Sara Wilder

"Writing Groups in the Writing Center" presents an empirical, qualitative study that examines collaborative practices in multidisciplinary writing groups, arguing that these collaborations offer rich expansions of writing center praxis. Using three case studies—undergraduate grant proposal writers, undergraduate thesis writers, and doctoral dissertation writers—the book explores how participants negotiate authority, navigate disciplinary boundaries, perform emotional labor, and develop expertise within writing center communities of practice.

It’s October 2023, and we stand at the front of a conference room at the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) Conference, smiling a little sheepishly as voices from our former writing center consultants echo from a Bluetooth speaker. “If you can articulate an idea … then you can write, you are a writer,” muses the consultant. At the same time, a vintage clip of Wile E. Coyote appears on the screen. Wile E. attempts to fire a bow and arrow but instead tumbles backward off the cliff.

For the next minute, the voices of consultants continue to fade in and out, confidently describing their thoughts about writing as Wile E. experiences his signature slapstick misfortunes. Some workshop participants laugh audibly; others smile, looking up occasionally as they continue cutting images out of magazines. Wile E.’s struggles are decidedly at odds with the speakers’ tone, and our group finds it funny.

This chapter presents assignments from an upper-level undergraduate course in digital rhetoric and audio composition. In this course, students explore theories of digital and sonic rhetorics through reading, listening, and composing with sound. I had two major goals when I began this class: (1) I wanted students to develop strong listening practices that allowed them to listen to, analyze, and critique sound, and (2) I wanted students to develop their rhetorical abilities to compose with sound. In approaching this course, I aimed to scaffold student work, to give students opportunities to play with sound on small, specific tasks that they could build from over time. Taking inspiration from scholarship by Tanya K. Rodrigue et al. (2016) and Heidi McKee (2006), I decided to structure the body of my course around four, 2–3-week units, each devoted to one of McKee’s elements of sound: music, voice, sound effects, and silence. My units on music, voice, and sound effects were each anchored by one major assignment featuring that sound element. Together, these assignments offer students the opportunity to gradually develop listening and composing practices by focusing their attention on particular elements and asking them to reflect on their compositional choices and their learning throughout the course.

Published in Literacy in Composition Studies.

Co-authored with  Michael Blancato (Roosevelt University), Gavin P. Johnson (Christian Brothers University), and Beverly J. Moss (The Ohio State University).

Abstract: Although much scholarship on community-engaged pedagogies attends to student negotiations of difference, little attention has been paid to how instructors navigate difference, particularly racial difference, across classroom and community spaces. In this article, we use the concept of brokering to examine how seven different instructors of a community-engaged writing course titled “The Literacy Narratives of Black Columbus” imagined the racialized spaces of the course and facilitated engagement between students and community members in those spaces. Drawing primarily on instructor interviews, we present three approaches instructors took to imagine and facilitate student and community engagement across racialized and spatialized boundaries. We found that instructor positionality influenced how they imagined and negotiated the roles of brokers who could facilitate connections between students and community members as well as provide students with cultural knowledge necessary for navigating the course’s racialized spaces. Ultimately, we argue that instructors, particularly in predominantly white institutions, must carefully consider race, space, place, and their own positionalities when planning and implementing community-engaged pedagogies.

Published in Written Communication.

Abstract: Scholarship has shown that writing groups are important sites of authority negotiation for student writers, yet little empirical research has examined how groups negotiate authority through conversation or how these negotiations influence students’ developing expertise. Drawing on observations and interviews of an undergraduate thesis and a graduate dissertation writing group, I use the concept of “presentification” to analyze conversational moments in which group members referenced advisors, “making present” advisor authority to influence group collaborations. Specifically, I analyze these moments to show how writing groups can serve as low-stakes communities in which students negotiate their emerging sense of authority. I found that whereas less experienced writers looked to advisors to solve writing problems and used advisor authority to stand in for disciplinary expertise, more experienced writers voiced advisor guidance to help pose writing problems and negotiate their own stance as disciplinary experts. This study thus theorizes one process through which student writers negotiate emerging authority across sites of literate practice and in collaboration with others who may not themselves be members of the same disciplinary community.