Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 23, No. 4 (2026)
A Two-Year Study on Co-Sponsored Graduate Student Writing Groups: A Joint Initiative Between Writing Center and Graduate Program
Julia Romberger
Old Dominion University
JRomberg@odu.edu
Megan Boeshart Burelle
Old Dominion University
mboeshar@odu.edu
Abstract
This study reports on a model of graduate student writing workgroups that were co-sponsored by the writing center and the distance learning English PhD program at Old Dominion University. These groups were initiated due to concerns about isolation coming out of the COVID pandemic as well as lengthy time to degree statistics and concerns about students who do not finish their graduate program (non-completes or non-completers in the literature on attrition). While writing group scholarship has established the value of peer writing support for graduate students (Aitchison & Guerin; Haas; Phillips), existing models largely address on-campus populations or rely on writing center tutors as facilitators (Cui et al.). Distance learners remain underrepresented in this literature. This study addresses that gap by examining a co-sponsored infrastructure in which a jointly-appointed graduate assistant for the Writing Center and English PhD program coordinated group logistics, reducing cognitive load for participants, while peer-led facilitation preserved a non-hierarchical dynamic. Interviews from the first and second year suggest students found these groups valuable for accountability and peer support in ways that differed meaningfully from self-organized or writing-center-only models: the institutional co-sponsorship conferred a degree of formality and authority that motivated participation and persistence without replicating the evaluative dynamics of faculty-directed settings. The authors argue this co-sponsored model offers an infrastructure particularly well-suited to distance learners in contexts where writing center resources are limited or program-specific needs require a tailored approach.
Keywords: graduate student writing groups; accountability; peer support; distance learners; co-sponsored writing groups
A Two-Year Study on Co-Sponsored Graduate Student Writing Groups: A Joint Initiative Between Writing Center and Graduate Program
Distance learning has been a staple at various types of higher education institutions after the COVID pandemic forced many university classes online. One question that arises when supporting online graduate students that is less addressed by current literature is how programs might best support the writing and community needs of graduate students who are no longer in course work or who work full time in addition to working towards their degree. These students do not have access to the frequent intellectual community meetings that being in coursework full-time grants. If our graduate student interviewees represent a common experience, students often struggle to set up writing groups, a value-proven asset, on their own. Additionally, much of the literature on writing groups coming from writing center scholarship is aimed at on-campus students who are often non-native English speakers(Aitchison, and Guerin; Cui et al.; Haas; Phillips), and the type of students mentioned above are generally not the focus of such studies if they don’t fit those parameters. There are rare exceptions that do address distance learners such as Cui, Zhang, and Driscoll’s “Virtual Graduate Writing Groups;” however, their study focuses on interdisciplinary writing groups with advanced writing center tutor facilitators. The infrastructure of our co-sponsored writing workgroup initiative is quite different, but we believe that the nature of the population it serves – primarily distance learners in related English disciplines – has useful lessons for writing centers but also, and especially, for alternate models for writing groups that may be necessary due to lack of writing center resources or special programmatic mandates and needs. Distance students’ educational progress has unique factors, and our research suggests writing groups play important roles in mitigating loneliness, programmatic disconnect, and a slowing of time-to-degree. These factors, while not unique to distance learning, are exacerbated by not being present on campus (Lawrence and Zawacki). The data from our study supports the research previously mentioned by demonstrating that writing workgroups managed by the writing center, the department, or the department in conjunction with the writing center are valuable because the onus to self-organize is taken off of graduate students, and the location of the management provides accountability and structure. These attributes further mitigate factors related to attrition. In this article, we will discuss a co-sponsored writing center/programmatic writing group.
While this study reports on a writing group model developed for distance learning doctoral students in English disciplines in particular, given the number of online graduate programs in the US, we believe the results of this research will be valuable to students at any stage of graduate work. As the beginning of the second year of the writing workgroups proved, students who had just begun their PhD coursework were as eager to join once they heard how things had worked out for students during the first year as the original intended population of students working on prospecti or dissertations.
Impetus for the Development of Writing Workgroups: Data from A Program Survey
Concerned about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the program, the Graduate Program Director for the English PhD, one of the authors of this piece, created a communications, community, and support survey to get data about student perceptions of how well those things were working for them in their program. Programmatically, we do not ask for data on the average age of our student population. The fact is that a majority of them are not traditional students who pursued an education as full-time K-PhD students. The majority have held jobs between degrees or are holding jobs, often at community college or 4 year institutions, indicating they are in fact older than traditional students, which is typical for students choosing to pursue a doctorate at a distance (Brown). Therefore, in addition to being a program of approximately 75% distance learners, there are complications with work/student life/family balance that traditional students do not always contend with. These attributes were a cause for some concern given the pandemic’s impact, which was felt even as our university and the country struggled to return to a sense of normalcy. In January of 2023, 26 of 72 enrolled students responded to this survey about PhD students’ sense of community and support from their peers and faculty. Results indicated that while students felt close cohort connections during coursework, they felt less connected to both their peers and the program after completing coursework, which could slow their time-to-degree. The survey posited several possible remedies for improving connections between students, such as faculty-lead reading groups, writing workgroups, student/faculty discussion groups about the program, regular informal zoom-based happy hours, and formalized mentoring sessions in addition to the mentoring that happens with their chairs or course instructors. Students expressed the most interest in writing workgroups (37%) with formalized, student-led writing workgroups as preferable among the options. The Graduate Program Director determined that the student-led writing workgroups were the most viable way to address the issue of disconnection and improve time-to-degree while hopefully stemming attrition. Writing workgroups were also connected to already ongoing broader support in the writing center, currently overseen by the second author of this article, that was interdisciplinary and used primarily by graduate students who were non-native speakers of English. However, the specific writing group initiative we co-developed was focused specifically on English PhD program students whose writing concerns focus more on the need to work within a scholarly community, development of scholarly identity and lengthy times to degree, which is not a model commonly found in the scholarly literature.
Scholarship on General Attrition Data for U.S. Based PhD Students
Attrition is a serious issue for US-based PhD programs. Students find themselves becoming a non-completer due to a variety of issues. These range from lack of mentoring, poor communication from the program about expectations, financial and personal problems, and feelings of isolation (Ampaw and Jaeger; Caruth; Devos et al.; Golde; Laufer, and Gorup; Lovitts; Nygaard, and Savva). The most recent US national statistics from Council of Graduate Schools (2008)– which are nearly twenty years out of date and don’t account for the pandemic–report the national average for completion of doctoral degrees across all disciplines at 56.6%, where the Social Sciences and Humanities (53%) fare poorer than the STEM disciplines (59.1%). Ampaw and Jaeger speculated that this difference is connected to the individualistic nature of graduate projects in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Underrepresented students, desirable recruits in diversification initiatives in many U.S. universities (at least until recently), have a 25% decreased chance of completion according to a study at a large university in the southeastern U.S. by Ampaw and Jaeger.
In addition to the attrition statistics cited for PhD students across disciplines in primarily brick and mortar programs, our PhD program, consisting of a majority of distance learners, faces the complications that impact attrition connected to both distance learning and non-traditional older students. Cathrine Ames et al. lay out the challenges of completing a dissertation project at a distance: As the dissertation project is not structured within a course, it requires self-regulation alongside navigating the discourse communities and expectations of the discipline to produce writing that satisfies a committee while not having as much regular contact with faculty and peers (Ames et al., 84). In their overview of the literature, Ames et al. do contend that implementation of web-based learning technologies to create a private online learning space can help ensure more adequate connections between students and their committees, but distance learning still increases the need for self-efficacy and persistence (Peck et al.).What is not addressed in Ames et al is the connection with peers who can help form a community of practice and assist with development of scholarly identity (Lassig et al.; Maher et al.). At the post coursework stage, students are peripheral members, striving for legitimacy. Using the framework of community of practice scholarship (see Wenger), the process of participating in coursework and then writing the dissertation can be understood as a means for moving from legitimate peripheral participation through to becoming a full member included in a community of practice. Ways of achieving this include reduced risk and cost of error (within coursework) and close supervision (working with dissertation chair and committee members), both of which eventually lead to lessons that are, critically, a part of the any academic community’s practices such as developing and presenting disciplinary scholarship in the form of conferences presentations, articles, and the dissertation. Community of practice participants must have access to “mutual engagement with other members, to their actions and their negotiation of the enterprise, and to the repertoire [of language and actions] in use” (Wenger 100). Education in a PhD program overtly scaffolds this by providing assistance with navigating the process of producing the prospectus and dissertation but also furnishing critical affective support that complements the dissertation student/chair relationship. The function of writing workgroups is to support the movement through production of scholarship, which is a hallmark of full community membership within the academy.
Description of Writing Group Structure
In fall 2023, after reviewing the survey results, the authors jointly implemented the program sponsored student writing workgroups. Additionally, we wanted to learn, via a multi-year study, if these writing workgroups had value as an important part of the PhD program’s infrastructure of support for students - especially those who were post-coursework. The co-sponsorship between the writing center and the PhD program was vital in two ways. The Writing Center Director, who is also an ABD student in the program, shared relevant research during discussions on creating the infrastructure, assisted with the decisions, and helped with structuring the study and signed on as co-primary investigator. This co-sponsorship also allowed us as administrators to create a joint appointment for a graduate assistant (GA) who was already trained in working with graduate student writing groups through their previous experience in the writing center. This GA was chosen for multiple reasons. As part of their previous writing center duties, they already had done the work of setting up and forming writing groups and could manage the smaller details of creating online writing groups. Additionally, because they had been trained as a graduate student tutor by the writing center previously and had, as part of their preparation to work in our writing center, completed the training developed and offered by the University of Michigan to support graduate student tutoring, they were very prepared to do this work. It is from these resources along with in-house training that they learned about accountability practices and guiding graduate students in utilizing feedback from instructors, directors, and chairs. The accountability training was most critical in that the GA was given a bit of latitude in how precisely they set up the infrastructure for communicating with the writing groups about attendance and reminders regarding logs and reflections. This work managed by the writing center-trained GA relieved the barrier that the cognitive burden of forming and managing writing groups placed upon students attempting to do this work on their own. A GA trained in this fashion also could readily merge writing center pedagogy with the needs of a particular program when necessary, which is one of the other key advantages of having a co-sponsored initiative. Having co-sponsored writing groups can also provide institutional authority. In our findings, students understood that this was a programmatic initiative, which, according to the interview data, encouraged participation and persistence. Thus we believe this form of initiative could be valuable in these respects for other institutions.
Importantly, unlike existing studies on writing groups (Aitchison & Guerin; Cui et al.; Haas; Phillips), the only responsibility of this GA during the actual workgroup time was to set it up and ensure that Zoom was working. The GA did not serve as a writing center facilitator or mentor in the traditional sense. The students participating were all seasoned teachers of English or experienced writing center tutors, so we felt that this was not a necessary role.
The writing workgroups met every two weeks for 90 minutes. Each meeting was student led, and the GA designated a leader for the next week to negotiate with members to set the upcoming agenda. This process was implemented to ensure student needs were met along with fostering metacognition about their writing by creating the structure and accountability a session agenda requires (Macauley; McBride and Hamilton). The process also fostered the importance of negotiating goals from week to week, a key indicator of writing group participant satisfaction (Wilder 21). The focus of the workgroups was not pedagogical but peer support through review and focused writing, so student leaders were not asked to produce mini-lessons or literature about writing, but instead focused their time as leader on agenda setting and keeping the group on task. Additionally, given the range of dissertation types coming from students in the English department — from literature to cultural studies, rhetoric and writing studies, and technical and professional communication — lessons about drafting sections of prospecti and dissertations would potentially be of limited value given the differences in genre conventions and disciplinary expectations.
Student agenda choices for the writing session were focused writing time, draft feedback and discussion, and writing problem solving. The first two categories of writing session type are common in the writing group literature (Blake, et al.; Haas). The final category of writing session type was recommended by a senior rhetoric and writing studies scholar who has worked with many graduate students in her career and is supported by literature (Lannin, and Townsend). Based upon decades of experience guiding students through theses and dissertations, she finds talking about writing problems — particularly in the form of discovering approaches to them while still in the very early writer-focused stages of drafting — is highly beneficial. As drafts are often highly mutable early on, feedback on the actual writing might not be as generative as solving writing problems. Writing problems range from struggling to address major questions of “knowledge production, text production, and self-formation” in the realm of ongoing development of their academic identity through writing (Aitchison and Lee) to more specific struggles to produce writing within discourse community expectations. Discussion of these struggles that encourage writers to create the specific articulations necessary to elicit feedback from the writing workgroup members can be an assist for working through such problems.
The first workgroups met during the second week of September and continued through the end of April, following the academic calendar.We suspended official workgroups over the summer. However, so that they did not completely lose momentum, we encouraged students to participate in all or part of a summertime four-day dissertation boot camp that included daily check-ins, focused writing time, and daily workshops from faculty on professionalization and writing topics such as synthesis, writing for conference CFPs, and approaches to publishing post-dissertation defense. We also learned at the start of year two of the study that some students from year one had continued to meet on their own a few times over the summer to check in, as their collegial bonds had become strong and they wished to continue encouraging each other and provide various types of writing support. These meetings were outside of the study but demonstrated the value of the working groups for community building.
Research Methods
After advertising for and setting up the small workgroups based upon student availability and their status as students who were finished with their coursework, we had six initial participants who answered the secondary call to be a part of a study connected to those groups. In this first round, we limited participation to students who completed coursework and were preparing for comprehensive examinations, writing their prospectus, or drafting dissertation chapters. Additionally, there were requests from students who were in coursework to be a part of the writing workgroups. They did end up joining in, but their data was not collected. However, because of their presence in the writing groups, these students make an appearance in the data collected in mentions of their writing workgroup participation by their peers in interviews. The appearance of these students in the interviews in turn influenced the decision to include students still in coursework made at the start of year two of the writing groups, which had a far larger cohort of 19 students; although, because they were not finished with coursework, they did not participate in this study.
The writing groups were primarily constituted based upon availability, a key factor distinguishing them from the multidisciplinary Saturday graduate student writing group offered by the writing center. After indicating preferences, the GA teamed students up in groups of three to five, which resulted in 3 writing workgroups that would be held virtually on Zoom twice a week during the fall and spring semesters of the 2023-2024 academic year. The GA was tasked with supervising the groups, assigning meeting leaders (although eventually groups took the initiative in this), administering Zoom links, tracking participation, sending out meeting reminders, sharing the data collection tool with participants, and managing rescheduling needs. The PIs, the authors of this article, did not see participation and reflection data until the academic year was over because we did not want the students to feel overly surveilled, and we wanted to minimize writing “for” the PIs in the reflections and logs. The role of the researcher in data collection is always a concern, which we tried to mitigate. This concern rose especially as we collected interview data at three different times during the course of the fall and spring semesters.
Students who participated in the writing workgroups were asked to volunteer for the study. There were three interviews per student conducted over Zoom throughout the academic year: one in early September near the start of the semester, one mid-year, usually in January, and one in April or May just after spring semester finals. This data was initially recorded via Zoom and then transcribed by Zoom’s built-in AI or Otter.ai. The principal investigators then watched the video recordings of each interview to ensure correct transcription. The transcribed interviews were coded descriptively to identify the themes present related to community, goal setting and progress, and accountability (Saldaña). Students were asked to provide a pseudonym for themselves, and any data specific to interactions with particular instructors or classes that could identify them were also anonymized; although, data of this type was extremely minimal. The logs were used to track participation in the meetings, and the reflections ended up being too terse to provide valuable information. The small number of study participants means that larger generalizations about the student-led co-sponsored workgroups initiative are not possible. We can determine that workgroups that did complete the year, meet often, and wrote together had outcomes related to community building and progress that were significant. For these participants, the infrastructure of the writing workgroups worked extremely well to support progress on their chosen goals as PhD students based upon their interview statements.
Findings from Pilot Year Participant Data
In the first year we had six PhD students participate in the pilot study; although, by the end of the study two had dropped out. Going into the study, nearly all of the participants stated that they hoped to get one or both of the following out of the experience of bi-weekly writing workgroups: relief from the isolation of being distance learners post-coursework and accountability to assist in making progress on their dissertation. These statements informed the choice of codes used by the PIs.
We will discuss community in a moment, but it is notable that the most important experience that all participants mentioned at least once if not multiple times across the interviews was accountability. The fact that these groups were co-sponsored by the writing center and PhD program mattered, “making it more official” even though it wasn’t required, according to Frances. Having peers within the program that they need to report on progress to and share writing with created impetus to move forward with their writing. The participants connected terms like “forces me to be done” with “less pressure” and “formal” was connected to accountability. Alicia mentioned how she looked forward to meeting “just having their feedback, the whole concept of the peer review.”
Kaylee expressed it this way:
I felt like this would give me an extra boost and something that would hold me accountable for working on it and needing something tangible. Also to maybe remove some of the feeling of isolation that comes along with writing your dissertation... There's already, you know, some sense of isolation. Being a distance student and then not meeting weekly in classes can definitely make it feel even more isolating.
Kaylee further elaborated that the sense of accountability was an immediate effect for her, even before the workgroups began:
Just meeting with the group the very first time motivated me to write in the OFF time when I wasn't meeting with the group, and that was really what I needed. I just needed that push. So, our very first meeting, I actually spent my time just trying to organize myself and get everything open again and set up so I would be ready. And so that really helped me, just to with the group, just to focus.
Nicole noted “I like this formal accountability. You know, especially I don't know it's a little bit different texting with one person, as opposed to seeing and communicating with three other people.” She thought the deadlines and check-ins “imposed on me by other people” were particularly helpful. And having a GA who facilitates and “delegates who's leading on which day, but we always know about it ahead of time, …, it's not a stressful thing, because we already know” according to Audrey. We also suspect, although no interview mentioned it, that the co-sponsorship with the doctoral program also took away any kind of misgivings or potential negative views of working just with the writing center might have had (however misplaced) for the graduate students.
The fact that these groups were peer led, with the GA rotating the assignment of leader amongst the students from meeting-to-meeting, also seems to have been beneficial in providing a space where everyone was supportive, understanding of the various struggles, but also able to provide substantive feedback and accountability (as mentioned earlier) without feeling exceptionally judged. Audrey and Alicia compared it to peer review with an emphasis on collaboration. Alicia claimed the “thing that makes it a little bit different from being in a writing center appointment is there's no clear, like, leader…. no clear, you know, authority … there's no clear person who's serving as the tutor role. It's still much more collaborative, so it still feels more like peers reviewing, but it does function that kind of way.” Audrey said it was a bit like a little family where you felt they were “holding you accountable ….in a really friendly way.” Audrey noted that sometimes with faculty students “don't always ask the questions that we should” because they assume they are bothering someone who is “really busy.” So, for her, the nature of the group was a “little less formal… you can ask whatever you want. I think it really does help everybody.”
It did not seem to matter that some of the students were in different stages, one of the reasons that we ended up opening the workgroups to people still in the course phase. Both Audrey and Alicia noted this. Audrey stated his way, “It feels very supportive. Even though the four of us in the group [sic], we are not all at the same place. We're all in different stages, but we're all far enough in that we all know, you know, we all understand where everybody is, and everybody in the group has just been.” This is also a type of community of practice work, and was quite valuable as students learned about genres, expectations, and how to function within the program and discipline to meet agreed upon goals (Wenger). Knowing their peers and having the burden of the organizing placed upon a GA who had half of her writing center assistantship tasked with setting up and managing the groups’ meeting times and other infrastructure needs including data collection seems to have made a significant difference in reducing the cognitive load on the workgroup participants.
While there was a Facebook group mentioned by Audrey, she noted that
I did not start it, but definitely joined it, some of my peers in the English department working on PhDs or, you know, right before the PhD, or right at, you know, in the middle of it. But [it] was originally kind of started to be a writing group, I think, and then, because everybody kind of realized how busy they were and it was going to be really difficult to coordinate it, it morphed into a support group. So, it's still very helpful, but it's definitely not the same as what I'm doing with the working group.
Frances and Alicia noted that they were part of other writing groups as well, but these groups either were informal and thus less structured and less productive for her (Frances) or were comprised of academics she didn’t know (Alicia). Frances expressed it this way: “Having a structured [writing group] that [is]… beyond just two friends agreeing to do something together, having something that's got a sort of a little bit of institution behind it, you know, … you agreed to do this.” Alicia also noted that her other writing group experience was a “just sit and write” type and it was far too easy to shut off the camera and go put in a load of laundry.
Notable was that Audrey, the student who worked as the writing center’s graduate tutor and ran a graduate writing group through the writing center on Saturdays for all graduate students, responded that she was initially hesitant to participate because she was “afraid it might be too much to do that and then have another weekly group because …even though I'm leading the Saturday writing group, I have not been able to do any writing myself during that time.” This writing center group is open to graduate students in any discipline, and so as the tutor she is responsible for facilitating the writing center’s graduate writing group and working with participants’ writing during their group’s meetings. Even though the position allows for it, her own writing is deprioritized. Audrey feels that this is expected of her because of both her role as writing center tutor and her disciplinary expertise as an English graduate student and teacher, despite writing center literature tending to advocate for non-hierarchical groups (Wilder 34). She is also free in this writing center and programmatic space of the concerns about upper administration vagaries in this space that are all too common to tutors (Costello). The workgroups in this study, comprised of English students with a different configuration of rotating leads, provided Alicia with more space to focus on her own work.
Modifications to the Writing Workgroup Infrastructure
The very first modification made to the writing workgroup infrastructure during the second year of the initiative and study was to open participation to all students enrolled in the PhD program. As reported above, it was found that a mix of statuses with the workgroup was seen as beneficial and, especially for those in the earlier stages of comprehensive exam preparation and prospectus drafting, educational for helping the students ease into the community of practice. While data wasn’t collected from those participants still in course work, the increased number of students in coursework asking to join the workgroups at the start of the second year indicates that there is perceived benefit to being part of a writing workgroup no matter what stage of the degree they might be in.
One of the adjustments we determined would assist with accountability would be the collection of digital agenda documents by the GA alongside the logs and reflections, which we did not do in the pilot year. The need to set an agenda was particularly noted by Frances whose group often lacked one, and, in her perspective, the group had less accountability to each other because of it. They showed up less frequently to meetings, cut meetings short, and rarely shared writing. The other group of students consistently had an agenda, and while Alicia felt they’d be fine without one by the end, Audrey felt their group was better for it as it helped them manage distractions.
Other adjustments that might be beneficial to writing groups supporting distance students might be to include regular circulation of the logs with thesis and dissertation chairs, should the students wish. Because this particular study was located within an English department where all the faculty were known to the PIs, the dynamics of accountability were different than they might be for an initiative that is spread campus-wide.
Discussion
From the dataset of the early years of this initiative, one of the first significant takeaways is that even self-described fairly disciplined writers need to have agendas set for each meeting. We had introduced them as part of the structure, but as we didn’t collect agendas from each meeting, and agenda setting quickly fell by the wayside for at least one group. The most successful group (we are defining success here as consistent meetings, sharing writing, and students feeling they had met their semester goals for the writing group) in the first year and the two groups who had the most significant success in year two of the study have mentioned how critical this was to keep them on task thus allowing them to meet their writing goals while still providing time for them to connect as part of a community of scholars. In part, the need for an agenda to provide structure is due to the isolation – as mentioned earlier. Students find these groups to be not only writing support but also meeting the affective need of social support. If an agenda isn’t agreed upon with built-in time for checking in with each other’s current lives and then a set of agreed upon tasks, then oftentimes the writing may become completely sidelined. This finding aligns with Macauley's argument for agenda-setting as a means of focusing on collaborative writing time, and with McBride and Hamilton's work on using agenda structure to build clarity and depth in writing sessions. That students consistently needed this structure even when they understood its value also supports Wilder's observation that negotiating goals from meeting to meeting is a key indicator of group satisfaction — and suggests that for distance learners managing competing obligations, the stakes of an unstructured meeting are higher than the literature on on-campus groups might anticipate.
As noted in the findings section, the most commonly reported value was accountability. Nearly every student either expected or experienced this. This additional push to self-regulate because the PhD program was a co-sponsor of the writing workgroups (no matter how we tried to make certain they were aware that we were not surveilling them) and that their peers are expecting them to make progress and bring something to discuss to most, if not all, of the meetings was clearly important. The reflections and logs, which they could choose, if they wished, to share with their chairs to demonstrate progress in absence of reader-centered drafts also provided accountability if they felt they needed it. Peer accountability is commonly discussed in the literature on writing groups as valuable and the data from this study proved this remains true (Brooks-Gillies, et al. 197-98; Busl, et al.). What this model adds to that conversation, however, is the role of institutional structure in shaping how accountability operates: as Wilder notes, authority in writing groups is negotiated among participants, but in this co-sponsored context, authority was also conferred from outside the group itself (by the joint institutional sponsorship of the Writing Center and the PhD program) in ways that motivated participation without replicating the evaluative dynamics of faculty-directed settings (Lawrence and Zawacki). As we saw in the interviews, while peers created accountability, they also provided non-judgmental support for the struggles and barriers that are often encountered when trying to produce academic writing and manage school, work, and familial responsibilities. This allows for creation of their own authority within the group (Wilder 19).
As was made clear in the interviews, the peer support and affective part of the workgroups seem to be as important as the writing support. Interview comments about the affective part of the workgroups were entangled with the comments regarding accountability as seen in descriptions of friendly feedback and the term family used by Audrey. Given that isolation is a significant factor in attrition when coupled with the life factors that many of these non-traditional students have, this result is unsurprising. The work groups gave them an opportunity to talk about their lives and how their lived experiences were impacting their work, making them feel “less alone.” They could also share challenges and frustrations regarding the program and their chairs (although it is to be hoped that they’d bring this to the program’s attention as well). This also aligns with literature and will be examined in future scholarship from this study (Brooks-Gillies et al.).
Our assertions about English graduate students being seen as the de facto facilitator in a writing center sponsored peer group that is multidisciplinary, as noted earlier, was borne out by Audrey’s experience as the writing center’s graduate tutor. Students in the group rely heavily on her expertise: she either works one-on-one with a writer after a drafting session, or facilitates collaborative writing between group members, leaving her no time for her own writing. This observation supports the decision to have the infrastructure for the workgroups situated in the degree program.
Limitations
One of the most significant limitations to this study was the fact that nearly all participants had writing pedagogy training as all were within an English doctoral program. If this co-sponsored infrastructure is to be implemented at other institutions, questions would need to be addressed such as: How can students apart from those trained in the teaching of writing courses or as writing center tutors be supported in feeling comfortable setting writing agendas? Adjacent to this, could the students in such a program who are participating in this infrastructure be provided with training and support from the writing center on this to get more comfortable with writing terminology and to learn to articulate what they know without having a writing center tutor as facilitator? Finally, WAC/WID training and support for degree program faculty interested in implementing this kind of infrastructure would need to be addressed.
Additionally, upon discussing the results of this study with the writing center with an eye toward thinking about wider implementation, it was clear that if such a program were to become multidisciplinary, the likelihood was that English graduate student participants would become the default writing mentor and group facilitator. Such a student would likely not receive the same benefits as other students, at least this was Alicia’s experience. So, with this particular population, as with other writing-centric humanities disciplines, there may be reason to keep the demographics for some groups within the bounds of English Studies or the humanities. With these concerns addressed, though, we believe that writing centers and WAC/WID faculty can work with the disciplines across their campus to consider a modified infrastructure close to this to support their graduate students doing degree work at a distance.
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End Notes
1. A long but incomplete list from U.S News &. World Report lists 119 categories and Gradschool.com lists 881 programs across the disciplines
2. The number is approximate because post-pandemic it was unclear if a few had paused their program or left and not officially indicated such.
3. University IRB 2002350-1
4. Please see the resources at https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/zc77ss45g?locale=en.
5. University IRB 2092439-1