Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 3 (2022)

From the Editors: Transformations 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

Praxis is proud to present our Summer 2022 regular publication, “Transformations in the Writing Center.” As Co-Editors of writing center scholarship, we have perceived a pointed effort on the part of you, our fellow collaborators, to present the many changes our writing centers have undergone and are undergoing with relation to how we serve writers in our respective institutions. Many of us call for greater representation within our writing centers, while still others demonstrate their efforts to serve students under new dichotomies offered by a post-pandemic society. We review the results of your centers’ newest policy enactments, in tandem with your efforts to best serve translingual members of our writing center societies. What seems homogenous across both quantitative and qualitative scholarly works is the mood of transformation that our centers are undergoing, whether policy-based or pandemic-related. With the scholarship that follows, we hope you find support and precedent for your own centers even as you undergo personal periods of transition.

Herein, Zuccarelli et al. apply propensity score matching, otherwise known as a complex statistical method to gauge factors associated with student writing center attendance and overall effects on students’ writing performance after visiting the writing center. In “Measuring the Effect of Writing Center visits on Student Performance,” the authors identify individuals who are most likely to make use of writing center resources, and outline very real result figures for these writers. They propose that their article could serve as a quantitative guideline for writing center administrators to assess their own center’s effectiveness, thus enabling policy makers to enact informed decisions for future programming.

In “Analyzing Scaffolding in Writing Center Interactions: Beyond Descriptions of Tutors’ Interventions,” Isabelle Thompson and Jo Mackiewicz extend existing work on tutor-student interactions by examining the value of scaffolding for both tutors and students. Applying insights from education and psychology to writing center conferences, the authors define and demonstrate characteristics of scaffolding that occur, in-the-moment, during conferences. Based on their illustrative analyses, the authors argue that using scaffolding not only benefits writing center practice and professionalization but also offers a conceptual lens that can inform and improve discussions about directiveness.

In “Peri-pandemic Graduate Writing Mentorship,” Xuan Jiang, Adrian R. Salgado, and Courtney Glass argue for an approach to graduate writing support that better attends to understudied and under-supported factors integral to the writing process. From their mixed-methods study of two cohorts of writing groups, the authors found factors within, across, and for writing that signal a need for more strategic guidance in graduate writing center support. Particularly, support that engages with temporal and spatial circumstances of these writers, especially for first-generation graduate students and multilingual writers.

The authors of “Disrupting the Narrative: Cross- National Consultants in a U.S. Graduate Writers’ Studio” contribute to the discussion of how predominant whiteness in US writing centers affects the wellbeing of multicultural center participants. Yvonne R. Lee, Sinenhlanhla Zungu, and Varun Joseph Andrews address a gap in scholarship, proposing that US writing centers are the ideal space to interrogate colonial perspectives through autoethnography, wherein personal experiences can catalyze policy changes in our writing spaces.

In “Inclusive Sentence-Level Writing Support,” Bridget Draxler, Anne Berry, Manuela Novoa Villada, and Victoria Gutierrez argue that linguistic justice efforts must permeate our approaches to sentence-level writing instruction, particularly when working with translingual writers. The authors present findings from a grant-funded research undertaking in which they created a series of training models which ultimately provide a heuristic guide to tutor decision-making based on sensitivity to the relationship between the type of error, the writer, the tutor, and the context.

We close with Jacob Herrmann’s review of Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace by Travis Webster. Herrmann finds Webster’s book to be a thought-provoking work that combines narrative and data. To Herrmann, Webster recognizes and demonstrates the significance of LGBTQ+ experiences in writing centers and encourages readers to engage critically with the day-to-day experiences and practices of LGBTQ+ laborers.

Finally, we here at Praxis are proud to share these explorations of writing center transformation. We look forward to the conversations and changes this scholarship will contribute to or begin.