Writing Center & Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Resources: Find Books

Writing Centers and Learning Commons presents program administrators, directors, staff, and tutors with theoretical rationales, experiential journeys, and go-to practical designs and strategies for the many questions involved when writing centers find themselves operating in shared environments. The chapters comprehensively examine the ways writing centers make the most of sharing common ground. Directors, coordinators, administrators, and stakeholders draw on past and present attention to writing center studies to help shape the future of the learning commons and narrate their substantial collective experience with collaborative efforts to stay centered while empowering colleagues and student writers at their institutions. The contributors explore what is gained and lost by affiliating writing centers with learning commons, how to create sound pedagogical foundations that include writing center philosophies, how writing center practices evolved or have been altered by learning center affiliations, and more. Writing Centers and Learning Commons is for all stakeholders of writing in and across campuses collaborating on (by choice or edict), or wishing to explore the possibilities of, a learning commons enterprise.   Contributors: Alice Batt, Cassandra Book, Charles A. Braman, Elizabeth Busekrus Blackmon, Virginia Crank, Celeste Del Russo, Patricia Egbert, Christopher Giroux, Alexis Hart, Suzanne Julian, Kristen Miller, Robby Nadler, Michele Ostrow, Helen Raica-Klotz, Kathleen Richards, Robyn Rohde, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, David Stock  

This collection helps students and researchers understand the foundations of writing center studies in order to make sound decisions about the types of methods and theoretical lenses that will help them formulate and answer their research questions. In the collection, accomplished writing center researchers discuss the theories and methods that have enabled their work, providing readers with a useful and accessible guide to developing research projects that interest them and make a positive contribution. It introduces an array of theories, including genre theory, second-language acquisition theory, transfer theory, and disability theory, and guides novice and experienced researchers through the finer points of methods such as ethnography, corpus analysis, and mixed-methods research. Ideal for courses on writing center studies and pedagogy, it is essential reading for researchers and administrators in writing centers and writing across the curriculum or writing in the disciplines programs.

Writing Centers at the Center of Change looks at how eleven centers, internationally, adapted to change at their institutions, during a decade when their very success has become a valued commodity in a larger struggle for resources on many campuses. Bringing together both US and international perspectives, this volume offers solutions for adapting to change in the world of writing centers, ranging from the logistical to the pedagogical, and even to the existential. Each author discusses the origins, appropriate responses, and partners to seek when change comes from within a school or outside it. Chapters document new programs being formed under changing circumstances, and suggest ways to navigate professional or pedagogical changes that may undermine the hard work of more than four decades of writing-center professionals. The book's audience includes writing center and learning-commons administrators, university librarians, deans, department chairs affiliated with writing centers. It will also be useful for graduate students in composition, rhetoric, and academic writing.

The New Work of Writing Across the Curriculum is a descriptive analysis of how institutions can work to foster stronger intellectual activities around writing as connected to campus-wide diversity and inclusion initiatives. Author Staci M. Perryman-Clark blends theory and practice, grounds disciplinary conversations with practical examples of campus work, and provides realistic expectations for operations with budgetary constraints while enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion work in higher education.   Many of these initiatives are created in isolation, reinforcing institutional silos that are not used strategically to gain the attention of senior administrators, particularly those working at state-supported public institutions who must manage shrinking institutional budgets. Yet teaching and learning centers and WAC programs gain tremendously from one another by building explicit partnerships on campus-wide diversity initiatives that emphasize cultural competence. In addition, both cultural competence and written proficiency enhance the transferable skills necessary for completing undergraduate education requirements, and this work can be leveraged to draw the attention of senior administrative leadership.   Faculty development and WAC need to make diversity and inclusion initiatives a priority for professional development. The New Work of Writing Across the Curriculum reviews initiatives that point to increased understanding of diversity and inclusion that will be of significance to administrators, WAC specialists, faculty developers, and diversity officers across the spectrum of institutions of higher learning.  

Situated among fields (applied linguistics, creative writing studies, writing studies), this book empirically explores the language of writers in contexts of learning externalized in literary genres. At its core, this book features linguistic and thematic analysis of the writing and reflections of adults who experienced what they usually described as meaningful CW in university coursework, sometimes in science and research-focused courses where they might not have expected to compose a literary genre. In addition to synthesizing empirical studies that in total included more than 3,500 participants, chapters present new research involving about 400 more. This book is meant to be substantial in its goal of systematically organizing what is known about CW's relationship to writers: in terms of feelings of engagement, gains in content knowledge, and revelations about oneself and others.

Student Writing Tutors in Their Own Words collects personal narratives from writing tutors around the world, providing tutors, faculty, and writing center professionals with a diverse and experience-based understanding of the writing support process. Filling a major gap in the research on writing center theory, first-year writing pedagogy, and higher education academic support resources, this book provides narrative evidence of students' own experiences with learning assistance discourse communities. It features a variety of voices that address how academic support resources such as writing centers have served as the nucleus for students' (i.e., both tutors and their clients) sense of community and self, ultimately providing a space for freedom of discourse and expression. It includes narratives from writing tutors supporting students in unconventional spaces such as prisons, tutors offering support in war-torn countries, and students in international centers facing challenges of distance learning, access, and language barriers. The essays in this collection reveal pedagogical takeaways and insights about both student and tutor collaborative experiences in writing center spaces. These essays are a valuable resource for student writing tutors and anyone involved with them, including composition instructors and scholars, writing center professionals, and any faculty or administrators involved with academic support programs.