Most institutions maintain institutional guidelines based on specific professional beliefs in order to establish social order within the setting and accomplish their institutional goals (Heritage, 2005; Heritage & Clayman, 2010). Therefore, a key research issue in institutional Conversation Analysis (CA) is to examine how institutional…

Institutional assessment in higher education often restricts measurement of learning to outcomes that elide the complexity of learning processes and contexts in favor of data that is tidy and manageable. Moreover, such outcomes are frequently written to express an economic value for the learning to justify the purpose of education as a personal…

This IPA study examines how professional college writing tutors feel their role is understood and appreciated (or not). While writing tutoring is a hallmark service at many undergraduate institutions, there remains an incongruence between what tutors, professors, students, and administrators expect from the role. In order to bring more clarity to…

Public-facing statements about anti-racism and linguistic justice have become common tools for educational organizations to promote values of criticality and openness. Such statements often explicitly reject practices that equate language difference with deficit and continue to harm marginalized groups that speak languages or use pronouns that…

Postsession narrative notes written by professional tutors in a health sciences university writing center had never been analyzed to identify the most common elements noted as subpar in graduate students' scholarly writing. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to examine these notes to identify the most common elements noted as subpar…

This dissertation investigates the experiences of multilingual writers in a writing center at a major research university based in the United States. It includes interviews with the writers and with the tutors who serve multilingual writers, to understand if these writers are getting what they need in the writing center to be successful in their…

Institutions of higher education have a unique opportunity to support their students' holistic development by incorporating elements of high-impact practice into campus jobs. High-impact practices ask students to dedicate significant time and energy to meaningful work, which channels students' efforts toward productive activities that deepen their…

The purpose of this study was to discover what defines a writing center by interviewing directors of writing centers in the Southern Appalachian area. This qualitative study was based on a single round of recorded telephone interviews with 13 writing center directors who meet the criteria for inclusion in the study. Many researchers have written…

The existing landscape of collaboration and partnership-based research involving university writing centers primarily explores joint initiatives with campus libraries, academic programs, and high schools designed to support a variety of student learning objectives. This project is motivated by the increasing demand for partnerships between…

Responding to student writers and their work is a staple of composition instruction, and there are numerous guides that offer educators advice on response strategies. However, such guides are often based on untested theories or assumptions about the effectiveness of those strategies, with little data-driven evidence of whether they work as hoped…

Using a qualitative approach based on grounded theory, this study explored the best practices of educational technology implementation in 2-year community college writing centers through a series of interviews with 13 separate 2-year community college writing center administrators. This study utilized Vygotsky's (1978) sociocultural development…

Researchers of graduate student success have recently begun engaging in studies aimed at establishing a better understanding of what practices best assist in graduate student retention and degree completion. Simultaneously, Writing Center scholars have been making a concerted effort to undertake empirical research focused on the everyday work of…

Writing center consultations are built of writer and consultant relationships, interactions, and differences. Listening is a stance that facilitates navigation of these differences that are so inherent to writing centers. Yet listening has long been undervalued in Western society and in rhetoric and composition and writing center scholarship. To…

Writing centers and writing programs, as well as the role of their administrators, are shaped by historical and disciplinary factors that have been closely examined by scholars over the last half century. However, the role of institutionality in writing center and writing program administration (WPA) studies has been ignored in much of the…

The purpose of this study was to to determine whether there is a relationship between management characteristics of writing center directors and the ability for writing centers to overcome challenges as perceived by writing center directors at public, four-year, historically black colleges/universities. This study also provides directors with…