The Writing Center Beyond an Academic Space? Finding Writing Center Community Partnerships as an ELL Student.

To most students, a university’s writing center might just be a place of academic seriousness (Leahy). This is especially true for English Language Learners (ELLs), as Zhang-Wu et al. point out in their 2025 on the writing center as a “contact zone,” where ELL writers’ simply want to “have the writing center as a particular tool to help them succeed in the transactional writing relationship they have with faculty and with the institution” (74). Is there a way for the writing center to truly build rapport with ELL students? Can the writing center be a community more than a place to refine academic writing? As an international student and a writing center tutor, I argue that there is. 

I came to this conclusion through founding Diverge, a student magazine for those who feel like their voices cannot be afforded by the traditional SAE publications on campus. In the magazine’s beginning stages, the Emory Writing Center offered ways of collaboration beyond traditional one-on-one tutoring sessions and built a sense of community for the magazine’s members even in the current political environment where immigrants and international students are antagonized. 

“It was nice having the space at the writing center to write and express safely with friends.” 

                                           – Josefina, a Diverge member and an Emory Writing Center tutor

I was relieved hearing that everyone had a good time after our first workshop with the writing center, since it did not feel like a traditionally “useful” workshop at all. It was November 2025, a year after Diverge was established, but only two months after the magazine acquired university funding – after long battles with the institution – to organize events, put up posters, and provide writing and craft tools for its members. Members joined the magazine because they were drawn to the mission of uplifting marginalized voices, but were hesitant to publish due to a lack of experience and their ELL backgrounds, and Diverge alone did not have the resources to train its writers. This is why I reached out to where I worked at, the Emory Writing Center, and asked if several tutors could help Diverge organize a workshop with a loose theme of building the confidence of marginalized writers. Connecting my two communities together, I was nevertheless nervous. I was worried that the writing center, a place students usually go to get better grades on their essays, an institution that seems to have the authority of what counts as good writing, would intimidate members who already lacked confidence in writing. 

But my anxiety soon softened as a member approached me and asked, “can we just sit and talk? ” Time flew when we were engaged in conversations about studying humanities as an international student, defying our Chinese parents’ expectations, and classes on multicultural topics that we cared about. Soon, the workshop came to an end. Worried that the member did not really get to “workshop” any writing, I apologized. However, she did not seem to mind at all our “waste” of time, expressing her satisfaction from getting to talk to another international, ELL humanities student about writing and life in general.

Indeed, rather than a workshop, the event felt more like a community-based conversation among the Diverge members. Another international student spent the time working on the grammatical structure of an essay she planned to submit in the traditional one-on-one tutoring style. She said that she wanted to try out the writing center, as before she did not feel confident enough coming in without the space being designated for marginalized writers. Three other students worked on a collage expressing queer fashion with one tutor. Despite the heterogeneous ways people worked on their creativity, they all seemed to share the same theme: finding our unique ways of expression and feeling comfortable with creating in a community. Participants were able to negotiate with their tutor collaboratively about the kind of writing help they wanted to receive – one that did not conform to any writing center praxis, and they were also able to make friends through writing. 

“The combination of the writing center pedagogy and Diverge mission ensures that tutors do not just ‘revise’ students’ writings – they keep students’ original voices.”

                                 – Clara, a Diverge member and an incoming Emory Writing Center tutor

Members kept bringing up good memories from the workshop in subsequent Diverge meetings, and collaborating with the Emory Writing Center became an unspoken tradition. When our magazine had trouble negotiating with the university to acquire more funding, the writing center provided us with its arts and craft materials. To recruit more members for our emerging magazine, the writing center staff also made sure to introduce Diverge whenever it hosted workshops for classes focusing on ELLs or multicultural perspectives. Gradually, the writing center became our magazine’s “rear garden,” nurturing our small community with a mission to challenge SAE narratives and American-centric voices. After the initial collaboration between Diverge and the Emory Writing Center, three members of the magazine decided to apply for a tutoring position at the writing center and more members – mostly international students – shared that they were grateful to have learned the resources at the writing center that they would not have otherwise known.

Scholars have contemplated on expanding the service of the writing center. Nancy Grimm has mentioned the writing center as a “third space” that “allows for practices of mindfulness, awareness, and reflection in organic ways” (Grimm qtd. in Sicari and Tunningley). Elizabeth Rodacker wrote about holding writing center workshops for international residents in a community garden, where tutors not only discussed questions about gardening and writing with students, but also helped navigate immigration processes (Rodacker). Strengthening the writing center’s community partnerships is especially important in the current political climate where immigrants and other marginalized communities are under attack. Ultimately, if ELLs can build confidence in their expressions and write with the common goal of challenging SAE standards, expanding the writing center’s role as simply a place for academic writing improvement, then that itself is a powerful form of resistance. 

Works Cited

Leahy, Richard. “Of Writing Centers, Centeredness, and Centrism.” The Writing Center Journal, Fall 1992, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 43-52.

Rodacker, Elizabeth. “A Writing Center without Walls: Community Gardens as a Site for Teaching English Language Learning.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Vol. 4, Issue 1, 2006.

Sicari, Anna and Tunningley, Laura. “Contemplation in the Writing Center: Pedagogies of Kindness, Respect, and Community for Mindful Activist Work.” Composition Forum, Vol. 54, Summer 2024, https://compositionforum.com/issue/54/contemplation-writing-center.php, accessed 27 Jun. 2026.

Zhang-Wu, Qianqian, Lundin, Isabelle M., and Lerner, Neal. “From ‘Contact Zone’ to ‘Collaborative Zone’: Multilingual Writers’ Tensions and Opportunities in the Writing Center.” The Writing Center Journal, 2025, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 73-94.