A 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.
The 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.
Read MoreEric Fischer is a visual artist and computer scientist based in San Francisco. He works with code to make art out of data he takes from public sources, and his images have been featured in MoMa's 2010 exhibition "Talk To Me" and in various publications including the Norwegian daily newspaper Dagbladet and American publications Esquire, Wired, and Popular Science. Eric is currently working on improving map accuracy and creating data visualization tools at a tech company with offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Today Praxis Managing Editor Thomas Spitzer-Hanks interviews Eric on his work and his field.
Read MoreI think my conscious experience of 'big data' probably started when school administrators decided to put RFID chips in our school IDs and to require us to wear them in a visible spot on our shirts all day, every day. It seems like a bad idea - I don't know what data they would gather from tracking our movements around the school since we had a class schedule we were suppose to follow anyway - but someone in administration probably said the magic words 'assessment' and 'data,' and we got chipped. That was in junior high. Since then the push for data and the concomitant rise of 'big data' as a concept and a buzzword has been approaching critical cultural mass. As bigdata has become more ubiquitous we've gotten more and more used to being seen as data, as content; when someone steals our data to use as their own we say that they've 'stolen our identity,' as if we are reducible to the quantifiable aspects of our lives. More than this, our informational identity is a kind of online currency now: we constantly give away our information as the price of admission to 'free' social media applications, email service providers, and online sales aggregators. But is that actually good?
Read MoreAt the writing center I help staff, we've just re-opened for summer, which means one thing: weeks upon weeks of personal statements and applications, mostly (so far) for med school. I think this may be my favorite genre, even though it is probably the most difficult and confounding genre of writing I can think of. After all, where else does a writer have to brag, be modest, and show professionalism and ability while gesturing modestly toward their relative lack of both, all while asking for something they desperately want?
Read MoreThanks to Thomas Spitzer-Hanks and the Praxis editorial team for inviting me to look back at one of my first publications, “Community Building in Online Writing Centers,” which was published a decade ago—in 2005. When I wrote this short essay, I was early in my graduate studies and new to thinking about online writing center work. I was also enthusiastic about the possibilities and personally engaged in the use of online chat forums, wikis, and Skype. More importantly, I was committed to equity in education and community building as a way to prioritize relations and the people who are often ignored when talking about technology.
Read MoreIn the writing center I help staff, the heuristic we use to guide consultations is to 'focus on the writer, not the writing.' Obviously from a service standpoint this is smart, since we won't be open long if we alienate the people that choose to come to the writing center by ignoring them in favor of their work; this policy also helps us avoid becoming an editing service. But I suspect the real point of this dictum to focus on a writer and not on their writing is to avoid using what I call a product-oriented worldview during the writing center encounter, because to do so would be to blunt the positive impact of that encounter.
Read MoreIn reading Lester Faigley's address to the 2015 South Central Writing Center Association published last week in Praxis, specifically his discussion of how complex writing center consultations are in cognitive terms, I am struck by two things: the importance of writing center practice to writing center theory, and the immense research possibilities presented by writing centers.
Read MoreAs we prepare to publish another issue of Praxis this week, we're thinking about time. As editors, we think about time in terms of deadlines, publication schedules, author time-to-publication, and upcoming projects, all of which are fairly discrete, tidy units. Someone has to do something by a certain moment, or in a series of certain moments, and as editors our job is to be that someone or to assist that someone, and to hold the timeclock. It's a little like a race, and just like at the end of a race, we're a little tired, a little sweaty, and a little proud right now.
Read MoreWe’re no longer in the cruelest month. (For those of us whose circadian rhythms move according to the academic calendar, April could also be described as a month-long inhalation before the semester furiously exhales.) Instead, we’re knee-deep in the weeds of writing those final essays.
Read MoreIt’s often said that our failures provide the best opportunities for learning in life. When we fail, we’re confronted by a question and a decision. What happened, and what will I do to improve for next time? The way we proceed from there has big ramifications for our successes and failures down the road.
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