This study seeks to explore ideas about learning and how it happens in writing center tutorials. The questions posed for this research are the following: 1) What does learning look like in writing center consultations? and 2) What moves do tutors make to prompt learning moments? The study was created by video recording nine writing center consultations over the course of a single semester. The researcher conducted the sessions herself and worked with the same writer each time. Segments of sessions were transcribed to reveal patterns of learning at work. Reflective memos were also collected, as well as a final retrospective interview. The results of the study showed that learning happens when tutors and writers create learning moments both together and independently of each other. Tutors and writers prompt learning by addressing four elements of writing center sessions: session activities, writer moves with the text at hand, writing processes, and learning processes. Addressing these elements in sessions leads to conversations about learning, which leads to learning taking place. This research is useful for further developing the identity of the writing center as a space that values and strives for authentic learning to occur.

Though Quintilian introduced the term in loco parentis in his Institutio Oratoria by suggesting that teachers think of themselves as parents of a student's mind, composition scholars have let parenting as a metaphor for teaching fall by the wayside in recent discussions of classroom authority. Podis and Podis have recently revived the term, though, and investigated the ways writing teachers enact Lakoff's "Strict Father" and "Nurturing Mother" authority models. Unfortunately, their treatment of these two opposite authority styles reduces classroom authority styles to a mutually exclusive binary of two less than satisfactory options. I propose clinical and developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind's taxonomy of parenting styles as the ideal way to reform our thinking as a field about the authority model we should adopt in our writing classrooms. While Baumrind includes the inferior models Podis and Podis work from in her authoritarian and permissive parenting styles, she found that the authoritative style, which is both strict and nurturing, promises the best results for parenting children: autonomy and academic achievement. By applying her descriptions of authoritative parents and the outcomes for their children to the practices of composition instructors and their students, I reveal how useful Baumrind's taxonomy of parenting styles could be for a field that often uses nuanced terms for authority without either clearly defining them or backing claims with replicable, aggregable, data-driven (RAD) research. If our field chooses to adopt Baumrind's terminology and definitions, then, we will be able to communicate about classroom authority in terms anchored in a coherent paradigm and garner more respect for our field as we probe the outcomes of Baumrind's authoritative parenting style as a college composition teaching style through our own empirical research.