The Center Will Hold

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Winner of the 2003 Best Book Award, Council of Writing Program Administrators

Winner of the 2004 IWCA Outstanding Scholarship Award

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In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges.

Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.

A collection that suggests a new agenda for research and teaching in writing centers, The Center Will Hold signals a turn toward the future in writing center scholarship. It belongs on the bookshelf of every writing center and will be used with graduate students and in tutor training seminars for years to come.