Doctoral students must participate in academic discourse communities, yet they report being underprepared to do so. In a collection of three papers, I employ autoethnography, qualitative classification, and discourse analysis to address the overarching question: Given a discipline-specific writing center for graduate students in a College of Education, what role – if any – do peers play in helping one another to negotiate and acquire academic discourse? Data include audio-recorded consultations, interviews, post-session reports, and field notes.