While the politics of the institutional location and physical environment of the writing center is not a new issue, the majority of this scholarship does not adequately consider tutors' and tutees' perceptions regarding these issues. The purpose of my study, then, was to understand if and how the institutional location and / or physical environment within a writing center affects the tutors' and tutees' perception of the writing center and / or affects the dynamic of a peer tutoring session. The participants in my study were volunteer tutors and tutees who had worked or been tutored at one or more of the three Writing Center locations at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale during the Fall 2008 semester. The instruments used in my research were surveys for both tutors and tutees that included fact-based as well as open-ended questions. In addition, some participants in my study also volunteered for a follow-up interview. Given the low number of participants involved in my study, the results do not provide sufficient evidence to make specific claims regarding my research questions; however, the results do have implications for future research on the institutional location and / or physical environment of the writing center. Specifically, consideration for writing center scholarship to offer more contextualized discourse on the institutional location and physical environment of a writing center, as well as the inclusion of tutors' and tutees' perceptions of these issues.

This dissertation explores discipline-specific writing support spaces in an attempt to better understand disciplinary writing from various perspectives. Neal Lerner suggests that writing center scholarship would benefit from interdisciplinary work; therefore, I investigate spaces that are uniquely positioned in disciplines to identify disciplinary questions within writing center work. These spaces will allow writing center professionals to gain a better understanding of the intersections between writing in the disciplines and writing center work, and the writing center's role in student learning, from within the disciplines. We can then integrate these interdisciplinary frameworks into writing center scholarship to broaden perspectives and subsequently better accommodate students across disciplines. This scholarship could offer some clarity as we try to expand our scholarly purview in order to identify some of the questions writing center professionals should be asking. Through ten interviews from three different academic institution, this dissertation interrogates questions that have been embedded within writing center scholarship for decades. This dissertation shows the prominence of the generalist / specialist debate, the 'students can't write' narrative, and explores a situated learning theory in writing center practice. While there has been valuable research done in writing center research and scholarship in an attempt to move writing centers out of the margins, many writing centers still maintain a marginalized status to some faculty and administrators within their institutions. Unless we shift the perception of, and the narratives coming from, writing centers, we might be replaced by writing support centers that are not affiliated with writing centers. These writing support spaces, as shown in this dissertation, provide students a plethora of discipline-specific resources, often including research and communication. If writing centers do not distinguish themselves as a place that can help students across disciplines, writing centers might move from a marginalized position into having no position within the institution at all. For writing center scholars, professionals, and students, the findings of this dissertation mean that as writing centers attempt to accommodate students who write in the disciplines, our identity potentially becomes distorted. Therefore, we must pay special attention to the narratives we use in the writing center and subsequently circulate to our faculty. We have an opportunity to reconsider those narratives and offer a new theoretical framework for how we conceive of and define writing center work. If we do not adapt a situated learning theory in writing centers, we might consider other alternatives so that writing support spaces, such as those highlighted here, do not replace writing centers altogether. Those of us who are involved in writing center theory and practice have a responsibility to consider the alternative venues students might seek for help and to, as a community, identify best practices and theoretical frameworks as writing centers seek to accommodate disciplinary writers. / Ph. D.

This study assesses the influence of writing center tutorials on student writing and presents tutoring best practices. Writing center scholars have emphasized the need for evidence-based studies to understand how one-on-one tutorials influence student writing practices. After examining twenty tutorial recordings along with their pre-and post-intervention drafts in two state universities (ten in each university), the author traced the influence of writing center tutorials on students' post-session revisions and identified tutoring best practices. The findings show that all the twenty students included in the study followed up on the issues addressed in their tutorials, in some form or the other, in their post-session drafts. In terms of tutoring strategies, the findings revealed that although most of the tutors in the study could identify and speak about global concerns (i.e. development, structure, purpose, audience), many lacked specific strategies to address these concerns effectively. To address this concern, this study identifies tutoring best practices related to global concerns. Furthermore, the findings also revealed that the tutors faced challenges navigating the directive/non-directive continuum of tutoring. To address this concern, this study presents tutoring best practices to demonstrate how tutors can shift flexible between directive and non-directive strategies during a session. / Ph. D. / Writing center scholars have emphasized the need for evidence-based studies to develop a deeper understanding of how one-on-one writing center tutorials influence student writing practices. My aim in this study was to examine how writing center tutorials influence student writing and to identify tutoring best practices. To assess how writing center tutorials influence student writing practices, I asked this question: Do students carry over what is discussed in their writing center sessions into their post-session drafts? To assess tutoring best practices, I asked: What tutoring strategies influenced students to revise their drafts? To examine these two questions, I recorded twenty writing center tutorials in two state universities (ten in each university) and collected the drafts that students brought to their tutorials (i.e. the pre-intervention drafts) as well as the drafts that students revised after their tutorials (i.e. the post-intervention drafts). By comparing the pre-and post-intervention drafts and listening to the tutorial recordings, I was able to determine not just what issues were discussed in each of the twenty tutorials, but also how much of this discussion was carried over by students in their post-intervention drafts. As a result, I was able to demonstrate how students make use of their writing center instruction after attending a writing center session. In other words, I was able to show what aspects of a session students’ carried over into their post-intervention draft. My analysis revealed that all the twenty students included in my study incorporated their tutors’ suggestions, in some form or the other, in their post-intervention drafts. Thus, I was able to show the various ways in which a writing center tutorial can influence student revisions. I also used my data to identify tutoring best practices. For instance, my data revealed that although most of the tutors in the study could identify and speak about global concerns in a student’s paper (i.e. development, structure, purpose, audience), many lacked specific strategies to address these concerns effectively. To address this need, I examined the tutoring strategies used by the tutors in my study to address such global concerns and identified best practices related to such interventions. I also analyzed my data to examine how tutors use directive (i.e. providing direct instructions or suggestions) and nondirective (i.e. engaging students by soliciting their views) methods of tutoring. Although many writing center scholars and practitioners recommend using a flexible approach to alternate between these two methods depending on the nature of each session, tutors often find it challenging to do so in actual practice. Through my analysis, I identified best practices to demonstrate how tutors can adopt a flexible approach between directive and non-directive tutoring strategies. Such tutoring best practices can be a useful resource for tutor training programs and contribute to the overall development of writing center pedagogy.

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Though every writing center administrator (WCA) manages a staff, staff management is not widely studied in writing center scholarship. This thesis reports the results of a nationwide survey of WCAs’ preparation for and experiences with staff management in writing centers. The data suggests that many new WCAs feel unprepared for staff management at the beginning of their administrative jobs. The data about WCA staff management beliefs is categorized into four themes: collaboration, empowerment, nurture, and authority. A disparity also seems to exist between the frequency of these themes in the participants’ description of their beliefs and the frequency of the themes in their descriptions of their daily practices. This thesis indicates questions for further research into these findings and discusses why staff management should be of larger interest to the field of Writing Center Studies.

This portfolio contains three separate research essays and a reflection that are related through a common theme, that of ethos. The research papers include: (1) an essay on the pedagogical value of Wikipedia when teaching students about developing authorial ethos; (2) a research essay on the value of writing centers employing tutors whose writing is not yet proficient in the standards set for academic discourse; and (3) a research essay on the use of blogs in first-year composition courses as a means of fostering agency, ownership of ideas, audience awareness, and metadiscourse use. These papers represent the variety of research I undertook during the M.A. program as well as my research interests moving toward the future.

The purpose of this study is to enrich understandings of the major issues encountered when tutoring writing with beginner-intermediate level Japanese EFL students in a Japanese university. Specifically, the thesis examines how students and tutors perceive the challenges experienced in EFL tutoring and the various roles tutors adopt during EFL writing tutoring sessions with Japanese beginner-intermediate students. A mixed method approach is employed utilizing different methods that combine qualitative and quantitative data. Four data collection methods were utilized: pre and post-semester interviews with writing tutors: student questionnaires from a sample size of 24: 30 tutorial observations: and two tutor training workshops (quasi-focus group). Symbolic interactionism (SI) provided a framework for analyzing tutors‟ roles and their practices during EFL writing tutorials. This view assumes that roles emerge from, and are significantly shaped by, interactions in specific social settings. It was found that writing tutors adopt the following roles: proofreader, translator, coach, teacher, mediator, and timekeeper based on their interaction with the individual student. Each role was adopted as a reaction to a challenge but also created new problems. Many of the roles the tutors adopted in this study parallel the research on roles tutors adopt in the ESL writing center, however in EFL tutoring these roles are magnified. For example, in this study tutors play both the role of teacher and mediator to a much larger degree. The translator role however is unique to EFL tutoring. The roles put forth encompass a different way for tutors to think about effective tutoring in an EFL setting with beginner-intermediate students. This study contributes a deeper understanding as to how administrators and writing tutors can better conduct writing center tutorials with EFL students.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In the complementary fields of Composition and Writing Center Studies, the common goal is to guide writers toward improvement in literate practices. However, the meaning of the word “improvement” has undergone radical shifts across time within both fields. It has of late shifted away from a concrete, product-oriented definition toward a non-concrete, process and person-centered nebula. In short, the field of Writing Studies has become very sure what improvement is not, while less sure what it is. Despite this uncertainty, one area of recent agreement appears to be the importance of control that writers hold in navigating within and across literate contexts, often referred to by the slippery term, agency. This pilot study seeks to utilize the voices of researchers across a spectrum of fields to more precisely define agency. This definition will be consistent with current scholarship in both Composition and Writing Center Studies and informed by related fields such as linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. It will then utilize that definition in constructing a RAD (replicable, aggregable and data-driven) qualitative analysis of post-session interviews between researcher and writer. This method will attempt to determine possibilities and guidelines for future research. Particularly, it will provide a framework for future researchers to measure improvement in writing through a more refined definition of social agency. Through that, it will seek to support previous study which suggests as little as a single session in the Writing Center can demonstrate improvement in students’ perceptions of their own writing.

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