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Item Tutors’, Spanish-Speaking Students’, and Writing Center Directors’ Dispositions Toward Literacy and the Effect of their Dispositions on Tutoring Sessions(2023) Ellis, Marina; Wilder, Sara; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)University composition classrooms and writing centers have continued to see an influx ofmultilingual students, particularly self-identified Hispanic students entering the academy and bringing with them a plethora of knowledge and experiences of their lived realities within and outside of academia. Yet these experiences are often overlooked for the sake of identifying one particular system for aiding them in their writing needs. This study uses semi-structured narrative inquiry-based preliminary interviews, observations of tutoring sessions, and follow-up interviews to examine the ways in which writing center tutors, heritage Spanish-speaking writing center tutees’, and writing center directors’ attitudes toward language and literacy are formed from their academic, sociocultural, linguistic, and cognitive experiences to understand the effects their lived realities have on tutoring sessions. In this way, this interdisciplinary study responds to calls from researchers in education, rhetoric and composition, and writing center studies for more research and expands upon current scholarship that highlights multilingual students’ lived realities as assets to the writing classroom and writing center rather than as deficits. Results from this study highlight the ways in which tutors and Spanish-speaking tutees’ dispositions toward literacy do have a positive impact on tutoring sessions, whether it is specific teaching styles the tutors have developed over time that are influenced by their own learning experiences, taking small moments within sessions to find commonalities with one another that therefore facilitate a collaborative rapport, utilizing techniques that encourage tutee agency, finding ways to empathize with tutees so that they feel comfortable enough to return to the center, and much more. These findings then have implications for improved tutor training initiatives that emphasize individualized instruction for multilingual students who attend writing center sessions, and assignments that require tutors to examine and reflect on their own literacy learning practices.Item Points of Learning Instead of States of Being: Reimagining the Role of Emotions in Teacher Development through Compassionate and Developmental Supports(2020) Stump , Megan; Madigan Peercy, Megan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The existing research on second-language (L2) teacher emotion presents emotional experiences as largely descriptive: we know what emotions L2 teachers feel, and how emotions impact L2 teachers and their pedagogy. However, current framing of emotion in L2 teaching does little to examine how L2 teachers navigate emotional experiences and how emotions factor into their learning and development process. I fill this gap in the literature by studying how L2 teacher preparation programs can support pre-service L2 teachers’ (L2 PSTs) expressed emotions and how this emotional support may impact L2 PSTs’ conceptions of their teaching and themselves as teachers. I approach this study from a sociocultural perspective which posits that the cognitive and emotional minds function as a dialectical unity and therefore, positions cognition and emotion as central to teacher development. Central to the findings for this study is a better understanding of how teacher educators support L2 PST emotion and what this support does for L2 PSTs. Specifically, I highlight two types of emotional support that teacher educators may provide to L2 PSTs: Compassionate Emotional Support (CES) and Developmental Emotional Support (DES). CES focuses specifically on emotions by encouraging L2 PSTs in successful and challenging times, normalizing their emotions, and providing multiple opportunities for them to share their emotions. Conversely, DES focuses on cognitive aspects of emotions by exploring alternative ways of thinking, doing, perceiving, and understanding L2 PSTs’ teaching. When L2 PSTs have a greater cognitive pool of options from which to orient themselves toward their teaching, they appear to be able to change their thinking, feelings, and activity related to their teaching. Essentially, L2 PSTs transform as a result of DES. My findings clearly indicate that emotions signify areas of significance to L2 PSTs and thus, are rich areas for exploration for learning. Teacher educators should focus on supporting cognitive understandings connected to expressed emotions to help foster L2 PST growth and development. When teacher educators approach emotions as being rooted in cognition, they are able to reimagine emotions as points of learning instead of states of being.