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Peripheral Visions for
Writing Centers
Jackie Grutsch McKinney
6 x 9, 174 pages
published: 2013

ISBN 978-0-87421-915-9
paper $24.95s

ISBN 978-0-87421-916-6
e-book $20.00

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Jackie Grutsch McKinney is the director of the Writing Program at Ball State University.

Peripheral Visions for
Writing Centers

Jackie Grutsch McKinney

Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers aims to inspire a re-conception and re-envisioning of the boundaries of writing center work. Moving beyond the grand narrative of the writing center—that it is solely a comfortable, yet iconoclastic place where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing—McKinney shines light on other representations of writing center work.

McKinney argues that this grand narrative neglects the extent to which writing center work is theoretically and pedagogically complex, with ever-changing work and conditions, and results in a straitjacket for writing center scholars, practitioners, students, and outsiders alike. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers makes the case for a broader narrative of writing center work that recognizes and theorizes the various spaces of writing center labor, allows for professionalization of administrators, and sees tutoring as just one way to perform writing center work.

McKinney explores possibilities that lie outside the grand narrative, allowing scholars and practitioners to open the field to a fuller, richer, and more realistic representation of their material labor and intellectual work.