Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 17, No. 1 (2019)

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: FEEDBACK AND INPUT IN THE WRITING CENTER

Tristin Hooker
University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

Fiza Mairaj
University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

We here at Praxis are proud to present our fall issue, the last issue of this calendar decade. In this issue, we address the value of input and feedback from the communities the writing centers aim to serve. Although it is important to work on continuous improvement of the services the writing centers offer, we often end up looking within the writing centers to do that. This issue shows us the ways through which input and feedback from the outside can be helpful in reshaping and ultimately improving the services and behaviors in and across the writing centers.

Our issue begins with Ashna Shome’s column, “Closing the Gap: A Practical Guide to Science in the Writing Center,” in which Shome explores some of the mismatches between writing center and science writing pedagogy, but also argues that science writing is more rhetorical than many consultants might think. Shome offers practical suggestions for working with science writers, drawn from the experience of science writing fellows.

Continuing the theme of tutor preparation, in Catherine Savini’s “From A Service-Learning to A Social-Change Model,” we see an example of a radically different approach for tutor education that the researcher implemented in her own classroom. The course discussed in this article was informed by the principles advanced by the critical service learning movement. It invited students to design and implement campus-based community building projects that prepared students to be peer tutors with awareness of social inequities and a deep investment in the campus community. The researcher discusses two iterations of the course, goes over the components of each iteration and students’ satisfaction and outcomes of students’ projects at the end of the course.

“‘I was kind of angry’: Tutors Receiving Feedback in Order to Understand Writer Resistance” from Julia Bleakney, Michael Mattison, and Jennifer Ryan also addresses tutor preparation, presenting the results of a study conducted with writing tutors-in-training at two different schools, who provided feedback to one another. Ultimately, this study provides new insights and new questions about writers’ resistance to feedback in consultations and suggests ways to prompt better understanding of and preparedness for resistance during tutor preparation.

Georganne Nordstrum keeps the focus on tutor preparation, with an eye toward professionalization in “Practitioner Inquiry for Praxis and Research: Professionalization vis-a-vis Collaboration in the Writing Center.” In this piece, Nordstrum explores the potential of Practitioner Inquiry models to promote collaboration and learning for consultants, particularly in consultant-director collaborations and relationships. Nordstrum’s replicable, aggregable, and data-supported research also helps to bolster evidence-based determinations of effectiveness for this model, and for writing center practice.

Claire McMurray then turns our attention from the writing consultation to writing groups in, “Writing Groups: An Analysis of Participants’ Expectations and Activities.” This article advances the literature on writing groups by examining the expectations and actual activities of writing group members. This study uses surveys and interviews to gather data on writing group expectations and satisfaction rates of those who participated. Some major themes emerge related to the expectations and actual activities of writing group participants. The author recommends ways to improve writing group participation and outcomes based on the findings.

Kristen Nichols-Besel, Katie Levin and Kirsten Jamsen then move us to consider student experience, and to advocate for creating and expanding space for students to claim and express their own identities in the writing centers. Their piece “Student Identity Disclosed: Analysis of An Online Student Profile Tool” goes over the students’ preferences about disclosing aspects of their identity when they were asked an open-ended question rather than asking them to check some predetermined boxes about their race, gender, national origin and linguistic abilities. Their findings uncover the ways that students’ identities are formed and/or reformed throughout the higher education.

Keeping our attention on service to students, our issue concludes with Katherine Field Rothschild’s review of Re/Writing the Center: Approaches to Supporting Graduate Students in the Writing Center, edited by Susan Lawrence and Terry Myers Zawacki, ultimately finding it, “a strong message from excellent researchers in the field that if we are to lift up scholars who will create knowledge in their disciplines, we must invest time in graduate students’ writing development” (81).

Finally, we here at Praxis want to take a moment to formally welcome our new Assistant Editor, Fiza Mairaj to Praxis this semester. She is a second year doctoral student in the Educational Policy and Planning program, and her research agenda involves studying refugee students’ experiences in education systems of host countries. Working at Praxis, she aims to indulge with the peer-review research processes in academia to strengthen her training as a researcher. Her prior work experience as a consultant has helped her reflect on her own journey as an international graduate student writer in academia and through her work at Praxis, she also hopes to further the agenda of making writing centers more facilitating and accessible to non-native English speakers.