This dissertation theorizes the writing center as bridge – as an institutional resource that supports second language graduate writers as they journey from outside the academy to the inside – including its strengths and limitations, both locally (for these writers at this writing center) and for the field more broadly. I offer the metaphor of the writing center as bridge, both as an alternate writing center identity and therefore as an alternate approach to tutoring, and as an approach that privileges the multiple subject positions that students hold as they use the writing center.
The project began with a desire to understand the roles that the writing center played in the writing development of three second language graduate writers. By using case studies to follow the writers through the first year of their graduate programs, I examine their writing center use contextualized within their broader writing development. Their experiences reveal a need for help that is outside the boundaries many writing centers have used to define themselves – help at the sentence level of the text and help that is discipline-based instead of generalist in nature. In short, help that challenges the underlying principles and assumptions of nondirective tutoring, the dominant theory, pedagogy (and identity) of many writing centers. Based on the literature, the experiences of these participants, and my own experiences as a tutor-turned-coordinator, I ultimately argue that nondirective tutoring is rooted in practice with native-English-speaking undergraduates and that this practice so dominates many writing centers’ identities that it has left little room for other subject positions, including those of second language graduate writers.