Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 21, No. 2 (2024)

From the Editors: Interrogating Intricate Entanglements in the Writing Center

Tristan Hanson
The University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

Emma Conatser
The University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

As writing center practitioners, we often find ourselves tangled in situations that have no easy solutions and searching for help. Whether confronting crises, mediating the desires of institutions and individuals, communicating with tutees, or developing and assessing our practices, we rely on our personal and communal experiences, as well as work of our colleagues, to guide us through. The articles in this issue probe some of our thornier entanglements by first revealing them and then offering useful guides for how we might deal with them both personally and communally. In doing so, they offer us concrete first steps for addressing the kinds of problems that keep us up at night. 

Genie Giaimo’s column essay begins the issue by addressing “the things left unsaid” in her book Unwell Writing Centers and in writing centers generally, namely, student death. Giaimo frames her personal experiences of student death as an administrator with evidence of the increasing need for writing center practitioners to develop practices “to plan for, respond to, and address student death.”  Crucially, these practices should draw on experiential knowledge, crisis response work, and postvention planning to move beyond sterilized institutional responses to potentially traumatic crises. 

In this issue’s first focus article, Saurabh Anand provides an autoethnographic look at linguistic labor in the writing center. Anand uses the “betweener” framework to position multilingual tutors as those who are best equipped to meet the unique needs of multilingual tutees. The article features three episodes of this framework in action from Anand’s lived experiences as a tutor, highlighting the way linguistic labor is navigated in each case.

Crystal Bazaldua, Tekla Hawkins, and Randall W. Monty follow with an interrogation of the assumptions behind the use of the ideograph “success” in writing center discourse. Using a Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, the authors examine the webspaces of writing centers in a large state university system for how they deploy “success.” Through their analysis, they conclude that writing centers may be propping up institutionalized neoliberal and white-supremacist discourses and structures even as they espouse and enact more equitable practices in their day-to-day operations. 

From there, Candis Bond and James Garner propose a new way of thinking about professional tutors and STEM consultations in “Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM and Health Sciences Populations.” The article discusses the way one health science university writing center prepares graduate and professional tutors to address the increasing need for advanced writing guidance in STEM areas specifically. Bond and Garner propose a training program for equipping these tutors to work with STEM writers with confidence in multiple genres and contexts.

In the issue’s final piece, Grant Eckstein and Kate Matthews reveal students’ perceptions of the “usefulness” of our centers. Specifically, they compare survey data on usefulness across three student groups: native English speakers, non-native English speakers, and those “who straddle the nuanced divide between native and non-native language proficiency,” Generation 1.5. In comparing these groups, the authors find that, while writing centers seem to be useful for nearly all students there are measurable differences between how different groups assess their experiences. They close by calling for further research that considers “the unique challenges faced by non-traditional students.”  

We’d like to conclude this introduction by thanking our authors, reviewers, and readers for their hard work and engagement with the journal. As the outgoing editors, we are so grateful to have been a part of this scholarly community and are proud of all the work that we’ve overseen at Praxis. We’d especially like to thank our editorial assistants, Sydney Patterson and Ava Hammon, for their hard work promoting and copy editing the journal while also working as consultants and staffing the front desk. They were an immense help this semester and deserve a lot of credit for supporting the publication of this issue. We offer our farewell knowing that the important conversations represented here will continue beyond our editorship, and we hope to see you all in writing centers, at conferences, and in the pages of Praxis soon.