This week I received another reminder that there is very little in this hyperconnected world of ours that doesn’t eventually figure in an encounter between writer and writing center consultant. The writing center is the kind of place where a consultation devoted to lamb kebab and the mechanics of writing ends up also being about the difficult, hazardous aspects of human sociality.

By now the internet rage cycle has moved on, but last week a great many people were looking at and talking about a powerpoint slide from a University of Houston Faculty Senate meeting. Aside from the remarkable fact that 1) something exciting and noteworthy happened at a faculty senate meeting, and 2) a powerpoint slide was that ‘something exciting,’ the presentation itself did make some remarkable recommendations. The question is whether these types of recommendations, and the heightened presence of guns on Texas campuses after August 1st, make any difference to writing centers.

As part of our monthly Consultant Spotlight series, today we sit down with David Vaughan DeVine, a graduating senior and long-time writing consultant at the University of Texas at Austin's University Writing Center, to talk about his experience as a writing center consultant, as a scholar, and as a colleague.

In Writing Center Studies we have plenty of data, both quantitative and qualitative, on how to best work with writers. Techniques for working with specific populations, ways of theorizing the uniqueness of writing center work in higher education, and strategies for continual improvement are our stock in trade, and over the last fifty years Writing Center Studies has become an academic field characterized by longevity and supported by substantial research. While research on how to best perform writing center work is ongoing, one area of Writing Center Studies has received almost no attention: the labor conditions in which writing center work is done. A new study currently soliciting for participation aims to change that.

Today the Praxis editorial team is pleased to announce the theme for a Guest-Edited Fall 2016 issue! The topic on which Praxis 14.1 will focus is one close to the hearts of the Praxis editorial team, and one we feel the journal is particularly well-suited to showcasing.

As the field of Writing Center Studies matures and the institutional settings in which the work is done slowly change, there seems to be a research hierarchy emerging - one in which quantitative research is valued over qualitative research. While institutional pressures and the desire to improve writing center efficacy feed into this phenomenon, it remains unclear what is driving the 'quantitative turn' in Writing Center Studies. It is also unclear what, if anything, is lost by it.

No. The answer is no. Please don’t stop reading. However…

I 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.

With 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.

One 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.

There 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.

Gun 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.

Today 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.

In 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.