Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Decolonizing Writing Centers: An Introduction, Glenn Hutchinson, Andrea Torres Perdigón

Writing Center Journal

Guest editors' introduction to The Writing Center Journal 42.1 (2024).

Front Matter

Writing Center Journal

Front matter for The Writing Center Journal 42:1 (2024).

Beyond Accommodations: Imagination, Decolonization, And The Cripping Of Writing Center Work, Karen Moroski-Rigney

Writing Center Journal

This article examines connections among disability, colonization, university policies, and writing center work in North America. By positing that university policies have long mimicked medical and scientific processes for creating—and then discriminating against—perceived categories of disability, this article makes interventions into traditional writing center practices and pedagogies without dismissing the spirit with which these aspects of our field came to be. The article has several central claims:

• Disability has been constructed by nondisabled entities (including doctors, scientists, and institutions).
  
  
• Disability’s “drift” and myriad forms act as both specter and insidious insurance against progress or inclusive design.
  
  
• Writing center scholarship has …

Centerless? Making Sense Of Disruptions In The Graduate Writing Center, Shannon Mcclellan Brooks

Writing Center Journal

This critical self-reflection is not a success story; rather, it is an effort of decolonial thinking that reckons with the idea, experience, and practice of centerlessness during pandemic-induced online transitions and operations in a graduate writing center (GWC). By tracing the contours of a series of interlocking disruptions the author and her graduate writing center community experienced during COVID-19, this article brings into sharp focus present colonial legacies inhibiting effective developments, moves, and adaptations to the GWC physical center space and praxis. Through retrospectively following pandemic-induced disruptions to her center, the author critically engages how epistemologies of coloniality and modernity …

Decolonizing Tutor And Writing Center Administrative Labor: An Autoethnography Of A South Asian Writing Center’S Personnel, Saurabh Anand

Writing Center Journal

This piece informs my journey of thinking and contextualizing the validity of autoethnography as a decolonial qualitative research method in writing center scholarship. This piece provides the lilt of everyday writing center initiatives, labor, and workings using five email exchanges as data depicting my interactions with various writing center stakeholders as a transnational writing center studies student-tutor, administrator, and doctoral student from South Asia, specifically India. This piece also argues how I used my experiences as one of a writing center’s personnel as a tool of empowerment in my liminal position in my writing center and elaborates on those experiences, …

Back Matter

Writing Center Journal

Back Matter for Writing Center Journal 41.3. Contains a Call for Nominations for the 2024 Muriel Harris Outstanding Service Award.

Re/Searching (For) Hope: Archives And (Decolonizing) Archival Impressions, Romeo Garcia

Writing Center Journal

On archives and archival impressions, this essay extends archival research to the elsewhere and otherwise. The essay asks, how do we reposition the contents of archives so that we can position ourselves in relation to it otherwise? It puts forward a theory of (decolonizing) archival impressions.

Reflexiones Sobre La Construcción De Espacios Bilingües: Los Centros De Escritura Como Puentes De Diálogo Académico En Torno A La Escritura Y A La Cultura, Andrea Salamanca Mesa, Ana Sofía Ramírez Viancha

Writing Center Journal

This article reflects on the creation of bilingual spaces, focusing on writing centers as facilitators of academic dialogue regarding academic writing and culture. The writing centers of Pontifical Javeriana University and Florida International University jointly explore how these centers can serve as bridges to promote effective communication and cultural exchange in educational environments where different languages coexist. The analysis addresses the significance of these spaces in fostering linguistic diversity and the impact on academic development. Este artículo reflexiona sobre la creación de espacios bilingües, centrándose en los Centros de Escritura como facilitadores del diálogo académico en torno a la escritura …

Forging The Future: A History Of The John Martinson Honors College, 2013–2023, Emily Allen, Jannine Huby, Pulkit Manchanda

The Founders Series

Forging the Future: A History of the John Martinson Honors College, 2013–2023 is the story of a collaborative effort to build a visionary place: an academic-residential college that would bring together students from across disciplines and differences to rethink the goals and practices of a college education. Designed to be a hub for interdisciplinary learning and innovative pedagogy at Purdue University and a national leader in honors education, the John Martinson Honors College (JMHC) was first and foremost a dream of the future. How that collective dream took shape—from the first, speculative discussions of a college to the literal construction …

Digitizing Delphi: Educating Audiences Through Virtual Reconstruction, Kate Koury

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

Implementing a 3D model into a virtual space allows the general public to engage critically with archaeological processes. There are many unseen decisions that go into reconstructing an ancient temple. Analysis of available materials and techniques, predictions of how objects were used, decisions of what sources to reference, puzzle piecing broken remains together, and even educated guesses used to fill gaps in information often go unobserved by the public. This work will educate users about those choices by allowing the side-by-side comparison of conflicting theories on the reconstruction of the Tholos at Delphi, which is an ideal site because of …

The Idea Of A Writing Center In Brazil: A Different Beat, Ron Martinez

Writing Center Journal

This article explores the emergence and development of writing centers in Brazil, using the author’s experience founding the Centro de Assessoria de Publicação Acadêmica (CAPA) at the Universidade Federal do Paraná as a case study. The author provides some historical context about Brazilian education and its traditional “banking model” of education (Paulo Freire) that did not value individual expression—including through writing. This model persisted even as composition studies evolved elsewhere. Academic literacy development in Brazil is thus a relatively recent phenomenon, and the effects of that paucity are felt among scholars in higher education settings. This motivated the author’s research …

Front Matter

Writing Center Journal

Front matter and editors' introduction to The Writing Center Journal 41:3 (2023).

An Exploratory Study Of Mindsets, Sense Of Belonging, And Help-Seeking In The Writing Center, Traci Freeman, Steve Getty

Writing Center Journal

In this exploratory study, we took as our point of departure Lori Salem’s (2016) call to investigate the factors that affect students’ decisions to visit the writing center. Rather than exploring student decision-making through a sociological lens, as Salem does, we drew on insights from social psychology to understand students’ motivations. We explored two self-theories drawn from social psychology that are associated with students’ academic achievement and with students’ help-seeking: (1) implicit beliefs about intelligence or “mindsets”; and (2) sense of belonging. Using questions from previously validated scales, we measured first-year students’ mindsets and sense of belonging and tested the …

Timely, Relevant, Practical: A Study Of Writing Center Summer Institute Alumni Perceptions Of Value And Benefits, Julia Bleakney, Mark Hall, Kelsey Hixson-Bowles, Sohui Lee, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran

Writing Center Journal

Since its inception in 2003, the IWCA Summer Institute (SI) has been understood within the writing center field to be an important professional development opportunity for new and experienced writing center professionals (WCPs). Publications on the SI to date have focused on anecdotal perceptions of the benefits to leaders and participants or on a single outcome, such as research output. Thus, the writing center field knows little about how and in what ways participants perceive the SI’s benefits across cohorts and across a variety of professional areas. By gathering quantitative and qualitative data from every SI cohort from 2003 to …

Accidental Outreach And Happenstance Staffing: A Cross-Institutional Study Of Writing Center Support Of First-Generation College Students, Beth A. Towle

Writing Center Journal

First-generation students (FGS) make up a significant percentage of college populations. However, they experience hardships that are less common for their continuing-generation peers. They struggle to understand the “rules” of college and lack the cultural capital that can help students succeed through generations of knowledge about how to navigate college. Writing centers attempt to lessen these burdens by providing outreach to marginalized student populations, including FGS. However, there has been a lack of cross-institutional research that examines exactly how writing centers support FGS. This article presents a mixed-methods study that begins to close that knowledge gap and demonstrate common patterns …

Writing Centers And Neocolonialism: How Writing Centers Are Being Commodified And Exported As U.S. Neocolonial Tools, Brian Hotson, Stevie Bell

Writing Center Journal

In this paper, we explore the complicity of writing centers in the Global North in global neocolonialism despite its resounding rejection within Western writing center scholarship, in which Romeo García contends that writing tutors can be “decolonial agents.” We show that higher education is used by governments in the Global North as a neocolonial tool and situate international U.S. writing center initiatives within this context. Writing centers have remained complicit in global neocolonialism involving the commodification and exportation of American English as well as Western-style institutions, curricula, and pedagogies. This is most explicit in recent writing center initiatives undertaken by …

Review: Unwell Writing Centers: Searching For Wellness In Neoliberal Educational Institutions And Beyond, Aurora Matzke

Writing Center Journal

“Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond” blends narrative, mixed methods research, and rhetorical analysis to make a case for the possibilities inherent in homegrown wellness practices that are “communal, political, and rooted in defiance of white supremacy.”

Effectively Affective: Examining The Ethos Of One Hbcu Writing Center, Karen Keaton Jackson, Amara Hand

Writing Center Journal

Over the past several decades, writing center scholarship has evolved to include multiple theories and pedagogies that led to widely used best practices. As is the case in many disciplines, often writing centers at large, research PWIs are most often cited and highlighted within the scholarship. While many of those readings do offer helpful strategies for working with students at all levels, often they do not account for the unique contexts and diverse student populations that make up many HBCUs. As a result, more research from a variety of writing centers is needed so practitioners see there are multiple ways …

How Genre-Trained Tutors Affect Student Writing And Perceptions Of The Writing Center, Lucy Bryan Malenke, Laura K. Miller, Paul E. Mabrey Iii, Jared Featherstone

Writing Center Journal

Writing center scholars have long debated whether writers are best served by “generalist” tutors trained in writing center pedagogy or “specialist” tutors with insider knowledge about a course’s content or discipline-specific discourse conventions. A potential compromise that has emerged is training tutors in the purposes and features of specific genres. The writing center literature showcases many different approaches to genre training. However, little empirical research, if any, has explored how tutors’ genre knowledge affects session outcomes. The present study used a mixed-methods approach to compare session outcomes for students who worked with generalist and genre-trained tutors. We analyzed pre-consultation and …

Back Matter

Writing Center Journal

Back Matter for Writing Center Journal 41.3.