Mindful Tutors, Embodied Writers: Positioning Mindfulness Meditation as a Writing Strategy to Optimize Cognitive Load and Potentialize Writing Center Tutors' Supportive Roles

In this article, I examine the potential that mindfulness meditation has to re-frame and expand the affective, supportive roles of writing center tutors. I argue that those of us working in writing centers can fully potentialize a tutor’s affective, supportive role and optimize a student’s cognitive load by incorporating mindfulness meditation as a stress-reducing strategy into writing center practices. Using Cognitive Load Theory as a lens, I establish how we might expand our understanding of the available mental space that tutors and tutees have to work, write, and learn in writing center sessions. Because mindfulness meditation has numerous cognitive benefits, I position that practice as a writing and stressreducing strategy that both tutors and tutees can use during and after their writing center sessions.