Praxis: A Writing Center Journal

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2152/26835

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published biannually by the University Writing Center (UWC) at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Praxis Vol 21, No 3: Telling Stories and Building Histories in the Writing Center
(2024) Gunnells, Alexandra; Turner, Samantha; Moore, Don; Mackiewicz, Jo; Thompson, Isabelle; Bleakney, Julia; Herman, Julia; Rosinski, Paula; Doyle, Melanie
Table of Contents: About the Authors -- Columns -- Editors’ Introduction: Telling Stories & Building Histories in the Writing Center / by Alexandra Gunnells and Samantha Turner -- Focus Articles -- A CHAT Analysis: Narrating the Writing Center’s Formative Period / by Don Moore -- The Global-Local Dualism in Writing Center Studies / by Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson -- What Do Students Learn and Expect to Learn From Consultants and Faculty in Courses Supported by Course- Embedded Consultants? / by Julia Bleakney, Julia Herman, and Paula Rosinski -- Telling Stories and Growing Up: An Autoethnography of Writing Center Storytelling / by Melanie Doyle
Telling Stories and Growing Up: An Autoethnography of Writing Center Storytelling
(2024) Doyle, Melanie
Recognizing the power of storytelling as an influencing writing centre practice (McKinney), this paper examines my near-decade long relationship with writing centres and explores stories I have told about writing centre work. Using analytic autoethnography, I analyze three reflective narratives from my writing centre history across two countries, through multiple disciplines. Despite the differing contextual factors of these narratives and the stories they feature, my analysis reveals institutional neoliberalism as the guiding influence on my storytelling. This finding is discussed alongside literature on emotional labour, contingent employment, and institutional interference. Ultimately, this paper highlights the untapped potential of autoethnography as an accessible methodology for precariously employed writing centre scholars and calls on the field to consider the influence of neoliberalism on our communication with students and tutees.
What Do Students Learn and Expect to Learn From Consultants and Faculty in Courses Supported by Course- Embedded Consultants? from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 21 No. 3
(2024) Bleakney, Julia; Herman, Julia; Rosinski, Paula
This study presents the results of our analysis of a subset of student survey data, collected over seven years of Elon University’s course- embedded consultant (CEC) program. Our analysis aims to understand how students in courses with an assigned CEC perceive to benefit from working with their CEC in tandem with the guidance they receive from the instructor. Since the synergy between the CEC and instructor is crucial to the success of the program, we hoped to see that students were learning complimentary things about writing from their CEC and their instructor. We analyzed students’ responses to survey questions about their learning from the CEC and the instructor by individual course, seeking to pinpoint how students’ expectations for learning at the beginning of the course align with or compare to their perceived learning at the end of the course. Many previous studies have sought to determine the benefits to students of CEC programs, and our study seeks to embrace the variation across individual courses and to look at learning in the course more holistically. Finally, our analysis helps us understand what we might do differently to manage students’ expectations and enhance their perceptions of learning in the course.
The Global-Local Dualism in Writing Center Studies from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 21 No. 3
(2024) Mackiewicz, Jo; Thompson, Isabelle
We trace the history of the global-local dualism, noting how writing center researchers and practitioners have employed it. We next discuss problems and complications inherent in the dualism, such as the way it obscures the interconnectedness of text components. We illustrate our points with excerpts from writing center conferences. We end by discussing possible implications of our analysis for tutor training. Our goal is to provide a more nuanced understanding of this ubiquitous dualism in writing center studies.
A CHAT Analysis: Narrating the Writing Center’s Formative Period from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 21 No. 3
(2024) Moore, Don
From the recognized beginning of the “laboratory” movement in composition instruction, teachers have sought to employ new and more practical methods useful in developing student writing. Such trends continue today as new generations of students enter the academy and new challenges emerge. From such conditions, we might see how components within a system of activity work together to meet objectives and develop outcomes within the shared dialectic of an activity system. With this idea in mind, this article reviews writing center-related scholarship from the late 1880s through the early 1940s to trace emerging contradictions in laboratory teaching’s praxis. Through the evaluation of laboratory teaching’s textual artifacts using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), I present a narrative about the development of the earliest writing center praxes: The Formative Period. With this article, I look to narrate an epochal beginning for writing center activity and present the development of guiding principles we find in our writing center work today. Through the process of revealing historical impulses, this article offers a view of writing center praxes in their elemental stage: The Formative Period, early 1890s-early 1940s. Ultimately, this article will show how the writing center is an activity that, over time, has mediated old system contradictions and developed new methods born of self-reflection, debate, evaluation, and progressive mediation, which continues to evolve. As communities like writing centers re-create themselves— through pushing and pulling, conflict and resolution, tension and release—they birth new realities, which all begins with the Formative Period.
Editors’ Introduction: Telling Stories & Building Histories in the Writing Center from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 21 No. 3
(2024) Gunnells, Alexandra; Turner, Samantha
Praxis Vol 20, No 3: Re-Evaluating Traditional Practice in the Writing Center
(2023) Hutton, Lizzie; O'Keefe, Alison; Bond, Candis; Grendell, Matthew; Pyper, Brynn; Elmer, Julia; Overly, Brooke; Hammond, Marinne; Garahan, Katie; Jackson Stone, Justine; Miller, Brynn; Walker, Kiara; Conatser, Emma
Table of Contents: About the Authors -- Columns -- From the Editors: Re-Evaluating Traditional Practice in the Writing Center / by Kiara Walker and Emma Conatser -- Focus Articles -- "There is No Rubric for This": Creative Writers' Bids for Writing Center Support / by Lizzie Hutton -- STEMM Student Writing Center Usage at a Health Sciences University / by Alison O'Keefe and Candis Bond -- Effects of Writing Center-Based Peer Tutoring on Undergraduate Students' Perceived Stress / by Matthew Grendell, Brynn Pyper, Julia Elmer, Brooke Overly, and Marinne Hammond -- Developing Purposeful Practices for Writing Center Introductory Presentations / by Katie Garahan, Justine Jackson Stone, and Brynn Miller
Advocates for Education in Prison-Based Writing Centers from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 2
(Praxis, 2023) Wilson, Julie
Prison-based writing centers are needed to support the academic achievement of college students who are incarcerated. This study describes the author’s work designing a writing studio to support credit-bearing courses in a women’s prison. I used a qualitative action research design combining scholarship, observations, surveys, and interviews with iterative practice. I approached the work with a generalist tutoring mindset based in my campus-based center’s work, but found that students needed access to course-based expertise in an isolating environment with scarce resources. Scholarship and interviews revealed pitfalls educators can bring to prison-based writing programs, including pressures to adapt to the prison’s “rehabilitative” mindset and unexamined low academic expectations. Also revealed was the expertise of incarcerated students in surviving this dehumanizing environment and recognizing their own academic needs. Recognizing this expertise, established programs successfully employ incarcerated students who also have academic credibility with their peers, as peer tutors. To improve our program, we initiated more communication with faculty to anticipate students’ needs for resources and to answer students’ questions more directly. Also, we created ways for students to have some degree of control over their sessions, through signing up for sessions in advance and moving between independent work and sessions in a computer lab. Whatever tutors a program uses, it needs to recognize their knowledge and use training to complement that knowledge. All writing centers can learn from the voices herein that we must create room in our spaces for students to advocate for their education.
What Our Tutors Know: The Advantages of Small Campus Tutoring Centers
(Praxis, 2023) Wetzl, Ana; Lieske, Pam; Mechenbier, Mahli
Tutoring centers from small, open-admission campuses provide a much-needed service to students, but they also have to compete with other tutoring options such as eTutoring and private tutoring companies. As university budgets shrink and administration begins to look at cutting costs, outsourcing tutoring may sound like a good idea. Yet, there are certain aspects of tutoring that cannot be easily created when tutoring is cut off from the campus environment, such as the knowledge that tutors accumulate from being part of the campus—attending courses, tutoring, and just being part of the same communities of practice as their tutees. The article draws from the theoretical framework about communities of practice developed by Etienne Wenger and looks into how tutors build this knowledge. Additionally, the article explores ways in which this knowledge can be incorporated more in initial and ongoing tutor training. Qualitative and quantitative data collected from our regional campus current and former tutors show that belonging to some of the same communities as the tutees, both on and off campus, allows our tutors to provide an individualized campus-centered tutoring experience that relies on tutors’ previous knowledge of what professors look for. This knowledge can be obtained in organic ways, such as from having had courses with the professor, working with multiple students asking for help with the same assignment, or collaborating with other tutors who may be familiar with the professor. This knowledge cannot be duplicated by other tutoring services that are not affiliated with a specific campus.
Reading the Online Writing Center: The Affordances and Constraints of WCOnline from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 2
(Praxis, 2023) Bhattarai, Pratistha; Colton, Aaron; Kim, Eun-hae; Manning, Amber; Schonberg, Eliana; Zhou, Xuanyu
While online synchronous writing consultations predate the COVID-19 pandemic by at least a decade, the contingencies of the pandemic have left many writing centers scrambling to shift to online-only or hybrid formats. Amid such sudden changes in operations, center administrators and consultants often miss the opportunity to examine the tools that facilitate digital consultations. After analyzing trends in the foci of consultations at the Duke University Thompson Writing Program (TWP) Writing Studio pre-pandemic, early-, and mid-pandemic, this article offers a “critical digital pedagogy” reading of one the most popular online writing-consultation platforms, WCOnline. Close reading the aesthetics and features of WCOnline—such as the whiteboard, LiveChat, and video windows—we highlight the software’s implicit pedagogical biases. In response to these close readings, we offer a set of best practices for maximizing the pedagogical affordances of WCOnline, paying particular attention to rapport building, gestural language, written chat and notetaking, and textual annotations.
A Model for Infusing a Creative Writing Classroom with Writing Center Pedagogy from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 2
(Praxis, 2023) Alden, Kelle
In response to criticisms about the methods and goals of traditional creative writing workshops, I used the foundational tenets of writing center pedagogy to develop an alternative workshop model and taught two upper-division creative writing classes using the new approach. I collected data inductively though class observation and field notes as well as students’ preliminary surveys and corpus of class assignments. The results suggested that using writing center practices in the workshop increased students’ civility toward one another and that prioritizing verbal conversations over written responses helped the students develop better feedback overall.
Faculty Writing Groups for Writing Center Professionals: Rethinking Scholarly Productivity from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 2
(Praxis, 2023) Alexander, Kara Poe; Andersen, Erin M.; Bleakney, Julia; Smith Daniel, Jennifer
In this article, we discuss how participating in a writing group during and after the COVID-19 pandemic helped us reimagine what scholarly productivity means for us as writing center professionals (WCPs). Drawing on our experiences in an online writing group for almost three years with WCPs from four different institutions, we identify three themes that emerged across our experiences: (1) writing center work as scholarly and intellectual; (2) professionalization and mentoring; and (3) social support. Identifying these themes made visible for us a broader notion of scholarly productivity. It also helped us think more strategically about the complex and layered work we do as WCPs as we consistently juggle competing work demands. We hope this article can help WCPs not only re-conceive what it means to be productive as writing center scholars but also to integrate a broad range of scholarly work more fully into what they are already doing.
What’s Your Plan for the Consultation? Examining Alignment between Tutorial Plans and Consultations among Writing Tutors Using the Read/Plan-Ahead Tutoring Method from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 2
(Praxis, 2023) Awad Scrocco, Diana
Writing center scholars and tutor-training manuals historically emphasize the importance of tutors and writers collaboratively negotiating consultation agendas to maintain writers’ ownership over their writing. However, when tutors encounter advanced student writers, writers from unfamiliar fields, or writers with complex linguistic repertoires, they may struggle to read student writing, identify writing issues, and negotiate effective, mutual agendas. One tool for navigating these challenges is the “read-ahead method”—in which tutors read student writing in advance and prepare for consultations (Scrocco 10). While this method offers potential advantages, a brief survey reveals that some writing center administrators worry that tutors who read student writing in advance may hijack consultation agendas. This exploratory mixed-methods study examines thirteen tutor-supervisor planning conversations and subsequent consultations to assess the correspondence between tutors’ plans and consultations and to consider what factors may support or undermine writers’ agendas. Results suggest that tutors who use the read/plan-ahead method do not fervently push their planned agendas over writers’ agendas. However, very detailed or particularly vague pre-consultation planning may set tutors up for sessions that fail to negotiate and carry out cohesive, well-prioritized shared agendas. The most collaborative, coherent consultations in this study balance tutor and writer agendas. They begin with writers’ submitted concerns, identify high-priority global writing issues, engage in substantive agenda-setting with writers, explicitly link tutors’ plans with writers’ agendas, and abandon tutors’ plans when needed. The read/plan-ahead model works best when tutors remember to place writers at the heart of building, revising, and enacting consultation agendas.
The Art and Craft of Sentence-Level Choices from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 2
(Praxis, 2023) Cohen, Michelle
From the Editors: Influences in the Writing Center: From Micro to Macro from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 2
(Praxis, 2023) Walker, Kiara; Passafiume, Kaitlin
Self-Initiated Writing Center Visits and Writing Development: A First-Year Writing Assessment from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 1
(Praxis, 2022) Sampson Anderson, Salena
This article analyzes the relationship between writing center use and writing improvements from the first to second semester in first-year university writing assessment data. The study correlates self-initiated writing center use and improvement in several areas, including title, thesis, organizational statement, organization, use of evidence, and clarity. These improvements contrast with those for peers who did not visit the center or who only visited when required. Writing center visits may directly impact assessment results when students visit the center with papers later designated for assessment. However, many assessment samples were not part of a writing center session. Instead, there may be differences in the population of students who self-initiate writing center appointments and those who do not. For instance, students with self-initiated writing center visits were less likely to identify as writers, and their initial assessment results were slightly lower than their peers’. However, by the second semester, their assessment scores generally surpassed those of their more confident peers. These findings suggest that students who self-initiate writing center visits are, as a group, better positioned to achieve increases in writing assessment scores across their first year because of productive writing center sessions and an open mindset for seeking writing support. However, this article also shows how quantitative data from writing program assessment may be leveraged against qualitative writing center data to highlight and address inequities, as observed in the case study of a multilingual writer whose assessment results did not feature the same positive changes as those of her peers.
Tutor Alums Doing Good: A Qualitative Study of the Character Strengths of Writing Tutor Alumni from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 1
(Praxis, 2022) Parsons, Molly; Brown, Emma
This article draws on data from 12 interviews with peer writing tutor alumni to demonstrate how their writing center training and experiences prepared them to work toward good (i.e., social justice or peace or rhetorical civility) in their post-graduation contexts. Recent scholarship in both writing center studies and writing studies calls for a redoubling of social justice efforts in our field (see Duffy, 2019 and Greenfield, 2020). This article asks how the field will recognize or know success in such efforts. Data from this small study suggests that there is untapped potential in the research tradition focused on tutor alumni experiences (including, most notably, the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project), which is commonly used to demonstrate the benefits of tutoring to tutor alumni. This article reverses this lens, asking, instead, how tutor alumni might benefit the world, and whether we might consider their post-graduation habits and actions, which they credit to their time as tutors, as a measure of the field’s larger, positive influence. Researchers will discuss a heuristic they developed for analyzing tutor alumni reflections that surfaces and distinguishes a range of character strengths (a concept out of positive psychology and the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics), including “civic-mindedness” and “social intelligence,” which, after practicing and developing in the center, alumni reported that they continue to enact in their communities and contexts beyond the center.
Center-ing Graduate Writers’ Beliefs, Practices and Help Seeking Behaviors from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 1
(Praxis, 2022) O'Connor, Victoria L.; Douglas, Red D.; Wynn Perdue, Sherry
With this mixed method study, we sought to gain a data supported understanding of graduate students’ writing beliefs, practices, and help-seeking behaviors at Oakland University, a Midwestern public, doctoral-granting university with higher research activity (R2), and an assessment of how our writing center programming is perceived to address those needs. Although respondents indicated they felt supported by their supervisors, they rarely met with these advisors, found few venues in their departments for writing-specific support, and struggled to find time to write. In addition to this mismatch between their beliefs and the support available, we also found that graduate students who felt their needs went unmet by their respective departments and advisors were more likely to seek out assistance from the writing center and to attend writing center sponsored writing retreats, workshops, and consultations. Those who reported attending writing center graduate programming found that the resources, accountability, and writing support facilitated their success. Overall, this study sought to deepen our understanding of graduate students at our university so we might better serve them and to extend existing Writing Center Studies scholarship with empirical research that is replicable within or transferrable to other settings.
Helping Undergraduate Tutors Conduct and Disseminate Research: A Practical Guide for Writing Center Administrators from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 1
(Praxis, 2022) Keaton, Megan; Schoppe, Ashley; Oliver, Daisha
In recent years, the field of writing center studies has begun to recognize the value of undergraduate research (McKinney; DelliCarpini and Crimmins; Fitzgerald and Ianetta). Additionally, scholars have begun arguing that the writing center itself is a prime research site. As tutors ask questions about the writing center and its work, the center becomes a place in which the tutors can look for answers (McKinney; DelliCarpini and Crimmins). In this article, we argue that writing center administrators should encourage and mentor undergraduate tutors to conduct and disseminate research. To this end, we offer specific practices for doing so. We begin by discussing the benefits of undergraduate research to tutors, to the institution, and to writing center studies as a field. Together, these benefits serve to make a case for administrators to devote time and resources to mentor their undergraduate tutors in research. Then, we list practical strategies for helping tutors conduct research and disseminate that research in the form of professional conference presentations and publications. Finally, we speak to potential challenges. We acknowledge that undergraduate research involves sacrifice, as too often writing centers are understaffed and underfunded. Yet we firmly believe that this work amply repays this investment, as our personal experiences attest.
From the Editors: Growth in the Writing Center from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 1
(Praxis, 2022) Walker, Kiara; Passafiume, Kaitlin

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