Call for Submissions: Theory in / to Practice

The Writing Center Journal's feature "Theory in/to Practice" (T/P) offers writing center specialists a new venue for innovative work. Like the more traditional academic essays that comprise the bulk of the journal's contents, these works demonstrate an engagement with recent research and contemporary scholarly debates. Unlike traditional scholarly essays, however, T/P showcases those primary documents that manifest the scholarship of our everyday practices - those syllabi, annual reports, and other writing center documents that translate our disciplinary expertise for an external audience.

T/P Evaluation Criteria

Audience awareness / broad applicability provides a primary concern for authors considering submitting to this feature. In other words, manuscripts that are accepted not only explain the institutional innovation or demonstrate the on?campus success of the primary document under consideration. Such essays will also demonstrate the value of the featured document beyond the author's home campus. Thus, a T/P that focused on an annual report would not only explain how this report met the rhetorical challenges faced by a specific writing center but would also explain how such a report models rhetorical features useful to a wide array of writing center reports.

Innovation is a primary assessment criterion for T/P submissions. Successful submissions will demonstrate that they substantially challenge or extend current writing center practice or disciplinary lore. Thus, a submission that featured a syllabus for an undergraduate writing center tutor education course would go beyond the well?circulated disciplinary touchstones and such common assignments as tutorial recordings, observation reports, resource development and reflective writing. While such a syllabus, of course, might find another way to demonstrate innovation beyond the readings and assignment sequence, it must be significant enough that such innovation provides a primary feature of the course. Due to space constraints, T/P cannot include individual lesson plans.

Engagement with current research is evident in both the contextualizing material and the primary document itself, and T/P manuscripts will demonstrate an awareness appropriate to current research. Thus, a manuscript that features an annual report would cite the scholarship in writing center studies on administrative reports and appropriate professional writing research on report design. By illustrating the ways in which an annual report takes both strands of scholarship into account, the primary document, too, would manifest an engagement with this work.

T/P Elements

Introduction: The introductory section should include an argument for the originality/innovation of the primary document and explain the institutional context in which it was created.

Primary document: A primary document from an individual writing center that illustrates best practice and innovation.

Analysis/Argument: This portion of the submission should show how the document engages current scholarship, as well as how it enhances practices or offers a new approach to a longstanding disciplinary challenge.

Evaluation: T/P documents undergo the same evaluative process as other manuscripts. Reviewers are asked to use these criteria as the basis for their assessments.