Writing from the Center is about one very fine writer's quest for a meaningful and moral life. The center he seeks and describes is geographical, emotional, artistic, and spiritual - and it is rooted in place. The geography is midwestern, the impulses are universal. Where and how do we find meaning? Where does a writer find inspiration? How can personal, artistic, family, and community needs be blended to create a harmonious life? What aids exist in such a ""located"" life against despair? How should a writer relate to and represent his place? Twelve interrelated essays probe these questions from different perspectives. ""Buckeye"" examines the resonance of objects and the mysteries of relationships and death. ""Imagining the Midwest"" surveys how other writers have seen and related to their region. ""The Common Life"" makes an eloquent case for community values. ""Sanctuary"" is an eloquent and painful consideration of environmental degradation. ""Writing from the Center"" and ""Letter to a Reader"" deal with Sanders's decisions to locate in the Midwest, to know his place, and to write about it in both fiction and nonfiction.

In a landmark collaboration, five co-authors develop a theme of ordinary disruptions ("the everyday") as a source of provocative learning moments that can liberate both student writers and writing center staff. At the same time, the authors parlay Etienne Wenger’s concept of "community of practice" into an ethos of a dynamic, learner-centered pedagogy that is especially well-suited to the peculiar teaching situation of the writing center. They push themselves and their field toward deeper, more significant research, more self-conscious teaching.

In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges. Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.

Re/Writing the Center illuminates how core writing center pedagogies and institutional arrangements are complicated by the need to create intentional, targeted support for advanced graduate writers. Most writing center tutors are undergraduates, whose lack of familiarity with the genres, preparatory knowledge, and research processes integral to graduate-level writing can leave them underprepared to assist graduate students. Complicating the issue is that many of the graduate students who take advantage of writing center support are international students. The essays in this volume show how to navigate the divide between traditional writing center theory and practices, developed to support undergraduate writers, and the growing demand for writing centers to meet the needs of advanced graduate writers. Contributors address core assumptions of writing center pedagogy, such as the concept of peers and peer tutoring, the emphasis on one-to-one tutorials, the positioning of tutors as generalists rather than specialists, and even the notion of the writing center as the primary location or center of the tutoring process. Re/Writing the Center offers an imaginative perspective on the benefits writing centers can offer to graduate students and on the new possibilities for inquiry and practice graduate students can inspire in the writing center. Contributors: Laura Brady, Michelle Cox, Thomas Deans, Paula Gillespie​, Mary Glavan, Marilyn Gray​, James Holsinger​, Elena Kallestinova, Tika Lamsal​, Patrick S. Lawrence, Elizabeth Lenaghan, Michael A. Pemberton​, Sherry Wynn Perdue​, Doug Phillips, Juliann Reineke​, Adam Robinson​, Steve Simpson, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran​, Ashly Bender Smith, Sarah Summers​, Molly Tetreault​, Joan Turner, Bronwyn T. Williams, Joanna Wolfe

Revised edition of: Researching the writing center, 2012.

Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors offers a book-length empirical study of the discourse between experienced tutors and student writers in satisfactory conferences. The study uses a research-driven, iteratively tested framework to help writing center directors, tutors, writing program administrators, rhetoric and composition researchers, first-year composition instructors, and others interested in talk about writing to systematically analyze tutors’ talk and to use that analysis to train new tutors. The book strives toward two main goals: to provide an analytical research and assessment tool—the coding scheme—that other researchers can use to understand writing center tutor talk and to provide a close, empirical analysis of experienced tutor talk that can facilitate tutor training. The study details tutors’ use of three categories of tutoring strategies—instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding—at macro- and microlevels and results in practical recommendations for improving tutor training.

Around the Texts of Writing Center Work reveals the conceptual frameworks found in and created by ordinary writing center documents. The values and beliefs underlying course syllabi, policy statements, website copy and comments, assessment plans, promotional flyers, and annual reports critically inform writing center practices, including the vital undertaking of tutor education. In each chapter, author R. Mark Hall focuses on a particular document. He examines its origins, its use by writing center instructors and tutors, and its engagement with enduring disciplinary challenges in the field of composition, such as tutoring and program assessment. He then analyzes each document in the contexts of the conceptual framework at the heart of its creation and everyday application: activity theory, communities of practice, discourse analysis, reflective practice, and inquiry-based learning. Around the Texts of Writing Center Work approaches the analysis of writing center documents with an inquiry stance—a call for curiosity and skepticism toward existing and proposed conceptual frameworks—in the hope that the theoretically conscious evaluation and revision of commonplace documents will lead to greater efficacy and more abundant research by writing center administrators and students.