“All Things to All People”: The Expanding Role of Writing Centers (original) (raw)
Related papers
All three of us utilize different lenses to perceive the world. We enter spaces as gendered, sexualized, racialized, and nationalized people, yet too often those identities are not foregrounded in the everyday work we do in writing centers. As a result, our everyday becomes easily hegemonic, unchallenged. For us, questioning the pedagogy and process of how we operate in sessions should be just as ubiquitous as the stories we share and the practices we employ in writing centers. Three recent books in writing center studies—Jackie Grutsch McKinney's Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, Sohui Lee and Russell Car-penter's The Routledge Reader on Writing Centers and New Media, and Ellen Schendel and William J. Macauley Jr.'s Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter—offer theoretical frameworks, technological innovation and program inquiry to re-imagine and critically explore how we think and practice in the ordinary (sometimes exceptional) spaces where one-to-one mentoring happens. We approach this review attuned to the distinct standpoints from which we look. Too often scholarship for/on writing centers flattens its audience , rarely addressing the intellectual demands necessary for participating in disciplinary conversations or the process for a diverse range of interlocutors to join these communities of practice. Harry approaches these texts as a faculty administrator and researcher of writing centers; Cara as a recent graduate student and current professional writing center consultant; and Michael as a second-year doctoral candidate in writing center and composition studies. Our orientations to these texts reflect different degrees of experience—as purveyors of stories of writing centers (the good, the bad, and others), as tutors struggling with (and through) new media to collaborate with writers, and as scholars engaged in everyday and formalized assessment of our mentoring practices.
From Other to Community: Making the Writing Center an All-University Facility
1992
Writing centers and their faculty are often considered to be "Others" because they have both power and no power--they have the ability to make a difference in students' writing abilities, but they are often excluded because they are seen as a "fixit," a clinic, a lab, an ancillary. Writing center faculty need to take more power so that they can exercise more power, and, in so doing, give more power to the university writing community. Writing centers must educate the university in writing center theory, functim, and aims--in the purpose of writing in a university--so that the center can be a place where the whole university can come together. Specific academic departments could set up workshops in teaching writing with the assistance of writing program and writing center staff. From there, writing programs can move to the grand step--encouraging and assisting in the planning and proposals for writing centers in different departments or areas. Obstacles include the resistance of other faculty members and the paradox of preparing students more definitively in the conventions of their own discourse (thus creating difference by attempting community). Writers in the disciplines will not always have to go to the English department's writing center for help if writing forces exist in their own programs. Writing centers will have plenty to do in sharing their abilities with the rest of the university so that all can benefit from that sharing. (RS)
Praxis, Volume 10, No. 2: Writing Centers at the Crossroads
2013
This latest issue of Praxis comes on the heels of the University of Texas at Austin Undergraduate Writing Center's 20th Anniversary and Symposium. This weekend-long event featured nearly thirty individual and panel presentations from writing center practitioners discussing the changing future of writing centers-technologically, theoretically, pedagogically, administratively, and globally. And although we did not issue a formal call for themed submission this issue, the focus articles and columns here all reflect that changes for writing centers are certainly on the horizon; figuring the ways to merge traditions of the past with practices for the future place writing centers in the U.S. and abroad at a crossroads.
Mapping Boundedness and Articulating Interdependence Between Writing Centers and Writing Programs
2018
This essay argues that institutional ethnography, a methodology LaFrance and Nicolas (2012) describe and advocate for in writing studies, provides a means by which writing center scholars can add to their maps of how their writing center programs coordinate with other writing programs at their institutions. From these maps, we can better articulate what writing center work is and what it is not, advocating for an institutional culture of interdependence. The essay extends the findings from a local institutional ethnography to add insights from multiple institutions. The findings suggest that writing center administrators may advocate for our work not only by arguing for parity with other writing programs, but also by communicating with others within the institution to align our internal narratives with external images. In addition, the findings imply that methodologies such as institutional ethnography are critical for examining the radical relationality central to writing center work.
The Writing Center: Fifteen Years of Transforming Writers at the University of Montana
2017
As a hub for campus conversations about writing, the University of Montana's Writing Center administers programs to help undergraduate and graduate students in all disciplines become more versatile and effective writers, readers, and thinkers. In one-to-one and small-group tutoring sessions and in writing workshops, tutors help students to recognize their strengths and weaknesses as communicators and to practice strategies appropriate to various writing contexts. In addition, the Writing Center collaborates with faculty to provide instruction that positively impacts student performance. v vi Covering Your Eyes
What Teachers of Academic Writing Can Learn from the Writing Center
Journal of Academic Writing, 2011
For over fifty years, US writing centers have been helping students, with writing centers found in approximately 90% of American universities and colleges (Eodice 2009). Because those who direct and tutor see student writers struggling with every kind of assignment, writing centers are important resources for anyone teaching writing or writing-intensive courses. Ironically, though, writing centers are an overlooked resource on literacy. As Eric Hobson and Muriel Harris argue, writing centers should share with those who teach writing to larger groups what writing center professionals have learned about the writing process. Based on four years of systematic research interviewing experienced writing center tutors, this article presents teachers of academic writing with valuable insights into how students misunderstand the writing process and how teachers of academic writing can improve their teaching of writing.
Praxis, Volume 10, No. 1: Diversity in the Writing Center
2012
We are proud to announce Praxis' second volume as a peer-reviewed journal. Our call for articles addressing diversity in the writing center fielded a record number of submissions. We thank all of the authors who submitted careful, insightful, creative and challenging work. We also want to thank our external review board and our editorial team as well as the administrative staff at the Undergraduate Writing Center. Andrea Saathoff, who led Praxis into peerreview status last year and continues to work behind the scenes, deserves a special "Thank you." This journal, like the writing-center scholarship and pedagogy it supports, exists because of the committed, collaborative work of a broad community of writers and educators. To our authors, reviewers, editors, readers and supporters-Thank you. This issue of Praxis, "Diversity in the Writing Center," reflects the broad range of individual and institutional experiences that shape writing-center practice across the country. The articles are rooted in the institutional realities of large and small universities, in racial, cultural and linguistic multiplicity, in the needs and opportunities of established and emergent centers, in the perspectives of student writers, tutors and administrators. While the authors included in this issue address topics as varied as racial justice, fat studies, multilingual centers and assessment strategies, several common interests run as threads through their arguments. The centrality of embodied experience to the work of writers and writing centers appears in two remarkably different lenses in "A Multi-Dimensional Pedagogy for Racial Justice in Writing Centers" and in "Making Room for Fat Studies in Writing Center Theory & Practice," but Rasha Diab, Thomas Ferrel, Beth Godbee and Neil Simpkins agree with Eric Steven Smith in arguing that writing centers bear the burden of and opportunity for direct action on the behalf of writers with marginalized bodies. Nancy Effinger Wilson's "Stocking the Bodega: Towards a New Writing Center Paradigm" and Noreen Lape's "The Worth of a Writing Center: Numbers, Value, Culture and the Rhetoric of Budget Proposals" each address the possibilities entailed in taking writing center practice beyond English-centered language instruction. Lape uses her experience with the founding of Dickinson College's Multilingual Writing Center to illustrate a taxonomy of rhetorical approaches to institutional opportunities, a topic that Kristen Welch and Susan Revels-Parker also take up in "Writing Center Assessment: An Argument for Change." Tallin Phillips' "Graduate Writing Groups: Shaping Writing and Writers from Student to Scholar" uses a "communities of practice" framework to indicate how graduate-student writers negotiate growth in their professional and scholarly identities. Sam Van Horne also addresses the role of writing centers in facilitating various writers' movement towards maturity in "Characterizing Successful 'Intervention' in the Writing Center Conference." Our two columns, Brooke Fiesthumel's "Black Fingernails and the White Page: The High School Writing Center" and J. Michael Rifenburg's "Fleshing Out the Uniqueness of Student-Athlete Writing Centers: A Response to Alana Bitzel," also draw our attention to the needs of writing populations that differ from the image of the "standard" undergraduate. We hope you find this issue of Praxis challenging, enlightening and enjoyable. As Rifenburg's column indicates, we are always interested in continuing the conversations that take place in and around our pages, and we are happy to consider responses to any of the excellent articles published in this issue. You can also follow the conversations taking place on our blog, WritePraxis.wordpress.com, and through our Twitter account, @WritePraxis. We owe one final round of thanks to Jacob Pietsch, our blog coordinator, and to the writers who have made our weekly postings on that site possible.