Education Commons^™

Wwa Reflection: Losing Sight, Making Scholarship, Sabrina M. Durso

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Wwa Reflection: “So Near Approach / The Sports Of Children And The Toils Of Men”: Pandemic Labour, Pandemic Imagination, Kathleen E. Lawton-Trask

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This reflection calls attention to the idea that the merging of the domestic and the intellectual, while especially intense during the pandemic year of 2020-21, is a familiar conundrum for women especially. It suggests that creativity can emerge from the intensity of domestic labour, noting the domestic mock-heroic poetry that was written by women in 18^th century Britain as a counterpoint to the rise of domesticity, and suggests that (for female academics who are also primary caregivers) scholarly responses and reflections may be easier to bring out of this pandemic moment than scholarly research.

Wwa Reflection: Building Writing Momentum: A Year Of Digital Conferences, Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This reflection, which considers the positive impact of attending online conferences on building writing momentum is in response to the ABO Call for Short Reflections (500-750 words) on Writing and Research during the Pandemic.

Race And Racism In Austen Spaces: National Trust In Jane Austen’S Empires Of Sugar, Tré Ventour-Griffiths

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Race And Racism In Austen Spaces: Notes On A Scandal: Sanditon Fandom’S Ongoing Racism And The Danger Of Ignoring Austen Discourse On Social Media, Amanda-Rae Prescott

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Sanditon fans have used social media more than many other past Jane Austen adaptations to discuss the series and to share news developments about the series. This was partially due to the COVID-19 pandemic preventing in-person marketing and fandom gatherings, but also due to some traditional Austen discussion platforms ignoring or banning pro-Sanditon discussions. White women from the UK and Europe dominated these online communities and set the tone for discussions of the plot as well as news about the series. BIPOC fans repeatedly clashed with white fans because the promises of an “inclusive” community were frequently dashed as soon …

Race And Racism In Austen Spaces: Eroticizing Men Of Empire In Austen, Kerry Sinanan

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Grasses, Groves, And Gardens: Aphra Behn Goes Green, Heidi Laudien

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Laudien argues in “Grasses, Groves and Gardens: Aphra Behn Goes Green” that Behn moves beyond the stylized and artificial backdrops of most pastoral to explore the unique ways the landscape can be manipulated to investigate gender difference and the dynamics of desire and representation. Laudien suggests that in prioritizing the pastoral as political allegory in Behn, we overlook the descriptions of nature and the importance she places on the natural environments she creates. Through close readings of several of her pastoral poems, Laudien reveals that Behn’s landscapes destabilize existing notions of the pastoral space as an idealized and organized place …

Dress As Deceptive Visual Rhetoric In Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, Kathryn S. Hansen

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Writers of fiction capitalize upon dress’s potential as an agent of deception, using clothing as a means through which characters control their identity to perpetuate lies. Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725) contains this type of heroine, and the novella shows dress can provide women with power that they can find in few other arenas. This novella constructs lying and dress as potent related tools that allow the protagonist to achieve her desires by creating untruths that pass for realities. In so doing, Fantomina capitalizes upon two related phenomena: the cultural perception of women’s status as innately …

Editors' Thanks To Dr. Linda Troost, Editor Of Ecw, Mona Narain

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Visions: Re-Historicizing Genre: Teaching Haywood’S The Adventures Of Eovaai In A Fantasy-Themed Survey Course, Megan E. Cole

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Eliza Haywood is an increasingly popular author to assign in eighteenth-century literature courses. But Haywood is also a prime figure to represent the eighteenth century in courses with a broader scope. This essay proposes teaching The Adventures of Eovaai in a fantasy-focused, introductory-level survey of British Literature. Identifying Eovaai as part of the fantasy tradition leverages students’ prior knowledge and facilitates teaching this complex novel to first-year students. Eovaai provides a wealth of topics for class discussions and activities, including the development of the novel as a genre, identity and othering in fantasy literature, and the use of fantasy conventions …

Visions: The Dance Most Of All: Envisioning An Embodied Eighteenth-Century Studies, Susannah Sanford, Sofia Prado Huggins

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

The editors introduce this special issue of ABO, highlighting the work of the authors included in the issue. The introduction draws on recent scholarship re-visioning the work of the long, “undisciplined” eighteenth century, arguing for an eighteenth-century studies that embodies our intersectional identities and honors the experiences of bodyminds surrounding texts and authors, as well as the bodyminds that interact with those texts in the present. Throughout the years, scholars have demonstrated that there is no single vision of what eighteenth-century scholarship is or should be, but rather multiple visions. This introduction urges scholars to consider how an eighteenth-century studies …

Building Networks Of Enterprise: Sustained Learning In The Writing Center, Steve Sherwood

Writing Center Journal

This essay examines the learning processes of writing center professionals through the lens of “networks of enterprise” (Wallace & Gruber, 1989), which reflects on the dynamic processes through which creative people, like writing center professionals (WCPs), bring together the diverse and complex tasks undertaken in their everyday work into a cohesive and satisfying career. While there is substantial turnover in the profession, some WCPs stay in writing center positions for decades. Drawing on information gathered through surveys and interviews with ten long-term WCPs (with an average of 28 years of experience), as well as reflecting on his own career, the …

A Balancing Act: Black Women Experiencing And Negotiating Racial Tension In The Center, Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison

Writing Center Journal

Writing centers increasingly have been concerned with issues of race and racism in the center. However, most of the conversation around race has centered on student writers, with references to tutors of color given only in passing or in the context of larger discussions on race. This study uses interview data and a grounded theory methodology to examine the experiences of racism and anti-Blackness in writing centers for female Black undergraduate and graduate peer tutors, categorizing the experiences in three ways: attacks on character and identity, denials of credibility, and silencing. Connections are drawn with the experiences the tutors have …

Agents Of Change: African American Contributions To Writing Centers, Sue Mendelsohn, Clarissa Walker

Writing Center Journal

African Americans and their contributions to our field’s first pedagogical models and operational structures are absent from writing center histories. This archival research invokes their presence by recounting the stories of five African American innovators—Bess Bolden “B. B.” Walcott, Coragreene Johnstone, Anne Cooke, Hugh Gloster, and Percival Bertrand “Bert” Phillips—spanning four decades at three historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Their stories invite an expansive understanding of writing center work, moving beyond a focus on traditional tutoring and strictly alphabetic literacies and into “strategic literacies”—the survival skills needed to stand up for oneself and one’s community in the face of …

“Was It Useful? Like, Really?”: Client And Consultant Perceptions Of Post-Session Satisfaction Surveys, Katie Levin, Sarah Selz, Meredith Steck, Eric Wisz

Writing Center Journal

Client satisfaction surveys have long been a cornerstone of writing center assessment, but to date, research on satisfaction surveys has largely focused on analyzing client responses from the survey and their administrative uses. Research rarely investigates why clients provide the responses they do and how consultants process these responses. This study, therefore, involved conducting separate client and consultant focus groups to learn about each population’s interactions with one writing center’s optional post-session satisfaction survey and the survey results. The findings revealed that while client participants used the survey to communicate high levels of satisfaction, client participants also thought about the …

Front Matter

Writing Center Journal

Front matter and editors' introduction to The Writing Center Journal 39:1–2 (2021).

Review: Advocating, Building, And Collaborating: A Resource Toolkit To Sustain Secondary School Writing Centers Edited By Renee Brown And Stacey Waldrup, Jenny Goransson

Writing Center Journal

The past decade has shown enormous growth in the number of SSWCs and a need for increased scholarship and research from this group. Inspired by the work of previous secondary school writing center director (SSWCD) authors, the content offered in the Advocating, Building, and Collaborating toolkit is rooted in directors’ real experiences in K–12 schools, rather than in the post-secondary context we find in most writing center scholarship.

Unicorn Status, Queer Activism, And Bullied Laboring: Lgbtq Writing Center Directors Reflect On Invisible Work, Travis Webster

Writing Center Journal

This article showcases interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) writing center directors about their administrative work. In it, findings reveal that participant work distinctly departs from recent empirical writing center research about labor (Geller & Denny, 2013; Caswell, Grutsch McKinney, & Jackson, 2016), particularly in ways that practitioners’ invisible administrative work is informed and complicated by their LGBTQ identities. Across 20 interviews, participants communicated that their work extends to making queer activist space through their writing centers; to supporting tutors, students, and colleagues of all orientations with issues central to queer communities and mental health; and to …

Centering The Emotional Labor Of Writing Tutors, Bethany Mannon

Writing Center Journal

Writing consultants regularly perform emotional labor. They suppress or express emotions to welcome clients and invoke enthusiasm to cultivate writers’ confidence. Because emotional labor performs these crucial functions, it merits focused attention in writing center studies. However, while research has considered the emotional needs that writers bring, scholars have not yet sufficiently examined the affective engagements that consultations require of writing consultants. The first section of this article presents a case for treating affective dimensions of tutoring as labor. The second section analyzes five tutor-training manuals using the Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF) to identify references to emotion and affect …

Faith, Secularism, And The Need For Interfaith Dialogue In Writing Center Work, Anna Sicari, Liliana M. Naydan, Andrea Rosso Efthymiou

Writing Center Journal

This article argues that religious and secularist identities complement and intersect in political ways with race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality and that they inform writing center practice because belief exists along a spectrum that involves all writing center inhabitants and affects all writing-centered conversations. We suggest that this spectrum of faith is evocative of the spectrums that theorists of race, gender, and sexuality in particular have discussed, yet often faith has been overlooked in discussions of identity in writing center work (Denny, 2010). We propose that theories of race, gender, sexuality and other identities that have served as springboards …

The Response To The Call For Rad Research: A Review Of Articles In The Writing Center Journal, 2007–2018, Havva Zorluel Ozer, Jing Zhang

Writing Center Journal

The study examined in this article explored the impact of RAD research on articles (N = 97) in a 12-year period of The Writing Center Journal (WCJ), in 2007–2012 and 2013–2018, to achieve four purposes: 1. to document the amount of replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research published in WCJ in two equal periods before and after Driscoll & Wynn Perdue’s (2012) call for RAD research in writing center scholarship; 2. to identify how WCJ articles score in individual areas specified in Driscoll & Wynn Perdue’s RAD research rubric; 3. to provide an understanding of methodological trends in research …

Nes And Nnes Student Writers’ Very Long Turns In Writing Center Conferences, Jo Mackiewicz, Zach Gasior

Writing Center Journal

Most tutors are trained in a core writing centers belief: Student writers who talk about their writing are student writers who will achieve better learning outcomes. Our comparative study—one of few in writing center research—examined the points in conferences in which student writers talked the most. We examined the very long turns (VLTs) of eight native English speaking (NES) student writers and eight non-native English speaking (NNES) student writers across 16 writing center conferences. We found that NESs contributed more VLTs than NNESs and that more NES conferences contained VLTs. We also found that stating goals for the conference occurred …

Review: Theories And Methods Of Writing Center Research: A Practical Guide Edited By Jo Mackiewicz And Rebecca Day Babcock, Emily Bouza

Writing Center Journal

With nine chapters on theories and 10 chapters on methods, all contributed by knowledgeable professionals, Theories and Methods of Writing Center Research: A Practical Guide, edited by Jo Mackiewicz & Rebecca Day Babcock, is the research guide I have been waiting for. I have previously conducted two IRB-approved studies on writing centers and am in the middle of my third; without this guide, I have had to pull from multiple sources and have tried to read between the lines of published articles to determine the theories, methods, and methodologies that might best suit a writing center-specific context as a …

Reflections On Award-Winning Books, 1985-2020

Writing Center Journal

Deidra Faye Jackson and Alice Johnston Myatt

Reflection: ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors

edited by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth, 2004

Composing An Anti-Racism And Social Justice Statement At A Rural Writing Center, Amanda Fields

Writing Center Journal

This article describes the year-long collaborative composing process of a rural writing center seeking to develop an anti-racism and social justice statement. The author reflects on the way in which rural perspectives are often dismissed, often seen as provincial and hostile towards ideas that might be included in an anti-racism and social justice statement. The piece also connects theories of composing, fluidity, and identity to the writing of the statement and provides a detailed analysis of the lengthy, often challenging composing process used. The author finds that the collaborative composing process, more than the resulting statement, was significant to the …

The Neglected “R”: Replicability, Replication, And Writing Center Research, Susanne Hall, Holly Ryan

Writing Center Journal

This article makes an argument for the value of both replicable research and replication research in writing center studies. In their discussion of replicability, the authors argue that writing about empirical research so that this research can be replicated will improve the quality of communication in writing center studies whether or not replication studies are subsequently undertaken. The authors further provide for researchers specific guidance on how to create replicable studies, focusing on best practices for describing data sets and sampling, sharing surveys and interview protocols, detailing coding efforts, establishing infrastructure to share data sets, and writing about statistics. Further, …

Praising Papers, Clarifying Concerns: How Writers Respond To Praise In Writing Center Tutorials, Mike Haen

Writing Center Journal

In face-to-face writing center tutorials, tutor praise is an action that builds rapport and motivates writers (Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2013). Drawing on and extending prior interactional analyses of praise, this article examines writers’ responses to text-based praise across 10 tutorials, with a particular focus on interactional segments in which writers reformulate their previously mentioned concerns in response to tutor praise. Unlike more common responses that signal acceptance of the praise, such as appreciation, overt acceptance, and alignment, this responding action reflects some momentary misunderstanding between tutor and writer in the tutorial interaction. Despite this, these segments also show writers taking …

Review: Learning From The Lived Experiences Of Graduate Student Writers Edited By Shannon Madden, Michele Eodice, Kirsten T. Edwards, And Alexandria Lockett, Rebecca Day Babcock

Writing Center Journal

Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers takes us from narratives to research. I was interested in and looked forward to reading this book, as, over the summer, some graduate students and I read Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School (McKee & Delgado, 2020), and I wanted to see how the books complemented each other. While Degrees of Difference was more personal, more narrative-based, and more interdisciplinary, both books stressed the importance of mentoring. But I am especially excited to bring some of the ideas from Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate …

Contingent Writing Center Work: Benefits, Risks, And The Need For Equity And Institutional Change, Dawn Fels, Clint Gardner, Maggie M. Herb, Liliana M. Naydan

Writing Center Journal

This study investigates and reports on the personal, professional, and programmatic benefits and risks associated with contingent writing center work. Interviews were conducted with 48 contingent writing centers workers, including directors, assistant directors, associate directors, graduate student workers, and tutors. Survey data of the interview participants showed contingent writing center workers are usually White women with advanced degrees. Most of this article focuses on interview data, analyzed using grounded theory. Interviews revealed participants’ understanding of what contingency means and revealed their struggles with instability, insecurity, and uncertainty even while they lauded the flexibility, freedom, and autonomy their contingency afforded them. …

Editorial Introduction, Katherine Daily O'Meara, Betsy Gilliland

Journal of Response to Writing

No abstract provided.