21.1 Assessing Writing Center Practices (OLD)

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 21, No. 1 (2023)

VOL. 21, NO. 1 (2023): ASSESSING WRITING CENTER PRACTICES TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS

From the Editors: Assessing Writing Center Practices Tristan Hanson and Emma Conatser

FOCUS ARTICLES

"How to Play the Game": Tutor's Complicated Perspectives on Practicing Anti-racism Faith Thompson Intended and Lived Objects of Learning: The (Mis)Aligned Purpose and Reported Effects of Writing Center Instruction Matthew Flederjohann The Writing MAP: A Primer for Facilitating Motivational Habits in the Writing Center Elizabeth Blackmon Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers: A Cultural Rhetorics Approach Marilee Brooks-Gillies and Trixie Smith

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 21, No. 1 (2023)

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Faith Thompson is a doctoral student at Salisbury University. She has been published in Another Word: From the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has forthcoming publications in English Journal and The Peer Review. She is a former graduate writing center tutor but is currently leading a writing group initiative at Salisbury. Her research focuses on antiracist praxis at writing centers, antiracist writing pedagogies, and racial literacy. She uses a critical whiteness framework to inform her studies.

Matthew Fledderjohann, Ph.D. is the Writing Center Director at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

His published work has appeared in Enculturation, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, and the edited collection Preserving Emotions in Student Writing. His research interests include revision, writing center studies, and apocalyptic rhetoric. Outside of academia, Matthew enjoys building LEGO creations with his children and indoor rock climbing.

Elizabeth Busekrus Blackmon is the Supervisor of the College Writing Center at St. Louis Community College, Meramec campus, in St. Louis, Missouri. In this role, she leads a team of professional writing tutors, conducts workshops for students and faculty, and facilitates the embedded tutoring program for the writing center. She has research interests in the learning commons model and motivation theories within the writing center. Her work has appeared in Journal of Response to Writing, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and FORUM: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty. She is the current treasurer of the Midwest Writing Centers Association board and the founder of the Gateway Writing Centers Association in St. Louis.

Marilee Brooks-Gillies is an Associate Professor of English and former director of the University Writing Center at IUPUI. She serves on the board of the Cultural Rhetorics Consortium and on the International Writing Centers Association’s Inclusion and Social Justice Task Force. She is past-president of the East Central Writing Centers Association. Her research focuses on rhetorics of belonging with an emphasis on embodied identities and power. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in CCC, Praxis, The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, The Peer Review, enculturation, and several book collections. She is an editor of Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines as well as special issues of Across the Disciplines and Harlot.

Trixie G. Smith (she/her/hers) is the queer-lesbian-feminist Director of The Writing Center and the Red Cedar Writing Project at Michigan State University, where she is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures and core faculty in the Center for Gender in Global Context. Her teaching and research are infused with issues of gender and activism even as they revolve around writing center theory and practice, writing across the curriculum, and teacher training. Likewise, these areas often intersect with her interests in pop culture, community engagement, and the idea that we’re just humans learning with/from other humans (you know, with bodies, feelings, lives outside the academy). Her scholarship includes material focused on embodiment, anti-racist, queer, and cultural rhetorics work in the writing center, partnerships in the community, across campus, and across the globe, and support/mentorship of graduate students in the academy.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 21, No. 1 (2023)

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: ASSESSING WRITING CENTER PRACTICES Tristan Hanson University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com

Emma Conatser University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com

As teachers of writing, writing center practitioners are often tasked with the difficult work of assessing their practices from a multitude of perspectives and with numerous stakeholders in mind. With this issue of Praxis, we offer a series of articles that address pedagogical assessment aimed at the everyday practice of the writing center. The first three articles address specific aspects of tutorials–anti-racism, learning outcomes, and student motivation–providing insights into how tutors might assess the work they do in specific pedagogical contexts. The issue ends with a call to make assessment a part of the everyday work of both administrators and tutors. Each article frames assessment practice as a way to create better, more equitable outcomes for students seeking help in the writing center. Crucial to this is fostering an environment where assessment is expected, welcome, and meets the needs of those who labor in our centers.

a means for reflecting on what they expect to accomplish in a given consultation, encouraging them to embrace the tutorial process even if it seems like intentions and effects may misalign.

The issue begins with Faith Thompson’s article, “‘How to Play the Game:’ Tutors’ Complicated Perspectives on Practicing Anti-racism,” where the author explores the manner in which tutors employ antiracist pedagogy in their sessions. Thompson uses interviews to collect the experiences of several tutors, surveying them to determine the way they position anti-racism in sessions with students. Here, the author offers tutors’ anecdotal evidence as a pulse check for the way anti-racist practice takes shape in the writing center and beyond.

In “Intended and Lived Objects of Learning: The (Mis)Aligned Purpose and Reported Effects of Writing Center Instruction,” Matthew Fledderjohan reports on the results of tutor/student survey data that indicates that the intended outcomes of a given writing center consultation often do not align with the lived outcomes. Despite the divergence of tutors’ “intended objects of learning” and students’ “lived objects of learning,” Fledderjohan is encouraged by “the fact that so many writers reported having learned about so many different issues suggest[ing] that tutorials can flexibly respond to writers’ learning concerns.”

Fledderjohan’s work offers writing center practitioners

Elizabeth Buskerus Blackmon follows, examining the state of student motivation and offering a new theoretical intervention in, “The Writing MAP: A Primer for Facilitating Motivational Habits in the Writing Center.” Blackmon notes that in order to properly assess student motivation in writing centers, tutors and admin should “primarily center on identity as a core aspect of motivation.” Blackmon’s model, the Writing Motivation Assessment Pathway (MAP), claims that “the intersectionality and formation of students’ identities, especially for underrepresented writers, can help tutors to visualize their motivations when writing.” In the article, the author offers a closer look at this framework, acknowledging the five traditional aspects of motivation (identity, beliefs, perceptions, context, and interactions) and centering on the role of identity.

The issue concludes with Marilee Brooks-Gillie’s and Trixie Smith’s “Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers: A Cultural Rhetorics Approach.”

Here the authors make the case for a set of consistent, flexible, collaborative assessment practices that account for the lived, embodied experiences and shared values of writing center practitioners and administrators. Key to this work is making sure that assessment is woven into the specific cultural dynamics and everyday activity of individual writing centers, lending assessment practices value and transformative power.

The articles featured in this issue reflect the hard work of scholars who are deeply invested in writing center pedagogy. In addition to these authors, we also want to recognize our readers and our review board for their continued support. This issue would not have been possible without the dedicated authors, reviewers, UT Austin faculty, and network of scholars who are dedicated to making innovative writing center scholarship more accessible to all

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 21, No. 1 (2023)

“HOW TO PLAY THE GAME”: TUTORS’ COMPLICATED PERSPECTIVES ON PRACTICING ANTI-RACISM Faith Thompson Salisbury University

fsears1@gulls.salisbury.edu Abstract I interviewed four current writing center tutors who self- identified as antiracist to answer the questions of: How do self-identified antiracist writing tutors at a university writing center define and practice antiracism? What factors limit these practices? After collection, I analyzed the data in three rounds, once inductively, and twice deductively, using a critical whiteness conceptual framework. Tutors suggested education on linguistic justice and code-switching, centering student voice, and disrupting power dynamics as key orientations in their self-identified antiracist practice. However, it was also found that tutors employed a White Educational Discourse throughout the interviews, often avoiding words and letting others off the hook, limiting the effectiveness of these orientations. Further, it was found that tutors often located antiracist practices in areas of the writing center ecosystem that were outside of their control, such as the purpose of the writing center. This study does not seek to criticize writing center tutors, but rather to provide insight into the effectiveness, opportunities, and limitations of antiracist praxis at writing centers. To conclude, I offer questions implicated in this study and directions for further research.

After the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, antiracist efforts at writing centers have seen a resurgent interest across the U.S. (Basta & Smith 63) mirroring other institutions. Antiracism is commonly defined as the active act of expressing ideas such as racial equality and supporting policies that reduce systemic racial inequity (Kendi 1). Many writing centers used this momentum to issue antiracist statements, host antiracist book clubs, and take up the cause of linguistic justice; however, antiracism was not a new concept at writing centers. Linguistic justice is “an antiracist approach to language and literacy education. It is about dismantling Anti Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic hegemony and supremacy in classrooms and in the world” (Baker-Bell 7).

Seminal rhetoric and composition scholar Villanueva is oft-cited as having popularized an antiracist movement in U.S. writing centers during his 2005 keynote address at the International Writing Centers Association (see Coenen, et. al., 2019; Condon, 2007; Denny 2010; Greenfield, 2011; Grimm, 2011; Inoue, 2016; Johnson, 2011; Kern, 2019; Ozaias & Godbee, 2011; Young, 2011). With that said, he was not the first scholar to

engage in this work at the writing center, although it may not have been labeled as such (see Grimm, 1999).

Many writing centers were unable to “sustain critical and difficult discussions about race,” (Greenfield and Rowan, “Introduction” 2) and antiracist efforts became part of broader race-neutral equity and anti-oppression discussions (Condon 20; Inoue 94). Given that antiracist efforts at writing centers have lost momentum before, and the tendency for antiracism to be used as a buzzword (Spaulding, et. al. 4), there is a gap in research on how antiracism is actually practiced by writing center tutors from the tutors themselves. Recent literature has begun to delineate potential practices (See Camarillo, 2019 and Garcia, 2017), but tutor voice is largely absent, with only a few studies written or informed by tutors themselves. As tutors are the ones interacting with students and executing the mission of their writing centers daily, research with writing center tutors can provide insight into the practice of antiracism at writing centers that may help sustain current antiracist discourse. This study seeks to support the developing knowledge base of tutors’ internalization and actual practices of antiracism at writing centers.

The Function of Racism at Writing Centers Although, “Writing centers could complain that Villanueva is shifting the burden of a long-standing social ill to the shoulders of those with the least institutional power,” (Grimm 78), Denny argues that writing centers are “culpable in the social forces around us and have an obligation to speak into, reflect on, and disrupt them when appropriate” (44). As such, the literature has established three major functions of racism in writing centers where it is appropriate for tutors to “speak into, reflect on, and disrupt.” First, student writing brought to the writing center can perpetuate racism and racist ideologies. Tutors can and should disrupt racist thinking in student writing by challenging students whose work makes racist claims

“How to Play the Game” • 3 or claims there is no racism (Coenen, et. al. 14; Condon 20; Greenfield and Rowan, “Beyond” 125; Suhr-Sytsma & Brown 21; Villanueva 4). ​Secondly, writing centers are often on the margins of campus as well, meaning students who use writing centers are seen as “outsiders” to university systems. Lockett describes writing centers as “Academic Ghettos,” that isolate and organize students of color into tangential or hidden spaces on campus (20). Additionally, the physical space and geography of writing centers often mimics white domestic spaces (Grimm 75; Haltiwanger-Morrison & Nanton), further isolating students of color who seek writing center support.

Lastly, writing centers can function as a gate-keeper to academia where students come to be “fixed.” This study largely concerns this function of racism at writing centers.

Writing centers have traditionally been viewed as “fix-it” sites where professors send students, often students whose first language is not Standardized American English (SAE), to have their papers “corrected” grammatically (North 433). North (433) argued that writing centers are misunderstood as a place where papers get fixed and, instead, posited that writing centers “fix” writers. While this argument generated a shift towards writing process support over surface editing in writing center best practices, it has been critiqued in antiracist literature. For example, Grayson & Nayanara argue the idea of “fixing writers” reinforces deficit thinking about students in writing centers (172). Kern (45) notes this perspective leads tutors to teach students to write like they do, which likely means students will be taught to write in SAE, as does Johnson (222). Grimm argues that this perspective places the onus on the individual rather than the systemic expectation of SAE (88). Camarillo (70) made a case for writing centers to be seen as border processing centers through reinforcement of SAE. They argue that writing centers, especially at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), are assimilating sites where students are regulated and told they either belong or do not belong at the university depending on their linguistic acculturation to SAE. They argue that SAE is not just a tool for academic success, but represents the erasure of students’ other linguistic tools and languages. The most significant criticism of North’s argument about “fixing” writers is how it reinforces the gate-keeping position of writing centers through the privileging of SAE (Basta and Smith 60; Cogie 229; Inoue 95; Young 66), both structurally and within tutoring sessions.

Antiracism at the Writing Center While there is no silver bullet to dismantling racism in writing centers (Faison et. al. 6), the literature on SAE suggests linguistic justice may be a direction towards antiracist praxis. Writing centers, therefore, have the potential to disrupt the gate-keeping authority of SAE and university systems (Alvarez 88; Denny 45; Shelton & Howson 78). In 2019, Alvarez asked us “What can writing center administrators do to make sure all languages are accepted and respected in their writing centers?” (89). In answering this, scholars are divided on how best to address language discrimination practices at writing centers. Inoue (98) proposed an antiracist writing assessment ecology in which tutors do not rank or judge writing as “correct” or “incorrect” and try to provide multiple perspectives when giving feedback. Young (64) theorized code-meshing, a practice in which writers are encouraged to use non-standard Englishes and other languages in conjunction with SAE in academic writing. This theory opposes code-switching, where students utilize non-standard Englishes outside of school contexts and adhere to SAE in academic and written discourse, which has been criticized as a linguistic form of “separate but equal” (Kern 47).

Denny (45) and Greenfield further this discussion by challenging the common notion that code-switching will mean success. Alvarez suggests that tutors learn about Students’ Right to Their Own Language to better serve multilingual students (88). Grayson & Nayanara (173), along with Lockett (27), argue writing centers should offer no grammatical editing services in response to language discrimination. However, Cirrilo-McCarthy, et. al. (64), argue that this approach further disenfranchises students of color, especially non-native English speakers. What is agreed upon across the literature is that antiracism must be practiced by tutors, not just taught theoretically in their training and professional development.

Despite this, much of the literature addresses directors’ intentions and reflections upon antiracist tutor training, with little attention given to how tutors actually operationalize such approaches. Further, tutor voice is largely absent from the body of work on antiracism at writing centers despite the possibility of tutors as theorists of race and racism (Garcia 41).

Although some studies focus on tutor resistance to race talk and why that might be the case (see Kern 2019), existing literature on tutor’s perspectives show that tutors are internalizing concepts of antiracism and linguistic justice at writing centers. However, they may

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“How to Play the Game” • 4 struggle with the actual implementation of such practices. For example, Coenen et. al., a group of writing center tutors who implemented a training program for tutors to support them in addressing race and racism within student writing, found that tutors were still unlikely to address race and when they did, responded with minimal effort and disruption (17).

This is similar to Johnson’s finding that tutors were uncomfortable addressing race with students, and usually attempted to change student writing that addresses issues of race or ignored the content of student writing that addressed race to focus on grammar instead (221). Suhr-Sytsma found that tutors felt it “was not their place” to correct oppressive ideas in student writing, unless those ideas were unintentionally expressed (36). More recent literature shows more promise for challenging racism, such as Basta and Smith’s recollection of tutor’s reactions to a potential hire who demonstrated traditional “fix-it” mentality, emphasizing what they had learned about linguistic justice. Overall, literature that centers the tutor’s perspective rather than writing center directors’ perspectives is still underresearched.

Current Study’s Context The research questions that guided this study are as follows: How do self-identified antiracist writing tutors at a university writing center define and practice antiracism? What factors limit these practices? To answer my research questions, IRB-approved data was collected at a university writing center in the southwestern region of the U.S. in the fall of 2021 with the consent of the writing center and its tutors.

Denny identifies a need to turn to HSIs and Historically Black Colleges and Universities when conducting writing center research (6). In particular, these institutions may provide insight on linguistic justice and antiracism due to their diverse demographics in which more students may identify as multilingual or dialect speakers. In this study, the university is a public post-secondary HSI in which 33.3% of students identify as Hispanic. Overall, 50.3% of the student body identifies as students of color with the rest identifying as white. In terms of faculty, 24.22% identify as people of color, with 9.23% identifying as Hispanic. For staff, 32.93% identify as people of color, and 18.49% as Hispanic. ​ The writing center has 29 employees. Out of these 29 employees, 25 are white-presenting during data collection, which does not represent the demographics of the student body. The writing center emphasizes

their equity priorities, providing an actionable antiracist statement in addition to their mission statement, stating the role language plays in racism.

Antiracist training efforts for tutors included a session on linguistic justice, SAE, and white supremacy during annual professional development and optional book clubs. They also established a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) oriented committee as part of their antiracist commitment. The DEI committee is a four-person committee. The committee had just finished reading Linguistic Justice by Amy Baker-Bell and was developing a linguistic justice statement to disperse amongst university professors at the time of this research. This statement, as well as one directed towards students, has since been published prominently on the writing center website.

Critical Whiteness Framework I adopted a critical whiteness framework to identify limitations to the tutors’ antiracist definitions and practices within writing centers. Whiteness can be defined as “embodied racial power” (Bonilla-Silva 156) by which those identified as white receive systemic privileges by virtue of their whiteness and are upheld by structures and ideologies that sustain white racial power. Colorblindness, the belief that one can be race-neutral and not “see” race (Bonilla-Silva 2) and Mill’s Epistemology of Ignorance, meaning the false belief in whites’ racial ignorance (15), are commonly identified as key critiques of whiteness. These structures and ideologies lead people to internalize whiteness, a phenomenon studied by critical whiteness scholars. In this study, I understood internalized whiteness to be a limitation to the practice of antiracism as internalized whiteness is a function of systemic racism that exists within writing centers, writing center tutors, and all facets of societal life.

Systemic racism occurs at all levels of writing center work, affecting professors, students, and consultants.

Positionality I am a white, female identifying former graduate writing center tutor and researcher whose speech is typically heard as SAE. I did not work at the writing center where this study took place. Similar to the participants, my research and understanding of antiracism is limited by internalized whiteness. In this study, I interrogated how whiteness impacts the practices of tutors, but I am not critiquing the participating tutors nor do I aim to position myself as

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“How to Play the Game” • 5 a “good antiracist white.'' This research is an offering to help tutors develop a more truly antiracist practice that aligns with their commitments and beliefs.

Methods Although eight tutors were invited in total, only four female identifying writing center tutors participated in this study. All names used are pseudonyms. Three were white (Kay, Lily, and Sarahanne) and one was Black (Maria). Racial demographics of this study were representative of the writing center itself despite the limited sample size.

Three tutors were part of the DEI committee (Lily, Maria, and Sarahanne), and three were peer (undergraduate) writing consultants (Kay, Lily, and Maria). Sarahanne was the only professional (graduate) writing consultant, and the leader of the DEI committee. As a requirement for participation, participants all self-identified as anti-racist practitioners regardless of membership within the DEI committee. At least one participant was from the southwest, and all but Sarahanne was a student at or alumni of the university where the writing center was located.

Participant recruitment was done through soliciting recommendations for new participants from past participants. Kay was selected after my personal conversations with them following antiracist professional development outside of our writing centers. Kay referred Lily and Maria, colleagues of theirs on the DEI committee. Maria referred Sarahanne.

I interviewed Kay, Lily, Maria, and Sarahanne separately using the same semi-structured protocol (see fig. 6 for a list of the guiding questions). The interviews were recorded and transcribed, and research memos were written after as part of early analysis.

Interviews ranged from 35-60 minutes each.

Additionally, Kay was observed in a writing session with a client for 45 minutes. The observation was not recorded, but I took detailed field notes and wrote a research memo afterwards to capture my initial reflections and further observations. All interviews and observations were conducted through Zoom.

Recordings were then uploaded into transcription software Otter.Ai, and I reviewed the transcripts for errors. I coded the interview transcripts in three phases. The first phase was inductive descriptive coding. During the second phase, I used deductive concept coding drawn from Poe and Inoue’s Ecological Guide to Antiracist Writing Assessment

(14) and for antiracist definitions and practices. This study views writing centers as microsystems within the broader ecosystems of universities and colleges. Using Poe & Inoue’s Ecological Guide to Antiracist Writing Assessment (14) to define the microsystem of writing centers, I looked at seven areas that antiracist practices at the writing center can show up: purpose, process, power, parts, people, places, and products. I used this framework to focus my study of antiracist practices at a writing center by locating the areas in which these practices might occur. An example of such coding is an instance when Kay explained what the antiracist statement issued by the writing center said, which was coded as “purpose.” This statement, which is an addition to the mission statement that guides the purpose of this writing center, is an example of when antiracism is being practiced within the purpose of the writing center (see Fig. 1 for more examples of antiracist practices in each area from the literature).

Lastly, in the third phase, I used deductive concept coding drawn from a critical whiteness framework described in the next section. In order to measure this internalized whiteness, I adapted Haviland’s White Educational Discourse framework (44). Haviland identified 15 ways that people discuss race, racism, and white supremacy in power- and race-evasive, colorblind terms. See fig. 2 for the definitions of eight forms of WED that align with colorblindness and the epistemology of ignorance: Avoiding Words, False Starts, Safe Self-Critique, Asserting Ignorance or Uncertainty, Letting Others off the Hook, Citing Authority, Changing the Topic, and Silence.

I employed eight of Haviland’s White Educational Discourse (WED) to code for instances where the internalized whiteness of tutors specifically limited their practice of antiracism. When coding, I did not just look for WED within the interview, but also within the practices and processes described. An example of this is when Sarahanne stated, “I really came about this the wrong way…” and expressed regret at not having been aware of linguistic prejudice and racism in the past. This was coded as “safe self-critique” because, while Sarahanne did offer a critique of themself, it was of their past self and laid the groundwork for their redemption in the present.

This was also coded as people because it regards a specific individual. In the analysis, codes were later quantified by frequency (see fig. 3 and 4).

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“How to Play the Game” • 6

Sites of Antiracist Practice Throughout the interview, participants discussed their beliefs about and practices of antiracism at the writing center 94 times in ways that identified with parts of the writing center ecosystem. Out of these, people, power, and process were the most prevalent (31%, 23%, and 17% respectively). The participants viewed the practice of antiracism largely through an interpersonal lens, identifying individual interactions (people and process), but also recognized the need for more systemic action (power). See Fig. 3 for the percentage of each part of writing center ecosystems that were discussed by participants.

Overall, tutors located potential antiracist practices in parts of the writing center ecosystem where they had little control. For example, Maria suggested that tutors’ races should be made available to clients beforehand, which is a “people” decision that she would not have control over. Only 17% of the 94 times tutors’ responses were coded as identifying with a part of the writing center ecosystem controllable by tutors (often the “process” of sessions). Repeatedly, tutors shared what they actually say to clients, and how they give feedback, which was labeled as process and understood to be controllable by tutors themselves.

Interestingly, Maria, Lily, and Kay all positioned themselves as in control of the process as well, sharing that they support students in editing their work despite it being a practice that the writing center did not want tutors to use when giving feedback. References to self-education on antiracism by the tutors were not labeled as part of the writing center ecology; however, if the education was a result of training at the writing center or otherwise involved with the center itself, it was coded as parts (e.g. reading Linguistic Justice).

Tutors’ Antiracist Practices

Definitions

and

All of the participants identified linguistic justice as the core of practicing antiracism at writing centers and recognized that antiracism is an active process, not passive. For example, Sarahanne defined antiracism the writing center as: actively…working towards, I would say, equity, where everyone’s language is not just accepted, but like…understood. I feel like that’s a big part of why there’s this injustice with languages, that they’re not all understood.

And so, for the writing center, in regards to the language piece, I feel like that’s it, like

we’re actively working towards it and educating ourselves as to what those different languages look like.

Here, Sarahanne identifies one of the active antiracist practices these tutors employed: educating others on linguistic justice and SAE. Throughout the interviews, participants highlighted such linguistic justice education efforts.

Kay spoke extensively about the public antiracist book club run by the center, and the DEI committee members explained that they had spent the most recent semester reading books on language discrimination and meeting with linguists in efforts to educate themselves. In extending education efforts outside of the writing center, tutors shared that one of the DEI committee’s goals is to develop an antiracist stance on SAE that can be distributed to university professors.

Educating students on code-switching and code-meshing as part of this practice came up several times in the interviews. Although the tutors identified SAE as a function of white supremacy in academia, most believed code-switching between SAE and students’ home languages was an important tool for the academic success of all students. However, only two of the tutors, Lily and Maria, reported educating students on code-switching and code-meshing.

Sarahanne and Kay did not report including students in this discussion on code-switching, but both stated they did not feel it was appropriate to engage in conversations about racialized topics with the clients, as it was not likely to be the students’ priority when attending a session at the writing center (see Internalized Whiteness as a Limitation for Sarahanne’s explicit reasoning).

Interestingly, though Maria was the most adamantly opposed to using SAE (“SAE is bullshit”), they also framed the choice for students as one of success or not. Maria emphasized that students should have a choice in whether or not to code-switch, noting that they tell them: Here's how to play the game. If you want to play the game and be successful, you're going to have to learn how to do these certain rules and work with them. But if you want to continue writing in your own stylistic language or dialect, then continue to do that. And I will help you with either of those. So it's support on, you know, telling people like, Hey, here's this tool, I'm going to give it to you so that you can have it and you can use it. But that doesn't make your writing any less important or personal.

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“How to Play the Game” • 7 By labeling code-switching as “playing the game,” they communicated to students that code-switching was the only way for academic success, and justified that by saying it “doesn’t make your writing any less important or personal.” Maria further stated that while they discuss this with students, it is important that they do not use client writing as their “battlefield” against SAE. Lily, however, took a more critical stance on code-switching: I, frankly, think it's a cop out, but they're like, oh, but that's not like, I'm teaching them to write this way. Because they'll need it out in the real world. You know, they'll need to know how to write and speak like this in order to get jobs.

And it's like, Well, let's think a few steps beyond that. If it's racist here, maybe it's also racist out there.

In this quote, Lily is responding to the same justification for code-switching that Maria used: that speakers of non-standard Englishes need to use SAE in school because it is the language of success. Lily identified this as a “cop-out,” noting this argument has a limited veracity. For them, code-switching is racist and perpetuates language discrimination both in academic (“here”) and in the broader world (“out there”). This critical stance was not shared by the other tutors, and both Kay and Sarahanne identified their roles as supporting students in learning to code-switch regardless of whether or not they educate students on code-switching explicitly.

Interestingly, despite the context of the study occurring at an HSI, conversations around code-switching were rooted in Black Language rather than Chicano or Latino Englishes. For example, Maria explained her definition of antiracist praxis as looking like “when a client comes in and says ‘Hey, you know, I speak Black Language and I write in Black Language and my teacher doesn’t like it.” Further, she elaborated “SAE and the groups that I think it most affected, which is the Black community.” Despite this focus in their scenarios, Kay identified “many of our clients are people who don’t speak English as a first language,” not dialectical English speakers. This focus might be related to the recent reading of Linguistic Justice by the DEI committee.

Another antiracist practice all four tutors discussed was to support students in finding their own voice in writing and “building that confidence” (Maria) in them. Both Kay and Maria explicitly used the word “confidence” as something they strive to support students with. The tutors each spoke of students feeling they did not know where to start with writing

or having been beaten down by professors who graded their writing harshly for style and grammar. For these tutors, a way to combat language discrimination was to validate students’ own voices and help them sustain it through writing, even while code-switching. For example, Maria mentioned that when supporting students with code-switching strategies, they reminded them that their writing is still personal and holds their identity.

Lastly, disrupting power dynamics between tutors and students was mentioned by all four interviewees as an intentional antiracist practice for working with students. Lily did not even refer to themselves as a tutor throughout the session, stating: I think tutoring, I don't know, it has some connotations that I tend to...I like to use consultant, because that just seems a little bit more equitable to me, because I think tutor kind of has this air of like, I'm gonna, like, swoop in and like, fix all the like, errors in your paper or whatever. And I tend to think of it as much more of a-, I don't know, not a transactional relationship, but like, we're kind of, I like to think we're more on, like, equal footing with the client.

Lily specifically addressed and rejected mainstream writing center pedagogies, both the traditional view of “fix-it” centers and North’s popular pedagogy of “fixing writers.”

Meanwhile, Kay noted that students tend to view the writing center as “authorities” on writing, and explicitly discussed race when talking about disrupting power dynamics: So trying to, sort of, dismantle that power structure in the session so that we're more equals is a really important thing to try and fight that white supremacy because you know I'm a white person, and I, I know that a lot of my education...I have to dismantle my own, you know, thought processes about writing and adjust that so that it's workable for my clients.

Throughout the interview, Kay discussed working with majority non-white clients, many of whom speak non-standard dialects of English or English as a second language. They viewed disrupting power dynamics not just as making tutoring sessions more equitable, but as a way to address the power dynamics of a white tutor and student of color.

Maria discussed disruption of power dynamics differently, explaining: I identify as a Black woman, I don’t identify as a white woman. And it impacts everything I do

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“How to Play the Game” • 8 in the writing center. It impacts the way I dress, the way I speak to clients, the way I speak to my coworkers, the way I assist my clients, the way I tell them about SAE. Later, she gave more examples of her racial identity changing the way she and her clients showed up in writing center sessions: I have had clients in the past that said, like, they open up the screen, because I used to be online, they open up the screen, and they’re like “Oh, my god, you’re Black!” and like, I’m like “yeah” and then like that student is automatically...we automatically connect. So I was with a student last semester, who showed up to the meeting with her hair completely done, right? So she spent a lot of time, she was a Black student, she spent a lot of time doing her hair. And as soon as I came on the chat and she was like, “Oh, you’re a Black woman.” I was like “I am.” She was like “I’m gonna put my bonnet back on.” I was like, okay, good, comfortable, you know? Do your thing. So yeah, it does affect my antiracism with my clients and the connections that I have with them and the outlook that clients have on the writing center.

As a tutor of color, Maria did not need to address the power dynamic between a white tutor and student of color; instead her presence was a disruption of racial power dynamics.

Limitations to tutors’ antiracist practices The tutors self-identified two major limitations to their practices of antiracism: professors and students.

Professors were identified as the main source of language discrimination. In fact, the DEI committee’s vision for educational efforts largely consisted of conversations with individual professors and producing a stance on SAE to provide professors with. Maria even illustrated their definition of antiracism at the writing center with an example regarding faculty, stating with “So the racism in [a scenario] would be the teacher. I'm the antiracist, in that, helping that client.” The writing center tutors were well aware of their position within the campus ecology, and felt, based on their experiences as students and tutors, that many professors privileged SAE. Although they wanted to support students in code-meshing, they relied on teaching code-switching strategies to make student writing “more palatable for professors” (Kay). Although the participants did not

place any blame on students, they also recognized students are “not there to…talk about” (Lily) racism, and they often just want to do what the professor asks so they can pass. Ultimately, professors’ expectations of SAE led the tutors to believe that SAE was necessary for students’ success.

Interviews also suggest that the writing center leadership was a limitation. Tutors were not involved in talking to professors or in broader antiracist efforts.

While DEI committee members had more ability than non-members to educate their fellow tutors, the lead member of DEI committee, Sarahanne, said they had not “the opportunity to speak with any professors.”

However, some of the tutors viewed this positively (e.g., Kay said “they really try to shield us”).

Internalized Whiteness as a Limitation An additional limitation for employing antiracist practices were the tutors themselves. Although the tutors’ efforts were in good faith, at times, in the interviews, the tutors seemed to struggle with being explicit about race and antiracism and diminished the impacts of language discrimination. For example, they employed extreme terms such as white supremacy to describe SAE, but then justified their support of it and code-switching pedagogies in tutoring sessions within the same response. In the third round of coding and analysis, I looked for eight forms of Haviland’s WED to identify how these tutors themselves were limitations to their antiracist practices.

In total, tutors employed WED 56 times (see fig.

5). Not every strategy was used, but avoiding words and letting others off the hook were the most common. In fig. 5, I quantified the amount of times each tutor used a form of WED. Similar to the overall findings, Sarahanne and Kay most heavily employed the Avoiding Words strategy. Lily relied most on letting others off the hook, particularly the writing center administration. Maria, the only Black tutor, employed White Educational Discourse only two times; once avoiding words, and, once, letting others off the hook. This suggests that Maria was less willing than the white tutors who participated to excuse racism to maintain group harmony within the writing center staff. Sarahanne employed the second most WED despite being the lead member of the DEI committee.

Avoiding words, the most commonly utilized strategy, was employed so often that tutors avoided talking about race in general. Outside of explicit questions about demographics, tutors only spoke

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“How to Play the Game” • 9 about race and racialized identity 11 times across all data collected. It was also a common theme to avoid talking about race with clients and outside the writing center, despite all tutors naming that antiracism must be active and continually practiced. For example, when explaining why they do not discuss SAE or code-switching with students, Sarahanne stated: ​You know, race is such a subjective thing. And it's also just this, like, for me, it just comes off as like this buzzword, like immediately people are upset. You know, you say the word racism and like, there is no lackadaisical response to the word racism, even people who are like, I'm not racist, you know, it's not a big deal. Like they're still responding very emotionally to it.

So I like focusing more on the individual instead of focusing on the fact that somebody has put them into this category of race with all of its assumptions and stereotypes. Yeah, I spend a lot more time saying, you, and sometimes I do say you and, like, the culture you're from, but I never really say race.

Here, Sarahanne goes to extreme lengths to avoid discussing race, even using coded language such as “the culture you’re from.” Despite being the leader of the DEI committee, and emphasizing the importance of antiracism, Sarahanne had the most resistance to practicing antiracism. In the interview, they also discussed how they began looking into the way race impacts writing center work because of a book that made them angry (and they are “still angry with it”), but did not explain what made them angry. The other tutors expressed similar perspectives that discussing race and racism made people too upset and so they avoided it. Kay discussed the leadership team “shielding” tutors from any negativity from professors, and Lily also explained that they talked about identity to avoid the “scary topic racism.”

The second most used strategy was letting others off the hook. The tutors all expressed a deep love for their positions as writing tutors and strong loyalty to their specific writing center. While they were able to address broader, systemic issues of language discrimination, they went to extreme lengths to avoid “offending” anyone (avoiding words) and to position themselves and their writing center as “good”. They also rationalized actions on the part of themselves and others that maintained the status quo rather than challenging them (letting others off the hook). Lily, in particular, seemed nervous that the writing center they worked at would learn what they had said, and they hinted that they did not think their writing center made antiracism enough of a priority only after

receiving clarity that the center would not see their transcript. However, their response, once reassured, was still a false start, (“I have a lot of, we don't need to get into this right now,...”) showing that they were uncomfortable challenging the writing center and its administration in any capacity.

Conclusion Writing centers seeking to actualize antiracist practices must start with tutors. They should move beyond the purely theoretical and reimagine writing center pedagogies. Tutors in this study attempted to bridge theory into practice, but, as demonstrated in fig.

3, tutors largely identified antiracist practices in power, purpose, and people; all components tutors cannot actively change (see fig. 1 for a definition of each of these parts of the writing center ecosystem). Only the process, here meaning the feedback tutors’ give, was in tutor control.

Within that small part of antiracism at writing centers that tutors control, they identified three key practices in their process and feedback: education on linguistic justice and code-switching, centering student voice, and disrupting power dynamics as key orientations in their self-identified antiracist practice.

Although the small sample size limits generalizability, my findings suggest some commonalities that might form an antiracist pedagogy for writing centers.

Writing center tutors and writing center training that seeks to center antiracism in their practice may want to consider including students in the discussion on code-switching, centering student voice in writing, and disrupting power dynamics between tutor and student in individual sessions.

Findings also indicate that tutors who want to practice antiracism are limited in their ability to do so not just by external factors such as professors but by their own internalized whiteness. Racial literacy training might be a way that writing centers can rupture internalized whiteness. Although the tutors had received training on antiracism, it was mostly educational (covering topics such as AAE, code-switching, and code-meshing) rather than self-reflective. Tutors may benefit from the opportunity to explore and impact their own racialized experiences. Doing so may allow them to embrace antiracist pedagogy more consistently and give them the knowledge and confidence to address and challenge white supremacy and language discrimination at their writing center. This limitation may result in a discrepancy between what tutors

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“How to Play the Game” • 10 actually do, what they think they do, and what they believe in doing. Future research should draw on data beyond interviews to explore this.

This study sought to uncover writing center tutors’ definitions of antiracism and practices of it at the writing center. It works to fill the gap of tutor voices, especially at HSIs and including tutors of color.

It was, however, limited by several factors. For one, the study only looked at four tutors with a small amount of data collected. These results, therefore, are not generalizable. Secondly, it is limited by its scope, with a narrow focus on the ways race and racism impact writing center work. An intersectional lens, considering other identities such as gender and sexuality, is warranted in future studies. Further, tutors are likely to experience racism, both linguistically and from clientele just as clients experience racism. This was not explored in this study, and should be a consideration for further research. Relatedly, distinctions should be explored differentiating between the impacts and functions of race, racism, and antiracism for tutors.

Lastly, interviews only addressed the 3rd function of racism at the writing centers (see page 3 for discussion). Within that, data collected focused on dialectical linguistic justice for Black English speakers rather than linguistic justice for multilingual, particularly Spanish-speaking, students despite the context of this study.

The findings of this study indicate that much research is needed on the actual practices of antiracism by writing center tutors. This study suggests that there is a gap that exists between what was said and believed by tutors and their reported actions. This is something writing centers should attend to if they want to truly practice antiracism. Tutor trainings alone may not be enough if learned knowledge and skills are not put into practice. This research raises such questions as “how do tutors employ antiracism within their locus of control?” and “how can writing centers combat internalized whiteness when advocating for antiracist praxis?”. Although there is no checklist for antiracism, a heuristic for process practices that tutors may employ would strengthen the likelihood that antiracism transfers from theory and into practice at writing centers.

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40–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487107310751 Inoue, Asao. B. (2016). “Afterword: Narratives that determine writers and social justice writing center work.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 14, no.

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94–99. http://www.praxisuwc.com/inoue-141 Johnson, Michelle T. “Racial Literacy and the Writing Center.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited

by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State University Press, 2011, pp. 212-227.

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Kern, Douglas S. “Emotional performance and antiracism in the writing center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 2019, pp. 43–49. http://www.praxisuwc.com/162-kern Latta, M. “Can’t Fix Anyone: Confronting Our Historical Love Affair with Deficit Thinking.”

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3, 2019, pp.17-24. https://www.wlnjournal.org/archives/v44/44.3-4. pdf Lockett, Alexandria. “Why I call it the academic ghetto: A critical examination of race, place, and writing centers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol.

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College English, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 433–446. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i216078 Ozias, Moira and Godbee, Beth. “Organizing for Antiracism in Writing Centers.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by L. Greenfield and K. Rowan, Utah State University Press, 2011, pp. 150-174.

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14-15. https://compositionstudiesjournal.files.wordpress. com/2021/02/poeinoue_full-3.pdf Shelton, Cecilia and Howson, Emily. "Disrupting Authority: Writing Mentors and Code-Meshing Pedagogy.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 12, no.

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“How to Play the Game” • 12

Appendix: Figures Fig. 1: Examples of Inoue’s Antiracist Ecological Model

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“How to Play the Game” • 13 Fig. 2: Definitions of eight forms of Haviland’s White Educational Discourse

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“How to Play the Game” • 14 Fig. 3: Breakdown of Tutors’ overall identification of each site for antiracism

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“How to Play the Game” • 15 Fig. 4: Breakdown of tutors’ overall usage of each form of White Educational Discourse

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“How to Play the Game” • 16 Fig. 5: Breakdown of tutors’ individual usage of White Educational Discourse

Fig. 6: Guiding questions for the interviews. Not every question was asked of every interview participant.

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INTENDED AND LIVED OBJECTS OF LEARNING: THE (MIS)ALIGNED PURPOSE AND REPORTED EFFECTS OF WRITING CENTER INSTRUCTION Matthew Fledderjohan Le Moyne College fleddema@lemoyne.edu

Abstract What do tutors think they teach in a given writing center session?

What do the writers they work with claim they learned? This IRB-approved study looks at responses from 74 pairs of surveys completed by tutors and writers about what they taught and learned in particular writing center tutorials. Drawing on the distinctions variation theory makes between intended and lived objects of learning, this study analyzes the general response trends evident across these surveys by coordinating tutors’ and writers’ separate perceptions. The results suggest that writers identify learning as having taken place much more frequently and across a wider range of writing-related topics than tutors claim to have taught. While short-answer responses reveal occasional overlap between writer’s perceived learning and tutor’s intended teaching, the marked discrepancy between the two suggests that a teaching/learning causality does not accurately represent much of the instructive effort and outcome occurring through writing center tutorials.

Knowing that writers claim to be learning even when the tutors they meet with don’t think they are teaching informs how tutors can perceive their effectiveness and how writing centers can position themselves as alternative educational spaces.

A writer made an appointment to talk with a tutor about her supplemental application essays for a physician assistant graduate program. She and the tutor spent an hour working through these documents, discussing the guidelines, reading the drafts, and identifying revision plans. The writer left feeling like the appointment had been “very helpful.” The tutor also thought the session had been productive.

However, the writer and the tutor had two very different perspectives on what had been learned and taught through that session. The writer said she’d learned the value of writing with confidence, the importance of reading her drafts aloud, and strategies for identifying what an essay prompt is asking. The tutor described teaching about tailoring application essays for specific audiences and using commas. One session. Two individuals. A scattered range of instructive intentions and reported learning.

This study explores the divergences and agreements—as represented in this example—between what tutors believe they’re teaching and what writers claim they’re learning in order to further understand the instructive work writing centers do. The alignment,

or lack thereof, between what teachers teach and what learners learn is something that education scholars have long recognized as being central to understanding and assessing knowledge acquisition. As education historian Robert McClintock has claimed, “[S]ince mass education developed, the dominant problem for educational theorists has been to ensure that students will learn what teachers try to teach” (412). More recently, this sentiment has been echoed by Graeme Gooday’s assertion that “the most important point in evaluating the educational process is not what teachers try to teach, but what learners actually succeed in learning” (144). But measuring learning is difficult because learning can be widely defined1, and it is differentiated across varied situations and the experiences of unique individuals. As education scholars Barbara McCombs and Donna Vakili have summarized, “Research underlying the learner-centered principles confirms that learning is nonlinear, recursive, continuous, [and] complex” (1586). Given writing’s intricately multifaceted nature, learning to write is no exception (Wardle and Roozen). It’s much easier to ask a tutor to identify their learning objectives than it is to confirm that those objectives were met, but the efficacy of a writing program is informed not by the teaching it intends to do but by the learning it achieves.

I began exploring tutors’ reported teaching and writers’ reported learning in connection to an institutional assessment project I developed at the writing center I direct at Le Moyne College—a small, Jesuit liberal arts institution in Syracuse, New York. I wanted to explore what our tutors say they teach, what the writers they work with say they learn, and what alignment might exist between the lessons and the learning. I structured this project as a way to assess our writing center’s engagement with one of our established learning goals—“Writers who visit the Writing Center will become more rhetorically savvy, technically skilled, appropriately confident writers who are able to attain greater success in their writing”—and one of our learning objectives—“Tutors will be able to explain writing processes, rhetorical expectations,

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Intended and Lived Objects of Learning • 18 stylistic norms, and grammatical conventions related to writing tasks that writers bring in.” I wanted to understand our tutors’ teaching in connection to our writers’ learning.

In what follows, I detail the scholarly context, research methodology, findings, and significance of a survey assessment project that analyzes 74 pairs of surveys accounting for both the tutors’ and the writers’ perspectives about particular writing center sessions.

Tutors detailed what they had intended to teach in a given session, and then the writers described what they learned. The resulting data reveal minimal alignment between what tutors believe they taught and what writers claim they’ve learned. And even when tutors and writers agreed that teaching/learning happened in connection to broad categories (e.g., writing in general, the writing assignment, the writer’s strengths/weaknesses, grammar/formatting, or external resources), they frequently disagreed on the specific lessons taught and learned. However, across these surveys, writers claimed to learn more than tutors said they’d taught. This suggests that tutors may not be aware of either the specifically learned content or the broad extent of their educational efforts. This reminds us that learning happens outside moments of direct instruction, that tutors’ instructive influence can transcend their intentions, and that tutors can facilitate learning without knowingly teaching.

By asking tutors to detail what they teach, this project joins a long history of writing center scholarship focused on tutors’ teaching. Tutor handbooks are filled with advice on what and how a tutor can teach. Scholarly attention to this important topic has ranged from Stephen North’s early insights on the value of training tutors to talk effectively about writing to Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson’s in-depth looks at veteran tutors’ teaching strategies.

Empirical investigations of tutors’ specific teaching practices have explored how tutors use scaffolding strategies (Thompson) and questions to teach (Limberg, Modey, and Dyer), how tutors teach multilingual writers (Alshreif; Nakamaru) and writers with disabilities (Cherney; Gentry), how composition instructors with tutoring experience implement tutoring strategies in their composition classrooms (Zelenak et al.), and how tutors teach when facing writers’ resistance (Park), among many others. This body of research considers what tutors do when they are tutoring writing and what is effective or ineffective about their teaching strategies.

But as previously referenced, education’s true effect is evidenced within a student’s learning. As such, what writers learn through their interactions with

writing centers has been another primary concern for composition scholars and practitioners. In 2001, Casey Jones conducted a review of the existing literature on writing centers’ influence on students’ writing abilities.

Jones begins with studies from the late 1970s and finds that by 1990 efforts to quantify tutees’ learning gains dissipated so that “only a handful of researchers have attempted to evaluate the performance of writing centers in enhancing student writing skills through the use of empirical study designs” (3). Jones notes that while “concrete evidence that writing centers do improve student writing is difficult to construct, indirect evidence is far easier to extrapolate” (17). More recently, scholars in search of that concrete evidence have designed a range of different kinds of studies, including ones that evaluate students’ post-writing center revisions as indicators of tutorials’ impact (Bleakney and Pittock; Pleasant, Niiler, and Jagannathan) and studies that use experimental and control groups to evaluate the influence of writing center tutorials (Farnworth et al.; Miller).

However, despite the attention that has been devoted to understanding tutors’ teaching and assessing writers’ learning, only a few studies have put these companion educational processes in direct conversation with each other. The current study’s simultaneous focus on both tutors’ and writers’ perspectives of particular writing tutorials parallels the methodologyTerese Thonus used in her research on how tutors and students understand success in writing center instruction (“Tutor and Student Assessments”) and her work on tutors’, tutees’, and instructors’ perceptions of tutors’ roles (“Triangulation in the Writing Center”). I have drawn additional inspiration from the triangulation methodology Isabelle Thompson et al. and Beth Kalikoff employ in their research on various stakeholders’ opinions about tutorial sessions. My study uses the practice of coordinating separate perspectives on the same phenomenon to explore particular teaching/learning events.

In attending to how learning and teaching function (in)dependently, I have been influenced by educational psychologists’ variation theory because of its capacity to identify unique elements occurring within an educational event (Morton and Booth; Marton and Morris). Specifically, variation theory makes a distinction between three different kinds of “objects of learning”: the intended object of learning, the enacted object of learning, and the lived object of learning (Häggström 53-4). The intended object of learning corresponds with a teacher’s plan and focus—the content transmission they are working toward (Marton,

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Intended and Lived Objects of Learning • 19 Runesson, and Tsui 4). The enacted object of learning is what an external observer can identify about how a teacher structures an experience to make the learner aware of the intended object of learning (5). And the lived object of learning is what the student takes away, the student’s experience of “the outcome or result of the learning” (5). For example, in the context of a writing center tutorial, an intended object of learning might be a tutor’s plan to teach a writer how to strengthen their thesis statement; an enacted object of learning could be what a tutor-in-training shadowing the session notices about how the tutor explains the writer’s need to understand thesis statements; and a lived object of learning would be whatever lesson the writer takes away from the session—whether that be strategies for writing a stronger thesis statement, a deeper understanding of their paper’s content, insight into their capabilities as a writer, greater appreciation for the writing center’s services, or something else.

Since my study draws from indirect reporting methods by relying on what tutors and writers say they taught and learned (as opposed to direct observation or external analysis of learning), I do not consider tutorials’ enacted objects of learning. My interest is in the intended and the lived objects of learning and the places where those objects align or disagree. As Thomas Bussey, MaryKay Orgill, and Kent Crippen have asserted, “Comparisons between the intended and lived objects of learning can be used to identify differences between what instructors hope students will learn and what students actually learn about a given concept” (13). To assess the relationship between tutors’ intended teaching and writers’ reported learning, this project directly compared tutors’ and writers’ reported teaching and learning experiences.

Methodology I began this research project by organizing IRB-approved focus group discussions with students who had visited our Writing Center. I wanted to gain an understanding of the kind of learning writers attribute to our Center so that I could ground the subsequent work in writers’ actual experiences. During the Fall 2020 semester, I used our appointment records to locate a random sample of writers who had visited the Center at least three times in the past year. I wanted focus group participants to have had a range of different writing center experiences to draw upon and reflect on. Once I found 7 willing participants, we set up two 1-hour Zoom conversations. The questions that guided these discussions were, “What have you learned

through your interactions with the Writing Center?

How did you learn this? What implications does this knowledge have for your continued growth and development?” Participants shared their perceptions of writing in general, their experiences with the Writing Center, specific things they’ve learned through their tutorials, and how they have applied those lessons in other contexts. I used the conversation generated by the first focus group meeting to draft questions for this study’s survey. I asked focus group members for their feedback on these questions during our second meeting. Focus group participants received $50 each through funds secured from my college’s student learning assessment initiative.

The survey I developed for writers about what they’ve learned through their Writing Center experiences served as a model for the parallel survey I created for tutors. Both surveys asked for respondents to share about specific things they taught/learned in the following five categories: writing in general (information about writing processes and rhetoric), writing this particular assignment (explorations of the prompt or assignment’s genre), the writer themselves (their strengths/weaknesses or perceptions of their confidence), grammar or formatting (ranging from sentence structure and comma rules to information about citation styles), and online resources. There were also questions about the tutors’/writers’ general impressions of the tutorial session and perceptions of the tutorial’s usefulness.

After securing IRB approval for this part of the study, I began distributing these surveys through the Spring 2021 and Fall 2021 semesters. I invited all of the tutors who worked at our center across these semesters (n=13) to participate. The ten who participated agreed to fill out surveys for a randomized selection of the tutorials they facilitated according to a pre-determined schedule. For example, some tutors committed to filling out a survey for every other appointment; some responded to surveys for the first or last tutorial they conducted every week. Whatever the frequency and schedule, these set response rates randomized the sessions tutors were describing and kept them from deciding after the fact to complete or not complete surveys for certain tutorials. Through the Spring 2021 semester and most of the Fall 2021 semester, ten tutors responded to 193 surveys about what they had intended to teach in those tutorial sessions. Tutors received $3 for each survey they completed.

When a tutor submitted a new survey, I would use the day/time information the tutor provided and our appointment schedule to identify the writer for this appointment and email them an invitation to respond

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Intended and Lived Objects of Learning • 20 to the corresponding survey about what they had learned through this session. I invited each of the writers associated with those 193 sessions to respond to the survey detailing what they had learned. Writers received $5 for completing a survey.2 I stopped collecting surveys after I’d gotten 75 responses from writers. I believed that 75 pairs of surveys would provide me with a data set that was both large enough to generate notable trends and manageable enough for me to work through on my own in a timely manner.

One survey ended up being a duplicate (filled out twice by the same writer about the same session). I kept the first version of this survey and was left with 74 usable pairs of surveys describing what the tutor thought they had taught and what the writer claimed to have learned.

Results As previously detailed, the surveys contained five sections that focused on a different area of writing teaching/learning: writing in general, writing this particular assignment, the writer themselves, grammar or formatting, and online resources. Each section began by simply asking the tutor/writer to respond “yes” or “no” depending on whether or not they had taught/learned about that particular topic. Figure 1 (see appendix for all figures) details the frequency of “yes” and “no” responses across all categories for both tutors’ reported teaching and writers’ reported learning.

For the purposes of this analysis, I only included responses to yes/no questions that had been answered by both the writer and the tutor within a given session.

For example, twelve of the 74 writers skipped the question about whether or not they had learned about external writing sources. Even when the tutors associated with these tutorials answered this question, their responses were not factored into the full analysis.

As such, the 796 individual responses delineated above account for 348 pairs of responses from both the tutor’s and the writer’s perspective. The 107 times these tutors said they had taught about a particular category and the 194 times writers said they had learned about that category is further visualized in Figure 2 which shows how many tutors/writers answered “yes” for each of the five categories of teaching/learning.

Across these five categories, the writers who said they’d learned about these issues outnumbered the tutors who said they’d taught about them. The closest alignment between the tutors’ reported teaching and the writers’ reported learning was within the more easily definable categories: teaching/learning about grammar and formatting and teaching/learning about

online resources. The most pronounced discrepancy between tutors’ reported teaching and writers’ claimed learning was evidenced in the “learning about the writer” category. Here writers were asked if they had learned anything about themselves as writers through the tutoring session; tutors were asked if they had tried to teach the writer anything about themselves as writers.Over half of the responding writers (59%; n=44) answered “yes” to this question, whereas across the tutor surveys, only 11% (n=8) indicated that they had taught the writer anything about themselves as a writer.

It is obvious through these data that many writers claimed they had learned about an issue that their tutor had not identified as something they had taught. But there were also occasions when tutors said they had taught something but the session’s writer said they hadn’t learned it. In fact, out of the 301 total “yes” answers provided by both tutors and writers, only 80 sets (n=160, 53%) were instances when both the tutor and the writer agreed that something had been taught/learned in connection to a particular writing category. Figure 3 clarifies further the extent to which tutors and writers consistently disagreed with each other across all five categories on whether or not teaching/learning had occurred.

And even in the 80 sets of answers when both the tutor and the writer agreed that teaching/learning had occurred in connection to a particular writing topic, participants’ responses to the subsequent short answer questions sometimes revealed additional divergences between what was perceived as taught and what was reported as learned. Respondents who selected “yes” for a given category were then invited to answer additional questions about what specifically they had taught/learned related to that category and how they had taught/learned it. An analysis of these short answer responses revealed that in 62.5% (n=50) of these 80 “yes” sets, the tutor and the writer both identified the same topic or issue of teaching/learning.

Figure 4 shows how many tutors and writers indicated that they had taught/learned about a general category as well as how many times their short answer responses aligned by referring to the same instructive topic.

Figure 5 provides two examples of paired answers to the follow up question about what the tutor/writer had taught/learned about writing in general (i.e., writing process and rhetorical issues). In the first example, the tutor and writer describe the same learning topic. In the second, the respondents describe very different learning topics. These 50 sets of closely aligned responses account for 14% of the 348 paired instances of teaching/learning the survey gathered data about.

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Intended and Lived Objects of Learning • 21 While this is a low percentage, these 50 instances of coordinated objects of learning were distributed across 53% (n=39) of the 74 surveyed tutorial sessions. This means that in the majority of the tutorial sessions this study considered, there was at least one instance of teaching/learning where what the tutor identified as their intended object of learning and what the writer identified as their lived object of learning were in close agreement as confirmed by congruent short-answer responses.

Discussion Survey Design Limitations Before discussing more fully the findings apparent across these surveys, it’s valuable to briefly account for what these data suggest about how the surveys’ designs elided the intersecting multiplicity of various writing functions. As compositionists well know, writing is complex. The teaching and learning associated with its processes aren’t always easily categorized. Across survey responses, learning encounters drift from one question to another and are identified as fitting within different kinds of learning by different individuals. For example, one tutor reported in the “writing in general” category that they had worked to teach a writer about avoiding repetition by identifying “a specific example of repetition in the student’s writing, [going] over how to fix it, and discuss[ing] how that same process can be applied to other areas of repetition in this paper as well as future papers.” This writer expressed an awareness of this multifaceted lesson, describing in the “learning about writing in general” section that they had “learned that I am too repetitive” and again in the “learning about yourself as a writer” section that they had “learned that ‘less is more’ sometimes. Not repeating myself makes my writing stronger.” What for the tutor was a lesson about writing in general was experienced by the writer as a lesson about both effective writing and about their own writing practices. Similarly, another writer detailed how they had learned about pre-writing strategies in the “writing in general” section of the survey, but the tutor for this appointment saw this as an assignment-specific lesson since they had been brainstorming topics for the writer’s paper. In comparing tutors’ and writers’ responses to these categories, we’re reminded that writing’s various activities don’t lend themselves to discrete, uniform, or easily agreed-upon categories. Some of the instances of teaching/learning that may have been aligned across the tutors’/writers’ experiences were perhaps artificially

divided by the separate categories used to structure this survey.

I also recognized through my analysis that tutors’ fluency with the distinctions compositionists make between features of writing may have informed their survey responses in ways that contrasted with some of the writers’ responses. This became most apparent when comparing the responses to the “writing in general” category. This category had been designed to focus on issues of rhetoric and writing process—key elements of what are commonly identified in writing center practice and pedagogy as “higher-order concerns” (McAndrew and Reigstad). And most of the twenty-four instances when tutors answered “yes” to having provided instruction within this category described teaching about issues like developing thesis statements, drafting introductions and conclusions, responding to particular audiences, and revising. Tutors mentioned teaching about grammar within this category only twice. However, of the 54 occasions when writers indicated learning about writing in general through their tutorials, fifteen identified lessons about grammar, punctuation, and formatting issues.

The fact that these writers identified what are commonly considered “lower-” or “later-order concerns” (Gillespie and Lerner) as being related to their learning about rhetorical issues or writing processes coincides with the move in writing center scholarship to eliminate the valuative distinctions between higher-order concerns (HOCs) and lower-order concerns (LOCs) (Grimm 14; Phillips 96).

This also supports Sarah Summers’ claim that “what seem like LOCs in general writing center scholarship may, in fact, be HOCs in practice” (259). Tutors might have a more specific, shared understanding of what the survey meant by “writing in general” than did the writers, but the writers’ responses encourage us to continue reflecting on how rhetorical knowledge is evaluated and distinguished.

In connection to tutors’ and writers’ potentially different assumptions about the components of writing as presented by this survey, study participants may have also used different language to describe similar objects of learning. Given their training and experience, tutors may be more adept at writing about writing and compositional instruction than the students they work with. For example, while one writer described learning how to simply “plan ahead,” their tutor detailed teaching them the pre-writing strategy of outlining their body paragraphs. The actual similarities in how learning/teaching instances like this one were experienced and perceived may be obscured by the different ways they were described.

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Intended and Lived Objects of Learning • 22 Of course, the limitations of using a survey as a methodological tool to account for intended and lived objects of learning transcend potential variations in response generated by imposed learning categories and the differentiated knowledge about writing held by tutors and writers. As Miriam Gofine has acknowledged, the validity of surveys as a research tool is limited (47). In this study, the surveys revealed not what was objectively taught by tutors in a given session or what was demonstratively learned by writers but what the tutors and writers reported having taught and learned. Even though a gap may exist between reported and actual teaching/learning, examining tutors’ and writers’ perceptions of their respective teaching and learning provides a point of entry into this issue—a way of starting the conversation about how tutors’ and writers’ understanding of the work achieved within discrete tutorial sessions might align or diverge.

this tutor answered “yes” to the question about teaching/learning about grammar and formatting. “I learned more about formatting,” the writer wrote, “[b]y giving each other examples.” The tutor said that they had “clarified [the writer’s] understanding of MLA in-text citations [by w]riting out an in-text citation and giving multiple examples of the different types of MLA in-text citations.” This learning was achieved through a discrete lesson, complete with explanations and practice examples. But as the writer’s reported learning about confidence suggests, not all learning is associated with direct instruction. Many other writers referenced learning about their writing style, strengths, or patterns of errors simply through reading (or having the tutor read) their paper aloud. These were instances of, perhaps, passive or unintentional instruction that nevertheless translated into lived objects of learning.

Writers’ Learning > Tutors’ Teaching

While the imbalance between what the tutors identified as their intended objects of learning and what the writers described as their lived objects of learning weighed in favor of writers’ learning, the gap itself is worthy of closer consideration. Discrepancies between what the tutor thought they’d taught and what the writer said they’d learned make sense when considering amorphous concepts like gaining compositional confidence. How would a tutor necessarily know that they had influenced a writer’s perception of their writing ability? However, this gap was also notable across more concrete learning topics that could be paired with discrete teaching moments.

For example, in the teaching/learning about grammar/formatting category, only 36% (n=27) of the 74 tutorials featured agreement between both the tutor and the writer that they’d taught/learned about grammar expectations or formatting practices.

The low levels of agreement between what these tutors identified as the intended objects of learning and what the writers reported as their lived objects of learning raise many questions. To what extent is this discrepancy related to tutors’ and writers’ differing views of writing—potentially diverging perspectives that could point back to their positions as expert or novice writers? When were tutors’ instructive attempts simply not effective, not communicated, or not received? Could this discrepancy be related to writers’ possible comparative eagerness to report lived objects of learning in contrast to tutors’ potential cautiousness toward identifying intended objects of learning?

Despite the various ways the survey itself may have influenced responses, a dominant trend that emerges through these results is the degree to which writers reported learning more than tutors reported teaching.

As particularly evidenced through the gap between the No : Yes ratios identified in Figure 1, tutors were much more likely to answer “no” to these questions about whether or not they taught about an issue, and writers were more likely to answer “yes” about their learning.

This discrepancy is most profoundly noticeable in the category about teaching/learning about the writer. In 11% (n=8) of surveys, tutors said they’d taught the writers about themselves; in contrast, 59% (n=44) of the writer surveys reported that the writer had learned something about their strengths, weaknesses, or confidence as a writer. In contrast, across 23% (n=17) of the tutor surveys and 24% (n=18) of the writer surveys, respondents indicated “yes” to the question regarding teaching/learning about online resources. Of course, how a writer learns about their compositional strengths might look very different from how they learn about, say, using an online citation generator.

For example, in response to the question about learning about themselves, one writer said that by “working with my tutor,” they had learned, “I can do it but it just takes time to become a good writer.” This was an uplifting and realistic lesson in confidence that was gained through experience and mentorship, not necessarily through direct instruction. In fact, this tutor didn’t report having taught this writer anything about themselves as a writer. In contrast, both this writer and

Learning Despite Discrepancies

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Intended and Lived Objects of Learning • 23 Despite these questions, as this center’s director, I’m more satisfied with a reported teaching/learning imbalance that favors writers’ claimed learning than I would be with one that favors tutor teaching. In 62% (n=46) of the 74 appointments, writers indicated with a greater frequency that they learned across more categories of writing topics than their tutor indicated having taught; in 26% (n=19) of responses, the writers and tutors answered “yes” to the same number of learning/teaching categories, and in 12% (n=9), the tutors identified teaching across more categories than the writers identified learning. A reported teaching/learning imbalance that favored tutors’ teaching would make me wonder more about possibly ineffective teaching and tutors’ potentially inflated view of their instructive influence. Instead, these survey results convincingly indicate that these writers believe they learned about writing through particular interactions with writing center tutors. Only 4% (n=3) of the responding writers reported not having learned anything about writing during their sessions—yet even two of those respondents described in their short answer responses how the tutor had helped them improve their papers. In the vast majority of cases, writers identified a range of lessons they had learned about writing—from structuring an essay to gaining confidence in their writing to citing sources in accordance with APA’s guidelines.

While I was working on this project, I showed these aggregated survey results to our center’s tutors in a writing center staff meeting. Many of the tutors had participated in this study, and they were eager to learn how the writers they had been working with had experienced their instructive efforts. We spent the meeting sorting through some of the anonymized data and asking ourselves, “What do these results suggest about tutors’ teaching, writers’ learning, and the relationship between the two? What implications do these results have for how we tutor?” The tutors were also pleased that so many writers reported having learned so much across so many different categories of potential writing instruction. But through this discussion, the tutors also raised an important question, “Matthew,” they asked me, “what did you mean by ‘teaching’?”

The fact that so much of what the writers had identified as their lived objects of learning had no connection to the tutor’s intended objects of learning brought into focus certain discrepancies between learning and teaching. Because, as we well know, teaching and learning are not always direct corollaries.

Teaching can be attempted even if learning isn’t achieved, and, as previously noted regarding the tutors

unintentionally teaching writers about themselves as writers, learning frequently happens apart from direct instruction. And, as my tutors reminded me, direct instruction is more associated with the role of a teacher than it is with the functions and responsibilities of a tutor. Certainly, sometimes tutors included discrete lessons about particular issues. We saw this earlier in the example of the tutor and writer working through practice citations. Another writer explained that their tutor, “taught me the details behind Ethos, Pathos, and Logos and how to incorporate it in my essay.” The tutor in a third session described identifying “a few different grammar rules (subject-verb agreement, punctuation rules, etc.),” and the writer they worked with confirmed that they had “learned some comma rules.” But many of the interactions these writers and tutors shared transcended the kind of direct knowledge transfer typically expected within a teacher/student interaction. Instead, these tutors and writers “discussed” (a term that was used 106 times across these 74 pairs of surveys), “work[ed]” (70 times), “read” (47 times), and “talked” (26 times). Tutors may not have always associated these efforts with teaching, but many of the writers claimed that they were learning.

This reminds us of the unique role that tutors play within the context of higher education. Tutors aren’t teachers. They don’t interact with students like teachers do. They don’t always align their efforts with distinct learning objectives or see themselves as conducting lessons in the same way as a teacher might. And yet tutors are still doing important, educative work.

Students clearly perceive tutors as influencing their learning—as playing a role in the new knowledge and expertise they are gaining. The extent to which students claim that learning is happening apart from tutors’ intentional teaching encourages us to refine our understanding of what is happening in writing center sessions and what makes them effective. Writers are learning even when tutors are not intentionally teaching. This pushes us to understand more fully how learning can emerge without direct instruction and how writing centers fit into that process.

Conclusion The alignment and misalignment that this study identifies between what tutors cite as their intended objects of learning and what the writers they work with report as their lived objects of learning offer validation for the compositional support writing centers provide.

This study reminds us of how many different learning

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Intended and Lived Objects of Learning • 24 opportunities and processes can occur within a tutorial session, and the fact that so many writers reported having learned about so many different issues suggests that tutorials can flexibly respond to writers’ learning concerns.

However, the extent to which what tutors and writers report as their intended and lived objects of learning diverges gives us pause for further consideration and opens additional questions about the nature of tutoring and learning. This study reveals that often tutors and writers have very different perspectives of what happens in a tutorial session. This discrepancy may be connected to any number of factors. It could be related to learning’s function as an individual and often internal process that can sometimes occur apart from direct instruction. It could be related to writers’ ongoing confusion or uncertainty about writing issues and indicate missed opportunities.

It may connect to tutors’ and writers’ differing perspectives on writing and the elements, skills, and processes writing draws upon. This study has prompted me to encourage our tutors to more intentionally reference teaching and learning in their tutorial sessions. Instead of just asking, “What do you want to work on?” at the start of a session, we’ve been experimenting with asking, “What do you want to learn today?” We’re considering the value of fostering more metacommentary within our tutorial sessions as a way to explain what we see ourselves as teaching and what we’re trying to help writers learn.

As previously referenced, this study serves as an opening exploration into this nexus between tutors’ and writers’ experiences. More work needs to be done to explore how tutors and writers experience the same tutorial session in different or similar ways in an effort to understand the points of connection and divergence between what tutors teach and what writers learn.

Certainly, approaching this issue through alternative research methodologies could productively further this conversation. For example, future researchers could observe tutorials in order to track what Ference Marton, Ulla Runesson, and Amy Tsui refer to as the “enacted object of learning” and compare it with the intended and lived objects of learning (5). Research could focus on how writers manifest and apply the learning they claim to have achieved through tutorial sessions by pairing surveys or interviews about writers’ writing center experiences with analysis of their writing.

Doing so would move the focus away from writers’ self-identified knowledge and expertise and open an exploration into their changed behavior and practices.

To continue understanding both what influence writing centers are having on writers and how our centers are

having that influence, writing center administrators would benefit from continuing to bring tutors’ and writers’ experiences and efforts together.

For me and my tutors, however, one of the most compelling aspects from this preliminary foray into how tutors and writers teach and learn through writing center tutorials has been the way it has highlighted the nature of peer tutoring as a lower-stakes instructive encounter where learning can happen through conversation and not always through prescribed lessons. This is an important quality of tutoring that we don’t want to lose—the organic, instructive possibilities of talking through assignments, reading writing with an informed peer, and discussing a text’s future development. This study suggests that writers’ learning is frequently not associated with tutors’ intentional teaching, and that’s okay. However, this is something that tutors should be aware of: the effects of writing center instruction as exhibited by what writers ultimately learn may not be anything the tutor was overtly trying to teach. This reminds us of how expansive the learning opportunities are across a tutorial session and how important it is for tutors to realize that even when they might not be knowingly teaching, the writers they’re working with may be learning.

Notes 1. For the purposes of this study, I draw from Malcolm Knowles et al. to define learning as gained knowledge and expertise. The focus that others have put on learning in association with changed behavior (De Houwer et al.) raises important considerations but does not align with the self-reported nature of this study’s data.

2. Tutors received less money per survey than writers because tutors could respond more frequently. Tutors’ multiple opportunities to fill out a survey allowed them to become more familiar with its questions which, I believed, would influence how long it would take them to respond. Also, since tutors filled out more surveys than writers, this varied compensation rate allowed me to extend my budget further.

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--. “Tutor and Student Assessments of Academic Writing Tutorials: What Is ‘Success’?.” Assessing Writing, vol. 8, no. 2, 2002, pp. 110-134.

Wardle, Elizabeth, and Kevin Roozen. “Addressing the Complexity of Writing Development: Toward an Ecological Model of Assessment.” Assessing Writing, vol. 17, no. 2, 2012, pp. 106-119.

Zelenak, Bonnie, et al. “Ideas in Practice: Preparing Composition Teachers in the Writing Center.”

Journal of Developmental Education, vol. 17, no. 1, 1993, pp. 28-34.

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Intended and Lived Objects of Learning • 27

Appendix: Figures Figure 1: Tutors/Writers Responses to the 5 Yes/No Teaching/Learning Questions

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Figure 2: Tutor/Writer Reported Teaching/Learning by Category

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Figure 3: Tutor/Writer Reported Teaching/Learning by Category

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Figure 4: Tutor/Writer Agreement Across General Teaching/Learning Categories and Short Answer Responses

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Figure 5: Examples of Aligned and Divergent Short Answer Responses

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THE WRITING MAP: A PRIMER FOR FACILITATING MOTIVATIONAL HABITS IN THE WRITING CENTER Elizabeth Buskerus Blackmon St. Louis Community College– Meramec ebusekrus1@stlcc.edu

Abstract Motivation interconnects with many aspects of a student’s higher education journey; a student’s goals, self-efficacy, interests, and prior experiences affect their level of motivation and engagement in a writing center session. This primer discusses the multidimensional nature of motivation and its relation to identity.

Through an exploration of the literature, the author designed a heuristic called the Writing Motivational Assessment Pathway (MAP). This tool focuses on understanding students’ motivations, engaging students more in their writing process, and encouraging their development as writers. The five components of the Writing MAP—identity, beliefs, perceptions, context, and interactions—work toward understanding a student’s motivational profile and pairing strategies that connect with each student. This article discusses how to identify students’ motivational habits through the Writing MAP to help students establish effective writing habits and foster self-regulation. This heuristic continues to be refined at the community college level.

As writing center professionals, we see daily how students’ perspectives about writing drive their motivation to write, and these drives become habits and practices which they ingrain into their process.

Motivation depends on a person’s perspectives, desires, and the context of a scenario (Dresel and Hall 58-59).

In other words, a student’s beliefs, wants, and needs influence that student’s motivation; additionally, the environment (classroom, writing center, home, etc.) affects the direction and intensity of a student’s motivation. At the college level, this framework relates to students’ prior knowledge and experiences, as well as students’ identity. Motivation’s interconnectedness with cognition, emotion, and behavior should encourage writing centers to consider how this concept impacts our work and how we can reflect on and facilitate motivational habits in the writing center.

Helping students to discover a fuller version of their identities as writers starts with understanding their motivations. Encouraging students to connect with their writing and to understand who they are as writers helps them to nurture their writing skills.

Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson consider motivation to be a crucial aspect of writing. They emphasize how “motivation – the drive to actively invest in sustained effort toward a goal – is essential for writing improvement” (“Motivational Scaffolding” 38).

Mackiewicz and Thompson study this process of cognitive and motivational scaffolding techniques in tutoring sessions (“Instruction” 59-64). Their depiction of motivation boils down to three core terms: interest, self-efficacy, and self-regulation (Mackiewicz and Thompson, Talk about Writing 25-26). According to Mackiewicz and Thompson, interest can increase focus on a task; self-efficacy (or one’s confidence level) can cause students to perceive an assignment as more challenging or easier than it is; and self-regulation (behaviors such as goal setting and metacognition) can lead to high degrees of performance. Each of these terms connect back to significant principles shown in the literature (as noted in a later section)—the effects of the learning environment, the students’ goals, and the interest level of students in these academic matters.

Although writing center tutors are not trained professional psychologists or counselors, they can work toward understanding motivation, identifying common motivational habits during sessions, and collaborating with students to reflect on writing habits. Motivation is a thread in the tutoring session, whether the tutor recognizes it or not. This concept impacts how the student approaches the assignment and how engaged the student is within the writing center. Students incorporate their identity, beliefs, perceptions, and context into their writing process, but they may not be aware of these elements and use them with intentionality. In this article, I first conceptualize motivation through the relevant scholarship on this topic, and then, I describe a heuristic I designed for tutors. This heuristic, named the Writing Motivational Assessment Pathway (MAP), is a way to understand this scholarship in a more comprehensive manner and to apply motivational concepts within the tutoring session.

The Writing MAP is a training tool that emerged from studying how the literature on motivation concepts can work holistically in a writing center setting. As I researched and explored motivation informally in a community college setting, I began to see how motivation functions in tutoring sessions and

The Writing MAP • 33 to work on understanding its applications in tutor training. From this research, I designed the Writing MAP, which focuses on understanding students’ motivations, engaging students more in their process, and encouraging their development as writers. This analysis allows the tutor to see the student’s motivational strengths and obstacles and to collaborate with the student, pairing strategies that connect with these strengths and lessen these obstacles. This article will primarily center on identity as a core aspect of motivation. Understanding the intersectionality and formation of students’ identities, especially for underrepresented writers, can help tutors to visualize their motivations when writing.

Defining Motivation and Identity: A Multidimensional Approach Markus Dresel and Nathan C. Hall emphasize the recursive nature of motivation. They define motivation as “the processes underlying the initiation, control, maintenance, and evaluation of goal-oriented behaviors” (59). They analyze motivation in terms of the individual, the learning context, and the individual within that context. The individual’s overall framework of motivation impacts how a student perceives a task and what their predispositions are when it comes to setting goals. When this individual is placed in a learning environment, they create goals; John G. Nicholls connects these achievement goals directly with behaviors (328-329). The student’s goals are further impacted by their self-efficacy (Bandura) and their overall perceptions, also defined as self-determination theory: autonomy, belonging, and competence (Luyckyx et al.). How the authority figure (in this case the tutor) constructs the environment also figures into the equation. In this context, the student considers the expectancies for achievement and their overall values, implements effort accordingly, and then assesses the results of their efforts. Robert G. Isaac et al. emphasize how these expectancies for success or failure impact students’ actions, and Maarten Vansteenkiste et al. focus on how students’ values connect with the students’ identities. Roy Baumeister adds to this definition of motivation, showing it as a desire to alter oneself or one’s situation (1-2), and Johnmarshall Reeve focuses on motivation as a process of “seeking” (32). Identity becomes a point of emphasis within motivation theory. James E. Marcia discussed identity in terms of two spectrums: exploration and commitment. As students’ identities

change along these spectrums, their motivations change as well.

Other scholars center their motivation definitions around the binary of extrinsic and intrinsic. Students with extrinsic motivation complete tasks for a reward or to evade a penalty; those with intrinsic motivation do a task for pleasure, enjoyment, or reward in the task itself. According to Yi-Chia Cheng & Hsin-Te Yeh, those with intrinsic motivation select more challenging situations, expand their knowledge more when they read, demonstrate more creativity, and show more interest than those with extrinsic (599). In looking through these conceptions of motivation, I noted the essential tenets within the research and grouped this research into five categories: identity, beliefs, perceptions, context, and interactions; these categories became the foundation for the Writing MAP (see fig.

1).

The Emergence of the Writing MAP and its Applications in Tutor Training Though I will explain each component individually, the Writing MAP should be viewed as recursive, like the writing process. The diagram of the Writing MAP gives a visual representation of these components (see Figure 1). The Writing MAP is an interactive theory, focusing on the student’s and tutor's part in the session and how the actions of both parties interplay. In this section, I will give merit to these concepts, apply them to a community college setting, and provide questions that correspond with the sections of the Writing MAP, which tutors can ask to gauge students’ motivational traits.

Defining Terms in the Writing MAP The first four categories of the Writing MAP involve analysis of the student. As the tutor becomes more familiar with the student’s motivations, the tutor can better determine an effective course of action within the tutoring session. Below, I explain how these categories came into fruition, how they intersect, and how they are identified during a tutoring session. It is not possible to analyze every factor in a tutoring session, but these five categories can provide guidelines for thinking about motivation during a tutoring session. The Writing MAP helps tutors to navigate issues of identity and motivation in the writing process.

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The Writing MAP • 34

Identity: A Process of Discovery and Choices Within motivation studies, identity proves an integral concept. According to Bart Soenens et al., identity focuses on “discovery and construction” (438); identity relates to the self but is also contextual, pertaining to different areas of life, such as culture, family life, religion, and career (Zhang 938-939). When a task is congruent with this self-definition, individuals’ motivation to complete that task increases (Oyserman and Destin 1001-1002). If a person must complete a task which aligns with their identity, their motivation is typically high, but for tasks which do not align with a core principle of their identity, their motivation remains low. Put more simply, identity centers on story. Evon Hawkins states: “identity is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves as well as the story we tell others about ourselves, and the story changes based on the situation we find ourselves in” (5). This story can have periods of vacillation and stability throughout one’s life.

Marcia uses the continuums of exploration and commitment to explain identity. Along these two scales are four types of identity statuses: identity achievement (high level of exploration, high level of commitment), moratorium (high exploration, low commitment), foreclosure (low exploration, high commitment), and identity diffusion (low exploration, low commitment).

Individuals change in their identity statuses throughout their lives. With identity achievement, people usually present themselves as confident, have good relationships, think complexly, and do not listen to peer pressure as easily as others. Moratorium status shows a similar trend with a high level of self-confidence and not following peer pressure. However, their family relationships are uncertain and not as stable. For foreclosure status, people follow the authoritarian model and often obey their parents or other authority figures on moral matters. Identity diffusion status shows a lower self-esteem and more unstable relationships (Marcia 7159-7163). How a student frames their identity ultimately impacts their effort, interest, goals, and self-efficacy as it pertains to writing.

Identity in the Writing Center In the Writing MAP, the main concepts under the “Identity” aspect include personality and a collective and cultural identity. Identities can incorporate race, culture, language, disability, religion, and more. While some of these identities can be visible, the nuances of these identities can have unseen implications and

motivations. For example, Sacha-Rose Phillips, a writing center tutor, reflects on her tutoring experiences and how she interacts with students based on her identity as an immigrant and ESL student. She assumes that she knows what other ESL students need based on a “shared identity” with them, but she finds: “a variety of factors can influence the extent to which writers feel personally connected to their work, including language identity, social class, and academic discipline” (Phillips 29). Similarly, Hawkins discovers motivation, interest in the assignment and in writing, and core perceptions about writing skills impact students’ identity, in particular their writing identity.

Students have varied interest, motivation, and self-efficacy levels that influence their identities, and tutors “can help clients negotiate the complex, interactive web of cognitive, non-cognitive and self-regulatory processes which result in a written product” (Hawkins 5). The writing center can have a direct impact on how this sense of identity relates to writing.

This mission of the writing center connects with who the writing center targets. My writing center focuses on a message of inclusivity, as many others probably do, encouraging students of all cultures, races, and abilities to enter. This message of acceptance can unfortunately become misinterpreted; some students might see the writing center as a remedial space, or they might fear the judgment of the tutors in this place.

For these reasons, some students do not visit the writing center or engage in a limited capacity with the writing center. Daisha Oliver, an African American tutor, comments on why more minorities do not visit her writing center: writing in the academic world is considered “white.” Oliver states: “[T]he WC runs the risk of becoming a place that eliminates your culture out of your writing under the pretense of ‘correction.’

‘Writing white’ often means that minorities resist inserting their authentic selves into their writing and fear visiting the WC” (29). These students think they must dissociate from their identities when they enter the writing center. While writing centers may advocate as a space for all writers, the writing center may be perceived differently by these underrepresented writers.

How can we authentically promote this inclusive ideology and help students to showcase their identities in their writing?

Writing centers encounter students with varying goals, needs, and identities, and in these contexts, they have the power to transform mindsets. Though tutors are not counselors, it is important to understand the identities of the students in the writing center because this outlook “can ultimately be a productive use of a

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The Writing MAP • 35 session when it helps clients balance their outside obligations with their writing needs” (Hawkins 4). By pinpointing the student writers’ goals, tutors can understand where students are headed, encourage students to reflect on this direction, and complicate the path. Though tutors are only with students for a short period of time, they can significantly impact students’ motivational journeys. Mackiewicz and Thompson highlight strategies that could engage students during a tutoring session, such as validation, encouragement, and focus on the student’s ownership (“Instruction” 63-64). By using these types of techniques, writing center tutors can have an impact on students’ motivation.

At my community college, students come from an assortment of different backgrounds. Many enter directly from the regional public schools. Some are from other countries, speaking a multitude of languages, a diversity that unfortunately can create roadblocks to writing in the English language. Some students have a different way of learning due to a disability, and some are non-traditional students who have waited for a time to come to college. During one day in the writing center, I may hear students tell of their passion for autoimmune diseases, their experience seeing segregation in schools, and their procrastination habits. Each aspect of their identity reveals something that can help our professional tutors connect to them and understand them. By knowing about students’ experiences and perspectives, tutors can provide more relevance in a session. Many identity-focused questions encourage students to share their hobbies, common personality traits, likes, and dislikes to understand more about who they are: ● What is a story that defines you? ● If somebody were making a movie of your life, what would the title of the movie be? ● How would your close friends describe you? ● How would you describe your hometown? ● What is your favorite book and why? ● If you could only do one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? ● What gets you excited to wake up in the morning?

These questions serve as examples; tutors should reflect on what questions are most natural in the moment with a particular student. The other categories of the Writing MAP feed into “Identity” and vice versa. A student’s identity impacts their interest and motivation in writing and their perception of the writing center. A student’s prior academic experiences (and how these experiences affect their outlook) make

up identity and become entrenched in the student’s sense of self, showing their perspective of the world.

Beliefs: A System of Goals, Interests, and Confidence For student writers, their identities come to fruition based on their beliefs about themselves. Albert Ellis et al. show how a system of beliefs can work through the ABC model: “often people experience undesirable activating events (A), about which they have rational and irrational beliefs/cognitions (B).

These beliefs lead to emotional, behavioral, and cognitive consequences (C)” (4). People develop a system of rational or irrational beliefs. Irrational beliefs can create cognitively distorted behaviors or consequences.

As seen in Figure 1, another aspect of the Writing MAP delves into students’ beliefs, or their goals, interest in learning, and self-efficacy. Goal setting has been crucial in this area of the Writing MAP. Setting end goals determines the process of learning.

Achievement goals move below the surface, shaping mindsets about the process of learning. Nicholls divides achievement motivation into three overarching goal categories: task-mastery, ego-determined goals, and work-avoidant goals. For task-mastery, the goal is to learn; for ego-determined, the goal is to please the teacher; and for work-avoidant, the goal is to commit to the least amount of effort for an activity. Nicholls finds that those with an ego-focused mindset will place themselves in circumstances where they demonstrate high ability in relation to others (330-331).

These goals then connect to a student’s self-efficacy. Self-efficacy signifies their self-perception of their abilities and overall confidence in performing a behavior. Bandura notes a pattern between self-efficacy and failure (“Perceived Self-Efficacy” 121, 130-131).

Those with a high level of self-efficacy determine any failures to correlate with effort, whereas those with a low sense of self-efficacy determine failures to correlate with intelligence. Additionally, individuals with stronger self-efficacy determine failures to not be an impossible hurdle (Bandura, “Perceived Self-Efficacy” 121, 130-131). In some capacity, self-efficacy affects students’ goal setting because of self-efficacy’s attentiveness to students’ choices, effort, and responses.

While work-avoidant goals are clearly not beneficial, ego-determined goals are far more complicated. These pursuits show a focus on pleasing an instructor or authority figure, more of an extrinsic

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The Writing MAP • 36 determiner. At my community college, one of the students who used the writing center, Stacey, came from a predominantly black high school. Told she would not amount to much in life, she received little encouragement from teachers and counselors in her high school, contributing to her low self-efficacy in academics. How students perceive themselves as writers affects how they approach writing and how motivated they are to write. According to Albert Bandura, the self is “socially constituted” (“Exercise” 77), meaning others can affect one’s identity and self-efficacy levels. The student’s goals, self-efficacy, and interest intersect to create the student’s motivational belief system. Some of these beliefs, ingrained in the student early in their educational journey, can be irrational, based on what others have told the student. In terms of students’ motivational habits with writing, irrational beliefs can lead to low performance, low interest, and procrastination. When tutors ask questions about students’ motivational beliefs, they can assess the root of any irrational beliefs which students may hold: ● What were you taught in high school about how to write? ● Describe some positive and negative moments you have had with writing. What experiences with writing do you remember most? Consider the experiences in school, at home, and in other environments. ● When you receive a writing assignment, how do you determine how much time to put into it? ● What are some of your writing goals? ● Do you feel like a confident writer? Why or why not? ● What is your interest level (with writing in general or with your writing assignments)?

With these inquiries, tutors can unpack how this student thinks and encourage the student to reflect on how past writing experiences may affect what, how, and why the student writes currently. The tutor should not consider this list to encompass all questions to ask nor should the tutor expect to interrogate the writer during the session. Asking one, two, or three questions would be reasonable; the tutor should observe if more are warranted based on the level of engagement during the session.

Perceptions: The Writing Which Students Hold Dear

Ideologies

For student writers, writing perceptions relate to a student’s system of ideology. Self-determination theory relates to the autonomy, competence, and relatedness a person considers toward a task. Koen Luyckx et al. claim that the components in self-determination theory are important to sustain to have identity growth (277).

What students understand about writing’s core values and about writing’s connection to career and life comes from their overall academic goals and personal identities. Past educational and learning experiences impact how invested and motivated one is in the learning process. Some students who come to the writing center lament that they are not strong writers and feel a sense of disconnectedness from their essay topics and from the overall process. With the example above, when Stacey visited the writing center, she frequently focused on or asked questions about grammar; her high school teachers marked her essays with red marks, using notations like “fragment” and “awkward” throughout the essay. This hyperfocus on one area of writing narrows students’ understanding of writing’s possibilities can create lower confidence, and/or create disconnect between students and their writing. Tutors can increase students’ confidence and help students see the multifaceted, relevant aspects of writing. The following questions correspond to how a tutor can understand student’s writing perceptions more: ● How would you define what a good writer is.

What attributes do you have of a good writer? ● After completing a writing assignment, how do you determine if it was successful? ● What successes have you had as a writer? ● Describe your writing process from start to finish. ● What would make you feel better about how you write?

These inquiries dig into how students perceive their writing process, abilities, successes, and failures.

Fostering this vulnerability can lead to insights about the student.

Context: Values and Expectations In the Writing MAP, contextual motivation depends on students’ thoughts and emotions in connection to the specific assignment. In a community college, students’ expectations of success, values, and

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The Writing MAP • 37 interests vary, and each of these aspects adds a layer to their composition. If they expect to fail, value the writing task as only a passing grade, and do not have much interest in the topic, their writing becomes flat and one-dimensional. I have worked with students who struggle with composing a complete sentence or reading a full-length text but value the ability to perform these actions. I have worked with students who have trouble organizing their thoughts and procrastinate on writing their essays, expecting their success to be minimal but not valuing the task enough.

Some students have no interest in the topic assigned to them, and their unfamiliarity with the topic then affects their level of self-efficacy in the task. Each of these expectations, values, and interests affects students’ attitude and motivations for that specific task.

Where students place their values and expectations determines how engaged they are in their writing assignment and in the writing center session. These expectations and values play out in expectancy-value theory. Robert G. Isaac et al. position expectancy theory as a process theory, showing how individuals’ beliefs about the task determine their actions (214-215). A student’s expectations regarding if they will succeed or fail in their writing might come from this student’s past academic experiences, such as pressures placed by instructors, parents, and peers; a student’s values in this process connects with their interests (academically and personally) and components of their identity. For example, if a student’s expectations for success are low, and their values focus on correctness and growth as grammatical improvement, that writer’s focus during the tutoring session will be narrow. Maarten Vansteenkiste et al. states: “it is important not only to consider whether people value their task engagement but also the kind of values they are upholding during their activities” (763).

The values each student upholds depends on the identities situated in that specific context, as well as the student’s mindset about that task.

Questions can be posed to have the student expand upon the context of that writing assignment and their perception of the writing center: ● What expectations have you set for yourself in writing this essay? ● Are there any specific writing concerns you have had in the past or the instructor would like you to address? ● Where are you in your writing process? What have you been focusing on as you have written?

●

Are you interested in this writing assignment?

Why or why not? ● Are you interested in this topic you have chosen for this writing assignment? Why or why not? ● What do you expect out of your session today? ● What do you think our purpose in the writing center is?

Asking these questions can be telling, explaining why the student has come to the writing center, what they think of the writing center, and what their emphases are for this writing assignment.

Based on these first four aspects of the Writing MAP, how can tutors know the student’s motivational strengths and obstacles? How does the tutor know what to focus on in each session? Applying the Writing MAP involves teaching tutors how to be motivational facilitators.

Tutors as Motivational Another Hat to Wear

Facilitators:

Using the Writing MAP can help to make sense of motivation in the writing center; the last aspect of the Writing MAP delves into the interactions in the tutoring session and the choices made regarding strategies and the session’s purpose. This area lends to yet one more hat for tutors, that of motivational facilitators. This hat is central to the other tutoring roles (e.g., writing experts, collaborators, etc.). As an expert, tutors are expected to know more about writing. This role connects to the “Perceptions” area of the Writing MAP; tutors should consider students’ learning and writing perceptions and teach them new approaches to their process based on their perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. In a collaborator role, the tutor works with the writer, offering suggestions in their writing. Within this role, tutors can encourage student’s interest and values in a task, or the “Context” area of the Writing MAP. Each of these hats intersects in some way with motivation.

The ultimate purpose is not to change the student’s motivational framework but to broaden and deepen it, helping students to see the complexity of choices they have as writers. Mackiewicz and Thompson comment: Because of the complexity of writing, student writers will not likely improve their writing competence much in a single conference.

However, with tutors’ support, they can gain answers to the questions that brought them to the writing center and possibly newly consider

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The Writing MAP • 38 their writing practice, so that their writing competence continues to evolve. (“Talk about Writing” 5) In the writing center, the goal is development, helping students understand their writing identities and processes. Attending to an aspect of a student’s motivation can encourage and engage students more in their writing.

Scholars such Mackiewicz and Thompson offer the theoretical frame for understanding motivation; my goal is to build upon research such as theirs to develop a holistic, practical tool to help tutors determine the support an individual writer might best respond to in the session. The role of motivational facilitators can incorporate many strategies, but in this article, I will focus on two specific intersections, both of which have a dimension of transfer. The first, establishing effective writing habits, is a significant strategy because it leads to the building of reflexive life skills. The second strategy focuses on self-regulation, an important habit that develops confidence.

Identifying a Student’s Motivational Framework to Establish Effective Writing Habits As indicated earlier, a student’s identity (knowledge, experiences, interests, personality, etc.) affects a student’s motivations to write. Assessing a student’s framework can help the tutor work with the student on establishing more effective writing habits.

Using the Writing MAP as a tutor training tool starts with understanding a student’s framework (the Identity, Beliefs, Perceptions, and Context categories of the Writing MAP). Writing center directors can train tutors to listen for irrational belief statements and question students on writing habits. Belief statements start with “I” and usually reinforce a claim about oneself.

Irrational beliefs are directly negative statements that depict a fixed mindset about writing, such as “I am a failure at this subject,” or “I cannot complete this task.” For example, one student at my community college writing center, Jill, has made frequent claims that she cannot write. When I questioned her on why she thought this way, she disclosed some learning challenges throughout schooling, mentioning that she had an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) throughout high school to accommodate her specific learning disorder (dyslexia). By knowing this information about her identity, I was able to work with her on how she best learns and help her develop a growth mindset. For Jill, many of her past experiences consisted of teachers commenting on sentence structure issues and formatting. When she failed in

these areas, she became discouraged. After being assigned a rhetorical analysis essay in her English Composition 102 class, she wanted to attend to surface-level concerns in her sessions, skirting the essay’s purpose of critically thinking about ethos, logos, and pathos. Together, we worked on discussing the purpose of this type of essay and refocusing her goals on these higher-order concerns. Helping students reflect on their writing beliefs, tutors can encourage students to investigate the “why” behind their motivations, partner with students on how to transform their irrational beliefs, and help them procure more effective writing habits.

On the other hand, finding a student’s motivational strengths involves looking at a student’s positive habits.

Perhaps a student has a high self-efficacy and considers any failures as opportunities to learn and grow.

Strengths can be displayed as positive statements or positive habits that lead the student toward a growth mindset, or a framework that understands failure as a pathway toward growth and challenge to expand on current skillsets (Dweck 15-17). The tutor should nurture these types of perspectives.

Fostering Self-regulation to Encourage Transferable Skills This reflectiveness can then help students with transferring their writing skills. Transfer remains a fundamental concept in composition studies and educational psychology and one which intersects with training tutors in the Writing MAP. Bonnie Devet mentions scholarship that highlights how self-regulation, self-efficacy, and reflection helps with the transference of skills for students and for tutors (130-131). Self-regulation extends to control over one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Barry J. Zimmerman and Adam R. Moylan show self-regulation as a complex, recursive process, part of which involves reflection (or awareness) (300-305). This self-regulation process gives the student agency and accountability and “determines indirectly changing patterns of poor behavior and positively influence the level of achieved performance” (Daniela 2552). Motivational facilitators can develop effective self-regulation of students’ habits.

Training tutors to facilitate this transfer process can also involve pointed questions. According to Ellen C. Carillo, helping students to transfer their knowledge about writing involves “transforming their prior knowledge rather than applying it” (52). Questions noted in the “Perceptions” section of the Writing MAP investigate a student’s conceptions of their writing habits. For instance, Jill considered grammar to be an important attribute in writing well, and her goal was to

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The Writing MAP • 39 pass her English Composition 102 class; I encouraged her to reflect on why she thought grammar was most important and examine other skills that could transfer to various assignments. How students perceive writing affects how they are motivated in approaching each task. While all these questions cannot be asked, the tutor can select a couple questions as a starting point for reflection.

A Writing Center that Motivates Though students oversee the creation of their own artwork, tutors can help student writers recognize their potential and increase their awareness of their identities. Dresel and Hall motion: [T]eachers have the potential, and thus the responsibility, to substantially impact the motivation of their students through the use of teaching techniques that maintain and bolster motivation in their students, as well as utilize classroom structures and interaction techniques that promote motivation in their students. (91) Instructors should consider this weighty mission both to teach students material and to construct a classroom which fosters motivation. A similar charge rests with those in the writing center. While it may not be the writing centers’ sole responsibility to motivate students, constructing a motivational environment can help with student perception of the writing center, development of effective writing habits, and growth as writers.

Establishing relevance in each session could encourage students to rethink their writing processes, commit more effort, and give a clearer purpose to the writing center. John M. Keller denotes relevance as a significant aspect of motivating students. While the environment cannot be fully responsible for the student’s effort, it can be constructed to provide students with “encouragement, scaffolding, and intermediate goal setting” (Keller 9). Rapport with each student allows tutors to know more about the student’s identities (i.e., prior academic experiences, writing expectations, values, and interest level), helping to decide what strategies would work best with the student. Care can best be developed once the tutor has rapport with the student. Self-efficacy should be developed in writing centers because they can act as an avenue to mature students’ sense of self and identity.

Building rapport moves students to share more about themselves, creating more familiarity for the tutor about the student. A greater understanding of the

student’s identity can help the tutor to foster more reflectiveness and scaffolding. Two motivational scaffolding strategies that Mackiewicz and Thompson mentioned demonstrate this emphasis on rapport: “demonstrations of concern for students” and “expressions of sympathy and empathy” (“Motivational Scaffolding” 47). With the former technique, the tutor shows a level of care and may inquire as to how the student is doing, and with the latter technique, the tutor may express sympathy about how challenging an assignment is. Using scaffolding to add relevance might involve gauging interests of the students, integrating modeling, and focusing on student choice in what to teach. These relevance activities can lead to students applying their knowledge to real-world situations and to more engagement and a stronger perception of belonging (Gormley et al. 177-179). If the assignment has value to the students, they are more engaged.

This process engages the students in the writing center session and in their own writing journey. By learning the process to identify a student’s motivational habits, tutors work toward understanding students’ identities. Through this process, tutors help students to connect with their writing; the tutor and student collaboratively set an agenda that moves the development of their writing process and their motivation forward. By using the Writing MAP, a writing center that motivates can transform students’ perspectives to help them become more balanced, complete versions of themselves.

Works Cited Bandura, Albert. “Perceived Self-Efficacy in Cognitive Development and Functioning.” Educational Psychologist, vol. 28, no. 2, 1993, pp. 117-148.

Bandura, Albert. “Exercise of Human Agency through Collective Efficacy.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 9, no. 3, June 2000, pp. 75-78, doi: 10.1111/1467-8721.00064.

Baumeister, Roy F. “Toward a General Theory of Motivation: Problems, Challenges, Opportunities, and the Big Picture.” Motivation and Emotion, vol.

40, no.

1, 2016, pp.

1-10, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-015-9521-y.

Carillo, Ellen C. “The Role of Prior Knowledge in Peer Tutorials: Rethinking the Study of Transfer in Writing Centers.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 38, no.

1-2, 2020, pp. 45-71.

Cheng, Yi-Chia, and Hsin-Te Yeh. “From Concepts of Motivation to Its Application in Instructional Design: Reconsidering Motivation from an Instructional Design Perspective.” British Journal of

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The Writing MAP • 40 Educational Technology, vol. 40, no. 4, 2009, pp.

597-605, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00857.x .

Daniela, Popa.

“The Relationship between Self-Regulation, Motivation, and Performance at Secondary School Students.” Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 191, 2015, pp. 2549-2553, doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.04.410.

Devet, Bonnie. “The Writing Center and Transfer of Learning: A Primer for Directors.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, Fall/Winter 2015, pp.

119-151.

Dresel, Markus, and Nathan C. Hall. “Motivation.”

Emotion, Motivation, and Self-regulation: A Handbook for Teachers, edited by Nathan C. Hall and Thomas Goetz, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2013, pp. 57-122.

Dweck, Carol S. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Ballentine Books, 2016.

Ellis, Albert, et al. “Rational and Irrational Beliefs: A Historical and Conceptual Perspective.” Rational and Irrational Beliefs: Research, Theory, and Clinical Practice, edited by Daniel David et al., Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 3-22.

Gormley, Denise K, et al. “Motivating Online Learners Using Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction Motivational Theory and Distributed Scaffolding.” Nurse Educator, vol. 37, no. 4, 2012, pp.

177-180, doi:10.1097/NNE.0b013e31825a8786.

Hawkins, R. Evon. “‘From Interest and Expertise’: Improving Student Writers’ Working Authorial Identities.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 32, no. 6, Feb. 2008, pp. 1-5, wlnjournal.org.

Isaac, Robert G., et al. “Leadership and Motivation: The Effective Application of Expectancy Theory.”

Journal of Managerial Issues, vol. 13, no. 2, 2001, pp.

212-226, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40604345.

Keller, John M. Motivational Design for Learning and Performance: The ARCS Model Approach. Springer, 2010.

Luyckx, Koen, et al. “Basic Need Satisfaction and Identity Formation: Bridging Self-Determination Theory and Process-Oriented Identity Research.”

Journal of Counseling Psychology, vol. 56, no. 2, 2009, pp. 276-288, doi: 10.1037/a0015349.

Mackiewicz, Jo, and Isabelle Thompson. “Motivational Scaffolding, Politeness, and Writing Center Tutoring.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, 2013, pp.

38-73, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43442403.

---.

“Instruction, Cognitive Scaffolding, and Motivational Scaffolding in Writing Center Tutoring.” Composition Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 2014, pp. 54-78, http://jomack.public.iastate.edu/.

---. Talk About Writing: The Tutoring Strategies Of Experienced Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2018.

Marcia, James E. “Identity in Childhood and Adolescence.” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. 1st ed., edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, Pergamon, 2001, pp.

7159-7163.

Nicholls, John G. “Achievement Motivation: Conceptions of Ability, Subjective Experience, Task Choice, and Performance.” Psychological Review, vol. 91, no. 3, 1984, pp. 328-346, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.91.3.328.

Oliver, Daisha Denise. “Tutor’s Column: ‘Is Writing for the Majority?: Examining Diversity in the Writing Center.’” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 46, no. 3-4, Nov./Dec. 2021, pp.

27-30, wlnjournal.org.

Oyserman, Daphna, and Mesmin Destin.

“Identity-Based Motivation: Implications for Intervention.” Counseling Psychologist, vol. 38, no. 7, Oct. 2010, pp.

1001-1043, doi: 10.1177/0011000010374775.

Phillips, Sacha-Rose. “Tutor’s Column: ‘Shared Identities, Diverse Needs.’” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 42, no. 9-10, May/June 2018, pp. 26-29, wlnjournal.org.

Reeve, Johnmarshall. “A Grand Theory of Motivation: Why Not?” Motivation and Emotion, vol. 40, no. 1, 2016, pp.

31-35, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-015-9538-2.

Soenens, Bart, et al. “Identity Styles and Causality Orientations: In Search of the Motivational Underpinnings of the Identity Exploration Process.” European Journal of Personality, vol. 19, 2005, pp. 427-442, doi: 10.1002/per.551.

Vansteenkiste, Maarten, et al. “Less Is Sometimes More: Goal Content Matters.” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 96, no. 4, 2004, pp. 755-764, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.96.4.755.

Zhang, Li-fang. “Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development.” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. 2nd ed., edited by James D. Wright, Elsevier, 2015, pp. 938-946.

Zimmerman, Barry. J., and Adam R. Moylan.

“Self-Regulation: Where Metacognition and Motivation Intersect.” Handbook of Metacognition in Education. 1st ed., edited by Douglas J. Hacker et al., Routledge, 2009, pp. 299-315.

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The Writing MAP • 41

Appendix: Figures Figure 1: The Writing Motivational Assessment Pathway (MAP)

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EVERYDAY ASSESSMENT PRACTICES IN WRITING CENTERS: A CULTURAL RHETORICS APPROACH Marilee Brooks-Gillies IUPUI mbrooksg@iupui.edu

Trixie Smith Michigan State University smit1254@msu.edu

Abstract

Our individual Writing Centers and the field of Writing Center Studies can be understood as specific cultural communities where writers write; where writers talk about writing with other writers; where writers are encouraged and empowered to enter a community of practice with other writers around making meaning through conversations, texts, and most importantly relationships. As Riley Mukavetz notes, a cultural community, such as the writing center, is a space where “one engages with texts [tutor manuals, intake forms, client surveys, theoretical articles read independently or in concert], bodies [tutors, clients, faculty who send their students to the WC, administrators], materials [essays, computers, candy bowls, tables and chairs], ideas [non-directive tutoring, process not product, ghosts in the center, the faces of the center], or space [basements, libraries, satellites, online, websites] knowing that these subjects are interconnected to the universe and belong to a cultural community with its own intellectual tradition and history” (109). Likewise, as Bratta and Powell tell us, it is through honoring all of these different aspects of community and storytelling that we build our theories and thus our practices. In shaping our inquiry into our communities by recognizing the relationships among the makers and makings, we come to writing centers as cultural rhetorics scholars.

From this cultural rhetorics positionality and our own lived experiences, we posit that assessment is a practice of everyday life in the writing center.

Something we do, and are called to do, on a regular basis, day in and day out. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau’s goal is to create an approach to make everyday practices visible; he writes, “This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, ‘ways of operating’ or doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them” (xi). We see this as a helpful understanding of assessment. In developing

We write about a cultural rhetorics approach to writing center assessment at two different institutions where we think about assessment as everyday practice that enables us to tell multiple stories about our centers. We share how we create assessment committees within the center and collaboratively develop and revise assessment approaches and instruments, particularly with consultant input. Then, we discuss the various communities that inform and benefit from our assessments, including consultants, a broad range of writing center stakeholders, and writing center administrators. Assessment as everyday practice means that we are better informed and prepared when these constituents ask questions, make requests, or operate from (false) assumptions. We hope this view of assessment leads readers to build relationships with the individuals in their centers and universities in order to create assessments that matter in particular times and spaces as well as assessments that morph and change as the readers’ cultural communities change.

A cultural rhetorics orientation is to enact a set of respectful and responsible practices to form and sustain relationships with cultural communities and their shared beliefs and practices including texts, materials, and ideas. This orientation rejects the idea that “everything is a text” to be read and instead engages with the material, embodied, and relational aspects of research and scholarly production. One engages with texts, bodies, materials, ideas, or space knowing that these subjects are interconnected to the universe and belong to a cultural community with its own intellectual tradition and history. --Andrea Riley Mukavetz As we’ve said, for us, the core of cultural rhetorics practices is an orientation and embodied storying of the maker in relation to what is being made. The makers of the pieces gathered here [in this special issue of Enculturation focused on Entering the Cultural Rhetorics Conversations] engage in that storying in different ways, through different means, hearing the voices of different ancestors and elders, honoring different kinds of stories.

Their stories build and are theories, forming a web of relations—making, re-making, and extending the brief outline of cultural rhetorics practices we’ve talked about in this introduction. --Phil Bratta & Malea Powell

Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers • 43 ways to make visible and understand our everyday practices, we begin to assess it. Through approaching assessment as an everyday practice and applying it to our everyday practices, we create a way to talk about our work in systematic, clear ways. We can use it to draw attention to practices that work well and to address practices that need modification(s).

Many writing center theorists and practitioners have previously noted the need for assessment, as well as the fear of assessment. Neal Lerner, for example, says that assessment is one of the words that “haunt” writing center professionals, alongside “research.” He then argues for reclaiming the words, and the acts, of assessment and research in order to “put into a critical context the common call to investigate how well we are doing” (58) and to “begin to assess our work in ways that we feel are meaningful and useful” (73).1 Similarly, Joan Hawthorne indicates her surprise that writing center professionals “have had to be pushed and pulled into assessment, resisting all the way” (237).

Hawthorne then makes an argument for assessment as a set of scholarly activities that provide us with evidence and information (and we would add stories) to be used with a range of stakeholders at every level.

Jon Olson and Dawn J. Moyer, and Adelia Falda have also argued for both the importance and ease of conducting assessment in our centers, comparing assessment to the tutoring work we already do: “addressing questions, through conversation, that help people see more clearly what they’ve been doing so they can then do more effectively what they need to achieve” (111). It is the everydayness of this work that leads them to argue for student-centered research as a way to provide valuable insight into the work of writing centers while giving students valuable experiences with research and assessment and all that these processes entail.

For decades, writing center publications have both celebrated the possibilities of research in the writing center and called for more research at the same time.

Alice Gillam’s survey of the scholarship on research argued that the literature fell into three categories: “the call to research, the survey or overview of research, and the critique, that is, in its own way, a call to research differently” (4-5). Often these calls have asked for more empirical methods. Driscoll and Perdue, for example, surveyed three decades worth of research in The Writing Center Journal and concluded that writing center professionals need to do more replicable, aggregable, and data-supported research (RAD) research. More recent scholars, however, point out some of the problems with RAD research. Alexandria

Lockett, when focusing on the experiences of Black women in writing centers, warns us to “be cautious about privileging replicable and aggregable data (RAD) research over more explicitly subjective methods. The language of RAD tends to strip the human experience of its nuance and may risk diminishing the various ways we might interpret experience as data” (33). Likewise, when discussing his research with queer-identified writing center directors, Travis Webster writes, From a RAD lens, my methods are replicable, and I do hope they could offer a lens for other queer, transgender, and raced projects. However, I caution against just any researcher replicating my methods and instruments given that my queer body played a critical role in the development and framework for the project, including and especially linked to recruitment and establishing trust with my participants. (18) Writing center assessment, then, is a form of research that needs to be considered and conducted in and with the community. Decisions about questions to explore and how to explore them need to be made through engaging with the center, its stakeholders, its needs, its practices, its history. Cultural rhetorics research focuses on the maker in relation to what is being made. In writing centers, we foster relationships and support writing in a myriad of ways, which differ from center to center and change over time.

How, then, do we create an approach to writing center assessments that embrace this emphasis on relationships? Relationships that exist in a particular context and historical moment? What kinds of questions do we need to ask and how do we go about answering them? Who should be part of the asking and answering? What methods do we use to create assessments that will provide us with the ability to learn more about our community, our relationships, in responsible and reciprocal ways? In Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter, William J. Macauley, Jr. writes, “Our work is unique, which means that others cannot reasonably be expected to handle the assessment of that work. In order to assess and accurately represent that work, we cannot work from lore or anecdote alone” (29). He calls for more deliberate assessments and research, so we can not only tell our own stories but also show our stories, stories collected in and through intentional, structured, and empirically sound methods2. The stories of the center include stories of consultants, student writers, administrators, engagement partners, and other stakeholders. Our approach to assessment includes the writing center community of each of our centers and

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Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers • 44 all of the various stakeholders’ investments in and connections to each of our writing centers.

To run effective writing centers under this broad idea of community and story, we need to understand our writing centers as composed of various communities of practice, where groups of learners operate on common ground. Like Malencyzk, et al. “we [as directors] admit to being strongly influenced by our many collective years tutoring in, directing, and researching writing centers, sites in which students teaching and learning from other students is woven into the fabric” (70). From the beginning of their time working in our particular centers, consultants recognize their voices are encouraged as part of ongoing conversations about what our centers are and can be.

To successfully create, implement, and revise meaningful assessments, we need to see ourselves as working together to tell compelling stories about what we do and how we do it. Central to developing a community of practice within the writing center, then, is a strong writing center education program that provides consultants with information about writing center history, a student-centered pedagogy, an emphasis on teambuilding and community, guidance on intercultural and workplace communication, attentiveness to diversity, equity, and inclusion as values that guide our practices, and other orientations important to the local contexts of our particular universities and centers. While models vary from credit-bearing courses, required staff meetings, and self-paced modules, writing center education matters to create common understanding of our values and goals and for recognition of the ways our daily practices support those goals.

In this article, we focus on the part of this education that stresses to consultants and staff, who represent the culture of the center, that assessment relies on the input of everyone in the center acting in community. This focus includes sharing how we create assessment committees and collaboratively develop assessment approaches and instruments, as well as how this information is then shared with the community in various ways and forms. We then discuss the diverse cultural communities that inform and benefit from our assessments, including consultants, writing center administrators, and a broad range of writing center stakeholders—from students to campus administrators.

Creation of Assessment Committees Dear Amber3, I am forming a new committee to help with the work of the Writing Center—the assessment committee. I would like for this committee to have a good mixture of new and experienced consultants, undergrad and graduate consultants, fields of study, etc. Therefore, I am inviting you to be a part of this committee, which will consider ways to evaluate the work of the center, the work of individual consultants, and the work of the administrators.

If you are willing to serve the writing center in this way, please write back and let me know. Also let me know all of your available meeting times (we'll move around schedules if we need to).

Thanks, Trixie For us, ongoing writing center education and professional development includes participating in committees. At both of our centers, the committees are sites where consultants across experience levels work together to build, sustain, and revise writing center programming and the structures that make that programming possible. One such committee is an assessment committee. The assessment committee at The Writing Center at Michigan State University (MSU) was established by Trixie soon after she came to the university as a way to pull in multiple student voices, to expand existing assessments, and to make assessment a common occurrence across programs and initiatives. In fact, Marilee served on the assessment committee at The Writing Center at MSU when she was a doctoral student, working with undergraduate and graduate consultants, the Director (Trixie), and Associate Director to create and implement various assessments. The assessment committee at The Writing Center at MSU continues in this form, and Marilee has started similar committees at both writing centers she has directed since graduating from MSU. When establishing the assessment committee at MSU, Trixie assembled a group of writing consultants that represented a wide spectrum of writing center experiences; some were in their first semester of consulting, while some had consulted at multiple writing centers over the course of many years. Some students were studying Rhetoric and Writing, while others were preparing for careers in different disciplines and professional capacities. The committee was intentionally organized to represent disparate and varied experiences and perspectives; each member was valued and each member contributed to the

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Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers • 45 development of assessment instruments and strategies used in our writing center. The aim was to develop a range of approaches that would help us not only understand but advance our work together. We started by reading some of the existing writing center and writing program literature on assessment to give us some common ground and a place from which to ask questions. Members of the committee also brought in readings from their own fields to help inform our discussions. Trixie recalls conversations about statistics from an accounting major, how-to guides for focus groups from a communications/ human resources major, and validity testing of initial instruments from consultants in linguistics and sociology. Following Ed White’s advice, we benefited from a team “representing different discourse communities” and “multiple measures” (199).

From the beginning, assessment was framed as a practice of the everyday life of the center, countering the narrative that assessment is some big scary monster. Instead, we choose to greet assessment as a friend who is always around to help us out. In Strategies for Writing Center Research, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, for example, argues that we conduct research for a wide range of reasons: to participate and contribute to a larger conversation, to interrogate practices, to make better decisions, to make stronger arguments, to complicate received narratives, to gain academic or professional cachet, and to enjoy our work more (or again) (xix-xx). Assessment is not some big project that happens every few years when accreditation documents are due or when we’re trying to argue for new programming, space, or funds. It is instead, a part of our daily sustenance—both food for thought and our exercise regime.

We had these very ideas in mind when we first began thinking strategically about assessment in the MSU Writing Center. We looked at what information we already had, such as client intake data, assorted emails and messages from both clients and consultants, and individual appointment information. We then asked ourselves what else we wanted to know. Multiple brainstorming and planning sessions led us to develop four key approaches to assessment, utilizing four different assessment/research tools: short client surveys administered in a two-week blitz once a semester, a lengthier consultant self-assessment completed once a year during a fall staff meeting, group interviews or focus groups with consultants focused on writing center administrators facilitated by the assessment committee once a year during a spring staff meeting, and session observations of each

consultant scheduled throughout the year. We viewed each of the individual instruments as pieces of a puzzle designed to collect stories from different constituents and perspectives; when put together these puzzle pieces would create a more robust (but never complete) picture of the work of the center. We also saw these as middle pieces of the puzzle with openings and nubs reaching out to other assessments in our center, our university, the larger writing center community, and to places as yet unknown (see Schendel and Macauley for their very useful articulation of ways to consider broader assessments in higher education in relation to writing center assessment design and implementation). We brought them to the larger staff for feedback that would help us clarify the purpose of each tool/approach/instrument and to be open and transparent about their purposes.

We purposefully worked these different assessments into the everyday work of our center over the course of three years, layering them into existing structures and practices to cultivate understanding of each of these approaches with the entire staff as they were implemented. We wanted to show how assessment is a way to look closely at what we were doing and how we could do it better—in other words, our everyday practices.

Marilee has since implemented similar models at two different writing centers, both of which had fewer existing assessments prior to her taking on the role of director. In each writing center, she started conversations about assessment with existing staff in ongoing professional development staff meetings and workshops and with incoming consultants in the writing center education course. Consultants read about writing center assessments, reviewed writing center missions, values, and goals statements, and were given time to reflect on the purpose of the writing center and how that purpose is evident in our everyday practices. In addition to local writing center archives and models from writing center literature, Marilee shared the MSU Writing Center assessment instruments with newly established assessment committees to consider how they may be useful as models to consider in developing their own.

Several years ago, Marilee encountered significant pushback from the broader staff in the process of trying to create a more collaborative environment in the Writing Center she directed at IUPUI, including engaging in assessments. Her initial moves to increase the number of staff meetings and to meet individually with each consultant was understood as a significant revision when it was intended as a way to get to know

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Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers • 46 consultants and the Center and learn more about the everyday practices of the Center. Her hope was that by engaging with consultants and learning about the parts of the job that were most exciting and satisfying for them and the things that left them frustrated or concerned she could work with them to make shifts to consultant education, strengthen the newly created committees, and develop an assessment plan. She was concerned when some consultants saw these overtures as “surveillance” and indicated that the center did not have a history or culture of “supervision and accountability.” While Marilee didn’t want her actions to be understood as surveillance, she most certainly did want to create a culture of accountability in the Center.

Looking back at these early stages in the development of our thinking about the communities of our centers, we can now say that assessment as a practice of everyday life in both of our centers is more attractive to our staff members generally, but this change does not happen instantaneously. It takes time for assessment to be seen as part of the everyday; however, being seen as an everyday practice is the only way for assessment to become familiar, inviting even.

For instance, as Marilee introduced the committee structure at IUPUI, she worked with staff to cultivate a culture of inquiry and curiosity, where consultants were encouraged to seek out answers to questions about consulting through reading scholarship and observing each other. Staff shared readings and began to see that learning how to do the work of writing centers was something that was never over. They were never “done” learning, and that made assessment of our practices less scary and, instead, helpful and interesting.

Over time, staff members can and will interact with the assessment process; they can ask questions, revise questions, revise answers, share results in multiple forms and venues; they can learn from it and grow with it, seeing it as a part of ongoing professional development and growth. For example, in Trixie’s center, the assessment committee now collaborates with all of the other committees in the center to generate questions for the semesterly client surveys; one semester when focusing on Dear Client Letters4 in Professional Development, we added a couple of questions about the usefulness of the letters and whether or not clients shared the letters with others (i.e., professors and advisors). When the assessment committee analyzes the collected data from various instruments, they then share out general feedback through the staff newsletter and/or blog and specific feedback to committees or programs that need to integrate this feedback into their future engagements.

Interacting with the feedback from assessment on a regular basis reinforces the everydayness of the process and builds a familiarity that encourages staff members to move stories around, re-constellating5 results or thoughts on a regular basis.

Revising and Responding to Changing Contexts Through listening, and listening carefully, we have gained a better understanding of our different lived, embodied experiences and the ways our various identity positions (including but not limited to race, gender, institutional status, and disciplinary backgrounds) and prior experiences inform how we engage in the work of the writing center and the ways we negotiate relationships with and among one another within and beyond the UWC. --Marilee Brooks-Gillies, et al.

Lipari’s notion of listening offers a way for those of us situated in the academy to attend to both when listening leads to understanding and also when listening leads to the recognition that we might not understand another person and therefore have a responsibility to make space for their experiences and perspectives. --Kathyrn Valentine As mentioned previously, communities of practice are multiply-situated, across centers, people, spaces, and places. In part that means that the everyday practices of assessment, of necessity, must change on a regular basis. Assessments respond to the ever changing staff of the writing center, both administrators and students, they adjust to the needs of clients and stakeholders, and if done correctly, they morph based on previous assessments. The questions we ask change because we need to know different things at different times. In addition, the process of engaging in assessment and the assessments themselves support and impact members of the communities connected to our centers in different ways. In what follows, we share the ways various communities contribute to or are informed by our everyday assessment approach.

Consultants As the ones on the ground interacting with writers on a daily basis in personal and embodied ways, our consultants have a different vantage point from which to assess their work and the work of the writing center more broadly. It behooves us then, to treat them as experts in this arena and to build connections across

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Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers • 47 our experiences and theirs, our theoretical positions and theirs.

Engaging in the assessment process can be valuable to consultants even before the assessment data can be reviewed and used to make changes to writing center programming. For instance, consultants observe each other using our observation instrument, which provides them with a framework for the kinds of value-driven practices that are common in our one-to-one sessions with writers6. Through observing their peers with the guidance of the observation instrument, they consider what practices are serving the writer, how writing center pedagogy is evident in our sessions, and what activities and strategies may be useful in particular contexts. From the observations, they get new ideas for activities and strategies to implement in their sessions. They can share ideas about their approaches with their peers as well, and they can reflect on their own practices. In addition, the process leads them to ask more questions about what happens in writing center sessions and what could happen in writing center sessions. As Blazer shares, “While we may be immersed in scholarship and conversation, our challenge is to figure out abbreviated but meaningful ways to engage with big ideas alongside tutors. And, as most of us facilitate staff education in periodic meetings throughout the semester, we have to stay mindful of the magnitude of this project and the challenge of sharing limited time with our tutors” (24).

For example, in the MSU Writing Center, we have begun focusing our staff professional development on a year-long theme. When we first released our WC’s Language Statement Policy, we used all of our staff meetings that academic year to think about, grapple with, and reflect on linguistic diversity and issues of language justice (see Aguilar-Smith, Pouncil, Sanders for more on this process). This in turn, meant that many of our assessments were focused on the learning around linguistic diversity. For instance, staff surveys became focused on changes in attitudes about language justice. In addition, observation instruments were revised to add questions about how consultants talked about issues of language in their sessions and techniques used to implement the language statement in their consulting. This emphasis on language justice changed the questions asked and thus the data/stories collected, which in turn led to new reflections and new questions. For example, these reflective moments led our multilingual writers committee to think about the need for indicating on consultant bios languages spoken or read to encourage clients to seek out

consultants who could help them in languages other than English if they so desired.

As illustrated, assessment can lead to shifts in thinking about writing and about what we value and what we teach in the writing center. Consequently, such changes can have a domino effect. Changes in writing center programming in response to assessment often lead to new/additional discussions with faculty who send their students to the writing center, for example, or conversations with advisory boards and other administrators in similar types of programs and services. In other words, we then need to think about our communities of stakeholders.

Stakeholders If consultants are the ones on the ground, then stakeholders are often the shadows looming around us, exerting influence, but perhaps not directly, asking or expecting particular programs or kinds of services, and often controlling budgets and personnel. Assessment then is needed to educate this group of people, offices, and communities so they can understand the stories of the writing center we are sharing. Such stakeholders may include writing faculty, other faculty across disciplines, and administrators such as chairs, deans, and directors. Stakeholders may also include accrediting and licensing bodies, advisory boards, regional/national/international disciplinary organizations, and institutional and community partners–both local and global. These stakeholders often represent larger movements on our campuses and in the world at large, and these movements prompt us to ask new and different questions while simultaneously pushing us for particular answers, figures, and/or stories.

As we engage in assessments and share stories/data from assessments, we can have an impact on the way stakeholders understand the work of our centers. As Grutsch McKinney writes,“[W]hen we repeatedly tell outsiders writing centers do x or writing centers are x, they expect x. They assess x. They fund x. And if x is an explanation, a story, meant to make the work understandable to outsiders but really only the beginning of what writing centers are, do, did, or could do, we might find ourselves having trouble getting reorganized or getting funding for y or z” (Peripheral 8-9). By sharing assessments with stakeholders and engaging them in parts of the assessment process, we begin to (re)shape understandings of what our centers are and can be to a

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Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers • 48 much broader audience than the consultants who work within our centers and writers who visit our centers.

While assessments help us understand our centers better and communicate those understandings to stakeholders, we cannot always anticipate what assessments will be necessary to inform point-of-need decisions within our centers. Sometimes stakeholders ask questions we are not ready to answer. For instance, in 2020 when all of us were pivoting to online versions of our writing centers due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the needs and expectations of our stakeholders changed quickly and loudly. Can you keep the center open? How will you move online? How can we accommodate the needs of our students? How will you help the faculty in their transitions? Both of our centers were already offering online appointments, so we had an infrastructure for moving online, but it was still a task to move all of our in-person schedules to online, and this was before thinking about other services such as workshops and writing groups, or thinking about the needs of our staff, as both employees and students.

In the IUPUI center, we found that while operations were fully online consultants were having a hard time connecting with each other in informal ways that came easily in an in-person environment. They could no longer quickly ask each other questions, share consulting strategies, or connect about collaborative projects. To address this need, we restructured our communication platforms and procedures (see Hull and Pettit). While this work made it possible for us to improve communication, morale, and daily operations, it was hard to make visible to stakeholders. All they noticed was that we had fewer writing consultations than usual. Marilee shared the Center’s staff focus group report assessment, which summarized consultant experiences, concerns, frustration, and celebrations from across the year with her department chair and dean. While it provided helpful information about the ways the Center was impacted by the pandemic that were compelling to her department chair and dean, it was not consistently compelling to other stakeholders. One unit responded by providing the Center with additional support for graduate writers, while another pulled financial support for undergraduate writers demanding the Center open for in-person operations in the fall and expressing concerns about a drop in usage.

At MSU the fully online consulting schedule was complicated by the needs of international students who had been sent home due to the pandemic and later of international students who couldn’t get back into the US because of COVID-19 protocols. These needs were

compounded by the needs of their professors who were struggling to meet the range of demands represented by all of their students and the university’s mandate (rightly so) to support them in any way possible. Our nascent plans for adding an asynchronous modality to our schedule was then fast-tracked. Some of our consultants were quickly trained in this form of consulting, and the schedule opened. However, we knew from the start that this new offering would require a new form of assessment as we reflected on what was working, what needed to be revised, and how we needed to proceed with future training and assessments. Our staff focus groups were immediately revised to focus on those conducting asynchronous sessions. Then, we added a set of client focus groups to get a more complete picture of how effective (or not) the asynchronous consulting was and what needed to be improved. These results were shared with the MSU Writing Center’s Advisory Committee, which then shared with us other faculty needs and struggles, particularly around workshops. At the same time, these consultant and client evaluations helped us revamp our training of asynchronous consultants, which was important as the affordances of asynchronous consulting became appealing to new groups of students, such as third year med students working on clinical applications in the middle of the night shift.

In both of these instances, our centers needed to respond quickly to changing institutional contexts.

Existing assessments supported some of the decisions we needed to make but were insufficient in addressing others. Based on these experiences, we developed new assessments or adjusted existing assessments to help us create or shift programming within our centers and make (sometimes) compelling arguments about our work to stakeholders outside our centers. While the examples we’ve shared focus on a hopefully rare global pandemic, more common considerations pertaining to relationships with stakeholders include adjusting to changing leadership and administrative structures within the institution, partnering with community organizations or other institutions, and the inevitable restructuring of our own centers.

Writing Center Administrators Writing Center administrators–directors, coordinators, associate directors, faculty supervisors–are the bridge between the consultants on the ground and the looming shadows of stakeholders and the interests they represent. Administrators, such

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Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers • 49 as ourselves, collect the various pieces of assessment and share them out, (re)framed for different audiences and purposes, theories turned into practices and enacted through policies and procedures. As Laura Greenfield says, “our practices inform our theories, which inform our practices, which inform our theories in an ongoing dynamic process” (141).

Within our centers and with co-administrators, assessments provide stories and data that inform program revision and creation. Assessments provide data and share stories that help us understand if and how our programs do what we designed them to do.

They provide us with information about client/writer experiences as well as consultant experiences. We share assessment data with staff to guide conversations about adjustments we might make to programs and to develop new assessments that help us learn more about the practices in our centers. As administrators, we also use assessment data and stories to consider changes to writing center education and mentoring. Change can be hard, and assessments give us data that enables productive changes and helps consultants see the need for moving out of their comfort zones to make necessary changes. As Sarah Blazer writes, “To make even small shifts . . . requires time, reflection, and careful attention to the ways that everyday, small acts relate to our philosophical stances” (2015, 46). In this way, assessments support writing center administrators in making data-informed decisions and communicating those decisions to consultants.

One aspect of programming that the MSU Writing Center has been reflecting on, revising, and continuing to assess is workshops–the workshops that consultants facilitate for faculty classes, programmatic meetings, and even community groups. Originally, our thought was that anyone who was a trained writing consultant could (and should be able to) facilitate any of the workshops on our menu. Afterall, they were all focused on some aspect of writing. However, feedback from consultant self-assessments as well as focus groups, indicated that this was not true. Some consultants felt unprepared for these workshops, others felt totally uncomfortable in this position and mentioned introversion and social anxiety as reasons they should be excused. Our first thought was that we needed additional training for everyone; we needed to address workshop literacies, so folks had a better toolkit for facilitating workshops. This training really did help some of our consultants, but pushback and feedback persisted–not everyone was cut out for workshop facilitation. This story was corroborated by the assessment forms from faculty who had engaged our

workshop services for their classes, particularly those who requested the same workshop across multiple sections of a course, which meant that they saw multiple consultants in action as facilitators. We, as administrators of the center, needed to reflect even more, ask more questions of our staff and our stakeholders, and find a more viable solution.

At present the MSU Writing Center has a new way of addressing this programming: we are still conducting workshop literacies training, but only for those who have opted in and taken on workshop facilitation as one of their jobs in the center. We have a more limited pool of workshop facilitators, but they are a group that is prepared, trained, and willing, which makes the workshops run more smoothly and makes our workshop coordinator’s job much more reasonable. We even have consultants seeking this training because they want to push their own boundaries and comfort zones and learn to facilitate workshops for groups of people. The multiple layers of and types of assessment feedback worked together to highlight a needed revision to policy and procedure and made for more effective programming and happier consultants.

The MSU Writing Center administrators in this story were often caught in the middle of multiple requests, needs, complaints, and suggestions. There were the needs of the consultants to consider as we didn’t want workshop facilitation to traumatize consultants or put them at risk. We also had the learning goals of faculty in the equation as well as the learning goals of the students participating in the workshops. Likewise, there were other stakeholder pressures to reach more students through class and programmatic workshops. All of these needs and pressures had to be mediated and the data from various assessments helped to inform the decision making, particularly when combined with pedagogical and theoretical knowledge about programs, assessments, student needs, and writing/centers.

Another common mediation in our administrative position is located in often confusing lines of reporting and general center assessment. The accomplishments, as well as the needs, of the center become the accomplishments and the needs of the administrator.

The “we” of the writing center becomes the “I” of the director; consequently, the director is often viewed as needy or selfish and the actual labor of the individual administrator is masked by the plurality of the center.

As Geller and Denny explain “writing center directors who find themselves in administrative appointments realize their academic route for advancement is unclear.

Writing center directors in tenure-track positions

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Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers • 50 question how intellectual labor is understood and how academic membership is conferred locally and disciplinarily” (103). Grutsch McKinney further explains that “Our collective research agenda [as writing center administrators] is stymied both because scholars are not hired as administrators (or administrators are not paid to be scholars) and because our gaze has more or less kept us, in large part, from substantial theoretical and empirical research on aspects of writing center work beyond tutoring” (Peripheral 85). This unclear and inconsistent positioning of writing center administrators points to a need for both broad and specific assessments that allow for telling and showing various stories depending on what is being asked of us and by whom. Various assessments also provide space and data to illustrate what we, as administrators, as researchers, as teachers and mentors, are requesting in the name of the writing center but also what we are requesting as individuals who work in/with centers.

As the first tenure-line director of the IUPUI University Writing Center, Marilee has encountered many instances where her career trajectory and the goals and objectives of the writing center were conflated. Concerns about the writing center having sufficient administrative support after the assistant director stepped down became less about what was good for the writing center in the long term and more about supporting Marilee through the tenure process.

Clearly, having the required amount of administrative labor was a necessary requirement for Marilee earning tenure, but seeing administrative support only in light of that short-term consideration was insufficient. The writing center would need consistent administrative support of more than Marilee’s one-course reallocation each semester even after she earned tenure. In this framing of the situation, the conflation of Marilee’s success and the writing center’s success, while certainly related, privileged Marilee’s tenure case over the long-term health of the center. Marilee worked to remedy this way of framing her work in relation to the writing center through the administrative focus groups assessment the writing center facilitated each spring and an external program review. Both the assessments and the review provided significant data about the need for long term investment in an administrative team for the IUPUI Writing Center to maintain its programming, especially its emphasis on providing high-impact learning practices for student consultants.

Assessments can help us more clearly distinguish when we are asking for resources that can support ongoing

development of the center and when we are asking for resources that support our individual careers.

Conclusion Assessment offers us an exciting opportunity to organize around our shared values and to engage in empirical research with our writing center communities. The work of assessment is an engaged learning, high-impact practice that helps writing center communities answer questions about work and provides consultants with experiences they can carry beyond their work in writing centers. It can lead consultants to see themselves as researchers with important questions and the skills needed to begin answering them. It can foster a culture of inquiry and curiosity across our centers and our discipline.

That said, assessment cannot solve all of our writing center or personal career problems, but assessment as everyday practice means that we are better informed and prepared when stakeholders ask questions, make requests, or operate from (false) assumptions. However, assessment is not something you build in isolation. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “For excellence, the presence of others is always required” (198)—their voices, their stories, their perspectives must all be taken into account for the big picture to emerge. In writing centers, a great many voices are needed to get a fuller picture of our operations, our successes, our limitations. An important set of voices within writing center assessment are those of students, both student writers who visit our centers and student consultants who work in our centers. As Malencyzk, et al. share, “We have often gone where students have led us—in our teaching, in our research, in our writing centers, in our program development—and we have followed others in the field who have championed students as knowledge makers” (70). In addition, at times we go where our upper administrators and university leaders direct us through their questions and requests, guided by campus strategic plans and university values statements. Likewise, we go where the field itself leads or, perhaps more importantly, where we want to lead the field.

It is our intention that this essay leads readers to embrace assessment in their own writing centers as a regular part of their daily practices. We want you to see assessment as one of many tools used in writing centers to help us better serve whoever our stakeholders are in our individual centers: students, writers, consultants, faculty, administrators, community

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Everyday Assessment Practices in Writing Centers • 51 members, and others. We know that this assessment will look and act differently in every writing center and will draw from and collaborate through the various methods and methodologies that are important to the people planning and conducting the assessments.

Therefore, we also hope it leads you to build relationships with the individuals in your centers and universities in order to create assessments that matter for (all of) you in particular times and spaces as well as assessments that morph and change as your circumstances and personnel change.

Notes 1. It’s important to note here that in this article Lerner critiques his own earlier work in the oft-cited “Counting Beans and Making Beans Count” for being statistically and logically unsound (62). Something he also revisits in the WLN article “Counting Beans Wisely.”

2. For more on cultural rhetorics methodologies see Anderson, Bratta and Powell, Brooks-Gillies et al., Cox et al., Powell et al., Riley Mukavetz, Webster, and Wilson.

3. This is a copy of an actual email sent to a number of student consultants in the MSU writing center in 2008. It was strategically designed to recruit a range of consultants for the newly forming assessment committee.

4. This is the present form of the client feedback form in the Writing Center at MSU. We use the genre of the letter in order to make the summary and feedback more personal and to recognize the client/writer as the primary audience for the client report.

5. As cultural rhetorics scholars, we understand our position within a “constellation of relationships” through which we create and maintain structures and practices that make up our everyday practices and the discipline of writing center studies (constellated itself in relation to the fields of writing studies, writing across the disciplines, etc.). As Powell et al. explain, “A constellation, however [unlike an intersection], allows for all the meaning-making practices and their relationships to matter. It allows for multiply-situated subjects to connect to multiple discourses at the same time, as well as for those relationships (among subjects, among discourses, among kinds of

connections) to shift and change without holding the subject captive” (5).

6. Outlining for example rapport-building, agenda setting, sharing resources, encouraging writer agency, concluding moves, and even the types of roles the consultant plays in the session.

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