Selling you on flexibility : toward a flexible framework for reflexive administration of writing centers

Training tutors has historically been and continues to be one of the most important, as well as the most labor- and time-intensive needs that directors of writing centers are called to address. As technological advancements have been made, those needs have continued to grow into online areas as well. The Writing Center at the University of Missouri, one of the longest running and earliest adopters of online asynchronous tutoring, has been meeting those new and particularly online needs since the early nineties. That history, alongside well-established tutor training methods allowed for a slightly smoother response to the pivot to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Using Institutional Ethnography as the primary methodology, this dissertation provides a historical view of the MU Writing Center's early adoption of online asynchronous tutoring via their Online Writery application, as well as a collection and evaluation of the pedagogical responses to 2020's COVID-19 pandemic in relation to the tutor training course offered each semester. As an outcome of those historical analyses of online needs, this dissertation presents a flexible framework for reflexive administration that can both respond to future local needs and provide transferable guidance for other program administrators.