

Wardle, Elizabeth. “Understanding Transfer from FYC: Preliminary Results of a Longitudinal Study.” Writing Program Administration, vol. 31, no. 1-2,

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2007, pp. 65-85. http://associationdatabase.co/archives/31n12/31n1-2wardle.pdf.

“Written Language Disorders.” American Speech-Language Hearing Association, www.asha.org/practiceportal/clinical-topics/written-languagedisorders/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2024.

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“HOW I SPEAK DOESN’T REALLY MATTER, WHAT I SPEAK ABOUT DOES”: BIPOC TUTOR VOICES ON LINGUISTIC JUSTICE IN THE WRITING CENTER

Chloe Ray Claremont McKenna College chloe.ray@claremontmckenna.edu

Abstract

Scholars in the field of writing center studies have previously, and continue to, criticize writing centers for upholding unjust systems, arguing for more practical, equitable, and inclusive anti-racist pedagogies–namely through means of linguistic justice. Within this is a call for more attention to the practices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) tutors and to Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). In this small, IRB-approved project, we interviewed three BIPOC tutors employed at an MSI and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), exploring how these tutors conceptualize linguistic justice and how they practice it within their work at their university writing center. By listening to the experiences of these three tutors, we gained insight into the nuanced and complex ways in which their lived experiences and histories influence how they conceptualize linguistic justice, both for themselves and in their work in the writing center. Our research revealed how the multiplicity, complexity, and nuance of identity specifically self-identification and belonging, the use of multilingualism and code-switching, and the defining of one’s authentic voice affect how a tutor understands and performs linguistic justice. We hope that sharing these tutors’ voices will highlight a need to recognize the intersections and multiplicity of language, discourse, and identity that shapes tutors’ experiences with linguistic justice work as well as acknowledge the labor they perform when engaging in that work in the writing center.

Introduction

While previous scholarship has made important strides in addressing social and racial justice in the writing center context (e.g., Diab et al.; Greenfield and Rowan; Grimm; Villanueva), linguistic justice, as both a term and form of strategic action, has received increasing focus. Many posit the 1974 CCCC’s conference statement, Students’ Right to Their Own Language, as an important catalyst for the pursuit of racial equity and justice within the field. More recently, the emphasis on anti-racist practices and linguistic justice can be seen from the 2022 CCCC’s conference theme “The Promises and Perils of Higher Education: Our Discipline’s Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Linguistic Justice” (Perryman-Clark). Linguistic justice within writing center scholarship includes the 2023 edited collection Writing Centers and Racial Justice: A Guidebook for Critical Praxis (Morrison and Garriott) and The Peer Review’s 2024 special issue Enacting Linguistic Justice in/through Writing Centers (Tucker and Bouza).

We believe that writing centers, particularly writing centers that use a peer tutor model, are uniquely positioned not just to support students across diverse

Erin Goldin

University of California, Merced egoldin@ucmerced.edu

linguistic backgrounds, but to actively advocate for linguistic justice within the academy. At the same time, we agree with recent calls to include more tutor voices in our research on how writing centers effectively enact linguistic justice. As Faith Thompson writes in her piece on the practicality of anti-racist tutor training, “Writing centers seeking to actualize antiracist practices must start with tutors. They should move beyond the purely theoretical and reimagine writing center pedagogies.” The conversations about linguistic justice in writing center work are still largely missing the voices and experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) writing center tutors. Coupled with this is the need to assess the practices of tutors at minority-serving institutions (MSIs), as much of the scholarship is primarily informed and practiced by tutors at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) (Camarillo). Thus, our research explores how BIPOC writing center tutors conceptualize linguistic justice and implement it in their tutoring practices. Throughout this project, we have learned, and thus aim to argue, how contextualization and deeper awareness of our tutor’s complex identities are necessary for the practical implementation of anti-racist and justice-informed pedagogy in writing centers.

Defining the Practice of Linguistic Justice

Despite the term “linguistic justice” gaining traction across scholarship, its meaning, and what it specifically entails, fluctuates. The origin of the term linguistic justice is often tied to April Baker-Bell’s text of the same name. Baker-Bell, however, doesn’t explicitly define linguistic justice as a term; rather, she posits the focus of her text as “an antiracist approach to language and literacy education” that seeks to specifically dismantle “Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic hegemony and supremacy in classrooms and in the world” (7). This definition has often been expanded as a means to dismantle the linguistic racism that affects a wider range of marginalized identities, languages, and discourses, as well as applied more specifically to college students, as opposed to the secondary students who were the focus of Baker-Bell’s study. Despite Baker-Bell’s context, pedagogy, and

demographic age not being reflected in the specific context of most writing centers, her work is still referenced as a cornerstone of how to enact linguistic justice work in the field and in our centers (e.g., Thompson).

A direct definition of linguistic justice within the writing center context can be found in Lucia Pawlowski’s 2024 article, in which she demonstrates how writing center administrators can utilize our spaces as informational hubs and catalysts for institutional linguistic justice. She creates a “scaffolded approach” of introducing antiracism to “all writing center stakeholders” within one’s institution. Most notably, she defines three distinct levels of linguistic justice: linguistic diversity, linguistic equity, and linguistic justice. Pawlowski defines linguistic justice as the “most progressive and radical” level as it “calls for action: it is a solution-based vision” (emphasis in original). Pawlowski’s text is important because it is one of the few that offers a distinguishable definition of what it means to enact linguistic justice specifically within a writing center context. For example, instead of relying on Baker-Bell’s text to define linguistic justice, Pawlowski contextualizes it as an actionable form of linguistic justice because it is a pedagogical framework that offers concrete methods for dismantling antiracism and linguistic prejudice within classroom curriculums.

While the discussions of anti-racist pedagogy within writing centers have informed the field for years (e.g., Greenfield and Rowan), the practical implementation of linguistic justice is still fairly new. Using Pawlowski’s definitions, we see linguistic justice progressive and radical visions and action in recent work that addresses how to specifically incorporate linguistically inclusive instruction into writing center sessions. Suggestions for linguistically inclusive practices are often strategy-based. For example, Zoe Esterly et al. discuss how the writing center is “strategically positioned” as a place for students to negotiate between their own linguistic practices and Standard Academic English (SAE), especially regarding grammar instruction (45). Other texts have worked to posit and promote linguistic “agency” and “resistance” in writing centers through the incorporation of translingual praxis (see Shapiro and Watson), or by turning to racial and critical literacies practices (see Johnson).

Within the conversation of linguistic justice, how it is being enacted is still rather varied and hard to define concretely. For example, code-meshing, a rhetorical technique that involves the mixing of SAE and the author’s non-academic discourse, as opposed to code-

switching, which is the practice of altering between discourses, may be regarded as an actionable strategy to be employed by a tutor in a session as a means to promote linguistic justice. However, we struggled to locate many examples within scholarship that present tutor perspectives on the ease or effectiveness of this or other particular strategies that are designed specifically to encourage linguistic justice. Overall, we noticed that the literature leans more theoretical and suggestive, with the voices and perspectives of administrators primarily being centered. Needless to say, linguistic justice is not merely a special topic or theme, but a movement that must be continuously implemented, revised, and ongoing. Thus, we see a need for more examples that represent how linguistic justice is enacted by tutors across various writing center contexts.

Defining Multiplicity

Although not always explicitly stated, conversations that are often inherent to linguistic justice are those concerning the multiplicity of one’s identity. One of the core goals of linguistic justice work is, as Baker-Bell states, to dismantle from classrooms the linguistic hegemony that places SAE, a language form that reflects dominant white linguistic codes, as one equivalent to power and correctness. On an individual level, linguistic justice is about valuing the experience, culture, history, and epistemology that is intrinsically tied to one’s language use, both rhetorically and ideologically. Language is identity, identity being something that is always a plurality. Thus, linguistic justice must be about acknowledging the plurality of linguistic identity the ones we are taught at home, at school, and in our various communities. This is how we’ve come to understand multiplicity in relation to linguistic justice and identity development, a core focus of our study.

Positionality and Stance

We acknowledge that, as individuals, scholars, and writing center practitioners, we occupy various, intersecting identities which shape how we understand and engage with the world, including how we approach our research. A central goal of our research was to create space for the voices of our undergraduate tutors, who have their own unique positionalities, identities, and experiences. However, we knew from the very beginning of this project that even taking on the role of “researcher” to interview and write about these tutors’ experiences was setting up a dynamic that is already limiting to that goal. We knew we would be filtering

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those voices through our own and that this was not something we could do without being attentive to the interplay of our own positionalities with those of the tutors we interviewed and with the overall research and writing process.

It is necessary to start by identifying our positionalities. Chloe is a multiracial (AfricanAmerican/white), able-bodied, cis-gendered woman. She was a first-generation college student who began working in a writing center as an undergraduate. She is currently in a non-faculty position as the Assistant Director of a writing center at a private, liberal arts college (PWI). Erin is a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered woman from a background of relative privilege. She has worked in writing centers, starting as an undergraduate, for over 20 years. She is currently in a non-faculty academic position as Director of a writing center at an institution designated Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), Asian American, and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI), and MSI. While we were not working together at the same institution at the time we conducted this research, our initial conversations about linguistic justice and the need for research about the experiences of BIPOC tutors emerged at a time when we were institutional colleagues.

It is, however, not enough to disclose our positionalities; we also knew we needed to be selfreflexive throughout the research and writing process. Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater explains that in order to “achieve a reflexive stance, the researcher needs to bend back upon herself as well as the other as an object of study” (119). By turning back on ourselves, we are able to attend to our role in the research process as well as our relationships with the tutors, with each other, and with the broader writing center community we wanted to share these voices with. While we don’t write about ourselves explicitly, we were present throughout the research process and we made decisions about what we were writing and how we were writing it. Because we wanted to focus on the voices and experiences of these undergraduate BIPOC tutors, we opted to engage in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Irvin Seidman explains that “at the root of in-depth interviewing is an interest in understanding the experience of other people and the meaning they make of that experience” (9). However, unless tutors coauthored their stories, something we couldn’t do properly in the scope and timing of this project, this piece cannot be a pure representation of their voices and experiences. We are writing as researchers, thus, we are making meaning alongside their stories. As we wanted to present these tutors as authentically as possible, we

emphasized long excerpts with minimal editing or paraphrasing in the “Results” section and aimed to relegate as much of our “interpretation” as possible to later sections.

Methods

Research Site & Relationships

University of California, Merced is a public land-grant university located in the San Joaquin Valley (aka the Central Valley) of California. With a student population that is 91% BIPOC (CIE), UC Merced is a HSI, AANAPISI, and MSI. As of Fall 2023, UC Merced’s undergraduate population was 65% firstgeneration and 59% Pell eligible. Sixty-six percent of all undergraduates are multilingual, meaning they speak a language other than English or they speak English and another language (CIE).

UC Merced’s University Writing Center (UWC) began as a pilot program in 2014 and was established as a full program in 2017. The UWC employs approximately 18 undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines and one graduate student. The students employed by the UWC generally represent the student population in that they are predominantly BIPOC, firstgeneration, and multilingual.

It is important to note that both Erin and Chloe have existing relationships with the UWC tutors through a variety of roles: Erin’s role as director, Chloe’s role as instructor of writing, including an upper-division tutor pedagogy course that collaborated closely with the UWC, and both serving as mentors to students who were often in Chloe’s classes as well as working with Erin in the UWC. Because of Erin’s director role and the power inherent to that position in relation to the tutors, she was not involved in any of the recruitment or interview processes. At the time this research was conducted, Chloe was no longer working at UC Merced, but multiple former students of hers were still working in the UWC. Because of this existing relationship, these tutors were able to open up to Chloe during the interviews in a way they may not have felt comfortable sharing with a stranger.

Data Collection & Analysis

Tutors were invited to participate in these interviews during a staff meeting that Chloe attended via Zoom. At that meeting, she presented a summary of the research project, including sharing the research question and goal of publication, and invited tutors who identify as BIPOC to participate if they had time and interest.

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Three undergraduate BIPOC tutors volunteered to participate and were able to schedule interviews with Chloe. Interviews were conducted via Zoom and averaged 50 minutes in length.

In these interviews, Chloe asked questions about tutors’ language and identity (e.g., “How would you describe the relationship between language and your academic identity?”), questions about linguistic justice (e.g., “In what context have you heard linguistic justice being discussed?”), and their practices as writing center tutors (e.g., “Are there any elements of linguistic justice that you apply to your own practice within sessions as a writing center consultant?”). Follow-up questions were occasionally asked to allow tutors to expand on some of their thoughts, but the conversation always remained focused on identity, linguistic justice, and tutoring.

After interviews were transcribed and deidentified, Erin re-joined the process and coding was done collaboratively in multiple rounds. As a way to let tutors’ voices drive our analysis, we chose to focus first on in vivo coding, which uses the words and phrases of

Table 1. Coding Categories with Examples Category Definition Examples

Definitions of Linguistic Justice words/phrases used when they define/redefine linguistic justice

Definitions of SAE words/phrases used when talking about academic writing and/or SAE

Linguistic Justice Practices

words/phrases used when describing tutoring in relation to language difference

Codeswitching/ code-meshing

Living w/ Complexity

words/phrases used when describing how they communicate in/for different communities or contexts

words/phrases that describe ambiguity or duality, belonging/not belonging to multiple identities, communities, etc.

participants for codes (Saldaña). Initial codes included words that tutors used frequently in their interviews, which we then grouped into categories. For example, all three tutors used words like “connect” and “disconnect” when talking about communities (language we did not introduce in our questions). We grouped those uses of “connect” and “disconnect” with phrases like “biracial but doesn't look biracial” and “I've traded my ability to speak to my community” into a category that included descriptions of ambiguity or duality in identities. The table below shows the five categories we found early in our coding process with definitions and some brief examples from the interviews. Through identifying these categories and subsequent rounds of coding, themes emerged that, for us, raised questions about the multiplicity of identity, especially regarding relationships and authenticity as pertinent factors of linguistic choice, as well as the understanding, challenges, and execution of linguistic justice.

“removes the stigma from having a dialect”

“freedom to speak without judgment based on like different, like, slight differences, so like, accents, and slightly different phrasing, or whatnot.”

“respecting those different discourse communities”

“very, very formal, rigid”

“It's definitely all fake”

“to be educated, you're white”

“standard English kind of strips away your, I guess, sense of identity”

“I just like to reassure students, like, ‘Hey, you can write any way that you want to’”

“I'll have them talk to me, and then we'll kind of write it out and then piece together sort of a puzzle”

“And that's when I can kind of have the conversation to them about tone”

“I still understand that there's some expectation, and there's still that some kind of standardized thing”

“if I don't disguise myself, I'm never going to be able to make it past those, like, gates that they've kind of put up.”

“I learned to adjust the way that I speak in professional settings and educational settings”

“It's very clear when I speak Spanish that I am not a native speaker”

“sometimes it was a compliment, like, ‘Oh, you carry yourself in, in a very professional way.’ And other times, it was like, ‘Why are you trying to act like something you're not?’”

“working through how to abide by the rules, but also still keep that sense of identity.”

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Results

This section explores key themes we identified: Multiplicity of Identity encompassing identification and belonging, multilingualism and code-switching, and authentic voices and Linguistic Justice Practices. These themes align with our overarching goal of showcasing the necessity of contextualizing and deepening our understanding of the nuances of our tutors' identities. By examining these dimensions, we aim to extend conversations about linguistic justice in writing centers, shedding light on the complex interplay between students' identities and their relationships with language an aspect often underrepresented in current literature.

Multiplicity of Identity

It became apparent early on in our interviews how each tutor’s unique life experiences affected their relationship practice and understanding to language, and thus how they internalize linguistic justice and practice it in the writing center.

Identification and Belonging

All three tutors are traditionally-aged undergraduate students (18-24) and identify as BIPOC, two of whom are multiracial. Vanessa (she/her) is a sociology major and poet, who has worked for the writing center for one year and identifies as African American. Redwood (they/them), who has also worked in the writing center for a year and is an engineering major, described themselves as “biracial but doesn't look biracial;” they consider themselves to be part of the Hispanic community and are also half white. Serenity (she/her) classifies herself as “Asian and of Hispanic descent,” specifically being Filipino, Chinese, and Guatemalan. She is a business major who has worked in the writing center for two years. When discussing the racial or ethnic communities each tutor identified with, they also noted how their language use was intrinsically tied to their acceptance within said community. In other words, they made a distinction between identifying as part of a community and actually belonging to, or being accepted, by it.

Vanessa

And if you're African American at UC Merced, then you have to act like it. You have to ascribe to the perspectives of what an African American person is. And I found that I couldn't necessarily always participate in black spaces because of that expectation

Vanessa’s statement exemplifies her complex reality that being a particular race or ethnicity does not necessarily equate to her feeling a sense of belonging or connection to those communities.

Serenity

So, like, when it came to languages, like, I wasn't Hispanic enough, because I didn't speak Spanish, or because they didn't do like Hispanic things…And the same with like, like, Asian, like, I don't look Asian, I don't speak any Tagalog, Kapampangan, nothing. So, I couldn't, it was a huge disconnect.

Redwood

So, because I know how to speak Spanish, I've been able to kind of integrate myself within, like, the Hispanic community. I've gotten to really interact with a lot of, like, people part of older generations.

Serenity and Redwood highlight how language can serve as either a barrier or a bridge to their ethnic communities. Like Vanessa, this illustrates how they see their identities as not determined by simply being a certain race or ethnicity, but often by feeling they belong to it

Multilingualism and Code-Switching

All of the tutors have varying levels of multilingualism, meaning varying levels of speaking and/or understanding multiple languages, with each having some relationship to Spanish. Vanessa, despite not being Hispanic, explained her relationship to Spanish as such: “I also understand Spanglish. I grew up in a community where it was predominantly Hispanic and Latino. And so I kind of learned how to understand Spanglish.” Serenity expressed a complicated relationship with Spanish because the version she learned in school did not allow her to fully communicate or connect with her Guatemalan family. She explained: English is my first language. And my mom didn't really, like, she talked sometimes in Spanish. But when she's talking to me, she talks in English. So, I didn't learn any I didn't learn Spanish from my family. I learned it in school…And then my mom's side of the family, only my mom really speaks English. So, there was like this huge pressure to speak Spanish, but they speak a different Spanish than in my Spanish class, because in school, they'll teach you international Spanish. But my mom's side of the family, they're all in Guatemala. Redwood does not go into depth about their relationship to Spanish, but as expressed previously,

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they seem to have a positive relationship with Spanish in the sense that it has allowed them to successfully integrate into the Hispanic community.

In addition to Spanish, each tutor touched on how their families and extended home communities also used different dialects. Vanessa noted how she does not use African American Vernacular English (AAVE) when she speaks; instead, her natural talking voice, or discourse, reflects elements of SAE. However, her discourse would often elicit critique. She explained, “[My family is] like, ‘Why don't you just say it the way we say’...And, like, friends would be like, ‘Oh, you speak proper?’ or, ‘You speak white?’”. Similar to Vanessa, some of Serenity’s home community speak a dialect of Tagalog called Kapampangan. Unlike with her Guatemalan family, her not knowing Kapampangan did not lead to a disconnect with her family due to the prevalence of English in the Philippines. Redwood notes comfort with the dialect of English their white family uses, stating they are “pretty familiar with, like, Southern lingo just because of, like, that white side of my family.” Each tutor’s description of their languages was intertwined with relational experiences.

The tutors pinpointed the various spaces, either academic or home, where they transition between different linguistic codes (i.e., “academic” language). For example, Redwood described speaking Spanish at home as well as in the UWC when working with bilingual students. Their understanding of codeswitching/meshing extended beyond just their use of it, exemplifying their rhetorical awareness in how they shift codes depending on context, audience expectations, and their own intentions.

Redwood

I mean, unfortunately, for example, if I'm trying to get, I am trying to get into grad school. If I want to get in there, I do, unfortunately, kind of have to disguise myself in a sense. Because if I don't, unfortunately, if I don't disguise myself, I'm never going to be able to make it past those, like, gates that they've kind of put up.

Vanessa

I think that we're all able to have a sense of individualism in the way that we speak and the way that we communicate with each other in the writing center, because it's such a comfortable space. And because we are so diverse, we don't have that same expectation that everyone needs to talk the same way.

Serenity

It's definitely all fake…And so when it comes to academic writing, it just feels like, okay, but like, what would they expect this to sound

like?...It kind of depends on the context. Again, I'm still, when I write to things, I still understand that there's some expectation, and there's still that some kind of standardized thing…But, definitely, what I like doing specifically is I like using it ironically, or like I weaponize it. So, I'll talk. So, this is like one of my, like, when I was saying, like, oh, I know how to, like, one of my Englishes is I can bully professors…I'll purposely, like, use casual language in emails to like professors even though everyone's like, ‘Oh my god, I'm emailing professor, it has to be professional.’ Contextualized by the tutor’s narratives, it becomes apparent how relational and rhetorical motivations primarily define how and why these tutors use their own linguistic repertoires. Thus, these observations provide insight on why these tutors may choose, or not choose, to use or promote certain linguistic choices during sessions.

Authentic Voices

Apparent within their interviews is a distinction of the use and purpose of SAE where it is seen as a dialectic variety that must be used to be accepted in academic spaces, as exemplified by how Redwood described it as a necessity for entering graduate school. Because writing center work is as much about discourse and rapport as it is about helping students with their academic writing, it’s important to acknowledge tutors’ personal, non-academic discourses. This conversation on discourse, or personal voice and authenticity, emerged within Vanessa’s interview, in which she described how SAE, and the general “white” language of academia, greatly influenced her natural discourse. She explained:

So sometimes I feel like a bit of my identity has been kind of taken away and replaced with something else. And in a way where, like, I naturally no longer speak in vernacular, African American Vernacular English, as often, but I understand it and so, like, since I was young, I kind of always tried to speak more proper in the eyes of educational institutions and that has kind of, like, kind of, I've traded my ability to speak to my community to speak to larger audiences that way.

When responding to a later question of whether the English she was taught in school has influenced the way she speaks:

I, growing up, as I mentioned, also, that I talked pretty proper, I read a lot from a young age, and I accustomed my speaking to the Standard

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English or Standard Academic English or something. In that way, I accustomed myself to that, and people told me that I spoke white, or it didn't sound black, or I talked white, or, you know, like, there was this trading identity that I had based off of the way that I spoke or, you know, people expected more or less of me depending on how I spoke.

When Vanessa spoke about how one has to talk black to be black, she said she felt her voice was authentically her own despite it having been “taken away and replaced with something else.” She elaborated:

I would say I own it, there's an element of authen-authenticity to it. Honestly, even though I do speak in a way that's kind of, like, heavily formalized to a generalizable audience, I still mean and emphasize everything with the way that I talk. So, because my prose is very accustomed to Standard Academic English, I still have in the content of what I speak, my identity.

Throughout her interview, Vanessa demonstrated an acute awareness of the influence SAE had on the development of her natural discourse.

Linguistic Justice Practices

Each of our three tutors frame linguistic justice in slightly different ways and have different approaches, at least based on the examples shared in their interviews, to practicing linguistic justice in their roles as writing tutors. The descriptions all three gave of their work in the writing center and their goals for working with students parallel the ways in which they define “linguistic justice.”

To Redwood, linguistic justice is about the "respect and acknowledgement of different types of writing within different communities" and avoiding "discrediting or...ignor[ing] people's form of writing and their form of speaking.” When framing linguistic justice within the context of their work in the UWC, they say, "by implementing more linguistic justice practices, it will help our students just feel more comfortable with the concept of writing and happier with what they're producing."

Redwood’s efforts to make sure the student is “happier with what they’re producing” is evident in one example they shared. In the session they described, the student they were working with had received some negative feedback from a professor, specific to the tone or level of formality of the student’s work. Redwood described asking the student to talk through their ideas, writing down what they heard from the student, and

then working with the student to put together the "pieces" while still keeping the student's "overall message." At the end of the session, Redwood said, “I could definitely tell that she was still upset with the professor. But I think it did help to kind of still keep her sense of voice while still kind of meeting that middle ground of the professor. So, compromise.”

Redwood further described their approach to linguistic justice in tutoring sessions by sharing an example of working with a student whose first/native language is Spanish. They said:

I think, to be able to respect their, kind of, how they, I guess, they approach writing through their native language, while also still trying to adhere to academic writing is a big part of our job…but we also kind of have this, like, job where we also have to make sure they're adhering to what their professors want. So, it's like a kind of difficult barrier, I guess, that we kind of have to learn how to traverse. And I think that's a big part of me respecting all my students’ kind of specific languages. So even though we'll do this session in Spanish, I will kind of try to help them relate kind of the grammar differences between Spanish and English and, kind of, trying to help them navigate that. So that when they're doing future papers, they know how to navigate that on their own while still keeping their own sense of, like, voice and ideas.

A central part of Vanessa’s understanding of linguistic justice is that there is “advocacy” in it. She elaborated on this, saying that linguistic justice is about “being able to uplift voices and…free dialects from an expectation.” She elaborated:

[Linguistic justice is] where you kind of, like, allow people to speak the way that they naturally speak and the communities they naturally speak in, and they're allowed to kind of, like, bring that into other spaces in other communities…Linguistic justice helps remove that expectation that if you speak a certain way, you must ascribe to a certain cultural identity or, or whatever you're saying the way that you speak it. Like, it removes the stigma from having a dialect, and a different way of speaking, even in academic institutions.

Vanessa thinks that linguistic justice is important for writing centers and writing tutors to uphold. When speaking about being a tutor in the UWC, Vanessa said: We're not necessarily here to tell students what to think and how to write. We're just providing them the tools necessary to get their ideas

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out…[we] want to help students embrace their level of understanding and writing without the fear of being judged or persecuted for the way that they speak and how they communicate their ideas.

In practice, what this looks like for Vanessa is “stressing how, like, powerful [students’] words are.” She describes talking with a student like this: I tell them as long as your, your statements, as long as you can ascribe significance and a place that they have within your writing, then they should be in there. If you can understand why you wrote that sentence, you have power in your words, because there's a significance to each and every sentence in your writing. And that can contribute to a strong overall paper…Your words are doesn't matter how you say it, or where you say it, as long as it's powerful in that statement.

Serenity defines linguistic justice as “the freedom to express someone like oneself without…someone telling you you're wrong or the way that you're talking is wrong.” She frequently referred to SAE and academic writing as “fake” and that learning this “fake” academic language is a way for a student (herself included) to “fight for their space.” She said, “[we] have to mimic what's already there, almost. So just, kind of, pretending like we talk like this, so we can have our space.”

As a tutor, Serenity sees linguistic justice as something that helps her “focus on the person instead of the writing.” She described folding “small conversation[s]” into her sessions because:

Even if it's just, like, a small conversation, building in linguistic justice, or kind of mentioning it, even just talking about that can really trigger something or, like, cause a slight change of perspective compared to the one that we've been force fed since elementary school. In one specific example she shared, she talked about working with a student who was “really caught on one word,” where the student was saying things like, “it just doesn't sound professional enough” and “I, like, sound like a first grader.” In response to this student, Serenity described a conversation in which she explained that “big words” aren’t always necessary and that “normally, it's better to just use more simple words and make sure that your intention is clear than, kind of, trying to use more professional words.”

Serenity sees value in “baby steps” like this conversation in sessions. She said, “It’s sometimes about just doing quick mentions” and not going into “the history and why you shouldn't say that word for

linguistic justice reasons for 15 minutes.” She further explained her view of linguistic justice in tutoring as: I think, kind of opening up the door for places that aren't familiar is a big enough step, which probably might not be popular. Some people want, like, linguistic justice, like, right there. And I just know, like, that's not going to happen, especially people who have been so used to the standard and so fed the standard that a whole new worldview, or a whole new, kind of, concept is really, really hard to come by. I think this kind of ties into my personal thing of unlearning, and how difficult it is to unlearn something you've been normalized to, especially the older you are, like, the longer you've been exposed to some tradition. So, baby steps is fine.

Through reflection, each tutor defined the use of SAE as a second, learned language that often clashes with a writer’s voice or true meaning. In turn, we see them making decisions within their sessions that take into consideration a variety of factors: the student’s needs in that moment, their understanding of the necessity and influence of SAE on the work at hand, and their own approach to navigating the parameters of justiceinformed work. The reflections provided by these tutors display a kind balancing act, one that is informed by complex identities and nuanced relationships to language.

Discussion

The excerpts we chose to highlight were a result of in vivo coding and, in turn, the co-creation of meaning throughout the coding process. It was in this process that we began to make meaning and interpretations of our tutor’s shared stories. Overall, we found that these tutors’ self-perception of their whole and linguistic identity played a major role in how they perceived and enacted linguistic justice. What we especially wish to note in the following section is how the complex multiplicity of tutors’ identities, shaped by relationships with various communities, is necessary to consider when trying to enact linguistic justice work in our centers. Conversations with our tutors have shown us that linguistic justice work is deeply personal and contextual.

Identification and Belonging: The Influence of Primary and Secondary Discourse Communities

Self-identification seems to be more than simply being, but rather belonging. This sense of belonging to a community seemed to influence the tutor’s

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perceptions of language. The tutor’s relationship to the language of their communities, including secondary discourse communities– those that are typically entered as opposed to born into (primary)–played a significant role in how the tutors understood and practiced linguistic justice.

Redwood’s approach to tutoring comes, at least in part, from understanding language as a means of access. Redwood, who is a STEM major and at one point in the interview described how “STEM hates all things justice,” spoke of wanting to help students find a balance between what the student wants to say and the expectations of the professor. Coming from a field that, as we understood Redwood to perceive it at least, has little room for pushing against those expectations, Redwood doesn’t necessarily encourage students to push against expectations of SAE; rather, they look for a middle ground or, in their words, “compromise.” Redwood explained that speaking the language of one of their primary discourse communities, Spanish, allowed them to connect with members of this community. We suspect that language ability was something valued by this community which in turn may have led to a positive sense of belonging. Alternatively, to enter into the desired academic space, Redwood described a need to disguise themselves in order to “make it past those, like, gates” of graduate school. It appeared to us that Redwood understood language as an important factor for accessing and being accepted in certain communities, thus influencing how they enacted linguistic justice. Redwood’s strategy of “compromise” in their tutoring sessions, and personal writing endeavors, seems to have been influenced in part by a value of the academic discourse community: the necessity to “compromise” oneself in order to enter that space.

Vanessa’s approach to tutoring is also shaped by layers of experiences with language, including her experience with writing poetry. She talks about poetry helping her understand the power of language; she said it is “powerful” to have “a way to get, like, people to understand your inner world and what you're thinking…and that is something that is found a lot in poetry.” She described applying this concept in other writing as well, and we can see it reflected in how she talks about working with students in the writing center. She explained, “If you can understand why you wrote that sentence, you have power in your words, because there's a significance to each and every sentence in your writing. And that can contribute to a strong overall paper.” The message of empowerment that she shares with students in sessions and her goal of “help[ing] students embrace their level of understanding and

writing without the fear of being judged or persecuted” is heavily informed by an understanding of the power of language that she attributes to her experiences with poetry. It appeared to us that the way Vanessa perceived her role as a tutor was influenced, in part, by her relationship with language as a poet, which in turn translates into how she talks about language with her students (“power in your words”).

What we’ve observed is that our tutors’ conceptualization and approach to tutoring has been influenced by their conception and relationship to language, which in turn was shaped by the many discourse spaces they move through. Unsurprisingly, they reflected “hybridity, intersectionality, and multiplicity” (Klotz and Whithaus 73) in both the conception of their personal identity as well as their discourse. In other words, their lived experiences have predisposed, and thus taught, them what it means to recognize, navigate, and perhaps feign acceptance into various discourse communities, both academic and of the home. As practitioners seeking to implement and encourage linguistic justice work in our writing centers, we need to be careful not to generalize our student’s identities, both with language and in regard to their perception of self. Otherwise, we risk potentially applying stereotypes or expectations that may have detrimental effects. We have to remember that our undergraduate tutors are often still in the midst of critical self-discovery and identity development. BIPOC and, doubly so, multiracial individuals like Redwood and Serenity, often struggle with identity development. The multiplicity of our tutors’ identities reflect a sense of self that is more prone to being in flux. Kerry Ann Rockquemore et al. explain, “Identity development for mixed-race people is neither in a predictable linear fashion, nor does it have a single endpoint” (3). Meaning, mixed-race individuals often change how they identify themselves throughout different stages of their life. Identity and belonging are also called into question when one’s parent and/or ethnic group is invalidated due to not looking or sounding a certain way (Harris). Our tutors shared this reality. Vanessa was chastised by her home communities because she “talked white” and not in AAVE. She poignantly reflects on the difficulty of being accepted by the black community at UC Merced, despite being black, because she didn’t correctly perform what it meant to be black. Similarly, Serenity struggled with the negative stigma of looking like she could speak Spanish fluently while not being able to. As remarked earlier, Redwood noted that, although they are someone who “doesn’t look biracial,” they have been able to connect with

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Spanish-speaking communities due to their multilingualism.

Considering students' identity development and nuanced experiences navigating academic, social, and familial discourse communities, the predominantly white field of writing center studies needs to be cautious not to overgeneralize the identities and experiences of BIPOC students. In “Unmaking Gringo Centers,” Romeo Garcia talks about the need to expand beyond the black-white paradigm, explaining that writing center scholarship typically only discusses race in reference to blackness and with a lack of nuanced identity. He argues that “blackness in this paradigm is meant to stand for all struggles, as well as of the failure of this paradigm to account for the particularities of the experience of people of color who are not black” (39). In a similar vein, Carlos Poston, speaking from the discipline of psychology, discusses the importance of racial identity development as it opposes the “cultural conformity myth,” which presumes those of a certain race are all perceived to have had similar experiences or share common ideologies (1). This may seem like an outdated notion, but as Garcia touches on with the black-white paradigm in our scholarship, there is often a tendency to apply a monoracial, or over-simplistic, lens to the experiences of BIPOC students. For example, not all students of color are multilingual or multidialectal. There are many students of color whose primary discourse, learned from their home space, is rooted in white linguistic codes. The paradigm that Garcia mentions is one that disregards these particularities, and thus adheres to the cultural conformity myth.

Our point here isn’t necessarily to suggest that our scholarship should try to account for all identities, in all their countless, myriad complexities. Even Multiracial Critical Race Theory acknowledges the sheer impossibility of trying to account for the innumerable narratives and experiences our tutors and students bring with them when they enter academia and the writing center space (see Johnston-Guerrero et al.). Rather, the foregrounding of our tutors’ narratives is to emphasize to writing center practitioners how essential the specific context of tutors’ identities and writing center demographics are to the teaching, talking, and enactment of linguistic justice.

Multilingualism and Code-Meshing/Switching: The Impossible Divide between Language and Relations

It became apparent within the interviews that each tutor’s discussion of their linguistic identity coincided with, unprompted, a discussion of relations, in turn highlighting that multilingualism does not exist

in isolation of one’s identity. Similar to racial and ethnic identification, one’s perception of their linguistic abilities goes beyond mere mastery. The idea that the tutor’s understanding of language as relational influenced the way they chose to, or not to, utilize a strategy like code-meshing/switching. This is why we encourage writing center practitioners to more deeply recognize the reality of language as something deeply relational.

Although our tutors understood the technique and rhetorical motivation of a strategy like codemeshing, it was not something that was embraced by any of the tutors. Vershawn Ashanti Young’s "Should Students Use They Own English” is often cited to exemplify and teach code-meshing as both a rhetorical and linguistic justice strategy that aims to combine oral and written discourses. Some contexts, like that of Karen Keaton Jackson and Amara Hand’s writing center, are “pro-code-meshing” (52) because they’re at an HBCU where students are more “likely to have student populations who are naturally fluent speakers of African American Language” (49). Alternatively, consider what we may be asking Serenity, who isn’t comfortable using Spanish; Redwood, who likes to stick to disciplinary expectations; or Vanessa, who is black but doesn’t use AAVE, when we encourage them to teach their students to code-mesh or write against academic expectations during their sessions. Young’s piece on code-meshing may be difficult for our tutors to fully relate to and/or enact. Once again, we are not suggesting that practitioners must decode all the nuances of their tutor’s identities. Rather, we hope that the sharing of these tutors' narratives sheds light onto the possibility of why linguistic justice, or other antiracist pedagogies, may feel hard to enact within sessions, as was the case with the tutors observed in Thompon’s study.

Authentic Voices: Considering the Reality that All Our Languages Are Our Own

Not just how we use language, but how others perceive us based on our language use, often plays an integral role in the development of our identity and perception of self. Vanessa describes an important, and not uncommon, experience for many BIPOC individuals; her discourse, her voice, has become one that has been deeply influenced or enmeshed with the white linguistic codes that make up SAE. A primary discussion within linguistic justice is the need to ensure a student's authentic voice and identity has a place within academic spaces and scholarship. Considering this, what, then, is Vanessa’s authentic voice?

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Jacqueline Jones Royster’s piece, “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own,” makes an important comment about the authenticity of the voice of BIPOC persons:

What I didn't feel like saying in a more direct way, a response that my friend surely would have perceived as angry, was that all my voices are authentic, and like bell hooks, I find it "a necessary aspect of self-affirmation not to feel compelled to choose one voice over another, not to claim one as more authentic, but rather to construct social realities that celebrate, acknowledge, and affirm differences, variety" (12). Like hooks, I claim all my voices as my own very much authentic voices, even when it's difficult for others to imagine a person like me having the capacity to do that…In both instances, genius emerges from hybridity, from Africans who, over the course of time and circumstance, have come to dream in English, and I venture to say that all of their voices are authentic. (37)

SAE can be considered a dialect in and of itself that is then imposed upon students in academic settings. What is not often discussed, however, is the reality that one can own this dialect imposed upon them. SAE is as relational as other dialects and languages and similarly affects our sense of belonging to certain communities. For Vanessa, SAE has become a part of her dialect, in which her voice is still authentically her own: “I would say I own it.”

Standard American English, like other dialects and languages, was depicted by Vanessa and Royster as an integral part of oneself, influencing both identity and belonging. When we teach tutors students that SAE simply equates to something negative, we disregard the reality that SAE, while it has “taken away” and disrupted our tutors’ voices, is also something that has become deeply intertwined into their expression of self, their discourse. The enculturation of SAE in academic settings “is an act of violence” (Lockett), and so a goal of linguistic justice is to change this, and to put a stop to experiences like Vanessa’s or Royster’s where SAE deeply imbued itself into their discourse. Yet the reality for many students, white and BIPOC, monolingual and multilingual alike, is that our discourse is, inherently and simultaneously, varied and authentic. This is not to say that SAE isn’t harmful and that we shouldn’t try to dismantle the hold it has over academic and professional spaces. Rather, we must be more cognizant of how we discuss SAE in our writing centers and in the field more broadly. Thus, in these discussions of SAE, writing center administrators attempting to discuss linguistic

justice in their centers and with their tutors need to be aware of the reality that our discourse may be made up of dialects with opposing histories or ideologies. Yet, Vanessa, like Royster, claims all the varieties, influences, and experiences of her voice when she says, “I still have in the content of what I speak, my identity.”

Implications

Considerations of Labor

Research on identity development presents how one’s self-identification influences their comfort and participation within certain movements; Victoria Malaney-Brown argues that “society’s monoracial perceptions or labels that [multiracial students] are ‘not enough’ [make] them self-conscious, and at times doubtful, of how they could contribute to racial justice movements” (154). Both Serenity (multiracial) and Vanessa (monoracial) expressed these sentiments of being “not enough.” Despite that, we see that they have chosen to engage in the labor of linguistic justice in their tutoring practice. As a field, however, it is important to note that when we encourage linguistic justice work in our programs, we also recognize it as emotional and deeply personal labor, because it asks our tutors to engage in potentially taxing or traumatic work.

For example, when faced with the predicament of how to teach grammar while adhering to linguistic justice within the context of tutorial sessions, Esterly et al. say to “introduce the writer to the concept of Standard English and dialectical differences, and to remind the writer that they have choices” (49). This ask may not be as easy as it seems, however. Consider how a tutor is to discuss “dialectical differences” when they may be in the midst of navigating the “disconnect” between their own identity and home communities, as Serenity was. When we ask our tutors to take up the labor of linguistic justice, work deeply entrenched in the self, our traditionally-aged undergraduate students may still be in the midst of discovering and defining themselves. Certainly, not every student may suffer from identity or community disconnects rooted in linguistic differences. Regardless, if we aim to encourage our tutors to engage in acts that are deeply connected to race and identity, we need to do the labor of acknowledging these intricacies. And to do that, we need to extend our conversations beyond theory and explore more practicebased research that represents a variety of contexts and that centers the voices and experiences of the tutors engaged in this work.

That being said, we don’t need to know the depth of our tutors’ pasts in order to be respectful of

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this kind of labor. As Bethany Mannon notes, emotional labor is central to the work of writing center tutors but is often not addressed in our scholarship as a skill that can be learned and practiced. When we encourage tutors to engage in linguistic justice work, work that may be drawing on fraught emotions for both the writer and the tutor, we are adding to an already notable cognitive and emotional load. It seems crucial, then, to recognize this work as labor and to name it as labor in explicit ways that may help tutors frame their own capacity for engaging in linguistic justice as well as help writing center practitioners frame their expectations for tutors engaging in that labor.

Considerations of Nuance

If emotional labor is a skill that can be learned, then we have to acknowledge, for ourselves and for our tutors, that it will have its own complex and messy learning process that will inevitably interact with all of the other developmental processes tutors are engaged in. Redwood and Serenity both shared examples of their efforts to “apply” linguistic justice in tutoring sessions where the students’ emotions were clearly at the forefront of the session. In Redwood’s story, it was a student who was “upset with the professor,” and in Serenity’s story, it was a student who was worried about “sound[ing] like a first grader.” While neither identify the work they did in these sessions as “labor,” let alone emotional labor, both Redwood and Serenity described navigating those sessions in very different ways, with Redwood aiming for “compromise” and Serenity explaining to the student that sometimes simple language is better than a “fake” expectation of “professional” language.

Whether this difference in approach is related to different stages of their learning processes, different “levels” of practice like those Pawlowski outlines, or some other invisible difference in dispositions these two individual tutors may hold doesn’t matter. What does matter is how we support these tutors in engaging in that labor and how we avoid judging either for being more “right” than the other in their approach. In other words, if we want to implement linguistic justice, we need to do the work of learning how best to support our specific tutors, in all their complexities, within our specific contexts. And to do that, we need more scholarship that is grounded in the messy, evolving realities of tutors’ everyday lived experience and practice.

Considerations for Implementation

Contextualization is essential for the actualization of linguistic justice work in our writing centers. That being said, we cannot offer universal strategies as, again, effective practice and learning require curating justice education to individual tutors and contexts. We also want to acknowledge that, due to conditions shaped by systemic inequities and political climates, some practitioners are positioned with more flexibility, sway, or autonomy than others. We believe that writing centers do have an important role to play in the pursuit of linguistic justice within their specific institution; however, that role fluctuates based on the writing center’s positionality. As we noted with how our tutors perceive and conduct linguistic justice, there is no correct way to engage in this work. A center has not failed in the implementation of linguistic justice if, for example, their tutors do not code-mesh in practice or the center lacks a public-facing linguistic justice statement. With this in mind, what we offer are starting points that practitioners can adapt based on the nuance of their centers. Though directed at administrators, we believe tutors can also initiate these practices and conversations.

Some practical considerations for implementation:

Start with the tutors. Introduce conversations about linguistic justice by inviting tutors to reflect on their own experiences with language and identity. Consider how you can create opportunities for them to share these reflections with one another, including options for sharing anonymously to encourage openness and vulnerability.

Listen with intention. Take a step back both literally and metaphorically whenever possible. Show tutors that their voices are not only being heard but genuinely valued. Consider how you can demonstrate your commitment to their lived experiences, thought processes, and evolving identities.

Keep the dialogue open. Acknowledge that this work is an ongoing process of learning and unlearning for tutors and administrators alike. Consider how you can build in multiple opportunities to revisit conversations about linguistic justice, allowing ideas and perspectives to deepen and evolve over time.

Create shared foundations. Collaborate with tutors to build a library of resources readings, media, frameworks about linguistic justice, language and power, and context-specific experiences with language. Consider how you can ensure a range of entry points,

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creating a living collection that reflects diverse voices, contexts, and experiences.

Name the labor. Be explicit about the expectations and emotional complexity this work may involve. Consider how you can recognize the different ways tutors may choose to engage or not engage and create space for those variations. Honor the time, energy, and emotional labor that come with this ongoing work.

Final Thoughts

While sharing the experiences the voices of BIPOC tutors to the field’s conversations about linguistic justice practices was a central motivation for our project, it was inevitable that our own perceptions of that work would be influenced by what we learned throughout the process of this project. We knew these tutors had stories to tell, and that these stories would be personal and powerful. We believe, even more now, that the nuances of our tutors’ identities and experiences, as well as that of our writing centers and institutions, must deeply inform the ways in which we engage in linguistic justice work. When we take up this work, both individually as practitioners and wholly as a field, we should seek to acknowledge the complex intersections of languages, identities, and communities as well as attend to the labor involved for those who are asked to “enact linguistic justice.”

We don’t need to know it all, but we must listen. And to do that, we must continue to engage in these conversations with our tutors and with each other. What we hope more than anything is that our small project encourages others to talk to their tutors to listen rather than just theorize to continue these conversations with the field, and in those conversations, create space for nuance and how they engage in that work. This work is complex, messy, and sometimes contradictory, but we know, from listening to our tutors, that it is vital. And we’re still learning how to do it better. With that in mind, we’d like to close with the voices of our tutors:

“Because to some people, [linguistic justice is] the first thing that they need to fight for in the morning. And for other people, it's not, and it is a privilege to do that.”Serenity

“But I think it's gonna take a lot of people and a lot of effort from within to really make any sort of progress.”

- Redwood

“Honestly, at some point, I just kind of like, I realized how I speak doesn't really matter; what I speak about does.” -Vanessa

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REEXAMINING “ATTITUDES OF RESISTANCE”: A SURVEY-BASED INVESTIGATION OF MANDATORY WRITING CENTER APPOINTMENTS

Chris Borntrager University of Arkansas, Fayetteville clborntr@uark.edu

Abstract

This article arose out of a need to better understand what happens in university writing center (WC) appointments that are incentivized or mandated by instructors. While the topic has received attention in WC literature, previous research focuses largely on student attitudes toward mandated WC appointments and only rarely addresses the interpersonal dynamics of these sessions. To address this gap, we conducted an IRB-approved, survey-based study investigating the impact of WC tutorial incentivization on writing tutors’ assessments of sessions’ effectiveness, comparing tutors’ scoring of different session types and conducting statistical queries on some of the larger categories. Our results challenge the widespread assumption that mandatory or incentivized writing center sessions are always an obvious tradeoff of “quality vs. quantity.” Specifically, we found that differences in tutor scores between voluntary and mandatory WC sessions were statistically insignificant and did not present a clear tutor preference for voluntary sessions over mandatory sessions; however, when types of incentivization were compared, tutors showed a subtle preference for sessions that were incentivized through a class-wide mandate over those that offered extra credit or involved individual referrals. In this study, we also discuss common metrics for gauging writing tutorials’ success, suggesting that WC practitioners may be placing an undue weight on “engagement.” We hope, most of all, to encourage further research that examines (and expands) institutional approaches to mandatory sessions and encourages a more welcoming stance toward the writers who visit WCs at the behest of their instructors.

Introduction

Writing center (WC) practitioners have been discussing the merits, risks, and drawbacks of “mandatory” writing tutorials (i.e., visits to the WC that have been prompted, mandated, or incentivized by faculty) for decades. Even though peer review is an established and effective tool for teaching writing (Nielson), mandatory WC sessions have also garnered a reputation as a “necessary evil” because of the logistical problems they often present: they can fill up tutoring schedules suddenly and often entirely, which presents problems for administrative bandwidth and student relations; they may bring WC staff into contact with other university stakeholders who may not acknowledge them as curriculum-independent writing experts; and they may, because of an assumed lack of student engagement, deplete the emotional and intellectual resources of tutors more quickly than other session types. Even though they are heavily reliant on context, such obstacles as these have become associated over time with mandatory sessions even in the professional

Taylor Weeks University of Arkansas, Fayetteville tlw006@uark.edu

literature, often to the degree that practitioners approach them fatalistically and seem to expect less from them than from voluntary visits. As with any issue related to human beings and their literacy practices, however, those things which seem self-evident in professional circles are almost always more complicated than they seem and often arise out of ideology. In presenting an empirical study of tutor assessments of mandatory sessions, we, along with such scholars as Jaclyn Wells, encourage WC professionals and those engaged in college teaching to interrogate their individual and collective beliefs about mandatory WC sessions, especially as these beliefs may affect practice. In this article, we argue that practitioners need to 1) question the tacit assumption that mandatory sessions are inevitably of poorer quality and 2) embrace a more open stance to writers who come at the behest of their instructors. For our (Chris’ and Taylor’s) part, our results remind us of something we often forget during an average day in the WC or writing classroom: far from being pre-determined, the writer-tutor dialogue the core of the WC’s method is dynamic, emergent, and full of possibility.

In this study, when we refer to WC sessions that are somehow incentivized by instructors, we use the phrase “faculty-incentivized writing center appointments” (FIWCAs). Hereafter, we use the acronym “FIWCA” to refer to WC appointments that meet any (or multiple) of the following criteria: 1) students are offered extra course credit for visiting the WC; 2) students are required to come to the WC as part of a class-wide general mandate; or 3) students are given an individual or specified referral to the WC. Gary Olsen notes that teachers often refer students to the WC in unique ways and with unique motivations, and we have tried to address this contextual complexity in our research design. These criteria, admittedly, do not cover the entire range of possibilities for incentivization of WC sessions, but they are, we think, useful for delineating some of the common referral practices that act as “bridges” between the classroom and the WC. The results of our study confirmed that, while some session types were indeed ranked lower or higher by tutors, the immediate context of a WC tutorial did not entirely determine its success rates or interpersonal

dynamics; on the contrary, the instructional contexts that we measured seemed to have only limited impact on the scores tutors assigned to sessions. Based on our results, practitioners have ample reason to assume a multiplicity of possible outcomes for FIWCAs rather than approaching them fatalistically.

Previous Research on FIWCAs: Attitude and Engagement

Despite their ongoing image problem, FIWCAs are an accepted part of life for many writing centers. As such, most studies published on the subject address practical problems that these sessions present, focusing on such issues as faculty relations, student outreach, and administrative decisions. The practice has not been without its critics, however. Stephen M. North, in his well-known article “Idea of a Writing Center,” discourages teachers from referring students to the writing center no matter their intentions. He writes: Even those of you who, out of genuine concern, bring students to the writing center, almost by the hand, to make sure we won’t hurt them even you are essentially out of line. Occasionally we manage to convert such writers from people who have to see us to people who want to, but most often they either come as if for a kind of detention, or they drift away. (72)

In this passage, North’s indicates his key objection to FIWCAs: he seeks to preserve the student’s buy-in and general attitude (which, he implies, are themselves fundamental to the WC’s method) by protecting their sense of agency. Indeed, North grounds his vision of WC method in the motivation of the student writer, as evidenced by his use of the phrase “willing collaborator” (70) to describe the student’s role in an idealized session. Based on subsequent literature, professional attitudes toward FIWCAs seem to have softened over time, but certain key assumptions about their impact remain largely intact, including the impact of teachers’ referral methods (and even mannerisms) on student attitudes toward the session. Gary Olson, for example, found that students who had been referred to the writing center often arrived lacking motivation or confidence, something he attributes to teachers’ insensitive referral methods. Other researchers have likewise also focused on the ways that teachers’ practices influence WC sessions, with some having gone so far as to say that the teacher is “present” in writing center tutorials as an absent player (Rodby; Roswell; Servino; Waring). There have also been several articles that discuss FIWCAs more generally, investigating their overall efficacy and

the attitudes of participants. Irene Lurkis Clark, who argues directly against the “old wisdom” by encouraging faculty to refer students to the writing center, problematizes any dichotomous thinking around the issue by noting that arguments against FIWCAs assume a homogeneous body of students and frequently rely on anecdote rather than research. Clark concludes that, because the students in the sample were unlikely to visit the WC of their own accord, it is ultimately in WCs’ favor for teachers to refer students, since FIWCAs are “perhaps better than no visits at all” (33). Wendy Bishop, reflecting on the difficulties of WC marketing initiatives, comes to similar conclusions, finding that many students in the study would not have come to the WC at all unless they were prompted by instructors. Barbara Bell and Robert Stutts, writing in The Writing Lab Newsletter, investigate both student and tutor attitudes in response to class-wide mandated sessions. Arguing that the benefits of FIWCAs outweigh the costs, they provide some useful strategies for ameliorating various attitudinal and logistical hurdles; however, when they note that the lack of student engagement in FIWCAs led to “angry students and exhausted tutors” (7) in their WC, they rely on anecdotal evidence. Barbara Gordon, in an article surveying research on FIWCAs, notes that WCs remain largely defensive against the practice even though research has largely refuted the negative impacts of these sessions. Jaclyn Wells, focusing on student attitudes on required tutoring, found that the students in her sample had a mixed response to FIWCAs but a generally positive attitude toward the WC more generally. Wells also goes a step further by reflecting on the defensiveness that Gordon points out, noting that WC research into FIWCAs is often not enough to cause WC practitioners to revisit their beliefs on the practice. In rhetorical pieces on FIWCAs (like North’s, for example) and practitioner pieces, authors appear free to rely on their experiences, whereas, in research articles, there is an apparent tension between “lore-bound” approaches to FIWCAs and more moderate, empirical approaches. The applied nature of WC work (and the apparent pragmatism of much of its professional discourse) means that there is ample guidance for administrators in such articles, but there is little attention given to empirical descriptions of FIWCAs in situ, the emphasis being on student attitudes toward the WC or teachers’ referral practices. As such, the tutoring and training implications of much previous research on FIWCAs are mostly implied rather than investigated directly. There are a number of questions we can ask about previous research on FIWCAs as we take the

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conversation further. What is the relationship between the immediate context of a FIWCA and its interpersonal dynamics? Which parts of the context have been addressed in research and which have been implied? How are we judging a session’s “success,” and whose version of “success” is being privileged? What do tutors think of individual FIWCAs compared to nonFIWCAs? The student’s relationship with the teacher and their overall opinion of the WC, as mentioned above, are frequently considered key contextual factors in research, but, crucially, these are not connected explicitly to specific session outcomes. The success of a WC session, in empirical research on FIWCAs, is mediated almost exclusively through student attitude toward the WC, whether positive or negative. It is largely assumed, then, that a contextual element of a tutorial is relevant only as it pertains to a student’s buyin, attitude, or stance; however, there is little evidence verifying the role that attitude plays in the interpersonal dynamics of actual tutorials. There is, in other words, a considerable conceptual gap between “student attitude” and a tutorial’s “success,” even though these are tacitly equated in much of the research on FIWCAs. On the surface, it indeed seems reasonable to assume that a negative student attitude will lead to poor session outcomes, but this assumption also underestimates the emergent, performative nature of attitude and the fluidity of the dyad. As Potter and Wetherell remark, attitude itself is not a static feature but is highly contextbound (45). A person’s attitude, whatever it may be at one moment, does not remain static across time and situations, nor does it perfectly predict future behaviors. If the success of a tutorial is measured solely by the writer’s attitude at a particular moment, then researchers risk reducing the tutoring session to a mechanistic exchange that is at the mercy of the preconceived notions of either party, rather than viewing it as a dialogue that is context-bound and discursively negotiated. Pedagogically speaking, a student writer’s positive attitude should not be taken as a de facto success. In addition to its exclusive emphasis on student attitude, previous research on FIWCAs also studies them in isolation from their communicative contexts and, crucially, without comparing them to nonFIWCAs that is, they are studied apart from the time, place, and interpersonal dynamics of the tutoring session, and any difference between FIWCAs and nonFIWCAs is not empirically verified. It remains largely to be investigated which aspects of a tutorial’s context most readily impact its interpersonal dynamics. It has already been established that teachers exercise profound influence on the dynamics and outcomes of writing

center sessions (Callaway; Jordan); our research, in its turn, compares tutor assessments of both FIWCAs and non-FIWCAs, thereby exploring the ways that teachers’ common referral methods affect the quality of writertutor dialogue across a larger sample. The overall conversation surrounding teacher referrals to the WC can benefit, we think, from 1) more empirical research, 2) clarification of FIWCAs’ impact on the dynamics of individual sessions, and especially 3) the inclusion of writing tutors’ perspectives on the issue.

Methodology

In this section, we describe the research site, the instruments we used, the process of data gathering, and some of the limitations of our study. Over the course of the project, we gathered data on 88 WC tutorials, using a total of 176 data points to investigate connections between external contexts and the interpersonal dynamics of the session. Using paired surveys to collect data from both student writers and tutor, we were able to form “snapshots” of tutors’ ratings of specific referral types and compare FIWCAs to non-FIWCAs statistically; however, our sample size taken as it was from a single university in the heartland of the United States on the cusp of COVID lockdowns is too small to reliably generalize our findings and apply them to other settings and times. As such, we understand our findings to be exploratory descriptions of the WC tutoring sessions as they appeared in a specific time and place. Furthermore, questions related to literacy, which Brian Street defines as “social practices of reading and writing” (111), are inextricably bound up in complex social processes and situated meanings; as such, literacy practices are most productively explored through a variety of approaches, especially through qualitative means that account for cultural and social influences. One more empirical study on FIWCAs will not settle the issue, but it may yet add weight to ongoing critiques and reexaminations of WC practice.

During the time that we gathered data for this project, we (Chris and Taylor) worked, consecutively, as graduate assistants in a writing center which served a student body of about 26,000 and maintained a staff of 11 writing tutors (four graduate and seven undergraduate). In our roles as graduate assistants, we oversaw tutor training, scheduling, professional development, and outreach. After gaining IRB approval (approval # 1810153663) in the fall of 2019, we began administering in-person, written surveys to student writers and their tutors, continuing until the middle of the spring term of 2020, when the COVID pandemic

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effectually ended face-to-face instruction at our university, whereupon we decided to move ahead with a smaller sample size. Neither tutors nor students were incentivized to complete their surveys, though we suspect that our positions of authority in the WC may have pressured tutors to contribute to the project. During the data gathering phase, each tutoring station was supplied with pens, written surveys, and detailed scripts that familiarized tutors with the project and provided disclaimers about voluntary involvement in the project. If the student agreed to participate, they completed the entrance survey before the tutorial began; then, after the tutorial had concluded, the tutor would complete the corresponding exit survey for that specific tutorial. If the student declined to participate, then the tutor was instructed not to fill out an exit survey. Once a student and tutor had both completed their surveys, the tutors were instructed to staple the two surveys together and place them in a large manila envelope that we had provided for that purpose. At the end of each tutor’s shift, one of the researchers collected the envelopes, placed a new manila envelope at the tutoring station, and deposited the completed surveys in a secure lockbox. Both the entrance and exit surveys asked respondents to enter the date and time of the tutorial, and we used these dates and times to match any surveys that tutors had neglected to staple together. If we could not find a match for either an entrance or exit survey, we omitted them from our data set. Once data gathering was completed, we entered our results into Microsoft Excel and destroyed the paper copies afterward.

The entrance surveys, intended for student writers, asked respondents to rate their understanding of the assignment and their self-confidence as they entered the session. We also asked students to circle either “Yes” or “No” in response to the following questions:

• Were you required by your instructor to visit the writing center?

• Were you offered extra credit for visiting the writing center?

• Did you receive any special instructions from your instructor regarding your visit to the writing center? (i.e., were you asked to focus on a specific area of the paper or specific skill?)

• If “yes” to above question, please list the area(s) you were asked to work on. (A space was provided on the survey to allow for short answer comments.)

In this survey, we sought to distinguish between these different contextual aspects of the sessions. The third question, for example, indicates an individual referral, which Olson suggests can have a deleterious effect on

student motivation. The contextual data gathered in the entrance survey was then paired with their corresponding tutor scores, such that the sessions could be grouped and rated according to their provenance. The exit survey, designed for tutors, used a 1-5 scale (1 = “not at all,” 5 = “very”) to answer the following 5 questions:

• Overall, how well do you think the session went?

• How easy was it to establish rapport with the writer?

• How engaged did you sense the student was in the session?

• How committed did the writer seem to making further changes?

• How impactful were the changes that the writer made to the paper?

Since we were interested in the tutors’ perspectives on the interactional dynamics of the sessions, we did not elaborate on the meaning of the different questions, preferring to trust the tutors’ notional understandings of the terms. For example, we did not provide any coaching in the various ways that a person may express engagement in a dyad (i.e., turn length, eye-contact, body language, prosody, or positing new topics), but instead allowed the tutor to answer according to their felt sense of a writer’s engagement or commitment without having to defend or quantify their assessment. We were more interested in tutors’ impressions of the session than in the sessions’ minutia or in any specific discursive move, as we did not account for social or cultural factors in communication in our surveys.

We conducted our analysis in two phases: we compared mean tutor scores across different session types (which makes up the bulk of the discussion below) and performed a statistical analysis comparing tutors’ scores of FIWCAs to those of non-FIWCAs. For the comparison of mean scores, we grouped our data to create cursory “snapshots” of tutor assessments for different types of sessions, including those sessions that were incentivized through extra credit or which involved a class-wide mandate. For the statistical test, we used RStudio to conduct a Mann-Whitney test to determine any statistical significance between the tutors’ scores of FIWCAs and those of non-FIWCAs.

This study has two main limitations that we have identified: relatively small sample sizes and a lack of demographic data. The first of these means that our findings would need additional verification in various times, places, and cultural contexts to gain anything more than a highly situated validity. The second means that our choice of instrument, a paired survey, does not

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gather much information on contexts outside of the classroom or the WC, so the meanings we can make of our results are necessarily limited. We did not account, for example, for such factors as race, language backgrounds, gender identities, or socioeconomic backgrounds, all of which exercise profound effects on access to educational opportunities and other social goods. We acknowledge that this quantitative study can give only a limited picture of irreducibly complex realities. As such, we view our findings as a single part of a much larger picture we take them to be merely exploratory, a prompt to reexamine aspects of WC practice and professional discourse. Indeed, Carino and Enders remark that, while quantitative studies may not be the best choice of research methodology for “mapping complex realities,” they are especially useful for challenging and elaborating the lore the “dark knowledge” that exists tacitly in communities of practice (84). This latter point is chief among our aims in this article.

Results

First, to differentiate the different contexts of the sessions, we created a series of codes indicating what type of incentivization, if any, was attached to each WC appointment in our data. These codes are described in the table below.

Table 1. Explanation of session codes. Every profile except for “NNN” qualifies for the category of FIWCA, which means that “NNN” is synonymous with “non-FIWCA” in that students in this category came to the WC of their own choice and were not incentivized to visit

Code Description

YYY Session is: mandatory; extra credit offered; instructions provided

YYN Session is: mandatory; extra credit offered; no instructions provided

YNN Session is: mandatory; no extra credit offered; no instructions provided

NNN Session is: not mandatory; no extra credit offered; no instructions provided

NNY Session is: not mandatory; no extra credit offered; instructions provided

NYY Session is: not mandatory; extra credit offered; instructions provided

NYN Session is: not mandatory; extra credit offered; no instructions provided

YNY Session is: mandatory; no extra credit offered; instructions provided

When creating these codes, we isolated the three variables in the students’ entrance surveys that established some of the context surrounding the students’ visits, including: whether the session was mandatory (in that it was a class-wide mandate built into the structure of the class); whether extra credit was offered to incentivize the visit; and whether the teacher had provided specific instructions that the student was to follow, this being taken as an indication of an individual referral. We used these codes to correlate the students’ entrance surveys with the tutors’ exit surveys and establish the mean scores of each code for purposes of comparison. Tutors’ scores, when we provide them, are rounded to the nearest hundredth.

Overall average scores were as follows:

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Table 2. Overall averages for the entire data set, which includes both FIWCAs and non-FIWCAs.

In the table below, we include the totals of each session type along with their mean scores.

Table 3. Mean scores of each session profile, arranged in order of most responses (top) to least (bottom), including mean total scores. From left to right, we provide: a list of session profiles in descending order of size; the total number of each session type present in our data; the mean scores of tutors’ overall assessment of the session; the mean scores of tutors’ assessment of student rapport; the mean scores of student engagement in the session; mean scores of students’ apparent commitment to making further changes in the draft; mean scores of the impact and effectiveness of changes made in the student’s draft; and the mean total score of each session type. There were 5 points possible in the first 5 categories; 25 points were possible in “mean total score.”

Out of 88 sessions (and 176 different data points), only 34 sessions qualified as FIWCAs; the remaining 54 sessions were all student-initiated. This meant that, since we were applying the same metrics to both FIWCAs and non-FIWCAs, we could compare their overall scores and see if various kinds of incentivization had any apparent impact on the tutors’ scores (this we do in a later query).

After this first exploratory query, we were struck by the variability of contexts and lack of a clear “winner” in tutor scores, both of which suggest that the sessions’ contexts did not influence tutors’ assessments in any obvious or overwhelming way. If the widespread assumptions about FIWCAs were accurate (i.e., that FIWCAs tend to have lackluster interpersonal dynamics), we might have expected the category “NNN” to score higher in every area, but this is true only in the “commitment to further changes” category. For every other metric of success, one or another FIWCA takes the lead: “YNN,” the second-largest code overall and largest category of FIWCA, has the highest total score (22.89 out of 25) as well as the highest score in rapport; “NNY,” the third-largest category, has the highest mean rating in overall engagement (0.11 points above “NNN” and 0.22 points above “YNN”) but the lowest rating in “overall score.” This was our first indication that the commonsense understandings of FIWCAs might not hold up on closer inspection.

In addition to the relative uniformity of tutors’ scores across categories, we also found that measures of engagement and rapport were viewed separately from tutors’ overall views of a session’s success; in fact, tutors favored “YNN,” a FIWCA, in both “total score” and “overall score” despite "YNN” having an “engagement” rating that was lower than non-FIWCAs by 0.11 points. This was our first indication that our tutors were assessing “engagement” as an independent factor

separate from their sense of the sessions’ overall success, since lower engagement did not seem to lead to lower tutor scores overall or a lower total score.

Once we had compiled our data according to session code, we conducted more targeted queries that investigated in finer detail the impact of referral methods on sessions’ interpersonal dynamics. We asked: “how do FIWCAs compare to non-FIWCAs in tutor assessments?” and “how were different types of FIWCAs rated by tutors?”

FIWCAs vs. Non-FIWCAs: How do they compare?

In addition to testing the usefulness of our session codes, we were especially interested to see how FIWCAs writ large compared to non-FIWCAs in our tutors’ assessments. Indeed, among our various questions related to WC practice, this seemed to be the most pressing, since the two categories had not been compared using the same metrics (that we were aware of). For this query, we aggregated the 34 FIWCAs (that is, we aggregated all codes except “NNN”) and compared them against the 54 non-FIWCAs, examining the mean scores of the accompanying exit surveys and conducting a statistical query on the two groups. When we looked at our “snapshot” of the mean tutor scores, the results seemed to support some of the previously discussed “commonsense” understandings of FIWCAs, but we suspected that aggregating FIWCAs elided differences between FIWCA categories that are apparent only when the session codes are separated. Combining the FIWCAs, in other words, brought their scores down across the various metrics, even though, as we had already established, not all FIWCAs were equally deleterious to tutors’ assessment of their success.

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In the previous query, “YNN” (the largest category of FIWCA) had a sizeable lead over “NNN” (non-FIWCAS) both in total scores and in “overall” assessment, while “NNN” held a noticeable lead in “engagement.” When FIWCAs (aggregated) are compared with non-FIWCAs, however, the latter takes a substantial lead in total scores, “engagement,” and “willingness to make further changes,” while attaining only a modest lead in “overall rating.” FIWCAs held small leads in the categories of “rapport” and “impact of changes made.” This apparent reversal from the previous query is a reminder that many of the less common FIWCA profiles (especially those that involved extra credit or individual referrals) received lower scores from tutors. FIWCAs writ large, as a result, were not rated as well as non-FIWCAs in most areas. In addition to forming a “snapshot” of the tutors’ assessments of FIWCAs vs non-FIWCAs, we also investigated whether there were any statistically significant differences in the scores between these two categories. To this end, we conducted a Mann-Whitney query on our survey data. We imported our cleaned data file into RStudio, grouping FIWCAs and non-FIWCAs so that the individual scores of each session in the dataset could be compared. Having used ggplot (a data visualization tool) to determine that our dataset was sufficiently “skewed’ (i.e., not a normal, bell-shaped distribution), we compared each set of session scores against that of the other group for a total of six separate queries. For example, the first query compared FIWCA’s “engagement” scores with the “engagement” scores of the non-FIWCAs and determined whether they were significantly higher or lower. When we gathered the results of our six different queries, the pvalue of each comparison was well below the traditional threshold for statistical significance, 0.05. This meant that there was no statistically significant difference

between the scores of FIWCAs and non-FIWCAs in any category. See the table below for a breakdown of each category.

Aggregated FIWCA Profiles: How do FIWCAs compare against each other?

Finally, to get a clearer picture of the differences between the three referral methods (mandatory, extra credit, specific instructions), we aggregated the different variables so that we had only three profiles of FIWCAs overall, one to represent each of the incentivization types represented in our data; we then compared the mean tutor scores of each category (we deemed the resultant groups too small to conduct statistical queries).

To create the category “mandated,” we used the code “YNN”; for “extra credit,” we aggregated “YYY,” “NYN,” and “YYN”; and for “instructions,” we aggregated the codes “NNY” and “YNY.”

“Mandated” was the clear winner among the three aggregated FIWCA categories. It had a large lead, up to 0.75 points, in “total score” and had a sizeable lead in “engagement,” “rapport,” and “overall rating.” “Extra credit,” the second largest category, came last in every category except “overall rating,” a full 0.38 points behind “Mandated”; in fact, the spread between “extra credit” and the other FIWCA categories is so large that it merits special attention. Whereas the “instructions” category performed well in all categories when compared against the overall average, “extra credit” came in at an average of 0.30 points behind the overall mean scores. “Instructions,” shorthand for “individual referrals,” performed better, coming in second place in all categories except “overall rating,” which is full 0.44 points below the average.

Table 5. Results of the Mann-Whitney query. The first group, non-FIWCAs, was compared with the second group, FIWCAs, in each category, “Overall,” “Rapport,” etc., and the p-value was noted to determine whether or not one category was significantly higher or lower. The p-value of each category was notably higher than 0.05, signaling that no statistically significant difference exists between the FIWCAs and non-FIWCAs in our sampling.

Table 6. FIWCA profiles aggregated according to the three variables: extra credit offered, visit mandated, and specific instructions o ffered.

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Discussion

The sessions in our dataset are localized in a culture, a location, and a particular historical moment, which means their results cannot reasonably be applied to other university writing centers or student bodies without caveat. Based on the results of our study, however, we can safely say this: WC practitioners (and those who take an interest in WC work) would do well to challenge any deterministic views of FIWCAs that would automatically assume them to be of poorer quality than non-FIWCAs. While some types of FIWCAs in our data (especially those that indicated extra-credit incentivization) did indeed receive notably lower ratings than non-FIWCAs, one particular type of FIWCA, the “mandatory” session, outperformed nonFIWCAs in several areas. The results of the MannWhitney query, furthermore, confirmed what we had initially suspected: that there were also no statistically significant relationships between FIWCAs and nonFIWCAs.

We also found that not all FIWCAs were rated equally by tutors, nor were they equally detrimental to a session’s dynamic. Indeed, even though non-FIWCAs (“NNN”) are deemed “best-case-scenarios" by many WC practitioners, “mandatory” (“YNN”) outperformed them in most regards except for engagement, including in areas pertaining to tutors’ “overall” assessments of the session. “YNN” also scored notably higher than other types of FIWCAs in the first query, and “Mandatory Aggregated” (“YNN’s” counterpart in the comparison of FIWCA types) was the overall leader among FIWCA types when these were compared against each other. This is an indication that simply comparing FIWCAs to non-FIWCAs is not necessarily an effective comparison if we are interested in improving tutoring practice they need to be differentiated with reference to the types of incentivization. In other words, since not all types of mandatory sessions had the same impact on engagement or tutor scores, it is worthwhile for practitioners and researchers to make distinctions between the types of sending and incentivization rather than to treat FIWCAs as a single category with a single supposed outcome. The sheer variability of referral methods in our data and the relative uniformity of tutor scores suggest that the current scholarly conceptualization of WC session contexts needs to allow for more complexity than simply “required vs not-required.” Having affirmed Irene Lurkis Clark’s remark that student bodies are not monolithic, we suggest that practitioners should assume a multiplicity of situations when considering the

contexts that might affect the quality of the writer-tutor dyad.

We also discovered that “engagement” was not an effective predictor of a tutor’s rating of a session’s overall success. “YNN,” a type of FIWCA, received notably higher overall ratings than non-FIWCAs despite the former receiving lower scores in engagement and rapport. In other words, although it was correct that student engagement and rapport tended to be lower in FIWCAs, the other aspects of the session, including the tutors’ overall impressions of the session, did not suffer thereby, which suggests that tutors were not treating engagement as the only factor leading to a session’s success. When other metrics were applied to the session, including the writer’s commitment to making further changes and the effectiveness of the changes made, tutors indicated that meaningful work was still being done in their sessions despite their lower assessment of student engagement. This is indeed good news for writers and tutors, especially since shows of “engagement” in a dyad are culturally situated behaviors that have no “final form”; these results reaffirm the need to approach conceptions of engagement critically and with reference to power differentials between interactants. We do not mean to say that engagement is not important in a WC session we only mean to say that engagement is only one of many considerations in a WC session and, perhaps, ought not be overemphasized at the expense of other goals, for reasons which we discuss in the next section.

Conclusion: Examining WC Views of Writer Engagement

As Jaclyn Wells writes, it is easy to ignore uncomfortable research findings, but, all the same, WC practitioners need to discover “what ideals hold us back from implementing new findings and make us cling to old approaches to writing center work” (108). In keeping with this suggestion, we here address some possible ideological underpinnings of professional discourse on FIWCAs. We have come to suspect the reason FIWCAs rankle us has more to do with our aversion to student recalcitrance than it does to matters of faculty relations. Indeed, we wonder whether or not FIWCAs are really just a convenient scapegoat for a deep mistrust of student disengagement. Like any other discipline, WC practitioners have their own ideologies arising out of their particular histories and contexts of practice. The field seems to have developed its own unique understanding of “dialogue” to such an extent that, rather than creating

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bridges for student writers, this conception can present interactional difficulties for those who do not share our conventions, expectations, or rules of engagement. If the WC’s method is based in dialoguing with writers, then a dialogue must so goes the accepted logic be a “two-way street,” with both parties contributing to a new and better state of knowledge. But the reality is more complex. The “rules” of dialogue are intersubjective, endlessly variable, and culturallysituated, which means that, if WC practitioners hold too strongly to a particular conception of participation or engagement, they also risk reifying an entire constellation of values, behaviors, words, and discourse practices which a good many millions, in fact of our students do not share. “Recalcitrance” does not take one form any more than “engagement” takes one form. If WC practitioners are really committed to an inclusive WC practice, we need to revisit our attachment not only to student agency (as evidenced by the ongoing conversation about FIWCAs) but also to student “engagement.” By continuing to idealize a narrow conception of dialogue, we can very easily assume that a recalcitrant writer is an obstacle to our method rather than the very object of our method.

In The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors by Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli, the authors include a “challenging situations” section, something that we have seen in multiple other tutoring guides. Here, they refer directly to FIWCAs when giving guidelines regarding recalcitrant writers, offering it as a possible reason why a session may seem to lack student buy-in. They write: Teachers sometimes require students to visit the writing center, and occasionally, such writers come with an attitude of resistance. They may refuse to answer your questions, give halfhearted answers, or otherwise indicate that they do not want to be there. Often, their body language is telling. They may slump in their seats, avoid eye contact, or avoid facing you.

How do you help these writers? (104)

The authors then provide a list of “dos” and “don’ts, including reminding the writer of their ability to accept or reject the tutor’s comments, cutting the session short, bringing the writer into the dialogue by giving them prompts or activities, or hoping that the writer may return another day when their attitude has improved. There is, notably, no mention of how to proceed with the session if the writer does not change their behavior the emphasis remains on how to remove the obstacle so business can proceed as normal.

In this above excerpt, it is especially notable how the recalcitrant student is approached in relation to

the authors’ conception of the WC’s method: the attempts to establish buy-in and offer both parties a means of dignified escape place the writer in a sort of “waiting area” outside of genuine dialogue, where the “real work” will get done. The problem the authors point out is not so much that the writer might have been commanded to come to the WC, but rather that they are not engaging with the tutor and are resisting the tutor’s objectives. A close look at this passage, we think, suggests that our issues with FIWCAs are really issues with perceived writer recalcitrance.

The above excerpt is, all in all, a good piece of advice for writing tutors, but it is also an example of the ways our ongoing attachment to writer engagement can limit our conceptions of possibilities in writing tutorials. As we have established in this study, not only did several types of FIWCAs perform similarly to non-FIWCAs, but tutor assessment of a session's success was largely independent of the students’ shows of engagement. The potential harm that we see in an overemphasis on engagement is not so much that our attitudes toward FIWCAs may be unduly sour but rather that it may lead us to sell short the possibilities of a session based solely on what we know about that session’s immediate context. As theorists in discourse studies (refer, especially, to John Gumperz) have established, context is a process more than a set of concrete circumstances, and as such is co-constructed and malleable. Gary Olsen confirms this by noting how negative student attitudes often seem to change during the course of the session, often in response to the tutor’s demeanor and professionalism. The tutor, in other words, has more chances to work with and through writer resistance than tutoring guides seem to suggest. If WC practitioners perceive “writer recalcitrance” merely as an obstacle to the learning process rather than a step in the learning process, there may be no one else who will see it as a learning opportunity for tutors and writers without direct and meaningful intervention, recalcitrance may indeed alienate students from the WC and perhaps from writing (as a skill and a subject).

Ultimately, we do not need to address our discourse about FIWCAs and recalcitrant writers just because there is sufficient evidence to contradict them; we need to change our discourse about them because our ways of speaking and writing about them finds its way, like groundwater, into tutoring practice through training sessions, instructional texts, and the formation of lore. We would do well to address our attachment to writer agency because our discursive practices affect the lived realities of those whose work and schooling we are responsible for. Since our tutors and writing fellows are

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the ones who enact any method WCs may be said to have, we ought to equip our tutors to welcome writer recalcitrance with poise, not to encourage them to enter “damage control” mode as soon as a writer slumps in a chair.

Call for Further Research

The results of our study do not represent a comprehensive investigation of FIWCAs writ large, but merely a small sample from a single university writing center in the continental United States. As such, we would hope that researchers, administrators, and practitioners across the world would make their own attempts to study the phenomenon in question. All we can safely say, based on our results, is that FIWCAs do not lead to poor session quality every time.

Additionally, there is a need for new training material and research focusing on serving students who have difficulty, for any number of reasons, joining in a dialogue about their writing. On the one hand, exploring mindfulness techniques may allow tutors to find common ground with reticent or recalcitrant writers. Tutors may also benefit from more research that uses interactionally-based research methodologies to account for the ways that individuals negotiate their aims, contexts, and expectations in tutor-writer conversations (i.e., conversational analysis via Harvey Sacks, ethnography of communication via Dell Hymes, and frame analysis via Erving Goffman, to name a few). Mackiewicz and Thompson, for example, use discourse analysis to establish key discursive moves made by experienced writing tutors. Such methodologies may enable us to, for example, further critique dominant conceptions of “engagement” or “recalcitrance” and enact more insightful critiques of tutoring practice, especially of the ways that whiteness and unequal power relations are baked into common understandings of “rapport” and “engagement.”

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Henrietta Tettey-Tawiah at SMSS for their help with the Mann-Whitney query. The authors state that there was no conflict of interest. All research was carried out in compliance with our institution’s IRB board.

The authors did not use generative AI for any writing or research aims associated with this project.

Works Cited

Bell, Barbara and Robert Stutts. “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions: The Effects of Mandatory Writing Center Visits on Student and Tutor Attitudes.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 22, no. 1, pp 5-8, https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/wln/v22/22.2 .pdf

Bishop, Wendy. “Bringing Writers to the Center: Some Survey Results, Surmises, and Suggestions.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 1990, pp. 31–44, https://doi.org/10.7771/28329414.1194.

Callaway, Susan J. Collaboration, Resistance, and the Authority of the Student Writer: A Case Study of Peer Tutoring. (Volumes I and II). 1993. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

Carino, Peter, and Doug Enders. “Does Frequency of Visits to the Writing Center Increase Student Satisfaction? A Statistical Correlation Study or Story.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 22, no. 1, 2001, pp. 83–103, https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1492.

Clark, Irene Lurkis. “Leading the Horse: The Writing Center and Required Visits.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 5/6, no. 2/1, 1985, pp. 31–34, https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1912

Gordon, Barbara Lynn. “Requiring First-Year Writing Classes to Visit the Writing Center: Bad Attitudes or Positive Results?” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 36, no. 2, 2008, pp. 154–63, https://doi.org/10.58680/tetyc20086887

Gumperz, John J., et al. “Interactional Sociolinguistics: A Personal Perspective.” The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2005, pp. 215–28, https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470753460.ch12

Jordan, Kerri Stanley. Power and Empowerment in Writing Center Conferences. 2003. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

Mackiewicz, Jo, and Isabelle Kramer Thompson. Talk about Writing : The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors. Routledge, 2015.

Nielsen, Kristen. “Peer and Self-Assessment Practices for Writing across the Curriculum: LearnerDifferentiated Effects on Writing Achievement.” Educational Review (Birmingham), vol. 73, no. 6, 2021, pp. 753–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2019.1695 104.

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North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 433–46, https://doi.org/10.2307/377047

Olson, Gary. “The Problem of Attitudes in Writing Center Relationships.” Writing Centers: Theory and Administration, editied by Gary Olson. National Council of Teachers of English, 1984, pp. 155 – 169.

Potter, Jonathan, and Margaret Wetherell. Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. Sage Publications, 1987.

Rodby, Judith, et al. “The Subject Is Literacy: General Education and the Dialectics of Power and Resistance in the Writing Center.” Writing Center Research, 1st ed., Routledge, 2002, pp. 221–34, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410604026-16

Roswell, Barbara Sherr. The Tutor’s Audience Is Always a Fiction: The Construction of Authority in Writing Center Conferences. 1992. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

Ryan, Leigh, and Lisa Zimmerelli. The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors. Sixth edition, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

Street, Brian. Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education Longman Group Limited, 1995, Severino, Carol. “Rhetorically Analyzing Collaboration(s).” Writing Center Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, 1992, pp. 53–64, https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1288

Waring, HM. “Peer Tutoring in a Graduate Writing Centre: Identity, Expertise, and Advice Resisting.” Applied Linguistics, vol. 26, no. 2, 2005, pp. 141–68, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amh041

Wells, Jaclyn. “Why We Resist ‘Leading the Horse’: Required Tutoring, RAD Research, and Our Writing Center Ideals.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 35, no. 2, 2016, pp. 87–114, https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1802.

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COMING TO TERMS: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF NAMING CONVENTIONS IN AND OF U.S. WRITING CENTERS

Abraham Romney Idaho State University abrahamromney@isu.edu

Abstract

Terms used to describe writing support workers in higher education, as well as the location of their employment have sparked a long history of debate in writing center studies but have led to only scattered empirical research. The author examines the history of this debate addressing connotations of various terms and then aim to verify actual naming practice. The present study investigates the impact such debates have had on writing center practice by assessing public web pages from 575 university writing centers to see what terms are generally employed. The study shows that “writing center” is the most popular name for the location of writing tutorial services and that “tutor” remains the most popular term. This finding suggests that “center” has won out over other terms, but the popularity of “tutor” is much less decisive. At institutions with higher enrollment, in R1 institutions, and in the case of graduate student employees, the use of the term “consultant” increases. The general prevalence of the “writing tutor” and the rise of the more recent “writing consultant” and other variants may suggest a lag between scholarly critique and writing center practice, but it could also derive from institutional context. Alternative tutor terms could be employed, but an empirical study of efficacy would be needed to move naming from the realm of lore and conjecture.

Introduction

Debates over the titles used to describe both workers and workspace for writing support have been a staple in writing center studies because, it has been argued, these terms shape both the kind of work we can do and the perception of that work by stakeholders and those who use the services.1 In 1990 Lex Runciman suggested that writing centers drop the term “tutor” altogether because it had too many remedial connotations, objecting to both referring to staff as tutors and to referring to the center as a “tutorial facility” (27). Scholars have covered the transition from terms like “writing lab” to the ubiquitous “writing center” (Learner), but other names and configurations exist for spaces in which auxiliary support for student writing takes place via conferences, sessions, consultations, or tutorials. Often behind the arguments for particular titles lie assumptions about the value and perception of those terms, occasionally with the sense that changing the name will have a significant impact. Certainly, names can affect the scope and perception of services as was the case for centers changing from a “writing center” to a “multiliteracies center” (Balester et al., n.d.), a term that could point to new directions and commitments (Romney and

Kitalong). Names used for tutors, however, do not always carry their own obvious meaning and are usually borrowed from other domains. One recent study in business management suggests that “human capital” can benefit from a sense of agency and creativity and can better cope with emotional exhaustion if given flexibility in choosing their own titles, but whether or not that translates to external perception is murkier (Grant, Berg, and Cable). Though the way a term is used depends on local perception, professional job titles and names for writing centers are rhetorical and can establish expectations of power, authority, knowledge, and duty and can signal relationship boundaries between clients and workers, influencing interactions and outcomes. As Cheatle and Bullerjahn point out though, it can be difficult to change undergraduate perceptions despite efforts to promote more expansive views of the work we do (25).

Despite a lack of empirical evidence of the actual effects of titles, the prevalence of debates over appropriate titles suggests that, largely, the field has taken to the assumption that the terms we use to describe a writing center workforce and the names we use to describe the space of a center has some effect on the type of work we do. At the very least, the names we choose do become part of the public face of our centers. Emily Isaacs and Melinda Knight, who undertook a study of writing center websites, suggest that writing center directors should be “vigilant in their work of developing a public face that projects writing centers in terms of what they do now, and also aspirationally” (5960). In his dissertation, Scott R. Sands looks at the terms we use as metaphors that shape the way that we view tutoring, metaphors that can both highlight and obscure the work that tutors do.2

Contested Terms

Scholars arguing for changes in terminology have generally aimed to improve communication about what work is actually done in writing centers and to more effectively get students through the doors. Institutionalized peer tutoring first came about in the late 1960s (Boquet, 474), which may have given rise to some of the unease with “tutor.” Many have pointed to the inherent (perhaps oxymoronic) contradiction of

being both peer and a tutor. Trimbur voiced prevailing academic attitudes, referring to peer tutoring as “the blind leading the blind” (22). Emphasizing the authoritative nature of the word “tutor,” he states that peers “are not qualified to tutor, to pass down knowledge to their tutees” (22). Later, Runciman argued that “we ought to recognize that the words ‘tutor,’ ‘tutoring,’ and ‘tutee’ do not accurately portray the full range of writing center activities. These words limit both our clientele and our budgets; they make our activities appear both marginal and exclusively remedial” (33). Critiquing the term “peer tutor,” Carino stated that examining each term independently “uncovers the issues of power and authority beneath them, issues imbricated in the institutional position of the writing center but carrying over into the pedagogy of peer tutoring” (116). According to this argument, adding an adjective to an inaccurate term is likely ineffective in reshaping connotations. The result can seem oxymoronic, like referring to someone as a “novice expert” or an “ignorant teacher.” The inherent contradiction could call the tutor’s role into question rather than adding clarity.

When it comes to names for writing centers, changes over time reflect their evolving emphasis as well as a desire to escape perceptions of marginality. “Lab” was the first term used by writing centers to define the space of the center (Boquet 466; Lerner 2). As early as the 1920s, labs focused on remediation, aiming to purify language (perhaps like a chemist might purify a chemical solution). It was not until the 1940s that writing center staff began to assume the role of nondirective counselors (Boquet 469). Although the role of writing centers has shifted, “lab” has continued to be regularly used by modern writing centers and writing center scholars, as evidenced by the publication of Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab and other similar sites (Inman and Sewell). Changes in writing center pedagogy, however, led to calls for replacing “lab” in order to distance modern writing centers from their original incarnations. Carino claimed that the word “lab” led to instructors treating writing centers as “a marginal place where the marginal student attends to the teacher’s marginal symbols on grammar errors” (35). A sense of the marginality of writing labs may have resulted from the interpretation of “lab” as an annex to the classroom where research would be carried out. In 1996 Grimm voiced similar concerns, claiming writing labs existed to “correct, measure, and supervise abnormal writers to help them meet the standards set by the institution” (533), as did Trimbur (in 2000), who referenced the long debate over the use of “lab” and the common worry that the word lent “pathologizing

overtones” to the centers it represented. No less pathologizing, “writing clinic” gained popularity shortly after the use of “lab” (Boquet) and was also associated with remedial tutoring. Learner describes the short life of the Dartmouth Writing Clinic and how it was perceived as a place where deficient writers could receive strictly remedial help. (Lerner 15). It may be that the trend toward using “center” was aspirational, referencing the centrality of tutoring in the face of such marginalization.

Title Talk in the IWCA Listserv

For some professionals, what to call their tutors or whether to change terminology remains a persistent question. Occasional conversations over names and terms persist over the International Writing Center Association (IWCA) email list where directors occasionally ask for advice on a range of topics. Several conversation threads over the last decade or so reveal that professionals hold strong and divergent opinions. Those title discussions sometimes involve graduate students or leadership roles (“A New Title for our Graduate Coordinator?”). In one thread, several writing center professionals weighed in on alternatives to the title “ESL Specialist” position, for example (“Job Title Suggestions”). Opinions have also been shared at length about the general term for undergraduate tutors (“Tutor Vs. Consultant”). Janet Zepernick of Pittsburgh State University articulated one of the commonplace arguments made in the field for abandoning traditional terminology: “You go to a tutor when you feel yourself to be weak in the subject, but you call in a consultant when the work is important…I think the shift in terminology is an important part of the new identity we’re crafting on campus” (“Tutor Vs. Consultant”). Katherine Kirkpatrick from Clarkson College disagreed, admitting, “I always thought consultant sounded so black ops/hired cleaner of situations” (“Tutor Vs. Consultant”). Later, Zepernick would insist that using “consultant” radically shaped the student/tutor relationship, that the title “tutor” encouraged students to give over control of their work while “consultant” encouraged them to have more agency as seekers of expert support, making coming to the writing center “an expression of agency and self-efficacy on the part of the client” (“Tutor or Consultant?”). The consultant/client relationship here seems to have clear business valence. Lisa Morzano commented that her center had recently switched to using the word “coach,” using a sports metaphor to explain their sense of the term: “It seems to communicate that the student is clearly the one ‘in’ the game while we’re on the sidelines” (“Tutor Vs.

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Consultant”). Donna Evans from Eastern Oregon University said that her writing center was changing back to “tutor” to be consistent with the other learning centers on her campus. She also mentioned that her center was currently changing from the name “Writing Lab” to “Writing Center” (“Tutor Vs. Consultant”). Later Starkweather voiced concern that the connotation of “consultant” might make the tutors seem expendable in a budget crunch at a for-profit institution (“Tutor or Consultant?”) These threads show that directors and writing center professionals continue to hold a range of views about different titles and that those titles can be put in place as a way of framing identities and leaning on analogies, but they can also simply be adopted for internal reasons or concerns at a given institution. Some consistency can be seen in efforts to democratize titles, giving tutors a choice in the matter. Muriel Harris stressed in one thread that “it’s also a matter of what term the tutors want. If we truly theorize about and practice collaboration, then we too collaborate with our tutors” (“Tutor Vs. Consultant”). When given the opportunity to choose their own title, her tutors picked “Undergraduate Teaching Assistant,” because they believed it would bolster their resumes. Similarly, Deanna Mascle of Morehead State University wrote, “When we were inventing our Writing Studio I gave them their own choice and they designated themselves as peer writers” (“Tutor or Consultant?” 2012). Continued conversations on this decades-long debate suggests that none of the strong arguments in writing center scholarship have been completely successful in shifting to new terminology.

Tutor Persists in Scholarship

Despite calls for replacing “tutor,” the term is still in regular use in writing center scholarly discourse. When we first started to investigate this topic in the center I directed, we accessed every article published by Writing Center Journal in the preceding ten years (20062016). Of the 1,096 key words from 116 peer reviewed articles, there were 114 uses of the word “tutor” and only 13 uses of the word “consultant.” In article titles specifically, there were 35 uses of “tutor” and just 2 uses of “consultant.” The most recent issue of Writing Center Journal used “tutor” or “tutoring” 15 times across its titles and abstracts with no other variants. Etymologically, the word “coach” was actually used to refer to extra academic tutoring long before its more common sports context, and it sees some use today as a term for tutors.3 While not seen as often as tutor in published scholarship, “consultant” has gained ground.4 For example, those developing the survey for the

National Census of Writing used “consultant” exclusively in their questionnaire despite occasionally mixing terminology, as in the question “Are your writing center consultants professional tutors?” In scholarship, however, it seems “tutor” remains the standard title and term for writing center work.5

The remainder of this study aims to track the actual impact of calls to change terminology by looking at the public face of writing centers in the United States. To what extent do writing center practitioners seem to have responded to critiques from scholars about the traditional names for center and tutors by adopting less traditional ones? In terms of quantitative representation of actual practice, the field remains relatively uncharted.6 Despite the long history of discontent with the use of certain words to describe writing center activity, no study to date has investigated the actual use of these words in writing center names and job titles, or the popularity of their alternatives. When it comes to finding information about current practice in writing programs and writing centers, surveys have been popular. This study is an effort to reduce subjective bias in this discourse and to engage in methodologies that can work as an alternative or supplement to the preponderance of self-reported survey data in the field. This study also represents an initial effort to map writing centers in the United States, providing data and grounding for further study by collecting and analyzing publicly-accessible data from university websites.

Method of Current Study

In order to examine present writing center tutor job titles, staffing, and center names, this study examines these terms as represented in official university websites available to the public. The present study sought to determine tutor titles and center names based on public self-representation through web pages within a substantial subset of all writing centers in the United States. The websites of 575 higher education institutions were investigated. The institutions were selected through the use of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS; National Center for Education Statistics). The selection criteria consisted of institutions offering 4-year baccalaureate degrees and above, private and public not-for-profit, and a reported enrollment of at least 5,000 students. This search produced a set of 575 university names and 12-month unduplicated headcount enrollments of graduate and undergraduate students. The data was compiled into a spreadsheet.

In order to speed up the process and to gather more data, redundant groups of universities were given to

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undergraduate and graduate student researchers supplemented by searches and cross-checking from writing center staff. The investigators were instructed to perform a Google internet search to find each university’s official writing center website. Web links were recorded on the spreadsheet for later reference. Investigators read each university web page or pages to determine the answers to the following questions:

• Does this university have a writing center? If so, what is its official name?

• Does this university writing center employ undergraduate students as tutors? If so, what job title is used to describe them?

• Does this university writing center employ graduate students as tutors? If so, what job title is used to describe them?

• Does this university writing center employ professional tutors? If so, what job title is used to describe them?

If on these web pages, more than one title was used to describe tutors for a single undergraduate, graduate, or professional position, investigators were instructed to record both titles. When listing the name of the center, if writing centers or writing tutoring were housed in a learning commons and not in an independent center, investigators were instructed to list the name of that center. If no writing center webpage could be located or no reference was found to a writing center or writing tutors in a thorough search of the university website, investigators were instructed to record no writing center name and assume there was no center for tutoring writing at that university. If no evidence for an undergraduate, graduate, or professional position could be found, the investigators were instructed to record “unknown” for the category.

Results

Of the 575 institutions investigated, 567 were confirmed to have writing centers or a tutoring program with some description on official university websites. 498 of the identified writing center names used “center” to describe their space of operation. In total, 15 different names for space were identified within the found writing center names. “Center” was the clear consensus representing nearly 89% of all names for spaces of operation identified in the study. Table 1 shows the frequency of the different names for writing (or university tutoring) centers.

Table 1. Names for Space of Operation Identified in Found University Web Pages

Space Name Writing Centers Using Name

Center 498

Lab 20

Studio 19

Commons 4

Place 4

Site 4

Room 3

Zone 3

Workshop 2

Institute 1

Clinic 1

Annex 1

Community 1

Den 1

Hub 1

94 unique combinations of job titles for writing center tutors were found. In these titles, 18 different terms for tutor were identified. Undergraduate, graduate, and professional job titles were counted separately and combined to arrive at the final totals. Table 2 shows all different terms for “tutor” identified and how many times each term was used, regardless of tutor type. In an analysis of all job titles combined (not divided by tutor type), “tutor” was found to appear the most frequently, followed by “consultant.” Note that “peer” was only used as an adjective modifying another tutor term in several combinations like “Peer Tutor” (occurring most at 65 times), “Peer Consultant,” and “Peer Writing Specialist.” While “consultant” had a significant showing with 324 uses, it still lags behind “tutor.” When modifying terms like “peer” are excluded to focus on primary job titles, “tutor” emerges as the majority term, accounting for approximately 54% of all titles identified and more if term mixing were not present (instances using both “consultant” and “tutor” on the website). “Professional” was counted as a modified 28 times. The term “consultant” was also often combined with “tutor,” either in describing what consultants do or in mixed titles across pages. 37

instances of universities using both “tutor” and “coach” were recorded and were counted equally for both below.

Table 2. Frequency of Tutor Terms Identified Across Tutoring Levels Tutor

students as tutors, and 128 indicated that they employed professional tutors. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the most common terms used for tutor roles, separated by tutor type and expressed as a percentage of the found websites where roles were successfully identified. “Tutor” was most used in every tutor type, followed by “consultant.” The third most common terms were “coach” and “assistant.” As mentioned, the word “professional” was frequently attached to those in a professional role. “Assistant” was most frequently attached to graduate student positions but was also employed as a role at the undergraduate level in lieu of “tutor,” as in “Writing Assistant.”

The average total enrollment for institutions that used “consultant” was 19% higher than the average total enrollment for institutions that used “tutor” (17,648 enrollment average for “consultant,” 14,602 for “tutor”). Seven out of 10 of the largest universities used “consultant” (or “consultant/tutor”), with “tutor” only in two instances, and a single instance of “coach.” When grouped into Carnegie research classifications of R1, R2, and RCU/Other, the percentage of universities using “consultant” varied significantly across classification, with “consultant” achieving its highest use most frequently at R1 Universities. The percentages in Figures 2 through 5 are calculated as a percentage of use based on the number of institutions with websites that were located and contained information about tutor titles. Because “consultant” and “tutor” were counted twice for some institutions that used both terms in their website, the total may not add up to 100 percent. Looking at Figure 2 through Figure 5 shows that “tutor” was the most popular term across all institution types and for all tutor types except for the RCU and Other category where professional tutors were more likely to have “consultant” as a title. Despite “tutor”’s dominance, “consultant” has a significantly higher appearance at R1 institutions at 38.3% in comparison to 29.1% and 27.7% at R1 and RCU/Other universities respectively. Figure 5 illustrates this difference and also shows the prevalence of “tutor” in the RCU/Other category observed in 66.2% of writing centers for which titles were found.

Out of the 567 found institutional websites, 504 indicated that they employed undergraduate students as tutors, 291 indicated that they employed graduate

1. Most Common Tutor Terms by Tutor Type Expressed as Percentage of Total Found Websites with Identifiable Roles

2. Most Common Tutor Terms by Tutor Type Expressed as Percentage of Total Found R1 University Websites with Identifiable Roles

3. Most Common Tutor Terms by Tutor Type Expressed as Percentage of Total Found R2 University Websites with Identifiable Roles

Figure 4. Most Common Tutor Terms by Tutor Type Expressed as Percentage of Total Found RCU University Websites with Identifiable Roles

Figure 5. Top Two Undergraduate Tutor Terms by Institution Classification Expressed as Percentage of Total Found Websites with Identifiable Roles

227 identified writing center websites indicated their writing center exclusively employed undergraduate tutors. This was the most common staffing arrangement. 175 writing center websites indicated their center employed only undergraduates and graduates; 74 indicated they employed all tutor types; 27 indicated they employed only undergraduates and professionals; 21 indicated they employed only graduate students; 19 indicated they employed graduates and professionals; 6 indicated they only employed professional tutors. When writing centers employed only undergraduate and professional tutors, job titles were commonly adjusted for tutor type (21 out of the 27 writing centers used different titles for different tutor types (72%). Job title adjustments were less common for other staffing arrangements. For centers employing undergraduates and graduates, job titles were adjusted in 27 of the total 175 centers (16%). Only one center that exclusively employed graduate and professional tutors adjusted job titles for different tutor types. In a regional analysis of the top three most used tutor terms, uses of “coach” were most concentrated in the East and Midwest. No regional trends were observed for “tutor” or “consultant.” See distribution maps in appendix.

Discussion

The data reflects a clear shift in names for space in the writing center community, matching common historical narratives and corroborating the historical narrative. “Lab,” once considered a name in wide use, now has been largely replaced by “center” though some 20 instances of “lab” were recorded in our data. This suggests that previous arguments to avoid “lab” have been successful in advocating a term that does not carry connotations of formulaic science and experimentation that may result in failure. Other less popular names carried implications that helped convey the writing center’s purpose. “Hub,” for example, implies a place where connections between writers can take place, and “studio” implies artistry and creative expression. However, although “center” was by far the most popular name in use, it is also a name that is less ripe with connotation. A center is simply a space, a focal point. Perhaps “center” has become so popular because it allows us to name a space for writing skill development support without having to decide exactly what role it will play in the writer’s experience. It also may match institutional terms for learning centers in other disciplines. Adopting a writing center name that offers few preconceptions may fail to immediately attract writers to writing center services (a product is more difficult to sell if its name does not reflect its function), but “center” may allow writers to approach writing centers on the right foot, with an open mind.

The analysis of tutor job titles and tutor terms, however, tells a different story. “Tutor” remains the most popular tutor term in use, across all tutor types, despite the many writing center articles taking issue with it. There was also extensive diversity in the minority that elected to use an alternative term. Although “tutor” was by far the most common single term, it led by a narrower margin compared to the overwhelming show for “center.” Potentially, this could signal a shift in the writing center community. Perhaps so many alternatives to “tutor” are in use because writing centers have begun to search for a more agreeable term but have yet to settle on the definitive solution. However, as expressed in the conversations on the IWCA listserv, it may be more likely that writing centers’ self-representations are constrained by the greater university ecosystem. “Tutor” may still be the most used term in our field not out of choice, but because of a need to validate the center’s work to departments, instructors, or those who control funding.

This explanation could account for the 28 cases identified of writing centers using “tutor” and “consultant” interchangeably to describe their staff. Some of these writing center websites, such as the website of Loyola University Maryland's Writing Center, at the time of collection, used "tutor" to describe their tutors but used "consultations" to describe sessions with tutors

(https://www.loyola.edu/department/writingcenter/o verview/online). Others, like the Writing Center of Minnesota State University-Mankato, would use "consultant" on their website, but use "tutor" in the website's navigation menu (http://www.mnsu.edu/success/tutoring/writingcenter.html). Other centers used different terminology on different web pages. California State University-San Marcos' Writing Center described employing "certified student consultants" on their mission statement web page but advertised "tutoring" on a page describing their services (http://www.csusm.edu/writingcenter/information/se rvices.html). Centers seem to be caught between advertising to two different groups: those outside the center and those within. Using terms that outside parties may recognize is advantageous, but these terms may also misrepresent how employees think about their work. As a result, two contradicting images of writing center activity are offered in the hopes of attracting more users, leaving readers to interpret which part of the advertisement is accurate. However, it is possible that consciously using multiple terms and the use of conflicting terms is evidence that that names are dynamic and rhetorical, that perhaps a single term feels

insufficient to describe the varied activities involved in tutoring writing.

Size and type of institution also seem to play a significant role in naming conventions. “Consultant” had a tendency to be used by institutions with larger total enrollments. It could be that schools with larger writing center programs have responded to arguments in scholarship critiquing prevailing tutor terminology. Another reason, however, may be the nature of the work conducted, which makes sense in the clear trend toward “consultant” at R1 universities and for graduate and professional staff at other institutions. It seems likely that those institutions with a more prevalent research mission as well as those in professional and graduate positions may work more often with those who are gaining or have gained advanced expertise in particular fields. A plausible explanation would be that “consultant” avoids the kind of promise of subject expertise and the remedial association individuals might have with “tutor” when dealing with more advanced writers.

Still no solid conclusions can be reached as to why certain names are employed based on this study alone, and the study still found several different terms in use. Unlike the neutral name center, all identified tutor terms carried clear connotations that define the interaction between tutor and writer. Popular wisdom as discussed in the beginning section of the paper has it that the title of “tutor” implies that the tutor is more knowledgeable than the writer, setting up an expectation that parts of the draft may be deemed correct or incorrect. “Consultant” may absolve tutors of having to stand by the effectiveness of their feedback, but it could still be seen as offering a strong signal of expertise. “Coach” connotes a motivating force that can whip students into shape in order to face the challenges (though probably not hollering such things as “excuses are crutches for losers” like my Junior High basketball coach did). Depending on one’s experience, “coach” could invoke a friendly observer from the sidelines, offering timely suggestions. A “mentor” implies a tutor writers can look up to and model themselves after. “Responder” is decidedly more neutral, focusing on a central activity tutors engage in. It might suggest a tutor who offers honest feedback, perhaps without attention to skill development. Writers might think a “collaborator,” “writer,” or “assistant” is a tutor who will help compose a document, which could be problematic, depending on how students and instructors understand the function of such collaboration. Any of the 18 base tutor terms identified carry implications and connotations that could point to

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some aspects of what it means to be a writing center tutor while ignoring others.

Room for Play?

Regarding staff, most institutions exclusively employ undergraduate students as tutors, followed closely by employing undergraduate and graduate students together. This suggests that perhaps the word “tutor,” which establishes a tutor/student hierarchy (an arrangement perhaps more fitting for a professional tutor meeting with an undergraduate student), is not an entirely accurate depiction of common writing center staff. “Peer” continues to be used to modify tutor to reduce hierarchical impressions. Job titles for writing center tutors were most likely to change per tutor type if the writing center employed only undergraduate student tutors and professional tutors. This trend is likely the result of recognizing the difference in expertise and authority between degree-holding professional tutors and undergraduate student tutors. Despite debate, however, few would argue with the fact that tutors do typically have some knowledge and training that most student writers do not. The issue may be less the hierarchical terminology and more the fact that the term does not describe all the collaborative roles performed in a writing center: acting as a sounding board, being a motivator, and many other elements of writing center sessions. Though writing centers are usually free services, they nevertheless rely on marketing of some kind to draw students in. They project a brand image designed to attract writers in a certain university community. The field of marketing has long held that images and words can influence user attraction and experience. Keller, Heckler, and Houston, for example, claim that selecting the proper name can “enhance brand awareness and/or help create a favorable brand image for a newly introduced product,” and that the most effective names are “inherently meaningful…so that the name itself conveys relevant product information” (48). Effective names can reinforce what the product is (like Simply Orange as orange juice) or can suggest certain attributes (Carnival Cruise Lines as a place to have a good time) (48). From this perspective, writing center titles for personnel and location names may not be “inherently meaningful.” “Tutor,” as has been suggested, may imply remediation and hierarchy; in addition, it does not necessarily define what a writing center tutor is.

One thing is clear from this study, if the field wishes to abandon the term “tutor,” much change would still need to occur. In practice, although at a relatively small number of institutions, enough variety

exists to indicate space even for neologism. “Labbie,” a term used by The University of West Florida’s Writing Lab, is a neologism for “laboratory assistant” (Kemmer), which likely draws parallels between experimentation and discovery and the writing process. Although the link between writing centers and laboratories might be undesirable, the idea of wordsmithing a tutor term to describe writing center activity might have some appeal, especially for those who are enamored with neither the business-like “consultant” nor the “coach” with its sports metaphors. But, aside from running into the difficulty of needing to convey the meaning of some neologism to end users, those attempting this may run into additional problems. Even made up words could evoke connotative echoes of other terms.

The difficulty in selecting or creating any term is that it simultaneously must sound approachable and useful, while also preserving a degree of professionalism for the tutors who have to put it on their resumes. This, mixed with a combination of other factors such as campus culture and administrative structure, makes finding a perfect word for everyone impossible. Isaacs and Knight using publicly accessible information from 101 writing centers found that centers “range significantly in their scope of activities, mission, location, staffing, and public website presentation” (37). It is unlikely that a single inherently meaningful word can be found that would capture such diversity.

In my center, our erstwhile search for alternatives to the use of “coach” (yes, I am the one with the sports metaphor aversion) turned up amusing substitutes that sound interesting, but ultimately miss the mark. Among our rejected ideas were “agent,” “detective,” “emissary,” “ambassador,” “model,” and “maven.” We picked each of these terms apart, carefully studying their etymologies, but eventually abandoned them. But I have to admit that “Labbie” puts a smile on my face, and I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of terms still in use which suggests there may be room yet for play in our naming culture. Future studies may find ways to prove or discredit the effects of staff titles empirically. Imagine, for a moment, a center that uses an archaic pedagogical term like “Lore-master,” a word from the 1400s for a master in learning (Oxford English Dictionary). A lore-master’s acolytes were known as “lore-children” (Oxford English Dictionary). What would a writing center that employs “lore-masters” look like? What relationship would they have with their lore children? The medieval fantasy invoked by such a term, especially given its revival in the terminology of games like World of Warcraft could be playful (Blizzard Entertainment). I would much rather have a visit with a

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lore-child than a tutee and probably even a client. Taken seriously, however, the paternalistic imbalance of power and authority could make both tutors and writers uncomfortable. Such terminology might emphasize some of the negative aspects of hierarchy or practice, as would be the case if a writing clinic were named “The Writing E. R.” in an institutional community that approached the center as a place to take writing catastrophes for last-minute life support measures, a practice that would defy concepts of revision and collaboration in learning. These extreme names punch up some of the issues writing centers deal with, whatever they may be called. Still, because a writing center’s core philosophies should influence how it represents itself to others, tutor terms and center names are arguably important as they are the two most salient uses of language used in association with center activity.

Limitations

The current study’s focus on publicly accessible university websites created some limitations on what information could be gathered. Some webpages require university logins to access content and scheduling systems. Other websites were considerably less developed, offering limited information on a single webpage. Because of the variety of information offered on the public websites, some data could not be consistently collected. I initially wanted to investigate how many centers employed tenured faculty as directors, for example, but this question was dropped from our initial study design because we found that many sites did not indicate who the director was or whether or not they were also faculty at the university. More extensive searching could determine if terminology and center self-representation correlates with differences in staff and leadership, as well as help verify the validity of the current findings. The list was first started as a thought experiment when I was directing the Multiliteracies Center at Michigan Tech and was expanded for the collaborative research effort, so some universities had merged or changed names. I have tried to account for these changes but kept data where relevant. R1 classification is based on the Carnegie Classification as of 2025, not necessarily the classification when the data was first collected. In addition, the collaborative nature of the research means that, although I did verify many of the websites personally, I relied on data obtained from researchers that I verified when something was in obvious error. In that regard, there is room for human error that went unnoticed. Websites also change over time, and some URLs were broken at time of writing, sometimes

because a website location changes or because a center’s website disappears completely or is replaced by a new version. Future research could seek additional and current data and could also include using Generative AI tools to collect data.7

Conclusion

The findings of this study indicate that tutors still exist in great number. Since many centers still employ the word, it arguably remains useful for employees in writing centers, but whatever term a center uses, that term may need to be defined for audiences that bring a set of assumptions to what tutoring is. While tutor still has the stage and consultant may be anxiously waiting in the wings, it may be possible for centers to find other terms for their employees. Taking inspiration from the use of “center” over “lab,” perhaps one solution would be to move toward a more neutral tutor term that users will recognize. That move could be pragmatic, if bland.8 Writing centers may benefit from finding more powerful and succinct ways to define themselves in a complex academic landscape of multiple literacies and modes, and names and terms may be a small, imperfect component of that endeavor. Further studies could track these trends over time. Empirical studies could test the efficacy of the terms that have been so vigorously proposed and defended. Such studies could allow us to move beyond conjecture and anecdotal evidence about the efficacy of our terminology.

Some previous scholarship addressing the naming of tutors has attempted to have the final word on the conversation, to implement new names or finally solve the problem of what we call those who work in centers. The data suggests that this conversation remains open, a conversation that must be responded to by a diversity of institutions nationally. Writing centers permeate the landscape of higher education in the United States, and the variety of leadership for those centers and the nature of writing center scholarship means that in each context questions of names and titles may continue, as my review of the IWCA listserv attests. One important takeaway from this study is that there is no full consensus on a national level of what centers or tutors should be called, making this far from an esoteric debate from the 1990s. In identifying themselves, directors and tutors walk a balance between desirable self-representations on the one hand and identifiability and accuracy on the other. Titles may not be the only way to describe our services. The question then turns away from “What should tutors be called?” to “What does being a tutor mean to you where you are?” In this

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view, what matters is the way we define and talk about our work. Messaging and terminology often occur on a local level, but the online presence of a center also paints a picture of its values and offerings. On a national level, tutoring as a practice has widely been accepted as necessary, but with continued upheaval in generative AI technology related to writing, the face and perhaps the name writing centers present for themselves continue to be important tools in shaping perceptions and reality.

Notes

1. For the remainder of this article, I will use the terms “tutor” and “writing center” for convenience and because those remain the most widely-used terms in writing center studies.

2. Sands suggests that any name should be measured by four principles accuracy, aspiration, complexity, and coherence to ensure that the chosen tropes effectively and fully represent the reality of writing center work (11).

3. The word “coach” has a longer history in academia than might be expected. Its original meaning referred to carriages as a means of conveyance. This meaning was adopted as a metaphor in 1830 as a slang term at Oxford University to describe unofficial tutors who helped students through university exams, presumably getting students to positive outcomes more quickly. These tutors operated independently of the official tutors at the institution. This slang led to its use as a verb, recorded in 1848 to mean to prepare someone for an exam (Oxford English Dictionary, 2016). This sense of getting someone from point A to point B more rapidly than they could on their own then was used generally. . It was not until 1885 that coach came to be used in an athletic context. Interestingly, the word coach is most likely adopted in writing center parlance with the sports metaphor in mind, as is the case with my previous institution, where the title has been in use in most learning centers across campus. Although coach may free tutors up to be more casual observers/commentators “from the sidelines,” rather than content experts, coaches of the sports variety can also invoke negative connotations of harsh, motivating individuals who push athletes to their limits.

4. The term “consultant,” originally a word used to refer to those who consulted oracles. It was

first used in 1894 to describe those qualified to provide professional advice (Oxford English Dictionary). Much more common in business contexts, the word has only been applied in an academic context relatively recently.

5. The word “tutor” is the traditional term used to describe a person who offers academic assistance outside of a classroom. According to the Oxford English Dictionary), the earliest known use of the word in this context was in 1398, in reference to private tutors.

6. Efforts like the National Census on Writing are a step in the right direction, though relying on self-reported survey data has its limitations.

7. My own experimentation shows some promise here, though the context window for processing large amounts of data creates problems with fabrication. Such scraping as an iterative process, however, could be a way to replicate and compare to the data obtained in this study and others.

8. Some innovations, however, don’t take hold. The idea of a multiliteracy (or multiliteracies) center created some stir but has since faded. In my data, the only remaining center with multiliteracy in the title appears to be California State University, Channel Islands. I directed the Michigan Tech Multiliteracies Center, which had been thus named by Nancy Grimm. The subsequent director changed the name back to Writing Center aiming for easier recognizability on campus.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank two Assistant Directors who helped me in this work. Rebecca Frost was helpful in finding sources when I initially started thinking of the topic, and William De Herder was an immense help in organizing data collection and initial analysis. I'd especially like to thank William for putting up with a lot of talk about tutor titles. I also owe a thanks to the graduate students and undergraduate coaches who helped me collect the data for this study.

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Appendix

Regional Mapping of Tutor

Regional Mapping of Consultant

Regional Mapping of Coach

EVOLVING PERCEPTIONS OF GENAI WRITING TOOLS: WHY WRITING CENTERS SHOULD BE GENAI PIONEERS

Nathan Lindberg Cornell University nathanlindberg@cornell.edu

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) writing tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) have emerged so quickly that their impact on writing centers is not well understood. This article presents data from two studies that were conducted in 2023 and 2024. One consisted of surveys of writing center administrators and related parties. The other was surveys and interviews of students. In 2023, administrators and related parties saw the new technology with suspicion and concern, while students embraced it. However, after a year, the narrative tended to merge. Administrators’ and related parties’ concerns diminished while students became less enamored. Both groups viewed GenAI writing tools as powerful but limited, requiring skill to use. Already some writing center directors are incorporating GenAI writing tools into their programs. This article argues writing centers can even go further, pioneering the use of the new technology.

In Graham Stowe’s September 2023 blog post, he grappled with the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) writing tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot) on the writing center. He assumed students would want help using the new tools and reviewing texts written with them. But Stowe noted that at the time there had not been enough IRB-approved studies that could guide how to approach the tools. He concluded, “The best course of action is to wait and see.”

A lot has changed since then, including that research has been conducted. This paper presents data from two studies conducted in 2023 and again in 2024. The first is a survey that gives evidence that writing center administrators and interested parties (e.g., faculty, staff) were initially wary of GenAI writing tools but felt less negative or even positive about them after a year. The second study consists of surveys and interviews of international graduate and professional students, who were quick to embrace the new technology, sometimes using it as a proxy for tutoring. However, after the initial luster wore off, some became disenchanted and even came back to the writing center, seeking human help.

The two perspectives can be seen as merging, finding the technology neither an existential threat to the writing center nor a replacement for it, but instead a powerful but limited tool that requires skill to use effectively. As Stowe predicted, clients are bringing in GenAI-created text, and some directors have accepted the technology and are already incorporating the tools

into their programs, making them part of tutor training and sessions.

The acceptance of the tools is not surprising. At writing centers, we have always worked with new technologies (Bryan). Today, we are in an advantageous position to work with GenAI in multiple ways. We have the knowledge and experience to ensure students don’t lose their voice to machines. We can raise awareness that GenAI can produce biased text. We can work to protect privacy. Additionally, positioned between faculty and students, we can advise on policy, striving to ensure the tools are used ethically and do not impede learning.

In this paper, I argue a further opportunity exists. Writing centers are not just in a position to accept GenAI writing tools, but they can and should lead the way in using them. These are the most powerful writing tools ever created, with many intriguing uses. We have the experience and ability to pioneer approaches that enhance existing writing strategies or even create new ones never before possible.

My Context with EAL Graduate Students

The premises in this article are an inherent part of my positionality. I teach for Cornell’s English Language Support Office (ELSO), and direct ELSO’s Writing & Presenting Tutoring Service, which works almost exclusively with international graduate and professional students, whom I surveyed and interviewed for this article. My students often write high-stakes, public-facing documents (e.g., dissertations, research articles) that form part of their reputations. Consequently, they are motivated to retain agency and to be wary of giving too much influence to GenAI writing tools. Working with these students, I do not have many ethical concerns about them cheating, i.e., having GenAI tools write their papers. However, many of these students were early adopters of GenAI tools. Most of my students use English as an additional language (EAL), and often write with what has been called written accents; just as we speak with an accent, we write with one (Cox; Zawacki, et al.). Written accents entail more than mistakes: they contain problems that stem from the relationship between English and a writer’s first language. For example, Chinese does not have the equivalent of articles (i.e., a, an, the), so Chinese

writers might fail to include articles or use them inappropriately. Other common issues include unconventional phrasing, vocabulary, and syntax, all of which are not necessarily erroneous, but make accented writing seem odd. If EAL students want to publish, they are usually required to adjust their accents to conform to North American academic standards (For more on the subject, see Lindberg, 2025).

To adjust written accents, our clients often used to make appointments with our writing service. In fact, pre-GenAI, on post-session evaluations, they consistently ranked “looking for mistakes” as their top goal. When ChatGPT 3.5 was introduced, my students quickly realized how effectively it adjusts accented writing. By spring 2024, their goal of “looking for mistakes” had dropped to a distant third, behind getting the tutor’s overall opinion and working on structure. Consequently, our writing center suffered a 31% drop in occupancy in spring 2023 and eventually declined by 60% in spring 2024.

Readers who work primarily with domestic undergrads might feel that input from international students does not apply to their situations. For example, undergrads are more likely to be developing their writing skills. If they rely on GenAI writing tools too much, they will miss learning opportunities. Thus, there is an incentive to ask these students to pause or abate their GenAI writing tool usage. However, such a request is most likely fruitless. It is more likely that future generations will grow up using these tools as an integral part of their writing process. Looking to early adopters, such as my students, can help us see how the tools are being used for authentic, public-facing writing in upperlevel classes and, eventually, by faculty and in the workplace.

Review of the Literature

GenAI writing tools have become so popular so quickly that writing center scholars are still debating their impact. Some have advocated that they are just the newest technology among a long list of those that writing centers have adapted (Bryan). However, these tools are much more powerful than previous technologies. Available 24/7, with access to knowledge in all fields, and actually able to construct coherent papers, they have been touted as replacements for tutoring (Mollick; Rahman and Watanobe). Though there were early attempts to ban GenAI tools (Yadava), as of yet, teachers have no reliable way of detecting GenAI-generated text (Heaven; Terry), so such bans are difficult to enforce. Trends indicate that GenAI writing

tools are only going to become more effective and ubiquitous (Graham).

In such a short amount of time, there has been a lack of IRB-approved research. There were, however, blogs on the subject (e.g. Hotson, Part 1; Hotson Part 2; Stowe; Lindberg) and a plethora of GenAI themed presentations at conferences. At the 2023 International Writing Center Association’s (IWAC’s) conference in Baltimore, a dozen events (i.e., panel discussions, roundtable discussions, individual presentations) were focused on AI several mentioning ChatGPT by name. At the 2024 online IWAC conference, that number increased to 58, which was 38% of all events.

With this quick growth spurt, many problems have arisen. The texts that GenAI writing tools generate can look like academic writing but contain mistakes or even fabricated information (Ali and Singh). Beyond inaccuracies, teachers and students have expressed concerns that GenAI tools are negatively impacting education even replacing humans (Shoufan). Furthermore, these tools could create a division between those who can afford the technology and those who cannot (Yan) and they may further solidify the use of colonial languages (e.g., Standard English) and the concentration of power (Madianou; Byrd).

Despite all the problems, scholars are also finding opportunities. For example, while Meyer points out that students’ voices can be lost in GenAI-writing, Wang sees this problem as an opportunity to discuss what voice entails and how it might be reinserted, raising awareness of the issues and, ultimately, leading to more controlled writing. In another example, Werse feels that relying on GenAI writing tools could negatively impact developing critical thinking, but Matas suggests that students can increase such skills by scrutinizing GenAIwritten text. And though Lester argues that GenAI text carries many biases, such as gender, she also admits it can be used to make such biases salient.

Meanwhile, students are developing their own approaches to GenAI tools (Terry), and teachers are creating lesson plans around these tools (e.g., Exploring AI pedagogy; Gardner). The WAC Clearinghouse published Teaching with Text Generation Technology, which contains chapters on using GenAI to identify bias and raise ethical concerns, as well as using the technology as an integral part of the writing process.

Still, there is much we don’t know. We need to understand what others are doing and how they are working with GenAI. We need to know more about students’ experiences and perspectives. We could also use this information not just to adjust, but to take the lead in using GenAI writing tools. Who better to

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navigate the problems and promote the benefits than writing centers?

Methodology

This study consists of three major components: (1) a survey of clients, (2) a survey of writing center administrators, and (3) interviews with clients.

For the first component, in May 2023 an IRBapproved survey (see Appendix A) was sent to everyone (e.g., students, alumni, faculty) on ELSO’s listserv and to the clients of ELSO’s Writing & Presenting Tutoring Service, and 51 responded. The survey was updated and sent out again in 2024 (see Appendix B) and 42 responded.

For the second component, in August 2023, an IRB-approved survey of about 25 questions (see Appendix C) was shared with writing center administrators and interested parties (e.g., faculty, tutors) via listservs and the Writing Center Administrator’s Facebook page. The same survey was updated (see Appendix D) and sent out again in August 2024. Preliminary results were released in two reports (Lindberg et al.; Lindberg and Domingues). In 2023, there were 66 participants, and in 2024 there were 81. Most participants were affiliated with writing centers that worked primarily with undergraduate students. Participants primarily identified as writing center administrators, but there were also tutors, faculty, and staff. A breakdown of participants is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Participants in student surveys for 2023 and 2024

minutes to just over an hour. According to the IRB protocol, all participants’ identities are protected, thus pseudonyms are used in this article.

To create themes from interview data, I followed Charmaz’s advice on memo writing. Before and after interviews, I kept notes, listing possible themes. Later, in a reiterative process, I transcribed interviews, revisited themes, and made adjustments, until I came up with the themes presented below.

I should note the limits of the study. Survey takers were anonymous, and it is impossible to tell how many took the survey both years. Thus, comparison can only be made generally. Quantitative data are drawn from small sample sizes, which did not warrant statistical analyses, thus, again, only general conclusions can be drawn. However, both the qualitative and quantitative data tell a consistent story, one that is reasonable and, arguably, expected, so I believe comparisons are valid.

Finally, a note on the figures given below: percentages are provided so tables will accurately portray comparisons between the two years, but the total number of those who answered questions is given in parentheses. In some cases, percentages may not add up to 100 because they were rounded to the nearest tenth.

Finally, in this article, the term GenAI writing tool is used. The actual wording on the survey in 2023 was AI chatbot and in 2024 GenAI tool. In each case, ChatGPT was consulted and asked which term it advised using. Each year it had a different suggestion. GenAI is used in this paper based on a recommendation of a human (and a friend), Jane Freeman, Director of the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication, University of Toronto.

Results

For the third component, the survey of clients included an interview request. Twelve clients accepted, and 11 were interviewed in May and June of 2023 (see Appendix E). In December 2023, seven participated in follow-up interviews (see Appendix F). In total, nine of those interviewed were international graduate and professional students, one was a postdoc, and one was a visiting scholar. All interviewees came from abroad and use English as an additional language. Interviews were conducted over Zoom and lasted from about 30

In this section, the results from the 2023 and 2024 studies are presented. The data from both years support a common narrative: The initial impact of GenAI writing tools waned, and now all parties are becoming more focused on what to do with these tools.

Results from Surveys of Writing Center Administrators and Interested Parties

In 2023 and 2024, writing center administrators and interested parties were asked if they felt students were using GenAI writing tools. Fig. 1 illustrates a shift from no to yes.

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Participants were asked how they felt about the impact of GenAI writing tools on their centers. As seen in Fig. 2, attitudes were skewed negatively, but from the first survey to the second, there was a substantial drop in “a little negative” and an increase in “neutral” and positive feelings, indicating that attitudes were becoming at least not as negative.

Participants were given the opportunity to explain their feelings about the impact of GenAI writing tools. With only a few exceptions, responses can generally be divided into three main categories: (a) negative, (b) positive, and (c) ambivalent. From 2023 to 2024, there was a shift from negative and ambivalent to positive, as Fig. 3 shows.

The most notable difference is 16% more ambivalence in 2023. One 2023 participant stated, “I think AI tools have tremendous potential to positively influence the quality of client writing, which is excellent. I believe this positive influence will result in significantly fewer clients needing assistance in the writing center, thus having a negative impact on the writing center itself.” This weighing of both sides decreased in 2024, implying that more administrators and interested parties had made up their minds about GenAI writing tools. In fact, some participants were embracing the new technology, with one stating, “I think AI is a very powerful tool and could prove extremely useful. We just have to figure out how to implement it correctly.”

Another notable difference between the two years is that in 2023, three participants complained that the technology had been thrust upon them without their consent. One participant noted, “It makes me angry that tech corporations in general have so much influence over our lives.” This sentiment was absent in 2024, implying that participants had become more resigned to the technology.

There was also a shift away from the negative impacts on writing center usage. In 2023, six participants expressed concern that the writing center’s occupancy would decline because students would turn to GenAI writing tools. One participant claimed, “I don’t think that there will be much work for writing center tutors or writing centers in general in the next 10 to 20 years.” In 2024, this concern was only given by four participants, while two others explicitly stated GenAI writing tolls had not impacted their occupancy levels, and another two were not sure.

Not surprisingly, in 2023 when GenAI tools were still new, participants did not report students bringing in GenAI-generated text. In fact, one participant stated bluntly, “I haven’t seen any student papers that are GenAI-generated come into the WC.” However, in 2024, GenAI tools had become

more widespread, and six participants directly referred to GenAI-generated texts showing up in sessions, with one stating,

I personally have had many appointments where the writer was using ChatGPT (and either admitted it, or it was obvious through language use/professor feedback). I usually end up working with these students to rewrite AI sentences so that it’s instead in their own words and try to emphasize the importance of their voice in their writing.

Participants were asked if they thought GenAI writing tools would change the way writing centers work with clients. In both years, the vast majority felt they would (Fig. 4).

Sixty participants elaborated their answer. Twenty-eight felt that writing centers will need to work with AI writing tools, ten mentioning that tutors will need to be able to use them with clients. One stated, “Writing center consultants will need to become conversant in generative AI usage strategies and how they affect clients' research and composition processes.”

In only the 2024 survey were participants asked how much they thought this change would be. The majority felt it would only be “some” (Fig. 5).

Participants were asked if they thought GenAI writing tools will change the way tutors are trained. The results are very similar in both years, with the vast majority feeling they would (Fig. 6).

When asked how substantial this change would be, there is a shift from “some” to “a lot” (Fig. 7).

Participants were asked how tutor training would change. In 2023, 54% of the 46 participants who answered the question felt that tutors would need to become familiar with GenAI writing tools, so they could incorporate them into sessions. This was roughly the same in 2024 for the 66 respondents, 58% of whom felt they would.

Participants also felt tutors would need to be able to recognize GenAI-produced texts and discuss possible problems, such as plagiarism, but there was a significant drop from 50% in 2023 to 27% in 2024. The decrease may be an indication that there was less concern that students were going to have GenAI write their papers and more concern that writing centers would need to learn how to work with these tools.

Finally, participants were asked if they personally used GenAI writing tools. Most did but not substantially. However, from 2023 to 2024, Fig. 8 indicates a shift toward more usage.

There was also a shift in what participants were using the tools for. In 2023, 40% (n=15) respondents reported experimenting with them, sometimes to see

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what students were doing. However, in 2024, only 18% (n=11) mentioned experimenting with them. Perhaps experimenting was winding down. In addition, the percentage of participants using the tools for writing, including brainstorming and writing low-stakes texts (e.g., emails) was slightly more in 2023 (60%, n=23) than in 2024 (51%, n=31).

Conclusions of Surveys of Writing Center Administrators and Interested Parties

Based on the two surveys, evidence indicates that writing center administrators’ and interested parties’ attitudes and usages of GenAI writing tools shifted from 2023 to 2024. Participants were becoming accustomed

to GenAI writing tools, showing less ambivalence toward them, accepting them in general, and feeling less trepidation that they would decrease enrollment. More writing center administrators and interested parties felt the new technology would impact the way writing centers work with clients and train tutors, and in 2024, GenAI-written papers were showing up in sessions. However, the majority of study participants were not using GenAI writing tools substantially, though a minority had fully embraced them.

A general pattern can be drawn: The shock of GenAI tools is wearing off and administrators and interested parties are seeing them as another tool that is useful and is becoming part of the writing center’s repertoire.

Figure 2. Generally, how do you feel about the impact of ChatGPT and other AI chatbots on writing centers?

Figure 3. If you would like, explain your answer: [Coded into three categories]

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Figure 4. Do you think ChatGPT or other AI chatbots will change the way writing centers work with clients?

5. How much do you think they will change the way writing centers work with clients?

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Figure 6. Do you think ChatGPT or other AI chatbots will change the way writing center consultants/tutors are trained?

7. How much do you think it will change the way consultants/tutors are trained?

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Figure 8. Do you personally use ChatGPT or other AI chatbots?

Survey of Students

In this section and the next, evidence indicates students appeared to have embraced GenAI writing tools quickly, but then their excitement waned, and students began to realize these tools are not a panacea for all writing issues but instead a powerful technology that has a lot of potential, but is only as good as the skills of those who wield it.

In the spring of 2023 and 2024, surveys were sent out to clients of the ELSO Writing & Presenting Tutoring Service. Like writing center administrators and interested parties, from 2023 to 2024, generally more students were using GenAI writing tools. In 2023, 75% (n=33) of students who took the survey had used one to help with their writing, whereas in 2024 this rate increased to 84% (n=21).

Students reported using them for a variety of purposes, most commonly checking for errors (Fig. 9), which could be an indication that EAL students were using GenAI writing tools to adjust their written accents. (See section My Context with EAL Students above.)

Participants were asked what types of projects they were using GenAI writing tools for. In both 2023 (n=10) and 2024 (n=7) the most common answer was research papers, followed by class assignments (n=3 in 2023; n=7 in 2024). Other uses included writing cover letters and resumes, rephrasing, and, as one student wrote, “anything, but not to generate writing.” In fact,

having a GenAI writing tool write a paper for students was one of the least popular tasks selected.

Some scholars have touted GenAI tools as a substitute for tutoring (Mollick; Rahman and Watanobe). Survey results indicated that this was true. When asked if students had used a GenAI writing tool instead of seeing a tutor, about half had in 2023 and seven percent more had in 2024 (Fig. 10).

However, the results are complicated. When asked if they would consider using a GenAI writing tool instead of a tutor, from 2023 to 2024, there was a dramatic negative shift (Fig. 11).

When asked why students used GenAI writing tools instead of going to see a tutor, for both 2023 and 2024, the majority felt they are faster and more convenient than working with a tutor (Fig. 12). Interestingly, relatively few felt that GenAI writing tools are more effective than tutors. One conclusion is that together, these two data sets indicate that the initial shine of GenAI dulled as students found the tools were not a substitute for human help.

Two survey questions concerned GenAI writing tools’ effectiveness. The first asked if students found GenAI writing tools’ assistance useful. In Fig. 13, the numbers are mostly the same for both years, except for a substantial decrease in the number who felt help was “extremely” useful.

This waning of enthusiasm also occurred when students were asked to evaluate GenAI writing tools’ results. From 2023 to 2024, a substantial number of

students judged them more “so-so” and less “really great”. Together, these two data sets indicate that the luster of GenAI had dulled. If students were becoming less smitten with GenAI writing tools, it stands to reason that they would seek help using them effectively. Indeed, from 2023 to 2024, a much higher percentage indicated that they would (Fig. 14).

Conclusion of Surveys of Students

Survey results indicate that more students are using GenAI writing tools for many purposes because these tools are so convenient. However, the initial excitement around GenAI seems to have faded. After a year, they found the tools less effective than human help and were less inclined to think of them as a substitute for a tutoring session.

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10. Have you used an AI chatbot instead of going to a tutor?

11. Would you consider using an AI chatbot instead of working with a tutor?

Figure 12. Why did you use an AI chatbot instead of going to the tutoring service? (Choose as many as you want.)

Figure 13. Did you find the AI chatbot's help useful?

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Figure 14. Would you be interested in having ELSO's Writing & Presenting tutors help you work with AI chatbots?

Results from Interviews with Students

The 2023 survey of students included an invitation to be interviewed. Eleven students agreed and I spoke to them in May and June of the same year. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed to come up with the themes below. In general, the interview data support the narrative from the student surveys: The luster of GenAI writing tools faded, and some students had begun to return to tutoring.

Using ChatGPT as a Proxy for Tutoring

ChatGPT was the first GenAI chatbot to gain widespread usage, and the only chatbot used by students who were interviewed. Before ChatGPT, Jasper, an architecture master’s student, had been a regular tutoring client, attending 79 sessions from fall 2021 to fall 2022, often to adjust his written accent. However, in spring 2023 the semester after ChatGPT was introduced he only attended three sessions. During our first interview, he was convinced that ChatGPT could take the place of tutoring. He claimed, “I think I use it every day and a lot every day for everything, for writing and for getting some brainstorm or some inspirations and to ask it to edit my writing and even use it to check words.” Jasper also used ChatGPT to write content. One strategy he used was to upload a page of his writing and ask ChatGPT to “remember” it. Then he would ask it to write a paragraph using his style. Jasper

had become so reliant on ChatGPT that when asked if he could write without it, he replied, “To be honest, I think now I cannot.” Then he added, “I am already addicted to it.”

Something Jasper used ChatGPT specifically for was “cleaning up a draft,” which he described as choosing more appropriate vocabulary and phrasing, both of which are considered part of adjusting accented writing. This was true for other interviewees, all who use English as an additional language. Yasmine, a humanities doctoral student, noted that ChatGPT could “polish” her expressions, making her language more “professional” and “academic.” Trinity, a business master’s student, asked ChatGPT to “fix the wrong expressions,” changing them into “natural language expressions.” Tru, a social science doctoral student, asked ChatGPT to give alternative expressions to her words that seemed “weird.” Then she looked over the synonyms ChatGPT provided to find the appropriate ones. Elisa, a PhD student in information science, made this adjustment with the terse prompt “check grammar.” Then ChatGPT would rewrite her text. Afterwards, she would read through the text and determine if the revisions were acceptable.

While ELSO tutors could help adjust written accents, ChatGPT was more convenient. Jasper said making an appointment with a tutor took time and effort. However, using ChatGPT required very little investment. Kai, a postdoctoral researcher in agricultural and life sciences, voiced a similar sentiment, stating,

“[ChatGPT] improved my productivity a lot now by reducing the time that I have to spend on editing some language issues.” He added, “[Addressing language issues] has become just a five-minute job.” Elisa admitted she often waited until the last minute to write her papers. At that point, it might be too late to make a tutoring appointment, and ChatGPT was a convenient alternative. Reese, a doctoral student in information science, said she didn’t have time to go to multiple tutoring sessions. Using ChatGPT was much more efficient.

Using GenAI writing tools gave Jasper confidence to progress further than he would have previously considered. Before ChatGPT, he had wanted to apply for a grant but did not feel his writing ability was good enough. However, with ChatGPT’s help, he applied and was awarded the grant. His success gave him confidence to pursue a PhD, and with ChatGPT’s help, he felt that he would be able to meet the writing requirements to earn a doctoral degree.

Problems with GenAI Writing Tools

Despite the benefits of GenAI writing tools, there were certain needs that they could not fulfill, and there were new needs that they created. One problem with GenAI writing tools is the companies that host them lack clear privacy policies. Consequently, no participant felt confident that the text they uploaded would be kept private. Tru was concerned that when she submitted text, it would go into a database, and later she might be flagged for plagiarizing her own words. Conversely, Elisa was concerned that the text that ChatGPT generated might be plagiarized, and if she used it, her writing would be flagged. Ariana, an engineering doctoral student, had just been hired as an intern in a large tech company and was assigned to work on a patent. She was given specific instructions not to upload any part of the patent to a GenAI chatbot because the information would not be secure.

Some students took measures to ensure privacy. Ariana did not include names when she asked ChatGPT to write her an email. Tru never uploaded more than a paragraph at a time, reasoning that ChatGPT would not have her full paper. Elisa used ChatGPT to proofread her papers, but she would not use it if she was co-authoring because she felt it would violate her co-writers’ privacy.

However, some students admitted that trying to retain privacy was a losing battle. Reese said, “Everything I write online has been recorded by some software I use, and I don't trust their private policies, so everything I write has already been stolen by some evil

big companies, so there's no difference if I put it in ChatGPT or not.” Yanis, an engineering master’s student, had similar feelings, stating, “I should be concerned. But I know right now since our information is already exposed to everything, I feel like there's nothing I can do.”

Along with privacy issues, there are ethical concerns (Yadava 218). Some students stated they had seen course syllabi, journal guidelines, and application stipulations that limited or banned the use of GenAI tools. However, none of the students were aware of any rules on the university or program level. The rules only seemed to come from individual professors, and even then they were not always followed. During my interview with Trinity, she initially thought that one course she was currently enrolled in allowed students to use GenAI writing tools to write papers. However, as we spoke, she became doubtful. She then shared screens and opened up her syllabus, so we could look it over. She was correct. However, there was a stipulation that if they did so, they were to include a description of how they used them. Trinity had not noticed the paragraph before, nor had she written such a description despite using ChatGPT to proofread her papers. She rationalized that she was just using it to check for mistakes not generate ideas so she did not feel she had violated the rule. Similarly, Elisa and Ariana felt that if they used ChatGPT to proofread, they were not doing anything unethical nor did they need to disclose the usage.

Lack of policy clarity left Jasper confused. In our follow-up interview, he was applying for a PhD program that stipulated GenAI writing tools should not be used when writing application material. He confessed, “I don’t know what does it mean by don’t use it don’t use it to write your paper, but may I use it to adjust it?” Jasper rationalized that if other people can afford to hire an editor, he should be able to use ChatGPT similarly.

Ultimately, the ethics of using GenAI tools for writing are difficult, something students who were also teachers had to face. Both Reese and Tru were teaching assistants for undergraduate classes, and both courses forbade the use of GenAI writing tools to generate texts. Despite the rule, both Reese and Tru said that they had seen students’ papers that they thought were GenAI written. However, since there was no reliable way to test for GenAI-generated text, neither took action. Reese explained, “There was no way to verify, so we just dropped it.”

The lack of clear policies on GenAI writing tools can cause students to feel that any use may be deemed unethical, and, consequently, they may be

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reluctant to discuss the matter. None of the interviewees had openly discussed the ethical use of GenAI tools with their colleagues or professors. As a TA, Reese didn’t expect her students to admit they were using GenAI tools because doing so would be “taking a big risk” that the teacher might grade them negatively. However, none of the participants were overly concerned. Elisa admitted she felt a little guilty when she started to use ChatGPT but not as much anymore. “Like, yeah, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “We already know, like, everyone is using ChatGPT.”

Of the problems noted so far, all can be addressed through technological adjustments that could ensure privacy and also explicit policies that could clarify GenAI usage. However, Declan, a visiting scholar, brought up a more complicated problem. He was reluctant to use ChatGPT because he thought it would impede his learning process, and he really wanted to improve his English language abilities. At the end of our interview, though, he had become more curious and said he might try it.

Another more complicated problem emerged when students used ChatGPT to adjust their written accents. Its voice was not what they wanted. In our first interview, Reese described how she would give ChatGPT a bullet list of notes and have it write a paragraph for her. However, in our second interview, she said that she didn’t like the chatbot’s style, which she described as condescending, like an authority speaking to subordinates. When asked what made the chatbot’s voice patronizing, she said it used long sentences and words that are too formal. Consequently, she had to go through ChatGPT-generated text to change words, phrasing, and syntax in order to reinsert her voice. At the time of our follow-up interview, she had quit asking ChatGPT to write for her. She found it easier to compose without it.

In a follow-up interview, Jasper also said his opinion of ChatGPT had evolved. He still praised it and relied on it to adjust his written accent but questioned if it represented his voice. While applying for PhD programs, he had ChatGPT write up some of his application statements. “When I read it, I thought, it’s totally not me. It’s not acceptable.” This was a similar sentiment to those held by Tru, Trinity, and Elisa. Perhaps the strongest reaction against ChatGPT’s voice came from Yasmine, who felt it repeated things too often and speaks “like a robot.”

Problems with voice, privacy, and ethics are issues of concern, but for some participants, the biggest problem with ChatGPT was that the allure had worn off and they had become disappointed with the results. During our follow-up interview, Reese said she rarely

used ChatGPT anymore. She felt her language and writing abilities had improved enough that cutting and pasting into ChatGPT had become too slow and cumbersome. Ariana was also disappointed with ChatGPT. She had tried to use it to change her tone (e.g., from informal to formal) but found the results lacking, so she started using it less. Yanis asked ChatGPT to help him with structure and transitions but found it unhelpful. Yasmine said that when she tried to delve deeper into a subject (e.g., “What is formal language?”), ChatGPT would inevitably end up giving her repetitive answers and circular logic (e.g., “Formal language is not slang” “Slang is not formal language”).

For some students, after the luster wore off, they found only limited usage for ChatGPT. The first time I interviewed Tru, she said, “When you first use [ChatGPT] you feel very fascinated about it, like how powerful and how convenient the tool is.” However, after five months of usage, she saw it as just another tool. In fact, in our follow-up interview, she preferred an app called QuillBot for paraphrasing and another called Grammarly for proofreading because both could be used in-text and did not require the cutting and pasting that was needed for ChatGPT. She used Google Translate because she felt it was more accurate. Occasionally, she still used ChatGPT for written accent adjustment, but it had become just another tool among many.

Returning to Humans

Some participants had actually started returning to human tutoring. As noted, Jasper had been a regular tutoring client, but when he discovered ChatGPT, he almost stopped attending sessions. However, in the fall of 2023, he attended 30 sessions, including nine that were face-to-face. It should be noted that during that semester, only one tutor offered face-to-face sessions, so attending nine sessions took a concerted effort. Though Jasper still valued ChatGPT, he felt that tutors provided better feedback even on surface-level matters and particularly with structure. He felt ChatGPT would never be good at giving feedback on structure because such analysis requires creativity, which the chatbot does not have. Ultimately, he felt that “If I want to make my writing even better, then I have to work with tutors.”

In our second interview, Tru also wanted human feedback, stating, “At the end of the day, I’m still writing for a human rather than an AI reader.” She added, “I still need my paper to be read by a human rather than a robot.” In our follow-up interview, Trinity

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expressed similar sentiments, stating that she might use ChatGPT to help her write papers, but she wanted her final version to be checked by a human.

Interestingly, at the beginning of this section, it was noted that students appreciated the convenience of ChatGPT, but conversely, some valued the investment it took to see a tutor. Jasper noted that if he made a tutoring appointment, knowing a human would be reviewing his writing motivated him to write better. Ariana felt similarly.

The students’ attitudes towards ChatGPT from our first interview to our second shifted, none more so than Jasper, who had once claimed to be addicted to the chatbot. He went from using ChatGPT for everything to becoming disenchanted with its voice and general feedback. He had returned to tutoring, but he still used ChatGPT to check his language. For Jasper and others, ChatGPT had become a tool that had its uses, such as adjusting accented language.

Discussions and Conclusions

This article starts with Graham Stowe’s 2023 blog post, in which he argued that we needed more research to know how to respond to GenAI writing tools. This article presents such research and constructs a narrative based on it.

The narrative has two sides. For writing center administrators and interested parties, the shock of GenAI had waned. They became less negative about its impacts and accepted it in a variety of ways. For students, nearly the opposite was true. Some were early adopters, seeing it as a panacea for addressing writing problems and a proxy for tutoring sessions. But they learned that GenAI writing tools also come with problems and ultimately are just limited tools. Some were looking back to tutoring for assistance to work these tools effectively and also to receive human help. The two sides can be seen as meeting, realizing GenAI writing tools are neither the inevitable demise of writing centers nor a cure-all, but instruments that can be useful.

For valid reasons, some administrators are still primarily suspicious and resistant to the new technology, but students appear to be using it more, even knowing its limitations. Now, writing centers are seeing GenAIcreated texts, and there appears to be no way to stop or pause the technology. Consequently, some administrators have already started incorporating GenAI writing tools into their training.

There are many reasons that writing centers are well suited to work with GenAI writing tools and even to benefit from them. These tools can relieve writing

centers from being proofreading services. Even EAL students seeking written accent adjustment are no longer as prevalent. Instead, we can focus on higherlevel concerns, such as working with broad structures.

In addition, we have features that computers can never match. We provide human help. Only we can give human reaction, while we continue to offer safe spaces, building community and making students feel like they are part of the institutions we work for.

We can also address problems that have emerged. We are in a unique position between faculty and students. We can assist students to navigate policies, and we can provide input to create new policies that are fair to both sides. We could take the time to investigate privacy issues to help students safeguard their work. With writing studies knowledge, we can ensure students avoid pitfalls, such as losing their agency and voice. We have the time and expertise to develop strategies for using GenAI writing tools to work effectively and ethically while still learning.

However, as GenAI writing tools become mainstream, we should not just accept and work with them. We have the opportunity to take the lead and pioneer them. With our knowledge and experience, we can develop strategies and prompts that are difficult or even impossible to create without the technology.

The potential is intriguing. These tools can quickly show the boundaries of a genre (e.g., structure, style, tone), giving students an indication of what is accepted and what is not. In seconds, they can find the central point of a paper and show how that point is (or is not) developed and supported. They can map how a writer guides or does not guide readers and assess the effectiveness of the guidance. GenAI has the potential to change the way we write, and writing centers have the experience and position to pioneer these techniques. (For specific strategies, see Lindberg.)

However, there are several problems (aren’t there always?). The first is that many of us in administration are experienced scholars and writers and we don’t need GenAI writing tools. Thus, we don’t use them. This study shows that this isn’t always the case in fact, some of us are already legitimate GenAI pioneers. But for others (initially including myself), it just seems like another annoying technology, and we search for reasons not to engage with it. I’ve been in multiple conversations that turn into gripe sessions about how bad GenAI writing tools are, such as that they support the dominant language and cause more class division. These are real problems and need to be addressed, but they don’t distract from the fact that these writing tools are the most powerful ones ever

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created. Ultimately, we need to engage with them. Not doing so would be woefully neglectful.

Unfortunately, there is another larger problem: writing with GenAI is difficult (Lindberg, “Writing with GenAI Is Difficult”) Though these tools have been touted as quick, easy ways to write papers, this only applies to very low-stakes writing. If writing is highstakes, public facing, and part of a repertoire that creates that author’s reputation, using GenAI writing tools is complicated. Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Copilot need to be trained they might not even know what a paragraph or sentence is. A user may need to go back and forth with them to get the results they want, creating prompts that require an advanced level of metacognitive thinking. After all, a tool is only as good as the skills of the user.

If we want to pioneer GenAI writing tools, we are going to have to work for it. We will need to publish more articles on strategies and approaches to working with GenAI writing tools. At conferences, we need workshops where strategies are taught and round tables where they are debated. Something that is becoming evident is that the technology is not going to go away or even pause. Future generations are going to use them as an integral part of their writing process. We will need to convince them that writing centers are still relevant and worth using.

Together, we have a much better chance of guiding the use of this new technology in a way that is ethical, effective, and ensures students continue to learn, and we can continue not just to exist but to thrive.

Works Cited

Ali, Mohammad Javed and Swati Singh. “ChatGPT and Scientific Abstract Writing: Pitfalls and Caution.” Graefe’s Archive for Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology, 25, May 2023, pp. 3205-3206, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00417023-06123-z.

Bryan, Mathew D. “Bringing AI to the Center: What Historical Writing Center Software Discourse Can Teach Us About Responses to Artificial Intelligence-Based Writing Tools.” The Proceedings of the Annual Computers and Writing Conference, 2023, edited by Christopher D. M. Andrews, Chen Chen, and Brandy Dieterle, The WAC Clearinghouse, 2024, pp. 15-26, https://doi.org/10.37514/PCW-B.2024.2296.

Byrd, Antonio. “Truth-Telling: Critical Inquiries on LLMs and the Corpus Texts That Train Them.” Composition Studies, vol. 51, no. 1, 2023, pp. 135142.

Cox, Michelle. “In Response to Today’s ‘Felt ‘Need’: WAC, Faculty Development, and Second Language Writers.” WAC and Second Language Writers: Research Towards Linguistically and Culturally Inclusive Programs and Practices, edited by Terry M. Zawacki and Michelle Cox, The WAC Clearinghouse, 2014, pp. 299-326.

Charmaz, Kathy. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. Sage Publications, 2006.

Graham, Scott. “Post-Process but Not Post-Writing: Large Language Models and a Future for Composition Pedagogy.” Composition Studies, vol. 51, no. 1, 2023, pp. 162-168.

Heaven, Will Douglas. “The Education of ChatGPT.” MIT Technology Review, vol. 126, no. 3, 2023, pp. 42-47.

Hotson, Brian. “GenAI and the Writing Process: Guiding Student Writers in a GenAI World (Part 1 of 2).” CWCR/RCCR Blog, 30 Aug. 2023, https://cwcaaccr.com/2023/08/30/productiv e-and-ethical-guiding-student-writers-in-agenai-world-part-1-of-2/. Accessed 20 May, 2024.

Hotson, Brian. “GenAI and the Writing Process: Guiding Student Writers in a GenAI World (Part 2 of 2).” CWCR/RCCR Blog, Oct. 2023, https://cwcaaccr.com/2023/10/05/genaiand-the-writing-process-guiding-studentwriters-in-a-genai-world-part-2-of-2/ Accessed 20 May, 2024.

Lindberg, Nathan. "We Should Promote GenAI Writing Tools for Linguistic Equity," Writing Center Journal: Vol. 43, no. 1, 2025 article 7, https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.2078

Lindberg, Nathan. “Writing with GenAI Is Difficult” 16 December 2024. Strategies for Writing with AI. Substack, n.d. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024. https://substack.com/home/post/p153231662

Lindberg, Nathan. Strategies for Writing with AI. Substack, n.d. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024. https://substack.com/@natelindberg?utm_so urce=user-menu

Lindberg, Nathan and Domingues, Amanda. 2024 Report on Chatbots’ Impact on Writing Centers ResearchGate, 2024. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38 3365521_2024_Report_on_AI_Writing_Tools '_Impacts_on_Writing_Centers.

Lindberg, Nathan; Domingues, Amanada, Zweers, Thari, and Goktas, Selin. Report on Chatbots’

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Impact on Writing Centers. ResearchGate, 2023. Accessed 23 Aug. 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38 0264917_Report_on_AI_Chatbots'_Impact_o n_Writing_Centers

Madianou, Mirca. “Nonhuman Humanitarianism: When ‘AI for Good’ Can Be Harmful.” Information Communication and Society, vol. 24, no. 6, 2021, pp. 850–868, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1909 100.

Mollick, Ethan. “Assigning AI: Seven Ways of Using AI in Class.” One Useful Thing, 12 June 2022, https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/assigningai-seven-ways-of-using. Accessed 20 May, 2024.

Rahman, Mostafizer and Yutaka Watanobe. “ChatGPT for Education and Research: Opportunities, Threats, and Strategies.” Applied Sciences, vol. 13, no. 9, 2023, https://doi.org/10.3390/app13095783.

Shoufan, Abdulhadi. “Exploring Students' Perceptions of ChatGPT: Thematic Analysis and FollowUp Survey.” IEEE Access, vol. 11, 2023, pp. 38805-38818.

Terry, Owens Kichizo. “I'm a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We're Using ChatGPT: No Professor or Software Could Ever Pick Up on It.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 May, 2023.

Yadava, Om Prakash. “ChatGPT A Foe or an Ally?” Indian Journal Thoracic Cardiovascular Surgery, vol. 39, 2023, pp. 217–221, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12055-023-01507-6.

Yan, Da. “Impact of ChatGPT on Learners in a L2 Writing Practicum: An Exploratory Investigation.” Education and Information Technologies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2023, pp. 13943-13967, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-11742-4.

Zawacki, Terry, et al. Valuing Written Accents: Non-Native Students Talk About Identity, Academic Writing, and Meeting Teachers’ Expectations. George Mason University Publication, 2007.

Please see the web version of this article for the full appendices

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REVIEW OF CULTURAL THINKING IN ACADEMIC WRITING: A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Jonathan Faerber Royal Roads University jonathan.faerber@tuj.temple.edu

Pu, Shi. Critical Thinking in Academic Writing: A Cultural Approach. Routledge, 2023. 184 pages. Western academics frequently define successful student writing in part by the author’s mastery and demonstration of critical thinking in their texts (Greasley and Cassidy 182). Therefore, in order to support international students coming to Englishspeaking institutions in the West, post-secondary writing instructors and tutors must understand these students’ diverse contexts and create an environment where these students are able to communicate their critical thinking effectively (Egege and Kutieleh 81). But what does this environment look like, and what are the relevant differences between the cultures of Western academic institutions and other cultures? Are these apparent differences meaningful, and do they influence how students conceptualize critical thinking? If so, how do these students understand or communicate their critical thinking within their own cultures to begin with?

In “Critical Thinking in Academic Writing: A Cultural Perspective,” Shi Pu thinks critically about these questions and masterfully combines empirical and theoretical research on the topic of cultural differences in learning and writing between China and Western societies, particularly the UK. However, instead of making inferences about students’ critical thinking ability from their cultural identity or their texts, as is sometimes typical in earlier research (Tian and Low 65), Pu develops a more compelling and long overdue account in which these students’ texts reflect the individual goals and environmental factors that influence their attitudes and perspectives on critical thinking.

The argument in this book starts from the premise that critical thinking is a cultural practice it is “built upon certain views of authorial voice and authorreader relationship” and is “related to views regarding ‘how knowledge is constructed, how knowledge is evaluated, where knowledge resides’ (Hofer, 2002, p. 4), and how knowledge is conceived in relation to learning and personal development” (27). With this assumption in mind, Pu articulates the ways in which the concept and application of critical thinking in student writing depend on individual factors such as institutional requirements and support, cultural expectations, and

each student’s motivation to align their own goals with such requirements and expectations.

In order to examine these factors, Pu takes three groups of Chinese students from contrasting cultural or linguistic settings as her primary subject matter (see fig. 1). All students worked towards similar academic credentials (a graduate degree in second language education) and submitted a literature review as a partial requirement for these credentials (Pu 45). However, while two groups wrote their literature reviews in English in two different cultural environments (United Kingdom and China), the third group completed an analogous assignment in Mandarin. Throughout her book, Pu finds that there are indeed apparent differences in how each group understands and demonstrates their critical thinking, both in their literature reviews as well as in the academic and professional decisions they make in order to complete their program (77). The students based in the UK and writing in English generally structured their literature review as an argument in several respects: they argued that their research topic was worthwhile (80), they provided reasons for choosing specific theoretical perspectives over competing alternatives (91), and they frequently articulated salient links between new data and their own perspective (90). This contrasts with the two groups of students in a Chinese institution, who each placed far more emphasis on the choices they were making at the early stages of a literature review (70) and spent more time detailing the historical development of their chosen topic in the literature and explaining the perspectives of the most authoritative sources on the topic (96).

At first glance, these findings appear consistent with previous research on the topic involving similar groups of students (Tian and Low 66). But unlike previous studies, Pu does not conclude from the superficial areas of contrast that these groups of students differ in their capacity to think critically. Instead, Pu suggests that these differences are explained in part by contrasting goals and the students’ perception of themselves: while the UK-based group saw themselves as researchers tasked with producing academic knowledge, the Chinese-based students valued having a comprehensive understanding of the literature and sought to make the best possible choices in selecting

the “correct” literature to review (119). In this way, Pu realizes that these disparities result from and reflect the external factors each student was faced with as well as the way they perceive themselves in relation to their writing (139).

Therefore, in the model below (see fig. 2), differences in writing patterns are not a straightforward

consequence of students’ capacity to think critically, but instead rooted in factors that are somewhat independent of students’ intellectual capabilities and outside of their control.

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For instance, while the UK-based students had direct access to literature in the English language and detailed resources and requirements, they also had significant autonomy to determine their own topic and to set their own research objectives (126-127). As a result, these students were more likely to see themselves as part of the English-speaking academic community (130). By comparison, the China-based students had limited institutional resources and requirements related to writing a literature review in the style of a so-called critical thinker (which is to say, a critical thinker as defined by Western academics). In addition, they were often unable to access, read, or understand the Western literature in their field and often worked on topics proposed by their supervisors (120). Therefore, from their perspective, they understood themselves to be positioned as academic novices at the very periphery of a Western-dominated scholarly community of critical

Limited Autonomy

Feels excluded from academic culture

Identifies with academic culture

thinkers, and they therefore were more likely to take on the role of a learner or practitioner rather than a researcher (136).

Viewed from this perspective, the degree to which students adopt Western approaches to critical thinking in their texts is related to their identity and autonomy as a researcher and their attitude towards the academic community, as well as their access to relevant resources. When “critical thinking” is portrayed as a defining part of the Western academic tradition, as it is in Dam and Volman (360), students who feel excluded from Western cultures may conclude that they also do not belong to the academic community (Pu 132). It is therefore natural for them to resist or doubt their own ability to internalize what they see as a foreign practice, as noted above and illustrated below (see table 1).

Demotivated and unwilling to follow academic objectives related to critical thinking.

Motivated to internalize critical thinking practices but lack confidence in their capacity to think and write critically.

Increased Autonomy

Demotivated but potentially confident enough in their capacity to think and write critically.

Motivated to internalize critical thinking practices and confident in their capacity to think and write critically.

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Unfortunately, Pu does not comment on the applicability of these findings to other cultural contexts, but it may be possible to analyze similar outcomes in other groups of students analogously. For example, even within Western cultures, it may also be likely that the apparent quality of student writing is not simply determined by their ability to think critically but is more fundamentally tied to the students’ own sense of motivation and belonging within the community that assesses their competence, as illustrated above, and as also described by Clark and Gieve (65) and Morita (583). At the very least, in an environment where an academic community continues to privilege Western scholarship and its associated approaches to thinking and writing critically, students from other cultures will continue to find it difficult to participate in these conventions. In this way, it is entirely possible that perhaps Pu’s insight is somewhat less culturally specific than she intended it to be.

That said, one of the many virtues of this book is that it is more focused on explaining what a cultural approach to critical thinking looks like than on detailing the potential implications of adopting this approach more broadly. In fact, it is because Pu rejects a universal assessment of students’ critical thinking ability that she is required to employ alternative approaches to assessing students’ critical thinking in her own conversations and evaluation of each student (123). Presumably, since Pu intended to propose a culturally specific approach, applying her analysis elsewhere will require relevant modifications that account for each student’s, tutor’s, or instructor’s own background as well as their local institutional context in future studies. Nonetheless, until these comparable studies can be completed in diverse contexts, it remains an open question whether or not Pu’s thesis has potentially broad cultural relevance, and indeed whether such results indicate a weakness or an advantage of her approach.

Notwithstanding these qualifications, Pu’s argument might be used to draw at least three related conclusions. First, student writing on its own is an insufficient metric of critical thinking ability and performance. Second, changing the way students write is fraught with important questions about individual positioning and cultural belonging rather than the considerably less important yet endlessly discussed questions about how to further expose every student to the existing Western, neo-colonial approach to critical thinking and writing instruction. Finally, students are more likely to share their critical thinking in this Western written form when they can understand and internalize the practical benefits and relevance of writing in this way

to themselves and their own cultural practices, as shown above.

This is not to say, of course, that it is appropriate or desirable for all students to adopt a Western cultural approach in their writing and thinking, or that the explicit goal of all academic writing should be to demonstrate critical thinking as Western institutions and academics define it. At any rate, academic writing should not be the exclusive method by which instructors evaluate critical thinking. Instead, to return to questions introduced at the beginning of this review regarding the relevance of cultural differences to critical thinking instruction, one of the key insights from Pu’s study is that changing students to resemble a specific cultural environment may be misguided. Ultimately, our efforts might be better focused on creating a more inclusive environment that resembles and rewards the many ways students think critically.

Works Cited

Clark, Rose and S.N. Gieve. “On the Discursive Construction of ‘The Chinese Learner.’” Language, Culture, and Curriculum. vol. 19, no. 1, 2006, pp. 54-73. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.1080/0790831060 8668754

Dam, Geert ten and Monique Volman. “Critical Thinking as Citizenship Competence: Teaching Strategies.” Learning and Instruction. Vol. 14, 2004, pp. 359-371. ScienceDirect. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learnin struc.2004.01.005

Egege, Sandra and Salah Kutieleh. “Critical Thinking: Teaching Foreign Notions to Foreign Students.” Educational Research Conference, special issue of International Education Journal. vol. 4, no. 4, 2004, pp. 75-85. ERIC, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ903 810.pdf

Greasley, Pete and Andrea Cassidy. “When it Comes Round to Marking Assignments: How to Impress and How to Distress Lecturers.” Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education Vol. 35, no. 2, 2010, pp. 173-189. Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930802691564

Morita, Naoko. “Negotiating Participation and Identity in Second Language Academic Communities.” TESOL Quarterly. Vo. 38, no. 4, 2004, pp. 573603. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3588281.p df

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Pu, Shi. Critical Thinking in Academic Writing: A Cultural Approach. Routledge, 2023

Tian, Jing and Graham David Low. “Critical Thinking and Chinese University Students: A Review of the Evidence.” Language, Culture, and Curriculum, 24, 1, 2011, pp. 61-76. Taylor and Francis.

https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2010.5464

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REVIEW OF THE CREATIVE ARGUMENT: RHETORIC IN THE REAL WORLD

Alex (Oleksiy) Ostaltev University of Texas – Austin oostaltsev@utexas.edu

Girshin, Thomas. The Creative Argument: Rhetoric in the Real World. Hackett Publishing Company, 2024. 376 pages.

In modern academic studies, the concept of rhetoric is no longer associated only with the organization of written speech. Instead, the word “rhetoric” today denotes a socially conditioned mode of presenting ideas and concepts that includes verbal and non-verbal means of communication. In this context, Thomas Girshin’s book The Creative Argument: Rhetoric in the Real World, appears to be a bold appeal to the origins of rhetoric as a discipline, i.e., to the methods of expressing thoughts in writing. At the same time, such an “Aristotelian” approach in Girshin’s book is correlated with the broader requirements of modern academy.

Classicism, first of all, manifests itself in The Creative Argument in the clear structure of each chapter that opens with an example of a rhetorically organized text and continues with its analysis, in which the author helps student readers identify certain rhetorical concepts in the given text. To facilitate the mastering of these concepts, Girshin places a small glossary of terms at the beginning of each chapter. As a result, in the seventeen chapters of the book, the reader becomes familiar with almost one hundred concepts of modern and classical rhetoric developed by Aristotle that survived to this day: claims and evidence, syllogism, warrant, attack and defense, truth value and emotional appeal, cause and effect, rhetorical strategy, etc. Using examples of resonant publications for proper understanding of these concepts, Girshin demonstrates the effectiveness of rhetorical models and strategies in the modern “real world.”

Among the aforementioned concepts, the notion of argument is the key one: Girshin organizes a major part of diverse illustrative material of the book around it. The middle part of The Creative Argument from the ninth to the thirteenth chapters demonstrates the main strategies of rhetorical argumentation: constructing a public message on valid examples, comparisons, and cause-and-effect relationships; strengthening argumentation with anecdotes and common reasoning, developing the argument on the basis of formal and informal logic, etc. Across the book, Girshin pays attention to the mechanics of argumentation, explaining in detail how a

“complex argument” is formed from a series of simple statements grouped around a “contradiction.”

Girshin explains the nature of the rhetorical argument and its dialectic and development strategies using a rather motley list of texts from different genres, many of which are quite famous. This illustrative material demonstrates a noticeable degree of tendentiousness: the author prefers to work with examples of modern rhetoric, namely political speeches, journalistic articles, and essays. Of the big classical texts, the book presents only two: the encomium in defense of Helen of Troy by Gorgias and Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” accompanied by laconic speeches of women orators (Elizabeth I’s address to the troops and Mary Stuart’s lecture on slavery from 1832). The rest are public messages from American presidents and other social leaders, essays by Girshin’s academic “partners in crime,” and famous articles of ideologists and even propagandists. The desire to immerse the student reader in a modern, primarily American, social context is the main principle and pedagogical guideline of The Creative Argument. On the one hand, this feature inevitably creates a sense of isolation and even demonstrates cultural limitations of the material; on the other hand, it shows how utilitarian rather than abstract rhetoric can be as a discipline. If efficiency and practicality are accepted as a prerogative, then the narrowness of the cultural horizon will not be an obstacle when working with Girshin’s book.

In general, in The Creative Argument, the reader might notice two layers of illustrative materials that hardly intersect: publications and nominal examples. Before discussing publications that demonstrate developed rhetorical models and concepts, students are asked to work out the details using more mundane everyday examples. For instance, students need to consider the rhetorical structure of a discussion about plans for the night, about the possibility of life on other planets, etc. Only after understanding how rhetoric “works” in the everyday sphere are students invited to start the analysis of the resonant publications written or delivered by professional orators, i.e. writers, journalists, and public figures. The two-tiered distribution of illustrative materials reveals what Girshin defined in the preface as “student-centered learning” (ix). This approach is especially evident in the persistent “you” addressed to the student reader and found on virtually

every page of The Creative Argument. The frequent use of this pronoun may seem like a deliberate violation of the rhetorical purity of the usually impersonal academic narrative. However, for Girshin, it is a way to shorten, through style, the distance between the professorial chair and the readers. The informal “you” address, coupled with associative examples from the life of a modern student, should, according to Girshin, facilitate the assimilation of the basics of rhetorical argumentation. The professor seemingly builds rhetoric “from below,” explaining the nuances of thought development not only on “heavy” texts of real rhetoric, but, as noted above, using “easier” examples of everyday rhetoric from social media, Tarantino films, or the memoirs of a recent student. Girshin is not alone in such an approach: modern American academy generally gravitates toward building its narratives “from below,” adapting the material to the level of the average student, and not vice versa, pulling yesterday’s schoolchild up to the Cicerones of modernity or the past. Contemporary scientific discourse, not only rhetorical, is also “studentcentered.” In this sense, Girshin keeps up with the times, not only ideologically, but also pedagogically. Sometimes the author supplements his twolevel sequence of materials with diagrams and charts that summarize the conclusions and present rhetorical devices, as they say, in the dry residue. Thus, Girshin explains and illustrates the rhetorical concepts in three ways, each of which is designed for a different level of preparation of student readers–samples, situations, summaries. In this, The Creative Argument demonstrates a high degree of versatility as a potential teaching aid for classroom work. Having mastered the basic concepts of rhetoric, with support from sample publications, summarizing graphics, and question-answer blocks, the student, according to Girshin’s plan, is able to construct a rhetorically complete statement from previously learned simple elements. This kind of craft-like approach to rhetoric, resembling playing Lego, fits as well into the Aristotelian concept of this discipline as into the procrustean bed of modern college writing courses. Being a Lego-like textbook itself, The Creative Argument is quite flexible, allowing students to lean either on “classical” methodology or illustrative material that can be selective and variable. The practicality of such an approach is an undoubted value for any rhetoric professional.

Praxis: