Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 23, No. 1 (2025)

From the Editors

Mary Fons
The University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

Sam Turner
The University of Texas at Austin
praxisuwc@gmail.com

Some of the thresholds we cross in life are obvious. Milestones like promotion or graduation change how we identify and participate in our worlds, enabling each version of ourselves to be at once in progress and of the past. Sometimes we cross a threshold and know our lives have changed forever. 

Other thresholds are more subtle, permeable but imperceptible. Sometimes the timeline of a momentous change is protracted: you’re going along in what feels like the status quo, then one day you look around and nothing looks familiar. Other times, you miss (or dismiss) a threshold, not realizing its gravity at the time.

The aim of Praxis is to bring readers the best work that comes across our desk, period. Thematic throughlines take shape as we put together a given issue, but if a solid piece doesn’t “fit” with a theme being mulled over, that doesn’t mean it’s a hard-stop for that manuscript.

But when harmony happens on its own, it’s lovely to behold—and so it is with this fall issue.

If there were a single keyword appropriate for the entirety of Praxis 23.1, we think “thresholds” does the job. The pieces in this issue, directly or indirectly, contend with both physical and metaphorical movements of writing center work, from traditional pedagogical, logistical, even spacial containers (Points A) to whatever’s on the horizon (Point B).

Sam and I would be remiss not to thank Katherine Bridgman for her help inspiring this issue’s theme. Bridgman’s article, “Crossing Thresholds: Identifying and Disrupting the Autonomous Models of Literacy Shaping Writing Center Work,” most certainly informed our “a-ha!” moment. In this essential piece, Bridgman urges universities to embrace multiliteracy in order to move across thresholds and out across the university. Bridgman advocates for the necessity of working alongside students as they draw from the breadth of their literacy practices. In today’s political climate, her argument is salient, indeed.

From the University of Arizona comes a conversation between practitioners in a center identified for termination. In “Writing Support Services to Mitigate Inequities: An Open Conversation,” Andrea Hernandez Holm, Karen Barto, and Jennifer Glass reflect on a precarious threshold where their support of students’ literacies at physical borderlands meet an institutional precipice.

In Richard Kahn’s piece, “Expertise Wielded; Expertise Yielded: An American Tries to Plant an Academic Writing Center in Post-Colonial Philippines,” we cross geographical thresholds to explore Kahn’s narrative of how “expertise” travels across cultural borders. And from a team of scholars from the University of Nevada, Baylor University, and Hartwick College, we learn about how writing center anniversary events become public rhetorical arguments in “More Than a Celebration: Writing Center Anniversaries as Epideictic Rhetoric,” by James M. Cochran, Kara Poe Alexander, Rachel Herzl-Betz, and Ricardo Ramos Duran.

Could there be a more apt example of a  consequential threshold than the rise of AI? How to handle the matter in the writing center is considered in Jeffrey Warndof’s essay, “What is Too Much Help From GenAI?” Here to share an undergraduate tutor’s perspective one year into the job, Katelyn Lentz offers “Introverts Achieving Confidence in the Writing Center: A Guide for Consultants”; the piece is both touching and applicable to anyone’s tutoring practice. And after  decades in the field, Roycelin Rogers DeLeon reminds us that the work we do daily comprises a journey that is more than worth it.

Full disclosure: this is my (Mary) first issue of Praxis. At the beginning of the fall semester, I crossed the threshold from writing center consultant to co-editor of this publication. I want to thank the staff for having faith in my abilities and co-editor Sam Turner for her good sense of humor and near spooky-level of patience with me as we’ve put the issue together. We’ll be back in the new year, and wish you peace and joy this holiday season.

-Mary Fons and Sam Turner