Category: Writing Center pedagogy

Two paths diverging in a forest

Finding Universal Design for Learning in Your “Tough” Tutoring Session

Disability and Writing Centers, Diversity and Inclusion, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Center Theory, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Anmol Sahni, Emory University—Last semester at the Emory writing center, I had one of those tutoring sessions that just felt… off. It began the usual way: greeting the writer, setting an agenda, and planning to read the draft together. These practices often work well—but that day, something wasn’t clicking. The student wasn’t disengaged, but I sensed a kind of resistance, or maybe fatigue, that the standard approach wasn’t addressing. […]

December 16, 2025
A blurry image of the word focus.

Writing Centers as Attention Technology

Disability and Writing Centers, Peer Tutoring, Tutorial Talk and Methods, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Tisha Turk, Grinnell College—In recent years, attention has come in for a lot of, well, attention. Scholars, journalists, and cultural critics have written about how corporations capture and monetize the finite resource of our attention and, sometimes, how we can regain control of it (Wu; Odell; Hari; Hayes). Those of us working in institutions of higher ed have probably observed the effects of attention capture not only on ourselves but on our students. My observations about attention are not […]

December 2, 2025

Academic Writing in the Borderlands

Graduate Students, Higher Education, Racial Justice, Social Justice, Writing Center pedagogy

By Andrea Hernandez Holm—Many writing assignments, genres, and reference styles require that writers include positionality statements. Some genres are entirely informed by positionality, even if we don’t recognize them. For example, personal statements ask the writer to explain what experiences have shaped their perspectives, objectives, and goals. Positionality can still be a difficult concept to grasp because we typically consider it only in the immediacy, and in relation to our own experiences—my positionality is informed by who I am. […]

November 4, 2025
A media designed by Saurabh Anand, including four caricatures, each with a question.

Discontented with Just Western Consent: A Global Anglophone Perspective on Writing Center Professionalization via Global Rhetorical Traditions

Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate Students, Higher Education, Multilingual Writers, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Center Staff, Writing Center Theory, Writing Centers

By Saurabh Anand, University of Georgia—As an international graduate student who speaks five languages and writes in three, I have survived multiple instances of North American writing epistemology hegemony across academic and professional situations. When they happened, such experiences surprised and frustrated me because […]

March 11, 2025
New tutor trainers and new tutors gather for a photo at end of year banquet

Video Narratives in Training

Technology, Tutor Publications, Tutor Training, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Katie Layendecker, Carthage College—When our director asked my co-trainer and me if there was anything we’d like to change about our training program, we knew we wanted to modernize it in a way that was both informational and fun. We couldn’t forget that, for the most part, our audience is first-year students who don’t know what a writing center is like. The new tutor training program at our writing center is led by experienced tutors and has been more or less unchanged for the past four years. This means […]

October 15, 2024
A frosted glass window with the words University Writing Center in black text.

Rebuilding a Research Culture Of, By, and For Our Students

Tutor Training, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Center Research, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Alexa Quezada, Indiana University Indianapolis—During the summer of 2022, my campus’s University Writing Center underwent a series of changes that massively impacted the culture of the Center, including our approach to research. We lost both our director and assistant director in rapid succession. Subsequently, roughly a third of our student consultants quit in a combination of solidarity and worry that the UWC—and their jobs—would not exist by the beginning of the fall semester. Just before the semester began […]

September 17, 2024
A human shaped robot with its hand on its chin with mathematical equations in the background

ChatGPT and Writing Center Tutors: Establishing a “both/and” Relationship

AI Writing, Multilingual Writers, Peer Tutoring, Technology, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Center Tutors, Writing Centers

By Jun Akiyoshi, The Pennsylvania State University, and Rajwan Alshareefy, University of Delaware—Both of us, Jun and Rajwan, have similar backgrounds. We worked as EFL/ESL teachers, studied in an interdisciplinary area of Composition and Applied Linguistics, enjoyed talking about research and practice of writing education, and most importantly, we worked together at the same writing center when we were graduate students. Even after we earned our Ph.D.s, we continued to engage with, learn about, and research (writing) education. Throughout the years, we often talked about the theory and praxis of (college) writing, second language education, among many others. Our conversations became more heated when […]

August 13, 2024

Not Quite Your Writing Clinic: Experimentations with a Caring Writing Curriculum amid “the Liberal Education Crisis”

Tutor Training, Writing Center pedagogy, Writing Centers

By Shaoxuan Tian, Wesleyan University—I forget when and how Lauren—my supervisor and colleague at Wesleyan University’s writing center—and I started to use the phrase “writing trauma.” // “Another sad one with some writing trauma,” she commented on one response to the “How do you describe your relationship with writing?” question in our Writing Mentor program’s application. […]

March 12, 2024