Editors’ Note

What the Pandemic Taught Us About Writing Centers 

 Sarah Rice, John Katunich, and Noreen Lape

In March 2020, we, the staff of the Norman M. Eberly Multilingual Writing Center at Dickinson College, faced a question that was in the parlance of the times, “unprecedented,” yet at the same time, ubiquitous to probably every other writing center around the globe:  how do we transition—essentially overnight—to providing writing support fully online amid a global pandemic?  Prior to March 2020, our center had never offered synchronous or asynchronous remote tutoring, and the initial concerns we dealt with were the obvious logistical issues—should we use Zoom, Teams, or the WConline platform? Do we start offering asynchronous tutoring?  What do we do with students who don’t turn on cameras or even microphones? How do we work with students who don’t have adequate workspaces or internet connections?  How do tutors work when they do not have the needed technology?

We quickly found and implemented a set of guidelines to help tutors and writers follow new and sometimes complicated procedures for remote tutoring (with many thanks to Lauren Fitzgerald, whose document of online tutoring guidance we adapted, as did many others, to get through those first bewildering months). We settled into an equilibrium in which the kinds of in-person conversations we always aimed to have with writers pre-pandemic—reading papers together, asking good questions, helping writers solve their own problems—were more or less reproduced through synchronous writing center sessions on Zoom. Nevertheless, what was missing—and proved over the following months and even years to be difficult to recreate—was tutors’ and writers’ sense of community and connection to the writing center. To this day, we are still rebuilding those connections.

In writing the call for papers for this collection, John and Noreen decided it was important to look at both what writing centers (including writers and tutors) lost over the pandemic as well as what they gained. Indeed, the many ways in which the pandemic profoundly and negatively impacted writers, tutors, and writing center administrators will be something the writing center community grapples with for years, given not only the rapid drop in writer visits that many writing centers saw, but also the lasting impact of writers’ disrupted learning during the pandemic. Moreover, we can not ignore the tremendous human loss that the pandemic has, and continues to, wrought; of the millions of lives lost during the pandemic, these too were writers, tutors and writing center administrators, and our friends, families, and loved ones.  The grief many of us experienced from the loss of community and connection in our writing centers was often deepened and compounded by the grief of so many lives lost prematurely.

However, the story of this collection is not one that we wish to characterize mainly in terms of loss; instead, the contributions of our colleagues in this digital edited collection reveal stories of profound and critical rethinking of a wide range of fundamental writing center practices, such as how we occupy our spaces, how we constitute a sense of community, and how and why we care for our writers and each other. This rethinking, which comes from the ways in which writing centers and practices were suddenly and deeply de-familiarized by the pandemic, has had the impact of giving many of us in the writing center community new insights into what we do and why.   This collection captures much of this defamiliarization and the learning that has come out of it.

This collection captures writing center work at a unique historical moment while also grounding the lessons learned in our everyday work in the writing center

For us at the Norman M. Eberly Multilingual Writing Center, this defamiliarization means that a core aspect of our writing center culture—the building and sustaining of a writing center as a learning community of writers and tutors—suddenly went from an important function that we developed and sustained organically in our day-to-day pre-pandemic operations, to a deeply-felt absence the moment that we were informed that students would not be returning to campus after the 2020 spring break. By losing our in-person community, we were able to see the contours of what was most vital to sustain. As life gradually returned to some semblance of normalcy, lessons of pandemic loss informed new purposeful initiatives to reconnect with writers and tutors, such as making writing center appointments available to students studying abroad, reorganizing tutor leadership roles, and undertaking tutor research on care-based inquiry in the writing center (the results of which appears in this volume in Abraham, Poland, Warren & Wendel).

At one level, this collection can be seen as documentation of some of the diverse and creative ways writing centers responded in the face of disruption from a global pandemic. More importantly, however, this collection captures how those responses prompted significant and fundamental questions about what it means to be a writing center and how we in the writing center world have re-constituted our work in more innovative, inclusive and critical ways by taking up those questions. To that end, this collection has been organized into three parts that focus on: how the pandemic disrupted our places and spaces, how we disconnected and reconnected during and after the pandemic, and how throughout we stayed focused on rebuilding community.

Disrupting Places and Spaces

Many of us experienced the early months of the pandemic as an “interruption” of our regular practices, as we rapidly shifted to online modalities for tutoring, perhaps naively thinking of these modalities in terms of “stop-gap” measures that allowed us to continue doing the work that we had been doing prior. In the subsequent months and years, the feeling of “interruption” gave way to the feeling of “disruption”—that is, a return to pre-pandemic norms was not only impossible, but for many of us, undesirable even if we could. The pandemic constituted a rupture or “fracture” (in the language of Wittman et al.) that created a space—both literally and figuratively—for radical reimagination of what our physical spaces could be or should be (as well as what they no longer could be). In this section, four chapters invite readers to rethink and reimagine where our work takes place and what we have learned during and after the era of the pandemic when most of us were faced with the sudden and unexpected disruption of losing access to shared physical spaces.

Wittman et al. asks the reader to sit with the paradox of the Writing Center as place, when the exigencies of the pandemic forced writing centers to rethink what we do when dis-placed.  The authors describe how the “fracture” of losing a place prompted critical redefinition of “what communication—and support for that communication—look like on a college campus.” This fracture also directs attention to the place where writing center work was happening–our homes.  Recognizing that the metaphor of “home” has often informed how we think of welcoming writing center spaces, Lane et al. invite us to look at the implications of this metaphor when it has lost its figurative implications and consider what radical care means when we are literally working with writers at their kitchen tables—and our own.

Looking closely at this experience of writers writing and visiting a writing tutor in the space of their own homes offers unique insight into the ways in which on-campus writing center spaces can be more hospitable, functional, and aesthetically pleasing for the writers who come there. In their chapter, Myers et al. share images of at-home writing spaces that they elicited from writers along with writers’ reflections of what mattered in those spaces.  They then ask how looking at the writing spaces that writers created during the pandemic can inform post-pandemic changes to on-campus writing center spaces.

LeCluyse takes up the question of how to design hospitable spaces by explaining how he brought together gamification and design to reimagine a writing center physical space in the face of social distancing requirements using d20, a virtual tabletop website used for roleplaying games. The author explores how gamification can, beyond an immediate response to the pandemic, center collaboration and agency in writing center design and practice.

Disconnecting and Reconnecting with Others

Besides the sudden and unexpected disruption of shared physical spaces, the pandemic inevitably created jarring disconnections between writers and tutors, and between tutors and their writing center communities. The abrupt ending to in-person relationships within the writing center that we forged over time by carefully building rapport and cultivating trust left many of us–tutors, directors, and writers alike–feeling isolated. Even though we moved to two-dimensional Zoom spaces to preserve our connections, we did not always feel connected. The essays in this section not only examine the toll exacted by this loss of relationships but also reveal that many of us centered care in our work as we sought to reconnect with individuals and the broader writing center community.

Focusing on the changes the pandemic brought to writing centers, Driscoll and Yim’s empirical study investigates the differences between synchronous and asynchronous tutoring before and during the pandemic. They conducted interviews with ten tutors and read over 2000 session reports to study the effects of asynchronous tutoring on writing center practice. Through statistical and computational analysis of words in session reports, the authors discovered the literal loss, which foretold the figurative loss, of the pronoun “we” in asynchronous writing center session reports. In the end, they reassess the importance—if not always the feasibility—of “we” as they grapple with ways to recuperate the “we” to better meet the needs of writers.

As if in answer to the problem Driscoll and Yim pose, the next two essays consider tutoring practices that address the tutor-writer relationship—the ostensible we. For the authors of these essays, the rapport-building phase of writing tutoring sessions became deeply defamiliarized by the pandemic. Through the lenses of hospitality and care, both essays imagine a more robust approach to relationship building than that of traditional models—one that enables writing tutors to make more meaningful connections with writers. Bernard, Wilson, and Miley examine how pandemic exigencies made writing center practitioners newly aware of the interpersonal dynamics of tutoring conversations. The writers use the lens of “participatory hospitality,” which they characterize as reciprocal, individual, and interdependent, to examine the moves tutors make to “invit[e] meaningful participation” from writers, concluding with tips to encourage hospitality, particularly in online settings. In a similar vein, Abraham, Poland, Warren, and Wendel draw from their experience as novice college writers during the pandemic to argue in its wake for the renewed importance of building rapport throughout the session and not just in the first five minutes. Drawing on personal narratives from post-pandemic as well as session transcripts from pre-pandemic times, they grapple with the gendered implications of privileging care over productivity as they pose a new tutoring heuristic that they term “care-based inquiry.”

Rebuilding Community

This final section speaks to the resilience of writing centers. As a community whose values and practices are grounded in theories of collaboration, we were specially poised to maintain community despite the monumental disruptions and collective trauma that we were all experiencing. During the pandemic when many students faced the academic year holed up in their childhood bedrooms (if they were lucky) tackling asynchronous courses, the writing center (even online) was a place where they could escape their isolation and interact meaningfully with supportive peers. Writing centers disrupted the isolation of the pandemic by cultivating community despite the challenges. The essays in this section address the innovative community of three different writing centers: one that built an online community of practice for their writing tutors, another that forged a research community for writing studies students, and a third that piloted  a community writing center—all in the midst of the pandemic.

When faced with the inevitability of going fully remote, many of us, especially those who did not offer online tutoring, scrambled to make sure they could sustain one-on-one writing tutoring. Chasteen et al. went a step further and described their considerable efforts to create remote communities of practice to sustain professional development opportunities for their tutors. The authors describe how they functioned as a community of practice (CoP).  As a CoP, they kept the lines of communication open between tutors and directors, and among tutors while continuing their commitment to ambitious goals related to wellness, social justice, and social media and digital production. Friedman et al. describe another ambitious community project—this time with a community of student researchers who worked with writing center director Andrea Scott. Scott elected to teach a pandemic-themed course during the pandemic that engaged students as researchers of the ways in which the student writing culture changed due to the pandemic. These students created a research design that interrogates threshold concepts in writing studies in order to explore the “what, how, and why” of writing at the height of COVID-19. A testament to community in its very form, this chapter is multi-voiced and collaboratively written. The final chapter in this collection by Madan, Reardon, and Santana zooms out (pun intended) from the academic quad to a region in Massachusetts where three writing center directors piloted a community writing center during the height of the pandemic. The authors who are writing center directors from three different area institutions detail how they developed an online community writing center rooted in social justice, reciprocity, and community engagement.

Concluding Note from the Editors

Like the chapters in this volume, this DEC emerged from the disruption of the pandemic to acknowledge the resilience and innovativeness of writing centers. Noreen and John undertook this project in order to make visible a significant historical moment for writing centers. They then asked an undergraduate peer writing tutor, Sarah Rice, who aspires to a career in publishing, to serve as digital editor. Sarah was involved in every step of the process, from reading manuscripts and talking through feedback to laying out the volume in Pressbooks. From her student/writing tutor perspective, Sarah saw the importance and challenge of working in virtual spaces during and after the pandemic. The following are her words:

We three editors hope this DEC will be a valuable historical snapshot of writing centers amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, we recognize that the innovative ideas presented throughout are transferable to post-pandemic writing centers. In conclusion, this collection captures writing center work at a unique historical moment while also grounding the lessons learned in our everyday work in the writing center.