In past issues of Center Moves, we’ve invited submissions on a pair of topics, for example, navigating AI with writers and collaboratively setting agendas, the two topics of issue 3. This focused approach gave readers not only rich new plans to use and adapt but also choice within those topics, a chance to see how writing center directors and staff in quite different centers developed plans for their staffs and in their specific contexts. 

In Issue 4, we’re doing something different. A wildcard issue––inviting any topic and resulting in unexpected thematic juxtapositions––allows us to invite submissions outside of those topics we’ve imagined so far. In this issue, we want readers (and ourselves) to learn about the diverse ways that other writing and learning center administrators approach tutor education, particularly in ways that might cross, or exceed, categorization. We feel that this open approach, which we hope to offer at least once every few issues, offers the potential for submissions that expand our teaching and training horizons.

This first wild-card issue includes a set of exciting plans featuring the work of writing center directors and staff members at five diverse institutions: 

Bonnie Devet, Mary Carr, Morgan Kelly, and Bianca Cedillo Perez prepare consultants to build analogies for writing center consulting, drawing on traditional rhetorical concepts to learn––from themselves and each other––what the work of consulting means. 

Elizabeth Gagne’ creates timely scaffolding for tutors to understand how and why tutoring is different from AI, and how tutors can engage their own intelligence alongside artificial intelligence to support writers. 

Carolyne M. King and Megan Boeshart Burelle develop a set of three scaffolded lessons that support tutors’ and writers’ rhetorical reading, helping them develop more nuanced ways of understanding source use across the disciplines. 

Michelle Marvin generates a workshop for tutors to develop more professional and personal tutor notes, helping them navigate and understand the genre and how they can communicate writing center values. 

CharLee Toth and Michael Ennis produce a cross-training usable in writing centers and tutoring centers, helping tutors understand, apply, and adapt concepts from cognitive psychology to support and deepen their practice. 

We hope the five plans collected here offer you new possibilities for teaching and training, and we invite you to submit a plan of your own to us for a future issue. 

––Melody Denny, Erik Echols, Juli Parrish, Olivia Tracy, and Erin Zimmerman

Marvin, Center Moves, no. 4, 2025.