Is This the Last Thing You Should Read on AXIS?
/No. The answer is no. Please don’t stop reading. However…
Read MoreA Writing Center Journal
What happens when we write? Why do we teach writing the way we do? How does writing education engage with questions of race, gender, accessibility, and cultural difference? How does the writing center function as an interdisciplinary space?
Axis extends the writing center conversation from Praxis, our peer reviewed scholarly journal, into a public forum. Exploratory, experimental, and informative, the blog speaks to questions on the cutting edge of writing center theory and practice. Axis features writing from undergraduate and graduate educators at the University of Texas at Austin, and guest writers from universities across the United States.
No. The answer is no. Please don’t stop reading. However…
Read MoreI come here to confess: I’m pretty sure I’m an SJW. At least sometimes. And I think maybe writing centers aren’t the place for that kind of thing.
Read MoreWith that laughably optimistic title it’s clear from the start: this blog post is in trouble. I have no idea how to teach people to write, and it’s a big part of my job.
Read MoreOne of the recurrent questions we ask ourselves as writing center practitioners is what we’re doing: basically, what our theoretical assumptions are about our work, and how they inform (or fail to inform, or even hinder) that work. Today I will ask what it means to be non-directive and non-evaluative in the context of the theory of educative discourse laid out in Basil Bernstein’s Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique (1996), which assumes pedagogic practice to be a “fundamental social context through which cultural reproduction-production takes place,” thus necessarily taking part in power relations originating outside itself.
Read MoreThere is new evidence that anthropogenic climate change may be drawing us all ever closer to a sixth mass extinction. This dramatic event, entailing changes to the planet that are vast and irreversible, is driven by shifts in human resource use and the expansion of human populations. On a much smaller and less dramatic scale, shifts in university governance are driving changes in the demographics of the campus community and in the ways writing centers do their work. These changes are having an early effect on graduate students.
Read MorePraxis managing co-editor James Garner reflects on his experience at the 2015 International Writing Centers Association conference.
Read MoreGun violence has become more prevalent over the last fifty years, and now seems to be almost ubiquitous, with more than 30 incidents since 2010. Today Praxis suggests that writing centers begin a conversation about what we, as safe places for students, can do.
Read MoreToday Praxis Managing co-Editor Thomas Spitzer-Hanks interviews his new colleague and co-Editor, James Garner, about his past in the writing center and his future plans for the journal.
Read MoreIn her July 21st blog post on AXIS, Kathryn Raign asked whether writing centers housed in insalubrious environments, and their directors, are being unfairly evaluated by student users. She posited that they are, due to her opportunity to measure student satisfaction with the space in a new location when the center she directs was moved. In the center that houses AXIS and its parent journal, Praxis, we have recently had a chance to evaluate Raign’s argument for ourselves.
Read MoreThe best high-risk climbers became the best because they had good mentors. The best writing lab tutors also had the best mentors—in most cases (I hope) their writing center director.
Read MoreIn her recent post on the subject, Melissa Nicolas notes that “writing centers sabotage themselves everyday by continuing practices that feed into our perpetual marginalization.” I, and many others like me, represent the result of staffing practices that lead to problems in writing centers. If we halt these practices, though, where would we turn in order to appropriately staff a writing center? The English department? Who exactly is qualified to work in a writing center?
Read MoreWhen I asked the current editors of Praxis if they could dig out an old article I had written, they not only graciously did so but also asked me if I would be willing to reflect on the article. In particular, they wanted to know if my polemical 2005 piece, “Writing Centers as Training Wheels: What Message are We Sending our Students? (3.1) still represented my thinking about writing centers. The short answer to that is "yes!"
Read MoreAs an open-access internationally peer-reviewed academic journal, it should come as no surprise that Praxis believes in the importance of scholarship generally, and of writing center scholarship in particular. We are dedicated to sharing our authors' contributions to the long effort involved in improving our grasp of the situation in which we find ourselves as scholars and as writing center staffers, and we believe that effort includes attention to the institutional and social landscape in which writing centers and scholars exist. Toward that end, today Praxis Managing Editor Thomas Spitzer-Hanks discusses how data, ignorance, and instruction traverse the divide between individual and institution with Gerry Canavan, assistant professor at Marquette University and editor of Science Fiction, Film and Television (Cambridge UP, 2015) and The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015) with Eric Carl Link.
Read MoreBack in January of this year, during a visit to Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee, President Obama announced a plan to provide two free years of community college attendance for eligible students, and earlier this month the U.S. Senate began to draft a bill intended to put the initiative into action. This follows intense lobbying that has made public and private HBCUs and minority-serving institutions part of the initiative, and the 90 billion-dollar plan is under intense scrutiny from all sides. The question this raises is why the existing challenges of community college students and scholars are not.
Read MoreWhat can the writing center do to amplify voices before they are lost?
Read MoreWriting Center directors have the most control over internal factors: who is hired as a tutor, what criteria are used to hire, and how tutors are trained. We rarely have any say over where our centers are located, or how they are designed and equipped. Too often, writing centers are shoved into any unused corner or classroom available. The space isn’t chosen for its effectiveness. It is chosen simply because no one else wanted it. But if space is the most important factor in determining whether students return to a writing center, recommend that writing center, or believe that the tutors in that writing center have the ability to effectively share a body of knowledge (As my research suggests), and center directors have little or no influence over that factor, are directors being unfairly evaluated when their administration looks at their ability to retain current users, and bring in more?
Read MoreIn his May 19, 2015, blog entry, Thomas mentioned the empirical research that Isabelle Thompson (Emerita Professor, Auburn University) and I have been doing over the last seven or so years. Specifically, he mentioned our recent book Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors (Routledge 2014). We have been pleased with the response we have received to the book, particularly the coding scheme for tutoring strategies that we developed and tested. It seems that writing center specialists are eager for more empirical research to guide our practices.
Read MoreDuring a recent conversation with two colleagues I was lamenting the lack of continuity in our writing center's data. Exciting, right? Okay, it's not necessarily exciting, but it's certainly interesting. It turns out that this whole data thing is pretty messy, and, most surprising to me, it turns out that that's okay.
Read MoreReading vintage Praxis always gets me thinking about how far writing center research has come, and no issue manifests this sense in me more that 2.2 (2005): Why Wire the Writing Center. I was transitioning from college to graduate school at the time of its publication, and although I was emailing regularly by 2002, the birth of email was still a relatively recent memory for me. Really, I had just a hair more experience with email than I had with writing center work, which I’d entered into as an enthusiastic sophomore peer tutor at Penn State University Park. Back in those days, we read papers on paper, and words such as YouTube, Facebook, or Prezi had yet to enter into our writing center lexicon.
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