Conclusion: What Can Collaborating Teach Us About Writing Centers and About Collaboration?

This chapter looks a bit more broadly at issues collaboration may raise in writing center and other writing settings. The stakes for student writing center users were quite different. Collaboration shapes knowledge both very slowly and very unexpectedly, factors writing center directors and tutors cannot ignore even when vice presidents and budgets press them to be more efficient. Thus, despite the complications and contradictions that working collaboratively entails, one can urge writing centers to continue to work with collaborative models, reflecting each day on what their interactions mean. The chapter offers a generalizable model for more congruent and reciprocal relationships between theory and practice in writing centers and in other collaborative settings. It describes writing centers’ and the larger academic community’s move toward engaging both graduate and undergraduate students in research, not as minor players or technical assistants but as co-constructors whose contributions shape their fields’ questions, designs, interpretations, and reports.