Welcome to Axis: the Praxis Blog!

Image by Maret Hosemann from Pixabay

What should a writing center blog do?

Every good website needs a blog, we thought. And then we were sad, because the idea of a blog felt like a burden. Every good website needs to constantly churn out content into an overloaded digital space.

Praxis is already a leader in peer reviewed scholarly discourse about writing center practice and theory. As Marcello cries in La Dolce Vita: Basta, Emma, basta. Enough already.

There are already a lot of great writing center blogs out there. We especially love the blog from the writing center at the University of Wisconsin, which features thoughtful comments about pushing the boundaries of writing pedagogy. Walden University, the University of Louisville, DePaul University, and others all have active blogs full of advice for aspiring writers.

The more we thought about writing a Praxis blog, however, the more we recognized the value of an informal public forum for extending the work we do at Praxis. Specifically, we hope to exploring the following ideas:

1. Writing center consultants are writers, too: what is the relationship between how we practice writing and how we practice writing education? This blog will be a place to share writing practices as they exist across disciplines in an academic setting, from the collaborative writing practiced by laboratory scientists to the coding of computer scientists and the monographs of humanities scholars.

2. Writing centers serve faculty: What do faculty members wish writing centers would do for them? Students come to the writing center to get help on their assignments, and writing center consultants seek to instill practices that have been carefully developed by writing pedagogues. But what are the hopes and dreams of the faculty members who send their students to us? We want to know more about what our teachers want.

3. Writing centers embrace multitudes: but not everyone comes to (or works in) the writing center. What are the demographics of the writing center, and what does that mean for our practice?

4. Writing centers exist in the world: what is the relationship between what happens in the writing center, and what happens outside of it? In the wake of the conflict in Ferguson, Missouri, we have been thinking through the role (and obligations) of writing educators to address the public events that shape university culture. As we work on our own dissertations, we have also been thinking about the role of our research in shaping our practice. We hope to address these relationships here.

Welcome to Axis, the imaginary line around which this body rotates. Axis is Praxis without the PR. We hope you will enjoy (and benefit from) the conversation.

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Interested in contributing to Axis? We accept contributions from staff at the UWC at UT Austin, and from guest writers around the Writing Center world. Contact praxisuwc@gmail.com (subject: blog) for more information.