Introduction

The Writing Center Journal's feature "Theory in/to Practice" (T/P) offers writing center specialists a new venue for innovative work. Like the more traditional academic essays that comprise the bulk of the journal's contents, these works demonstrate an engagement with recent research and contemporary scholarly debates. Unlike traditional scholarly essays, however, T/P showcases those primary documents that manifest the scholarship of our everyday practices — those syllabi, annual reports, and other writing center documents that translate our disciplinary expertise for an external audience.

— "Call for Submissions: Theory in/to Practice" (2010, Writing Center Journal)

Writing centers, by their very nature, experience high rates of turnover and, thus, are continually peopled by newcomers, both tutors and administrators. With so many novices cycling through, and relatively few long-time specialists with deep knowledge of the field, how does a writing center develop and sustain a robust community of learners? Through an analysis of an assemblage of everyday writing center documents and the activities that circulate around them, this book argues for a variety of practices that work to build and maintain a writing center learning community, firmly grounded in research and theory. Inspired by the Writing Center Journal's feature "Theory in/to Practice," this book, addressed to both writing center administrators and tutors, demonstrates engagement with contemporary research and theory by showcasing primary documents that manifest the scholarship of everyday practices. Documents include a list of twenty valued practices for tutoring writing, excerpts from transcripts of tutoring consultations, samples of session notes detailing the work of tutoring, posts and comments from a writing center blog, and an assignment description for a tutor-led inquiry project. The purpose is to illustrate the ways everyday documents both enact and forward writing center scholarship. Each chapter includes background on a specific document and the exigencies that led to its creation and surrounding activities. The centerpiece of each chapter is the document itself. Then each chapter offers an analysis of the document, exploring its innovations, showing how it engages current scholarship, as well as how it enhances practices and extends, complicates, and offers new approaches to longstanding disciplinary challenges. These challenges include various aspects of writing center work, from tutoring to program assessment, all converging around an overarching concern — the tie that binds these documents together — tutor education. In addition to their preoccupation with tutor education, these focal documents and the chapters that analyze them are linked by two more key concerns: (1) a set of conceptual frameworks, which adhere to advance related principles for writing center work, and (2) an inquiry-stance toward writing center work.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

With this text-based approach to writing center scholarship, I argue for grounding the everyday documents we create, whether policy statements, websites, course syllabi, assessment plans, promotional flyers, annual reports, or the many other genres we engage to do writing center work, in conscious conceptual frameworks. With each chapter, my goal is to show the ways focal documents reflect and generate underlying assumptions about writing, teaching, and learning. Examination of everyday documents, I argue, illuminates the theories that underpin and motivate writing centers. As Nancy Grimm (2009) puts it, we need "a willingness to question foundational assumptions that typically guide writing center practice." Informed by George Lakoff, Grimm invites writing centers to examine the "unconscious cognitive models" we use to understand our work. This orientation is not mere navel-gazing. As Grimm points out, examining conceptual underpinnings invites change. "Significant change in any workplace occurs," she writes, "when unconscious conceptual models are brought to the surface and replaced with conscious ones" (16). This book takes up Grimm's invitation by applying a variety of theoretical lenses to everyday writing center documents to unearth the foundational principles that animate their creation and the activities that take place around them.

These theoretical lenses include the following: communities of practice, activity theory, discourse analysis, reflective practice, and inquiry-based learning. While these lenses are not new to writing center scholarship, bringing them together in this way sheds light on the ways these conceptual frameworks work as complimentary or adjacent theories to underpin tutor education. All the frameworks share fundamental understandings of teaching, learning, and writing as inherently social activities. All understand language use in terms of action. All are dynamic. In this way, the theories that animate each chapter do not operate together in absolute consistency, but they adhere to construct a consistent set of principles for writing center work, and tutor education in particular. To illustrate their usefulness for analyzing writing center documents, I've highlighted one as a primary analytical framework for each chapter. At the same time, I occasionally draw connections to one or more of the other theoretical perspectives. While one lens affords a certain view of a particular document, I encourage readers to explore ways that the other perspectives might also be applied in order to illuminate different aspects of a document and the activities that circulate around it.

Popular books for tutor training, such as Donald McAndrew and Thomas Reigstad's (2001) Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences, Ben Rafoth's (2005) A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner's (2007) The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring, and Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood's (2011) The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, tend to be practical rather than theoretical. Even texts that do address theory explicitly, such as Robert Barnett and Jacob Blumer's (2007) The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice, do so narrowly, through the field of rhetoric and composition. With few exceptions, notably Nancy Grimm's (1999) Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times, Elizabeth Boquet's (2002) Noise from the Writing Center, Harry Denny's (2010) Facing the Center, and Jackie Grutsch McKinney's (2013) Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, writing center work remains under-theorized. For readers who ask, "Why this book now?" One answer is that there is a continued need in our field to theorize writing center work. That John Nordloff's...