Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 2 (2022)

From the Editors: Guidance in the Writing Center

Kiara Walker
The University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

Kaitlin Passafiume
The University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

We here at Praxis are proud to bring you our Spring 2022 regular issue, “Guidance in the Writing Center.” This issue brings together perspectives and research that demonstrate the importance of considering the goals and courses of action that writing center practitioners employ to improve their centers. In our discipline and in our writing centers, the issue of guidance appears in more obvious ways at the administrative level and in the work done within writing center sessions, but also in less noticeable or apparent ways, such as administrators and consultants guiding students through writing center spaces, be they online or in person, and through writing center forms and procedures. The columns and articles in this issue hinge on concerns about guidance,  strategy, and goals, and they ask us to (re)consider our approaches to various practices within the writing center from the way we conduct sessions to the way we approach designing our spaces.

Genie N. Giaimo opens our current edition with her column “Continuing to Labor in a Crisis: Counternarratives to Workism Culture.” In this updated discussion that Giaimo originally initiated in the summer 2020 edition of Praxis, our author raises an eyebrow to the ever-present workism culture typically practiced by academics. She guides us towards best writing center practices by suggesting a readjustment of this culture in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In “Explicitness and Rationale: Purposeful Communication in Asynchronous Online Writing Tutor Sessions,” Anna Rollins turns our attention to tutor feedback and the presence of directive and nondirective tutoring strategies in asynchronous sessions. In her study of tutor feedback, Rollins uses Ahmar Mahboob’s and Devo Yilmaz Devrim’s framework to classify tutor responses, finding that interrogatives play a significant role in asynchronous sessions and therefore warrant more pedagogical focus. Rollins’s column speaks to the importance of training tutors to use feedback strategies that guide sessions in a manner that is both responsive to the asynchronous format and to a student’s perspective.

In our first focus article, Erica Cirillo-McCarthy addresses the responsibilities of writing center administrators (WCAs) striving toward an antiracist writing center, particularly the guidance that WCAs can offer to graduate students. In “Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection,” Cirillo-McCarthy uses Asao Inoue’s understanding of white habitus to critically engage with her own practices as a writing center administrator mentoring graduate students. Based on this reflection and previous counterstories from BIPOC graduate students, Cirillo-McCarthy develops a set of elements for a “culturally responsive mentoring process,” offering WCAs guidance in approaching and handling their mentoring role.

In the following focus article entitled “Making What We Know Explicit: Perspectives from Graduate Writing Consultants on Supporting Graduate Writers,” Stacy Wittstock and her co-authors present a practical guide for peer-graduate consulting practices in the writing center. They suggest that while much scholarship serves to support graduate writers, little has been done towards consistent practice for graduate consultants who support their peer-graduate writers. These authors draw from their own experiences in the writing center in what they term “a guide written by graduate students, for graduate students.”

Next, Brendan T. McGovern guides us on discursive tutoring strategies in his article entitled “The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development: Enhancing Discourse Community Knowledge through Metacognitive Dialogue.” McGovern explores the role of metacognition in writers’ progress during tutoring sessions while he asserts a need to examine the specific role of writing center tutors in the development of individual student.

In our final focus article, “Whose Space Is It, Really? Design Considerations for Writing Center Spaces,” Rachel Azima offers guiding principles for writing center design based on findings from her mixed-method study of renovations at her writing center. Azima’s study adds an empirical approach to previous scholarship on writing center space, using surveys and interviews of students and consultants to grasp and understand responses to the writing center before and after renovation. Azima ultimately argues that listening to students needs should be the core that guides writing center space design.

Our current edition closes with Mustapha Chmarkh’s review of the 2020 book entitled Internationalizing the Writing Center: A Guide for Developing a Multilingual Writing Center by Noreen G. Lape. This review aids us in the synthesis of Lape’s guidance towards best practices for those practitioners who hope to serve a multilingual writing community. Chmarkh’s review highlights Lape’s most salient advice as he weighs in on the book’s usefulness for our own advocacy of multilingualism in the writing center.

Finally, we here at Praxis want to thank our readers and our review board for their continued support. We are proud to share this collection, and we look forward to the conversations that these pieces will continue or start.