Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 22, No. 1 (2024)

From the Editors: Writing Center Practices in Times of Flux

Alexandra Gunnells
The University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

Samantha Turner
The University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

In times of technological and political upheaval, how do writing center practitioners sustain their commitments to collaboration and care? How might reflecting upon our intentions around these practices offer routes forward for WCs across contexts? Although the topics in this issue vary widely, the authors demonstrate a shared commitment to addressing these questions. We are excited to share with you a collection of rigorously researched focus articles and thought-provoking findings related to tutor training, generative AI, and approaches to antiracist, wellness, and trauma-informed practices. 

In this issue’s first column essay, Hannah Johnson addresses the importance of space in writing consultations. By placing writing center scholarship about online writing consultations alongside Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Johnson questions how online writing consultations differ from in-person consultations. In doing so, Johnson urges writing center practitioners to consider their intentions when offering online consultations. In other words, how might writing center practitioners approach online writing consultations from a different pedagogical perspective?

The issue’s second column essay reflects upon and extends conversations that took place at ECWCA 2024 in a roundtable hosted by peer tutors Meredith Perkins, Ally Britton-Heitz, and Kylie Mullis. The authors investigate institutional responses to generative AI, and articulate the challenges that discretionary AI-use policies pose for tutors. This essay moves beyond pro- or anti-AI conversations to consider the fluctuating roles and expectations of WCs and consultants in a rapidly shifting educational landscape. 

In this issue’s first focus article, Sarah Kugler and Faith Thompson perform critical discourse analysis to identify the linguistic features of  writing center antiracist and linguistic justice statements. Kugler and Thompson remind us that even the most well-intentioned language may “inadvertently hedge [WCs’] commitments to racial justice,” and, ultimately, present a compelling study that articulates the importance of aligning language and action in writing center antiracist and linguistic justice statements. 

Next up, Kate Hargreaves and Lindsey Jaber argue that trauma-informed practices in the WC can improve student and staff well-being. This multi-institutional study works from the understanding that trauma is ubiquitous in educational spaces, and employs an equity-centered trauma-informed framework to explore how writing tutors across universities perceive and narrate their engagement with student trauma, extending conversations about labor and precarity in the WC towards the pedagogical implications of TI practices for tutors. 

In the next focus article, Carey Smitherman Clark et al. seek to understand how writing centers employ impression management strategies to appeal to a variety of stakeholders. The authors pay particular attention to how writing centers manage stakeholder impressions online, arguing that many WCs demonstrate an intentional approach to impression management that prioritizes perceptions of attractiveness and competence. 

In the issue’s final focus article, Christopher Basgier, Layli Miron, and Richard Jake Gebhardt offer a detailed reflection on their center’s experience implementing an ePortfolio professional development curriculum for their tutors.  The authors build upon the field’s calls for evidence-based tutor training  and contribute a replicable, aggregable, data-supported (RAD) study on the effects of ePortfolio training on consultant’s ability to support multimodal projects.

This issue concludes with Jeff Fields McCormack’s review of Beyond Productivity: Embodied, Situated, and (Un)Balanced Faculty Writing Processes. McCormack praises the collection, edited by Kim Hensley Owens and Derek Van Ittersum, noting that it offers a crucial account–and questioning–of the unrelenting pressure to publish that pervades academia. McCormack highlights how Beyond Productivity can help academics rethink pre-COVID academic policies and how these policies might be reshaped. 

We here at Praxis remain deeply grateful to the reviewers, authors, and copy-editors who helped make this issue a reality. Turns out putting together an issue during the fall semester is more difficult than doing so in the summer, and we were lucky to work with two brilliant undergraduate tutors–Sydney Patterson and Audrey Fife–to prepare this issue for publication. We wish a restful holiday break to all of our authors, reviewers, and readers, and look forward to returning to Praxis in the new year.