Redefining Roles: The Professional, Faculty, and Graduate Consultant’s Guide to Writing Centers

Redefining Roles is the first book to recognize and provide sustained focus on the presence of professional, faculty, and graduate student consultants in writing centers. A significant number of writing centers employ non-peer consultants, yet most major training manuals are geared toward undergraduate tutoring practices or administrators. This collection systematically addresses this gap in the literature while initiating new conversations regarding writing center staffing.
 
Thirty-two authors, consultants, and administrators from diverse centers—from large public four-year institutions to a private, online for-profit university—provide both theoretical frameworks and practical applications in eighteen chapters. Ten chapters focus on graduate consultants and address issues of authority, training, professional development, and mentoring, and eight focus on professional and faculty consultant training as well as specific issues of identity and authority. By sharing these voices, Redefining Roles broadens the very idea of writing centers while opening the door to more dialogue on the important role these practitioners play.
 
Redefining Roles is designed for writing center practitioners, scholars, and staff. It is also a necessary addition to help campus administrators in the ongoing struggle to validate the intellectually complex work that such staff performs.
 
Contributors: Fallon N. Allison, Vicki Behrens, Cassie J. Brownell, Matt Burchanoski, Megan Boeshart Burelle, Danielle Clapham, Steffani Dambruch, Elise Dixon, Elizabeth Festa, Will Fitzsimmons, Alex Frissell, Alex Funt, Genie Giaimo, Amanda Gomez, Lisa Lamson, Miriam E. Laufer, Kristin Messuri, Rebecca Nowacek, Kimberly Fahle Peck, Mark Pedretti, Irina Ruppo, Arundhati Sanyal, Anna Scanlon, Matthew Sharkey-Smith, Kelly A. Shea, Anne Shiell, Anna Sicari, Catherine Siemann, Meagan Thompson, Lisa Nicole Tyson, Marcus Weakley, Alex Wulff
 

Megan Swihart Jewell has served as the director of the Writing Resource Center at Case Western Reserve University and at Duquesne University. She has published articles on writing centers in WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and the Journal of Pharmacy Education and has published articles in several other scholarly journals and collections linking contemporary trends in writing pedagogy to avant-garde poetics.
 
Joseph Cheatle is director of the Writing and Media Center at Iowa State University and co-leader of the International Writing Centers Association Summer Institute and serves as an at-large representative of the International Writing Centers Association Board. He was a member of the Elon University Center for Engaged Learning’s Research Seminar on Residential Learning Communities as a High-Impact Practice and part of a research team that received the International Writing Centers Association Research Grant for examining writing center documents and creating a digital repository.