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, however, two faculty members were chosen by the School of Liberal Arts to take over as interim director and assistant director. This move saved the Center, but it was clear that our new administrators had taken on these roles reluctantly.

At the same time, our university announced that it would be switching all cloud storage from Google Drive to OneDrive. Prior to this, our staff had built up years of research, resources, and past and ongoing projects in our Drive. In the chaos of administrative changes that summer, very little of this was transferred to OneDrive, and what was transferred, we had little time to double check. Much of what we did manage to save was corrupted, as we discovered in the following months while training new consultants. In the high turnover of student employees, these resources had been integral in perpetuating our existing research culture.

Between this loss and the loss of our previous administrative team, much of our institutional memory disappeared overnight. Our new, less-than-enthusiastic administrators had little investment in recovering or perpetuating the research-focused culture of the UWC. However, those of use who remained from the previous era—four graduate student consultants and one undergraduate consultant—were determined to rebuild.

Rebuilding

The new director and assistant director came into the Center with a smaller staff, less funding, fewer resources, next to no institutional memory to draw upon, and little interest in writing center studies compared to the previous administrators. As such, they took a hands-off approach toward student research, dedicating their efforts instead toward metrics of more use to higher administrative powers in our school, such as budget and number of appointments. If we, the incumbent student consultants, wanted a culture of research, it was up to us to create—or recreate—it.

Not only are peer writing tutors professionals, but they are uniquely-positioned professionals in writing centers who inhabit an ephemeral “peer perspective” that has the potential to contribute much to undergraduate writing tutor research and to the body of writing center scholarship. 

Ervin, “The Peer Perspective and Undergraduate Writing Tutor Research”

Rebuilding a research culture as student consultants proved difficult for several reasons. Previously, our director had built up a robust culture centered on professional development, primary and secondary research, and engagement with a scholarly community both within and outside of the UWC. This culture had become so ubiquitous that taking on research projects had become relatively easy, whether a consultant was an undergraduate or graduate student. With our committees, procedures, forms, resource guides, and layers of mentorship all gone, we found ourselves suddenly in the deep end with nothing to keep us afloat. Since the driving force behind student research had been the administrators, we struggled to find motivation and direction. Additionally, with no records or in-center resources to rely on and most of our incumbent consultants graduating that year, we had to find a way to keep what culture we could build from leaving with us.

The last two years have seen a lot of trial and error on our parts, as we’ve attempted to address both our rapidly dying research culture and its underlying cause—primarily, lack of administrative support—from a variety of angles and tactics.

Staff Meeting Discussions

Our first step was to introduce our new administration and incoming consultants to the texts we considered to be the foundations of our Center’s pedagogical philosophies. Toward that end, administrators and incumbents agreed to dedicate a portion of each bi-weekly staff meeting to discussing consultant-assigned readings. The first volunteer assigned an article on multimodal composition—the topic of his presentation at the most recent regional conference; the ensuing discussion was successful, if a bit stilted. The second assigned Laura Greenfield’s “The ‘Standard English’ Fairy Tale”, a text that had been ubiquitous in our Center under the previous administration. While this consultant took care not to assume prior experience with scholarship on linguistic justice, he did assume the same willingness to engage with new ideas that everyone had demonstrated during the previous article discussion. He was mistaken.

At times, we felt it was our duty to take what we had learned, and the discourse we had developed to articulate it, and become politically active.

Brown, et al., “Taking on Turnitin: Tutors Advocating Change”

New consultants—both students and faculty—engaged thoughtfully with the text, connecting to Greenfield’s concepts and arguments with examples from their own personal and professional lives. Both of our new administrators, however, shut down during the discussion. They belittled Greenfield’s assertions and seemed to deliberately misunderstand the text’s main premises. The next several staff meetings saw similar patterns emerge, with consultants assigning readings on linguistic justice and anti-racism from a variety of angles, and administrators dismissing the value of these concepts—at one point, one administrator asserted that engaging with such scholarship was not necessary for the instruction of writing. One consultant, who has since left the Center, describes some of these staff meeting discussions in greater detail in a recently published article, “Confronting Resistance to Linguistic Justice: Developing White Racial Stamina in the Writing Center”. Over time, less time was allotted for these conversations at fewer staff meetings; it became clear that while our new administrators would stop short of outright banning research on the topics with which they disagreed, they did not want to make space for it.

Within a few months of these increasingly frustrating staff meeting discussions, we knew that we could not rely on our new director or assistant director to buy into the value of engaging with new ideas through scholarship. The one great success of these discussions, however, was to ignite our collective desire to research more, if only to prove our administrators wrong. If we wanted to cultivate research in the UWC, it would be under our own initiative, and we resolved to do so with more guerilla-style tactics. The question then became, how do we use what little space we have to encourage such initiative, especially in new consultants? The answer we turned to was to start early.

Training Practicum

The UWC trains incoming student consultants—both graduate and undergraduate—through a semester-long training practicum taught by the director, assisted by a graduate consultant. In the past two years, the practicum has run three times with three different teaching assistants. Both the director and each subsequent TA adapted simultaneously and in response to each other.

The first TA—who had trained under the previous director as an undergraduate, left the Center for a few years, and returned in fall 2022 as a graduate assistant—positioned herself early on as a voice of dissension during class discussions. She leveraged her passion for scholarship, and the few class periods that she was allowed to lead, to introduce ideas that the director considered “radical”. She encouraged the trainee consultants not only to explore ideas outside of those taught in the course, but also to disagree—with her, with their readings, and especially with the status quo. In sowing discontent with the status quo, this TA paved the way for new research projects.

It is important for students to know that serious research can be, and is, conducted in writing centers.

Cheatle, et al., “Creating a Research Culture in the Center”

The second TA—who had started at the Center at the same time as the new administration but had been friends with multiple past and incumbent consultants as an undergraduate—directed her attention toward course texts rather than class discussions. Several of the director’s preferred texts had been published before half of the new class of trainees had been born, and this TA set about finding new articles and updated editions of books whose language and concepts might better appeal to the current generation of trainees. The director chose not to include the TA’s suggested readings the semester, but she did work two updated book chapters into the next semester’s readings. The TA also successfully implemented trainee presentations of their individual final projects to encourage idea sharing between budding scholars. 

I—who had trained under the previous director as an undergraduate and had worked continuously since then at the UWC—was the third TA. Having seen the director’s resistance to writing center scholarship, I chose to focus more on the bridge between theory and praxis. I relied on my experience to both support and challenge the assertions in our readings and spoke frequently about the connections between my experiences and my research interests in the Center. I also arranged for a panel of consultants to speak on their own research projects and processes in order to demonstrate the accessibility of student research in a field populated by student professionals.

Each of our tactics achieved varying levels of success—by various metrics—in motivating and supporting trainee consultants in their research. The one pattern that stayed consistent, however, was that once trainees of each class had matriculated into the Center, they lamented the lack of meaningful projects and opportunities for professional development. We had succeeded in encouraging a research culture in the practicum but still needed to keep that culture going in the Center itself.

External Opportunities

Due to the lack of professional development opportunities available in the UWC, we’ve leaned on external opportunities to motivate and provide a direction for research, such as those offered through conferences and publications. In the first year following the change of leadership, our consultants were conflicted about the prospect of engaging with the larger scholarly community. On one hand, we felt ill equipped to participate, given the lack of administrative support, scaffolding, or encouragement in our research. On the other hand, we had become more motivated than ever to share our experiences with other writing center scholars.

The East Central Writing Centers Association Conference (ECWCA) has long been our regional conference; in 2023, four student consultants presented and another three attended. Five of these seven participants had trained under the previous administration, and for us, the conference was an oasis of scholarship—of inquiry, mutual learning, engagement, mentorship, and opportunities. Following our return to the desert, we remained reinvigorated. Coincidentally, that year, the ECWCA board announced the creation of a new journal—one aimed at becoming many students’ first publication. Between our conference experience and the new journal, these types of external professional opportunities became our consultants’ new goal post.

Research in the scholarly community allows tutors to develop critical thinking skills and experience different forms  of collaboration, including mentorship. When tutors participate in conferences and publish their work, it not only serves as an invitation to professional conversations, but also shapes their professional identity.

Keaton, et al., “Helping Undergraduate Tutors Conduct and Disseminate Research”

This new goal provided a sense of direction where before we’d had none. We began suggesting project ideas to other consultants based on their interests and forwarding news of conference and journal calls for proposals to each other. I scrounged up past proposals from old email and Discord conversations to use as examples for new consultants interested in submitting proposals. As the TA for the practicum that fall, I mentioned often that essays and discussion topics in the class could serve as seeds for future articles or presentations. As the next ECWCA approached, we encouraged our coworkers to consider what they might present about, even if they didn’t plan to follow through; several down-time conversations saw us bouncing increasingly wild ideas back and forth.

In 2024, seven students represented the UWC at ECWCA—in addition to both administrators—with four presenting twice and one presenting three times. All together, our center made up nearly a quarter of the presentation schedule. Additionally, one consultant became an editorial assistant for the new ECWCA journal, another had joined the ECWCA board and published an article in the same journal, a third is currently revising an article for publication next year, and I’m publishing a post in this very blog.

The more we’ve engaged with an external scholarly community, the more motivated we have become to bring bits of that oasis back to the UWC.

Looking Forward

Although we’ve accomplished much in the past two years, we still have a long way to go in building and sustaining a robust culture of inquiry in the UWC. One goal in this coming academic year is to populate our Center’s OneDrive with new resources based on recent projects. By reconstructing a long-term institutional memory, we can begin building on our predecessors’ work again. Ultimately, the goal is to continuously improve and reach new heights, rather than starting from the ground up each time as we have been.

Mentor-mentee relationships are also vital in facilitating research. Everyday conversations have proven instrumental in encouraging newer consultants to take on research projects, and graduate students in the Center have served as informal mentors to undergraduates. However, we have no mentors of our own. Some have found mentorship externally, with other faculty on campus or with administrators at other writing centers, and another goal is to expand these relationships, especially through ECWCA. With mentorship, my hope is to fill gaps in our existing knowledge and experience, such as with primary research.

A third goal revolves around the reimplementation of committees in the Center. At the request of multiple consultants, our administrators have recently created a system of small committees—different from those under the previous administration but still useful in promoting collaboration between consultants on projects. Now that we have more projects and research interests being cultivated in the UWC, we can use these committees to find commonalities among each other and share ideas to create more robust projects.

With each year, student consultants in the UWC have honed our methods and built upon the successes and failures of each previous tactic. By now, we are no longer working to rebuild what we had before but are instead cultivating a new culture of inquiry within the bounds of our current circumstances. Each new step is a challenge, but adversity has given us the directed motivation to engage with research in ways we might not have under the previous administration. Everything we’ve accomplished in the past two years is a testament to the strength of our commitment to inquiry and to improving the world we write in.