Re/Writing the Center

Re/Writing the Center
Author: Susan Lawrence
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2019-03-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1607327511

Re/Writing the Center illuminates how core writing center pedagogies and institutional arrangements are complicated by the need to create intentional, targeted support for advanced graduate writers. Most writing center tutors are undergraduates, whose lack of familiarity with the genres, preparatory knowledge, and research processes integral to graduate-level writing can leave them underprepared to assist graduate students. Complicating the issue is that many of the graduate students who take advantage of writing center support are international students. The essays in this volume show how to navigate the divide between traditional writing center theory and practices, developed to support undergraduate writers, and the growing demand for writing centers to meet the needs of advanced graduate writers. Contributors address core assumptions of writing center pedagogy, such as the concept of peers and peer tutoring, the emphasis on one-to-one tutorials, the positioning of tutors as generalists rather than specialists, and even the notion of the writing center as the primary location or center of the tutoring process. Re/Writing the Center offers an imaginative perspective on the benefits writing centers can offer to graduate students and on the new possibilities for inquiry and practice graduate students can inspire in the writing center. Contributors: Laura Brady, Michelle Cox, Thomas Deans, Paula Gillespie​, Mary Glavan, Marilyn Gray​, James Holsinger​, Elena Kallestinova, Tika Lamsal​, Patrick S. Lawrence, Elizabeth Lenaghan, Michael A. Pemberton​, Sherry Wynn Perdue​, Doug Phillips, Juliann Reineke​, Adam Robinson​, Steve Simpson, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran​, Ashly Bender Smith, Sarah Summers​, Molly Tetreault​, Joan Turner, Bronwyn T. Williams, Joanna Wolfe

"They're All Writers"

Author: Jennifer Sanders
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2017
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0807758205

“They're All Writers” will help teachers explore the power of writing centers. In elementary school classrooms across the country, writing instruction (not grammar worksheets or spelling drills) is still the neglected “R.” In this book, classroom teachers will find foundational information about the writing process with everything they need to begin and facilitate a peer tutoring writing center. Student-led writing centers harness the social and instructional power of students working and learning together, and this book includes specific lessons to teach students how to be effective peer tutors and how to be better writers. Book Features: A new, research-based approach to writing pedagogy that integrates both writing process theories and writing center pedagogies. Complete lesson plans to help teachers implement a writing center curriculum that meets Common Core and other quality standards. An approach that harnesses the power of social learning, develops students as leaders in their schools, and facilitates generative conversations around writing.

Center Will Hold

Center Will Hold
Author: Michael Pemberton
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2003-12-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 087421484X

In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges. Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.

Writing Centers at the Center of Change

Writing Centers at the Center of Change
Author: Joe Essid
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2019-09-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 042975714X

Writing Centers at the Center of Change looks at how eleven centers, internationally, adapted to change at their institutions, during a decade when their very success has become a valued commodity in a larger struggle for resources on many campuses. Bringing together both US and international perspectives, this volume offers solutions for adapting to change in the world of writing centers, ranging from the logistical to the pedagogical, and even to the existential. Each author discusses the origins, appropriate responses, and partners to seek when change comes from within a school or outside it. Chapters document new programs being formed under changing circumstances, and suggest ways to navigate professional or pedagogical changes that may undermine the hard work of more than four decades of writing-center professionals. The book’s audience includes writing center and learning-commons administrators, university librarians, deans, department chairs affiliated with writing centers. It will also be useful for graduate students in composition, rhetoric, and academic writing.

Writing Center Research

Writing Center Research
Author: Paula Gillespie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2002
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780805834468

There are writing centers at almost every college and university in the United States, and there is an emerging body of professional discourse, research, and writing about them. The goal of this book is to open, formalize, and further the dialogue about research in and about writing centers. The original essays in this volume, all written by writing center researchers, directly address current concerns in several ways: they encourage studies, data collection, and publication by offering detailed, reflective accounts of research; they encourage a diversity of approaches by demonstrating a range of methodologies (e.g., ethnography, longitudinal case study; rhetorical analysis, teacher research) available to both veteran and novice writing center professionals; they advance an ongoing conversation about writing center research by explicitly addressing epistemological and ethical issues. The book aims to encourage and guide other researchers, while at the same time offering new knowledge that has resulted from the studies it analyzes.

Everyday Writing Center

Everyday Writing Center
Author: Anne Ellen Geller
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2007-04-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0874216621

In a landmark collaboration, five co-authors develop a theme of ordinary disruptions ("the everyday") as a source of provocative learning moments that can liberate both student writers and writing center staff. At the same time, the authors parlay Etienne Wenger’s concept of "community of practice" into an ethos of a dynamic, learner-centered pedagogy that is especially well-suited to the peculiar teaching situation of the writing center. They push themselves and their field toward deeper, more significant research, more self-conscious teaching.

Radical Writing Center Praxis

Radical Writing Center Praxis
Author: Laura Greenfield
Publisher: Utah State University Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2019-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1607328437

In Radical Writing Center Praxis Laura Greenfield calls for a paradigm change in writing centers, imagining a field whose very reason for being is to facilitate justice and peace. The book calls on readers to more critically examine power and agency in writing centers and to imagine new possibilities for the field’s theories and practices. Large, intersecting systems of oppression manifest in the everyday practices of institutions, classrooms, and writing centers. Local practices in turn influence the surrounding world. Radical Writing Center Praxis therefore challenges the writing center field to resist assumptions of political neutrality and instead to redefine itself in terms of more explicit ethical commitments. In this paradigm it is clear that to engage in anti-oppression work is not merely a special interest but rather a vital interest to all. Introducing the concepts and vocabulary of radical politics, Radical Writing Center Praxis examines the tensions between the field’s professed beliefs and everyday practices and offers a process by which the writing center discipline as a whole might rebuild itself anew. It will be invaluable to writing center directors, tutors, scholars, and students as well as to administrators and compositionists.

Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies

Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies
Author: Jo Mackiewicz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2019-11-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0429581866

This collection helps students and researchers understand the foundations of writing center studies in order to make sound decisions about the types of methods and theoretical lenses that will help them formulate and answer their research questions. In the collection, accomplished writing center researchers discuss the theories and methods that have enabled their work, providing readers with a useful and accessible guide to developing research projects that interest them and make a positive contribution. It introduces an array of theories, including genre theory, second-language acquisition theory, transfer theory, and disability theory, and guides novice and experienced researchers through the finer points of methods such as ethnography, corpus analysis, and mixed-methods research. Ideal for courses on writing center studies and pedagogy, it is essential reading for researchers and administrators in writing centers and writing across the curriculum or writing in the disciplines programs.

Internationalizing the Writing Center

Internationalizing the Writing Center
Author: Noreen Groover Lape
Publisher: Parlor Press LLC
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2020-03-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1643171674

Internationalizing the Writing Center provides a rationale, pedagogical plan, and administrative method for developing a multilingual writing center. The book incorporates work from writing center studies as well as second language acquisition studies, including English as a second language; English as a foreign language; second language writing; and foreign language writing. Author Noreen Lape draws on ten years of experience directing a multilingual writing center that offers writing tutoring in eleven languages, and she incorporates the voices and insights of foreign language writing tutors and faculty from surveys, interviews, and tutoring session reports. Lape begins by exploring the dominance of English-medium writing centers in a globalized world and arguing for the expansion of English-centric into multilingual writing centers. She then considers how tutor training differs when the writing center is multilingual as opposed to monolingual, and the writing is second language and foreign language as well as “native” language. The chapters on tutor training explore issues such as holistic tutoring, composing in a foreign language, the role of translating in the writing process, creating a positive learning environment, and developing intercultural competence. In multiple appendices, Lape shares original exercises that writing center administrators can use to train foreign language writing tutors. The book ends with a discussion of strategies for engaging faculty and administrators as stakeholders, and collaborating with those stakeholders to create a sustainable center.

Tutoring Second Language Writers

Tutoring Second Language Writers
Author: Shanti Bruce
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2015-12-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1457199386

"Tutoring Second Language Writers, a complete update of Bruce and Rafoth’s 2009 ESL Writers, is a guide for writing center tutors that addresses the growing need for tutors who are better prepared to work with the increasingly international population of students seeking guidance at the writing center.Drawing upon philosopher John Dewey’s belief in reflective thinking as a way to help build new knowledge, the book is divided into four parts. Part 1: Actions and Identities is about creating a proactive stance toward language difference, thinking critically about labels, and the mixed feelings students may have about learning English. Part 2: Research Opportunities demonstrates writing center research projects and illustrates methods tutors can use to investigate their questions about writing center work. Part 3: Words and Passages offers four personal stories of inquiry and discovery, and Part 4: Academic Expectations describes some of the challenges tutors face when they try to help writers meet readers’ specific expectations.Advancing the conversations tutors have with one another and their directors about tutoring second language writers and writing, Tutoring Second Language Writers engages readers with current ideas and issues that highlight the excitement and challenge of working with those who speak English as a second or additional language."