(E)Merging Identities: Graduate Students in the Writing Center

by Melissa Nicolas

Fountainhead Press is pleased to introduce (E)Merging Graduate Students in the Writing Center, the second book in the Fountainhead Press X Series for Professional Development. (E)Merging Identities provides an overview of the challenges and rewards that await graduate student clients, tutors, and administrators in the writing center. The text is intended as a resource not only for graduate students but also for faculty and writing center professionals who work with them. Whether used as a classroom text or a professional development resource, (E)Merging Identities provides an opening for sustained conversations about theorizing the work graduate students do in the center as well as highlights the professional, academic, and personal stakes for graduate students in this environment. Authors in this collection address such questions How do graduate students navigate through the complicated work of being tutors and teachers, often simultaneously? What are the benefits and drawbacks of working in and doing research on writing centers as a graduate student? And what is the nature of the relationship between a graduate tutor and graduate and/or undergraduate clients?

172 pages, Paperback

Published January 15, 2008

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection does a nice job of looking at the paradoxes and politics involved with graduate student work in writing centers. However, the authors rarely posit solutions for the situations they describe. Therefore, as a former graduate student administrator and current faculty/staff member in a Writing Center, I recognized many of the situations depicted in this book without ever truly feeling like the book provided mitigating strategies to avoid the more unpleasant elements of them. As a result, the book's most appropriate audience might be graduate students who might be in the process of deciding whether writing center work is for them rather than administrators who currently work with graduate students (particularly if they had already done administrative work as graduate students themselves).