<p>The writing centers created to serve predominately white institutions (PWIs) are not designed to meet the needs of Indigenous writers. Despite ostensible moves towards equity and social justice, Indigenous peoples often remained overlooked in writing center studies, partly due to the lack of attention paid to centers in Indigenous-serving institutions. <em>Weaving Centers of Resistance</em> responds to this gap by mapping the writing centers and tutoring centers at Indigenous serving institutions, investigating how tutoring pedagogy for writing is adapted in these contexts, and developing recommendations for culturally relevant writing center pedagogy. The research was conducted in three stages: A survey designed to collect basic demographic information was sent to 33 Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs),  35 Native American-serving, Non-Tribal Institutions (NASNTIs), and 13 Native Hawaiian-serving Institutions (NHSIs). From participants in the survey, 10 writing and tutoring center practitioners were recruited for two rounds of virtual interviews. Finally, two interview participants were recruited for virtual case study interviews. This dissertation is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter contextualizes this project in Indigenous movements towards rhetorical sovereignty set against composition’s implication in racist ideologies. The second chapter lays out the history of western colonial education, surveys Indigenous topics in writing center studies, and argues for decolonizing the writing center movement towards just pedagogies. The third chapter troubles empirical methodologies within writing center studies and discusses the methodologies and methods used for this study. The fourth chapter offers findings from the survey sent to Indigenous-serving institutions. The fifth chapter introduces the ten writing and tutoring center practitioners interviewed for this study. The sixth chapter reports on themes developed in qualitative coding of interviews. The final chapter synthesizes the findings, discusses limitations, and offers a path forward for writing center practitioners working with Indigenous peoples. A few of the key findings of this project are the prevalence of learning centers in Indigenous-serving institutions, the deeply intersectional challenges faced by Indigenous writers, and the importance of relationship for tutoring in Indigenous contexts. This work attempts to offer practitioners in Native educational contexts better tools to teach writing from Indigenous perspectives and provides scholars across humanities strategies for rethinking resistance to linguistic colonialism.</p>

Writing center directors (WCDs) often situate their programs in physical and virtual spaces without fully studying the pedagogical and political implications of their decisions. Without intense study, writing centers risk building programs within spaces that undermine their missions and philosophies. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre argues that "From the analytic standpoint, the spatial practice of a society is revealed through the deciphering of its space" (38). The study of space also reveals important political and financial priorities within the institution. Furthermore, the positioning of buildings and the spatial layout of a campus display the institution's priorities and attitudes toward writing center work. Theorizing the Online Writing Lab (OWL) through the lens of cultural and political geographies, it becomes apparent that the physical spaces of many writing centers are not as sustainable as WCDs might like, and in many ways, they are marginalized within the larger institution. This dissertation prompts a rearticulation of place and space in the writing center. In this dissertation, I argue that in an attempt to rethink current practices, the virtual space of the writing center should perpetuate, extend, and improve the social practices employed in our physical spaces. I draw from mapping exercises to inform my critique in an attempt to advance our understanding of writing center physical and virtual spaces. The changing geographical and cultural landscape of the institution demands that writing centers pay close attention to spatial implications as they employ technology to create dynamic virtual resources and more sustainable spaces. I rearticulate writing center spaces through cognitive and digital mapping, urban planning, and architectural theories. I make several contributions through this work: theoretical, to rearticulate the physical and virtual space of writing center work; political, to understand the constructions of the writing center's pedagogical spaces; and pedagogical, to understand best practices for creating virtual spaces that enhance learning, unlike those we have seen before or have had available in the writing center.

In this study, I will first examine the institutional position of writing centers as they were published on starting in 1993 in order to gauge how those writing centers report successfully integrating into their institutions. Once a precursory set of trends and integration factors have been identified, I will then interview current writing center professionals about the institutional position of their own writing centers to determine if the parameters for the successful integration of writing center into their institutions have changed. To better describe and analyze these parameters for integration, I will apply a theoretical framework of my own design that uses systems theory, network theory, and organizational learning to create a more nuanced and critical understanding of how and why these parameters for integration change and what key factors writing center professionals should consider when examining their own writing center’s institutional position and integration.

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The purpose of this qualitative dissertation was to seek characteristics common to writing tutorials because current discussions and assessments of tutorials rely strongly on specific pedagogical approaches that may or may not be present in all tutorials. This dissertation seeks characteristics common to all tutorials. A second purpose of this dissertation was to explore differences in those characteristics based on levels of flow, a measure of how much a person is likely to repeat an experience, felt by both students and tutors. The dissertation begins with a review of literature to establish where current understandings of tutorials developed. It then progresses to an examination of six total cases. The cases are made up of individual tutorials; the data points included observation notes from the tutorials, survey results from student and tutor participants, interview data from students and tutors, and video and transcript data from the tutorials themselves. Grounded theory was used to analyze the data, meaning data was reviewed many times and coded through open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. Data analysis revealed eight characteristics in verbal and nonverbal categories. The verbal categories are questions, praise, mentions of time, negotiating an agenda, and postponing. The nonverbal categories are writing on the text, gaze, and smiling/laughing. These characteristics, with the exception of postponing, are common to all of the tutorials examined. The fine details of how each characteristics is displayed in each tutorial differ depending on the flow score of the session. The dissertation is able to present general characteristics of all writing tutorials that differ in fine detail based on high and low flow scores. / Department of English

<p>Writing centers and writing programs, as well as the role of their administrators, are shaped by historical and disciplinary factors that have been closely examined by scholars over the last half century. However, the role of institutionality in writing center and writing program administration (WPA) studies has been ignored in much of the scholarship about these two sub-disciplines. This dissertation examines the role of institutionality by developing a new method, relationship-mapping, as a way of understanding how the complex nature of institutional contexts impacts the work of writing centers and writing programs. Through a study of 13 small liberal arts colleges, it is determined that the factors of this specific institution type shape and transform the ways in which centers and programs develop relationships and collaborations to teach and support writing. Relationship-mapping shows promise, though, beyond small colleges and could be used at a multitude of institution types as a way to responsibly critique institutions and how they support students, as well as a way to study institutional cultures of writing. </p>

<p>The Elon Research Seminar, <i>Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer</i>, was a coalition of rhetoric and composition scholars’ attempt at codifying writing transfer knowledge for teaching and research purposes. Although the seminar was an important leap in transfer research, many ‘behind the scenes’ decisions of writing transfer, often those not involving the writing program, go unnoticed, yet play a pivotal role in how writing programs encourage and reproduce writing transfer in the classroom. This dissertation study, inspired by a pilot study conducted in Fall 2018 on writing across the curriculum programs and their role in writing transfer, illustrates how an institution’s context systems (e.g., macrosystem, mesosystem, microsystem, etc.) affect writing programs’ processes—i.e., curriculum components, assessment, and administrative structure and budget—and vice versa. Using Bronfenbrenner and Morris’ (2006) bioecological model, I show how writing programs and their context systems interact to reproduce writing transfer practices. Through ten interviews with writing program administrators at state comprehensive universities, I delineate specific actions that each writing program could take to encourage writing transfer. I develop a list of roles and responsibilities a university’s context systems play in advocating writing transfer practices. The results of the study show that research beyond the writing classroom and students is necessary to understand how writing transfer opportunities arise in university cultures of writing.</p>