This research uses a mixed methods approach to explore the both the preparation for and perceptions of graduate consultant writing center work. A review of literature shows a gap in both the knowledge surrounding graduate writing consultant education and the long-term outcomes or transfer of writing center training and work to post-graduate careers. The survey instruments in this study draw from two established studies, the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project and the National Census of Writing, while a request for curricular artifacts draws on case study research conducted by Jackson et al. Findings indicate that graduate consultants are being prepared for their work in writing centers, but that directors are not intentionally including discussions of how that work may transfer into academic careers, particularly those in writing center leadership. Despite this, current and alumni graduate consults report both immediate and long-term transfer of writing center experiences, skills, and knowledge into their occupations. The transfer of learning is perceived as being most profound for those who have remained in the academy as either professors or administrators. This research has implications for graduate students, directors, and institutions, and I conclude with an analysis of how directors can be more intentional in their work with graduate consultants in order to better prepare a new generation of writing center administrators who are aware of the academic, political, and scholarly opportunities that are possible through writing center careers.

As multimodal composing plays more prominent roles in academic, professional, and public life, writing centers are challenged to take on multiliteracy work, and some have even gone so far as to redefined themselves as multiliteracy centers. However, writing centers that take on this work will find process theory, which has dominated writing consulting since the 1970s, inadequate for the task. A study of the history of the higher- and lower-order concern prioritizing strategy demonstrates the shortcomings of process pedagogy-based tenets of writing center practice. They represent historical vestiges of the field’s struggle for disciplinary legitimacy rather than a response to exigencies of composing. Teaching multiliteracies instead demands a rhetoric-based approach. This project explores what such an approach would mean for the writer/consultant interaction, consulting staffs, the writing center’s institutional identity, and centers' role in the public sphere. I redefine the role of writing consultant as rhetoric consultant and propose a writing/multiliteracy center-specific pedagogy of multimodal design. The focus then turns to finding definitions of centers that can shape their evolving identities and construct multiliteracy work as integral rather than an add-on. Drawing upon Kenneth Burke’s frames of acceptance, I examine the limitations of the field’s defining mythologies and propose a way forward in identity formation, shaping definitions of writing/multiliteracy centers that are at once stable and flexible. Finally, this project argues for a fresh interpretation of the center’s core identity as a democratizing force. John Dewey's definition of publics helps to define the field's democratizing mission as a project of extending access to education to diverse groups of people. Projected growth in the number and diversity of higher education enrollments offers writing/multiliteracy centers important opportunities to shepherd underrepresented groups through college. However, a more ambitious democratizing mission stands within reach: the changing landscape of composing challenges centers to support composers who want to take active roles in the public sphere. This project proposes pedagogical shifts that make public work possible. / text

This report addresses how leaders at the Undergraduate Writing Center (UWC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) can respond to changes in administration, staff, and funding to promote awareness and recognition of the UWC and increase funding to both preserve and enhance UWC programs and services that will address the needs of UT’s dynamic student population. In doing so, I apply reflective and deliberative practitioner theories to writing center work, analyzing my work at the UWC from the perspective of a reflective practitioner and participatory planner. I first provide an overview of the UWC. I then explore theories related to writing pedagogy and practice and serving as a reflective and deliberative practitioner. Next, I discuss trends in the university climate in general and UT in particular, using them to contextualize the challenges affecting the UWC as an organization working with the university system as it enters into the transition period. Finally, I propose responses to these challenges as well as future directions for UWC leaders. / text

This research sought to ascertain through a phenomenological approach whether and how collaboration occurs in writing center administration. The reflections and perceptions of former writing center gWPAs provided insight into a variety of institutional contexts and experiences present in writing center collaboration. The participants perceived themselves as learning skills that have helped them succeed in faculty, administrative, and personal situations. But there is more than these interpersonal developments in their stories; they see their writing center collaboration as necessary for the daily work of the writing center and for their success in carrying out daily tasks as gWPAs and administrators. Despite some of the participants believing they could have been more immersed in the politics of the institution or even more immersed in the collaborative work of the writing center, they nevertheless credit their experiences with a deeper understanding of the institutional structure and writing center work. Additionally, they report transferring their learning from administrative collaboration to aspects of their life and career outside of the writing center.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OFMelissa Kinsella, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Rhetoric and Composition, presented on February 26, 2021, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: GRADUATE TUTORS/INSTRUCTORS: NAVIGATING SHIFTING IDENTITY ROLESMAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Lisa J. McClure Writing centers directors at many universities staff graduate student as tutors; these graduate students receive support for their graduate education while also fulfilling important role in the university. These graduate tutors can hold dual roles as both tutors and instructors - Graduate tutors/instructors (GTIs) as I have called them. GTIs have complex identities that include graduate, student, instructor, and tutor components. GTIs navigate between shifting roles as both classroom instructors and writing center peer collaborative tutors. There is a preexisting writing peer collaborative pedagogy and ethos that GTIs are expected to uphold when becoming writing center tutors. This phenomenological qualitative research study utilizes a survey and follow-up interview to specifically explore how GTIs view and experience their peer tutoring relationships, collaborative tutoring techniques, and their navigation and shift from instructor to tutor. GTIs are studied within the context of SIUC’s writing center. The results of this research offer initial insight into the GTI experience and provide a starting point for exploring the GTI experience on a larger and deeper scale. Writing center pedagogy emphasizes a peer tutoring dynamic; results find that GTIs feel differing degrees of peer frequencies dependent on both the GTIs’ and tutees’ demographic. Further, collaborative techniques are offered within writing center scholarship to enact peer tutoring exchanges; results identify a tendency to collaborate with all tutee demographics with frequency differences reflecting the stage of the writing process and tutee need. The peer and collaborative results present scenarios in which peer and collaborative tutoring doesn’t necessarily go hand-in-hand, while also suggesting that collaborative techniques could be used in spite of a peer relationship; collaboration could also be utilized to enact a peer exchange, even when a peer relationship isn’t present. Moreover, there are ways that shifting from instructor to tutor impacts the tutoring exchange in terms of tutor authority, knowledge, evaluation, and technique. Writing center directors and researchers should acknowledge the complexity of the GTI experience in order to support and understand the GTI exchange and navigation. Keywords: peer tutor, graduate tutor, writing center collaboration, instructor to tutor navigation

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In 1984, Stephen North said of writing center research: "There is not a single published study of what happens in writing center tutorials" (433). In the eighteen years since then, writing center practitioners and scholars have produced impressive research and development work, but few empirical studies have added to the sub-field of computer-mediated writing conferencing, though there are more than 300 online writing labs, OWLs, listed on the National Writing Centers Association website. This study started with the understanding that there are significant behavior, communication, and tutoring technique differences between online tutoring and face-to-face tutoring that can affect tutor training, which the research from the fields of computers and composition, computer-mediated communication, and writing centers shows. The purpose of this research was to describe the nature of the online writing lab tutorial. Qualitative analysis was used to prepare a full picture of the online tutoring sessions of three tutors over a six-week period in the Radford University Writing Center. The researcher took the role of participant/observer/interviewer for the sessions. Interviews and talk during conferences with the tutors, were transcribed, coded and contextualized, adding to the understanding of the tutor?s online work. Using a functional analysis model created by Gere and Abbott (1985) and applied by Hewett (1999), transcripts of the tutorial conferences were divided by linguistic idea units and coded according to function, intent, and consciousness. Additionally, a coding scheme was created out of the interview transcripts and from the tutorial responses of this study that focused on the technical and social aspects of the online conferencing, which helped objectify the nature of computer-mediated conference. / Ph. D.

This dissertation unites two seemingly unrelated fields, writing centers and technical writing, to study the feasibility of creating an online technical writing resource. Despite prolonged attention to multiliteracies and collaboration in both subfields, writing centers and technical writing do not commonly implicate one another in their shared mission of shaping students to become savvy writers with an awareness of rhetorical concepts and situations. This dissertation establishes how complementary these two fields are based upon their shared pedagogies of collaboration and multiliteracies. I suggest that a service design approach is beneficial to writing center research. Similarly, the technical writing field has little research and scholarship dedicated specifically to online writing instruction and pedagogy. Historically, writing centers have served students from all disciplines, but research demonstrates the effectiveness of specialist over generalist writing support. Taking a specialist perspective, I use service design methodology to gather input from student and instructor stakeholders about how online writing tutoring and web resources can address their needs. Using survey and interview data, I designed and piloted an online tutoring service for students enrolled in the Technical Writing service course at Virginia Tech. In student and instructor surveys, participants reported that they were highly unlikely to use online tutoring sessions but were more likely to use a course-specific website. Additionally, student interviews revealed that the Writing Center is not necessarily a highly-used resource, especially for upper-level students. Instructor interviewees indicated some misunderstandings and limited views of the Writing Center's mission. Nevertheless, a small number of participants in both groups spoke to a need for specialized tutoring in the Technical Writing course. In terms of feasibility, integration of online services for this course poses the greatest challenge because it relates to the amount of change needed to successfully integrate online tutoring or web resources into the curriculum. With some attention to how OWLs and synchronous online tutoring can be an asset to teaching technical writing online, I argue that the pilot project described in this study is relatively feasible. / Doctor of Philosophy / A feasibility study addresses whether or not an idea or plan is good. In the case of this dissertation, the idea is whether or not to offer online writing services—such as tutoring and a repository website—to students enrolled in Technical Writing at Virginia Tech. In order to study the feasibility of this plan, I first argue for bringing together the fields of writing centers and technical writing. Two strong reasons for uniting these fields are based upon their shared methods and practices of teaching collaboration and multiliteracies. Multiliteracies in this dissertation refers to critical, functional, and rhetorical computer literacies; each literacy is important for Technical Writing students to develop as they enter their future careers. Historically, writing centers are places on a college or university campus where students from all disciplines can go for tutoring; this is known as the generalist approach to writing tutoring. However, research demonstrates the effectiveness of a specialist approach—where a tutor is familiar with a student’s discipline—to writing tutoring over generalist writing support. Therefore, I take a specialist perspective in this study. I use service design system of methods to gather input from student and instructor stakeholders about how online writing tutoring and web resources can address their needs. Service design is commonly used in the service economy, such as restaurants and hotels, in order to design or redesign services. In particular, service design focuses on people and their needs. Using survey and interview data, I designed and piloted an online tutoring service and a website for students enrolled in the Technical Writing service course at Virginia Tech. In student and instructor surveys, participants reported that they were highly unlikely to use online tutoring sessions but were more likely to use a course-specific website. Additionally, student interviews revealed that the Writing Center at Virginia Tech is not necessarily a highly-used resource, especially for upper-level students. Instructor interviewees indicated some misunderstandings and limited views of the Writing Center’s mission. Nevertheless, a small number of participants in both groups spoke to a need for specialized tutoring in the Technical Writing course. In terms of feasibility, integration of online services for this course poses the greatest challenge because it relates to the amount of change needed to successfully integrate online tutoring or web resources into the curriculum. With some attention to how online writing labs and synchronous online tutoring can be an asset to teaching technical writing online, I argue that the pilot project described in this study is relatively feasible.

This dissertation examines the theory and praxis of taking an expanded concept of the human-computer interface (HCI) and working with the resulting concept to design a writing center website that facilitates online tutoring while fostering a conversational approach for online tutoring sessions. In order to foster a conversational approach, I explore the ways in which interactive digital technologies support the collaborative and communicative nature of online tutoring. I posit that my research will yield a deeper understanding of the visual rhetoric of human-designed computer interfaces in general and writing center online tutoring websites in particular, and will, at the same time, provide support and rationale for the use of interactive digital technologies that utilize the space within the interface to foster a conversational approach to online tutoring, an outcome that the writing center community strongly encourages but acknowledges is difficult to achieve in online tutoring situations (Bell, Harris, Harris and Pemberton, Gillespie and Lerner, Hobson, Monroe, Rickley, Thomas et. al). The resulting prototype design that I submit as part of this dissertation was developed by considering the surface and conceptual dimensions of the HCI along with pedagogies that support interactivity, exploration, communication, collaboration, and community.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / As an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to work in the University Writing Center (UWC) at IUPUI. This opportunity influenced my life in many ways, but none more important than my teaching. Looking back on my time in the UWC, I did not realize the connection between writing centers and composition classrooms. As a graduate student, I began to read literature that defined composition classrooms and writing centers as separate worlds. However, once I was an instructor, these two worlds were seamless weaving in and out of each other to the point that I couldn’t separate them. In fact, I didn’t understand how one could. I had read literature defining composition classrooms and writing centers as different worlds but was having experiences in the classroom that contradicted this perception, so I wanted to investigate how these experiences influenced my teaching. I sought out literature that explored the writing center-composition classroom connection to look at specific elements of my teaching and how they tied to UWC practices. This case study grew out of the initial challenges I faced as a new instructor, which led me on a journey to find my own approach to teaching composition. That journey resulted in the implementation of writing center best practices, that I learned as a tutor, into my teaching philosophy, and this background equipped me to approach writing instruction as a facilitator, guiding students to become better writers.This case study examines which writing center practices, gleaned from my experiences in the UWC at IUPUI, I’ve incorporated into my classroom, why I’ve chosen these practices, and what student feedback reveals about these practices.