One of the recurrent questions we ask ourselves as writing center practitioners is what we’re doing: basically, what our theoretical assumptions are about our work, and how they inform (or fail to inform, or even hinder) that work. Today I will ask what it means to be non-directive and non-evaluative in the context of the theory of educative discourse laid out in Basil Bernstein’s Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique (1996), which assumes pedagogic practice to be a “fundamental social context through which cultural reproduction-production takes place,” thus necessarily taking part in power relations originating outside itself.

There is new evidence that anthropogenic climate change may be drawing us all ever closer to a sixth mass extinction. This dramatic event, entailing changes to the planet that are vast and irreversible, is driven by shifts in human resource use and the expansion of human populations. On a much smaller and less dramatic scale, shifts in university governance are driving changes in the demographics of the campus community and in the ways writing centers do their work. These changes are having an early effect on graduate students.

Gun violence has become more prevalent over the last fifty years, and now seems to be almost ubiquitous, with more than 30 incidents since 2010. Today Praxis suggests that writing centers begin a conversation about what we, as safe places for students, can do.

Today Praxis Managing co-Editor Thomas Spitzer-Hanks interviews his new colleague and co-Editor, James Garner, about his past in the writing center and his future plans for the journal.

In her July 21st blog post on AXIS, Kathryn Raign asked whether writing centers housed in insalubrious environments, and their directors, are being unfairly evaluated by student users. She posited that they are, due to her opportunity to measure student satisfaction with the space in a new location when the center she directs was moved. In the center that houses AXIS and its parent journal, Praxis, we have recently had a chance to evaluate Raign’s argument for ourselves.

It's been a big summer for Praxis. Thank you.

As an open-access internationally peer-reviewed academic journal, it should come as no surprise that Praxis believes in the importance of scholarship generally, and of writing center scholarship in particular. We are dedicated to sharing our authors' contributions to the long effort involved in improving our grasp of the situation in which we find ourselves as scholars and as writing center staffers, and we believe that effort includes attention to the institutional and social landscape in which writing centers and scholars exist. Toward that end, today Praxis Managing Editor Thomas Spitzer-Hanks discusses how data, ignorance, and instruction traverse the divide between individual and institution with Gerry Canavan, assistant professor at Marquette University and editor of Science Fiction, Film and Television (Cambridge UP, 2015) and The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015) with Eric Carl Link.

What can the writing center do to amplify voices before they are lost?

At the writing center I help staff, we've just re-opened for summer, which means one thing: weeks upon weeks of personal statements and applications, mostly (so far) for med school. I think this may be my favorite genre, even though it is probably the most difficult and confounding genre of writing I can think of. After all, where else does a writer have to brag, be modest, and show professionalism and ability while gesturing modestly toward their relative lack of both, all while asking for something they desperately want?