by Amelia Bailey, Griffin Brilhart, Sara Buie, Emily Bouza

Mickey Harris (1995) says writing tutors are in a “middle ground where their role is that of translator or interpreter, turning teacher language into student language.” At James Madison University’s Writing Center, we often consider how to renegotiate this role of translating and interpreting “teacher language” in our consultations with student writers: When do we continue to work with individuals to interpret assignments and feedback from a professor, and when do we want to move beyond the individual student to work at a more systemic level? Scholars such as Werner (2013) and Scott (2015) argue that writing centers need to work with faculty to truly change campus culture around writing, and writing consultants have a lot to offer faculty on the teaching of writing.

The topic of this collaborative paper was first raised by Amelia, Griffin, and Sara, all of us undergraduate tutors, who wondered if the subject matter would be feasible for a presentation at the 2025 Mid-Atlantic Writing Center Association (MAWCA) conference. We decided to bring the idea to Dr. Emily Bouza, the disciplinary writing coordinator at JMU’s writing center, to discuss how we as consultants can partner with faculty on campus. When instructors send many of their students to the writing center for help on the same assignment, consultants get familiar with the assignment and the students’ main concerns. Once consultants take stock of those concerns, we can decide which steps we might want to take to work with the professor. What follows are some examples of what this decision process looks like on our campus.

Questions in Individual Appointments

Writing consultants often encounter individual concerns during sessions which prompt them to evaluate their role as a peer-consultant. For instance, in one scenario at our writing center, a client expressed discouragement after their professor had rewritten large portions of the client’s work. The consultant reported difficulty navigating this situation. They wanted to ensure the client could retain their authorial voice while also meeting the faculty member’s expectations. Scenarios such as this can lead tutors to ask, “What should we do when a professor’s teaching contradicts our understanding of common writing center pedagogy?” Negotiations between writing consultants and faculty can be tricky because most writing centers, such as ours at JMU, do not have clear avenues for communication or collaboration with faculty.

For most isolated incidents, such as the one described, we recommend writing consultants do their best to support the client’s needs without negotiating with faculty, but it’s important to be able to recognize when a conversation or collaboration with a faculty member would be a useful next step. When consultants notice patterns across sessions where intervention or conversation with faculty would be useful, we offer the following strategies to work alongside faculty.

Patterns Across Required Sessions

For example, it’s common at JMU’s Writing Center for students of the first-year writing course to come to us confused about their assignment’s requirements. Specifically, many students seek our guidance on writing rhetorical analyses. We often discover that they don’t understand the nature of rhetorical analysis, and are instead merely identifying rhetorical appeals rather than examining their function and efficacy. While we could—and often do—point those students to our “Summary vs. Analysis” online handout, there’s enough of a pattern in these sessions to suggest that it would be beneficial to collaborate with faculty to better equip JMU students with the analytical skills needed for the course.

Another pattern we encounter is a lack of investment when writing center sessions are mandated. For instance, one visual design course at our university gives students complete freedom in choosing the subject matter for an important assignment, but requires that students visit the writing center prior to its submission. In order to be admitted into JMU’s graphic design major, students need to pass this course, so they have every reason to be invested in a session at the writing center; but many just aren’t. This suggests that there could be an opportunity for the course’s instructors to educate their class on the value of the writing center and contradict common misconceptions that we are an editor’s office or a punitive, strictly remedial space.

Through the myriad of situations we’ve encountered, we’ve come to understand that the students we serve could greatly benefit if our writing center reaches out to start conversations with university faculty. We’re considering multiple avenues about how to best do this. For instance, we can increase promotion of our in-class, consultant-led informative presentations to first-year writing instructors, detailing the ways their students can best utilize our services. We can also advertise the Writing Center’s page on JMU’s website, where we host multiple resource handouts that would best fit the concerns we see the students encountering in their courses. We hope to start conversations with these actions to counteract the misconceptions of the writing center that are held by both faculty and students alike. However, we are also exploring an additional opportunity to more specifically target patterns that have arisen from these misconceptions.

Creating Workshops to Address Patterns

We developed one process to respond to such patterns and hopefully change our writing center’s relationship with our greater academic community. Specifically, our center took a three-step approach when evaluating how to best respond to a growing need from over 600 students in the College of Business looking for advice in creating business proposals for a required core class. First, we got familiar with the assignment. Our consultants had worked with the business proposal assignment individually for several semesters, and had an understanding of its requirements. Second, we took stock of common themes and identified which best practices had been effective for students by having open dialogue with consultants about their business-student sessions. Finally, we executed change by developing strategies to respond to client needs and to improve the consultant-client experience.

Once we had our three-step plan, we decided to develop joint workshops for these students, rather than require each individual group to meet with us one-on-one. By utilizing our writing center staff’s expertise to gain insight about patterns they’d seen across sessions, we identified the sections of the assignment where students commonly struggled and focused the majority of the workshop content on addressing those sections. We also included any pertinent information that the College of Business faculty team requested we clarify, based on their own experiences teaching the course content. The workshop’s trial run was held during the Spring 2025 semester and it was a huge success! Nearly 200 students attended the workshops and were given space to learn more about the assignment and work with their groups. These workshops were successful because consultants were able to work alongside JMU faculty and writing center staff. We familiarized ourselves with the assignment, took stock of common student challenges, and executed change by developing targeted strategies to improve student learning.

Closing Statements

While negotiating the relationship between writing centers and faculty can be difficult, writing centers offer an important potential for a collaborative space with faculty. These collaborations can take steps toward changing the culture of writing on campus. Also, by working with faculty, writing center consultants can help create long-term change based on patterns across multiple sessions, rather than one-off solutions with individual student writers.

When we shared these ideas at MAWCA, many writing centers shared similar challenges when navigating the relationship between peer consultants and faculty. Some attendees mentioned their writing centers have established relationships with faculty and build these networks so they can quickly move into interventions; establishing workshops, creating specific resources or guides for commonly seen assignments, and partnering consultants with faculty to offer a student perspective for feedback on assignment descriptions are all examples. We hope to continue to build on these ideas to encourage writing center consultants to be advocates for strong writing pedagogy at our university.

Below, we’ve provided a series of open-ended questions for writing centers and consultants to consider when imagining their relationship with faculty members. Our hope is that these questions may begin a larger conversation about the potential of writing centers as a collaborative space across campus.

How can writing center tutors best serve faculty in addition to students?
How do the roles of writing tutors overlap or differ from faculty?
How should we balance the privacy of a session with the discussion of syllabi, assignments, and assessments with teachers?
What possible limitations or concerns may come up for tutors collaborating with professors?
How does the role of generative AI programs like ChatGPT change relationships between writing consultants, faculty, and students?

Works Cited

Harris, Muriel. “Talking in the middle: Why writers need writing tutors.” College English, vol. 57, no. 1, 1995, pp. 27–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/378348.

Scott, Andrea. "Commenting across the disciplines: Partnering with writing centers to train faculty to respond effectively to student writing." Journal of Response to Writing 1.1 (2015): 5.

Werner, Courtney L. "Constructing student learning through faculty development: Writing experts, writing centers, and faculty resources." The CEA Forum. Vol. 42. No. 2. 2013.