Narrating the Writing Center: Knowledge, Crisis, and Success in Two Writing Center Stories' is year-long comparative case study of two writing centers in the US and the UK and draws upon ethnographic and textographic methodologies. Using writing center documents such as annual management reports, websites, training materials, and interviews with writing center staff and administration, I investigate historical, cultural, and political influences on writing centers and trace moments of change in writing center history in order to contextualize the changes both writing centers faced in terms of funding, location, and identity. I examine traditional and contemporary epistemological paradigms that inform writing centers' everyday practices and underlying ideology that both correspond with and resist institutionally-sanctioned ways of knowing and institutionally-embedded ideology. Using documents and interviews from both sites, I explore the ways in which writing centers find themselves in a reactive position during crises, such as the crisis of access, of literacy, and of funding, rather than a proactive position. Drawing from frame analysis, I argue for reframing the narratives surrounding writing center identity and praxis through the use of code words which have the potential to align writing center praxis with institutional values and result in increased agency for writing centers during crises. I conclude with a blending of contemporary definitions of kairos and stasis in order to create a rhetorical method of writing center communication that can serve as a potential path toward writing center sustainability, and I offer current writing center administrators a heuristic for implementation.

Although researchers in composition studies have examined the instructional conditions that help students revise successfully, there is little published scholarship about how college students use feedback from a peer tutor in the revising process. Thus, I designed a qualitative, collective case study to investigate how students revised after writing center conferences. I used the conceptual framework of activity theory to analyze the entire system of student revision. I used the concept of situation definition to examine how students' understanding of writing conferences and rhetorical concepts, such as revision, changed (or did not change) during the writing conference. I analyzed the revisions with a taxonomy from a study by Faigley and Witte (1981). The findings of this study were centered on two different groups of students who had writing center conferences: those who had specific goals for their writing conferences and those who did not. Students who did not have specific goals for their conferences ceded authority to the writing consultant (the title that this writing center used instead of "peer tutor") who they believed could identify and correct sentence-level errors. When these students revised, they almost always integrated direct feedback about how to correct errors in grammar and mechanics because they believed that their instructors valued writing that was free of errors. But these students only integrated indirect feedback about microstructure revisions if they believed that the revisions were important to other aspects of the activity system such as their instructors. Students rarely made macrostructure revisions, but writing consultants rarely discussed this kind of revision. The writing consultants and the students without specific goals for their conferences had different situation definitions of the purpose of a writing conference and how to meaningfully revise their writing. The writing consultants did not try to promote situation re-definition by moving the discussion away from the text toward a conversation about the strategies that the student used to produce the draft. The conducted the conference at the level of the student in order to fulfill the student's agenda. This contradicted the main philosophy of the writing center, which was that a conference should be a productive conversation about the ideas in a piece of writing. The second group of students, who had specific goals for their conferences, consisted of writing consultants who also had writing conferences with other writing consultants. Writing consultants shared the same situation definition of the purpose of a writing conference and this led to them having productive conversations that framed the act of revision in a more complex way than "revising for the instructor." However, their conferences were focused on how to revise the text, so the consultants also did not try to promote situation re-definition to help their peers develop new writing strategies. The faculty in this research study had differing conceptions of the purpose of the writing center, but their situation definition was closer to that of the students who believed that the writing center was for helping students edit their texts. Instructors used the writing center as a resource to help their students revise their writing, but those who believed the writing center was only for basic writing assignments did not use the writing center or relied on writing consultants with specialized knowledge to help them. An important implication of this research is that peer tutors should be trained to elicit the students' situation definitions of what a writing conference is for and what it means to meaningfully revise. In this way, peer tutors can structure an activity that focuses on helping students to develop situation definitions that are more appropriate for successfully revising their academic writing and for completing future writing projects. Writing centers can also work to help instructors develop more appropriate situation definitions of what a writing conference can do for their students.

This study presents empirical research to contribute to the ongoing debate between Writing Center (WC) scholars concerning theoretical conceptions and perceptions of tutor and tutee roles and identities as peers, novices, and/or experts. The study explores how symmetrical (peer) and asymmetrical (expertnovice) identities are locally co-constructed and reconstructed in turn-by-turn utterances between WC tutors and tutees. Audio-recorded data of 30-minute WC conferences were collected and micro-analyzed within the parameters of Conversation Analysis. The data reveal that, contrary to the label of peer tutoring, tutors and tutees more frequently reinforced their macro-level statuses as experts and novices, respectively. For tutors, expert identities were co-constructed by using tag questions, controlling turn and topic allocations, less frequently ratifying tutee’s contributions, and by rejecting the tutee’s contributions—either what the tutee wrote or said—more frequently; at the same time, tutees co-constructed their own noviceness by more frequently ratifying the tutor’s contributions, more frequently boosting ratification, less frequently rejecting the tutor’s contributions, less frequently controlling turn and topic allocations, and by not asking tag questions. Where the macro-level expert-novice dichotomy was more easily reinforced micro-interactionally, achieving peer identities involved cooperative coconstruction by the tutor and the tutee. The data suggest that peer identities required the following conditions to exist: (1) tutors who wished to distributeagency to their tutees in order to co-construct a more symmetrical—or peer— relationship had to less frequently employ interactional strategies that index their own expertise; (2) tutees had to accept the agency that tutors distributed to them, which contributes to tutee empowerment; (3) tutees had to use interactional strategies that typically indexed expertise for tutors—such as turn and topic control and use of tag questions—and decrease the frequency of interactional strategies that index their own noviceness, such as frequent ratification and boosting; (4) tutors and tutees had to share evenly balanced frequencies of the interactional strategies that index both expertise and noviceness; (5) tutors and tutees continued to re-establish conditions 1-4 throughout the conference to maintain a symmetrical power relationship. Shifting the agency from the more powerful tutor to the less powerful tutee accomplishes two things: tutee empowerment and establishing a more symmetrical power relationship between the tutor and the tutee. This study contributes to the small, but growing branch of research that seeks to better understand how scholars’ theoretical perceptions of tutor and tutee identities as experts or peers compare to the in-the-moment representations of tutors and tutees that empirical research reveals.

In this thesis, I investigate the extent to which creative writing impacts the ways writing tutors work with student writers on their academic writing. In doing so, I interview five writing tutors with creative writing experiences for their personal definitions of creative writing, and the extent to which drawing on, or ignoring, creative writing impacts their writing tutoring. Through combining the interviews with reflections into my writer identities, I find creative writing focuses on self-expression and narrative features which strengthen disciplinarity and conventions. Additionally, focusing on creative writing’s influence in the writing center allows tutors to engage as fellow writers able to learn alongside the students they tutor. Specifically, I notice writing tutors perceive a division between creative and academic writing. Crossing that perceived division requires a willingness to confront assumptions about academic and creative writing, but allows for the opportunity for tutors and the students they tutor to deepen their writing processes.

This study concerns itself with tutor attitudes toward tutoring creative writers in writing centers. In it, I look at these attitudes and compare tutor definitions of creative writing, tutor comfort with tutoring writers, and tutor training. Tutors attitudes toward their training and their beliefs about what training to tutor creative writers should entail tell a great deal about the privileging of creative writing and creative writers in writing centers. This study is an important first step in considering that privileging, its source, and its effects. For the study, tutors completed an online survey. They were not asked for any identifying information, and online software allowing the tracking of IP addresses and email addresses was disabled so that no identifying information could be collected. It is my hope that this study will aid the writing center field in reconsidering the ways in which writing center theory and practice meet, and in constructing a better way to bring ideals and practice together. Because writing center tutors are in a unique position as frontline practitioners and reader/writers of writing center theory, understanding their attitudes is an important step towards lessening the gap between our ideals and our realities.

Recuperating Composition’s lore in postdisciplinarity in order to illustrate the polyvalent, multidirectional positionality of our practices, this study argues that Composition’s lore, as it functions in a community of practice, helps locate and address various challenges with the cultural displacement that burgeoning scholars experience as they critically negotiate their practices within the expectations of the academy. Bridging the communities of writing teachers in classrooms and writing centers in a demonstration of institutional polyvalence, this ethnographic study’s participants suggest the reflexive influence of postdisciplinary lore in the cultivation of authority and practitioner identity. As one point of access to this cultural negotiation, the transmission and application of myth contextualizes lore as cultural phenomena affecting both professional and pedagogical development in graduate student teachers and tutors. This study concludes that the reflexivity offered in postdisciplinary sites of cultural engagement encourages a negotiated, recursive power relation between the institution and the practitioner, thus creating multiple, malleable sites of authority and agency within disciplinary culture.

This thesis presents the findings of a study of writing center tutorial practices in a Middle Eastern university where the language of instruction is English. Data from stimulated recall activities, written observations, and interviews were analyzed to answer the following research questions: 1. How do tutees perceive the effectiveness of writing center tutorials? 2. How do tutors perceive the effectiveness of writing center tutorials? 3. Which type of tutoring approach do tutees find more effective? 4. Which type of tutoring approach do tutors find more effective? The data revealed that tutees noticed an improvement in their assignments, believed that their concerns had been addressed, and that they had acquired transferable skills. Most tutees assessed their tutors positively, valuing tutors who inspired confidence and were able to explain concepts clearly. Although tutees appreciated knowledgeable tutors, they valued egalitarian peer-tutoring relationships. Tutors reported that tutorial sessions improved their tutees' assignments and that tutees had acquired transferable skills. Nevertheless, tutors were critical of their own performance. Some tutors admitted to lacking the knowledge necessary to explain certain writing concepts, including grammatical concepts; some felt they dominated the tutorials; and others felt their approach was too directive. The data revealed that both tutors and tutees preferred the directive approach for lower order concerns and a non-directive approach for higher order concerns. This study shows that diverse tutoring models that accommodate the background and experiences of Middle Eastern students, and their particular strengths and weaknesses, should be considered. It recommends tutorial training that emphasizes flexibility and recognizes the distinctive nature of each tutorial situation and the opportunity it presents to address the needs and expectations of individual students. These findings could signal a direction for the development of writing center pedagogy that focuses on the linguistically and culturally diverse students in the Middle East.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010. / Title from screen (viewed on July 29, 2010). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Stephen L. Fox, Susan C. Shepherd, Teresa Molinder Hogue. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-70).

The purpose of this study was to determine the roles that Native English speaking (NES) and non-native English speaking (NNES) tutors play in sessions with NES and NNES tutees in a U.S. Midwestern university's writing center, according to the perceptions of both types of tutors and tutees. The study also aimed to determine the extent to which the "native speaker fallacy"--the preference for anything related to native speakers over anything related to non-native speakers--was evident in these perceptions, particularly in tutoring strategies, difficulties in tutoring, and tutoring competence. The researcher collected data for the study from pre- and post-session interviews of both types of tutors and cross-analyzed coded patterns from this data with patterns found in pre- and post-session interviews of both types of tutees and with the researcher's observations of the participants' sessions. According to the research results, both tutors' and tutees' perceptions as expressed in their interviews were more affected by the tutors' status, NES versus NNES, than by specific qualifications of the tutors to assist tutees, with the responses revealing the participants' assumption of native speakers' superiority. Despite cross-analyzed findings that NNES tutors were perceived as more able to explain the causes of error, findings also revealed NES tutors' confidence in their NES status as compensating for their lack of grammar knowledge and NNES tutors' perception of themselves as inferior and needing to compensate for their non-NES status through teacher-like directness in assistance offered. Also, despite tutees' expressed appreciation for NNES tutors' explanations of errors, tutees still expressed a preference for NES tutors and applied a double standard, with NNES tutors seen as effective only if proved to be good writers and NES tutors assumed to be effective by virtue of their native speaker status. Drawing upon findings suggesting the influence of the native speaker fallacy on the participants' perceptions, the researcher concludes by discussing the significance of this study for identifying possible university initiatives to enhance appreciation of diverse cultures and for suggesting that although intrinsic knowledge of language seems preferred over learned knowledge, possessing both types of knowledge and the flexibility to employ more fluid roles as both peer and teacher would seem to equip tutors for more productive sessions.

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