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Published on 01/01/00

Published on 01/01/00

Published on 01/01/00

The cultural informant role as sketched by Judith Powers, in her article “Rethinking Writing Center Conferencing Strategies for the ESL Writer,” was warmly received in our writing center when I introduced it shortly after her article appeared in 1993. With ESL students comprising a steady 30% to 40% of our clients, we had had plenty of experience with feeling not only the inadequacy of nondirective tutoring for meeting the needs of non-native writers but also the uneasiness of sessions that strayed from that approach, by then synonymous with effective one-toone work (Brooks 1; Ashton-Jones 31-33; Shamoon and Burns 135-36). The cultural informant role endorsed by Powers gives writing center tutors flexibility for meeting specific needs of ESL students not met by the nondirective writing center ideal. With their many cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic differences, ESL students often lack the knowledge to engage in the question-and-answer approach to problem-solving used in most writing centers (Powers 40-41). And the read-aloud method for discovering sentence-level errors, frequently productive for native speakers, provides little help to ESL students who lack the ear to hear their own errors (Powers 41-42). The value of the cultural informant role, then, is that it validates sharing information about English that these students have no way of knowing on their own. Yet after several semesters of basking in this more flexible approach, many of us on the staff, including graduate assistants in both English and Linguistics as well as practicum students, began to feel that too often this role, at least when sentence-level errors were concerned, tended to translate into the tutor editing and the student observing. Katherine Purcell, in her recent article “Making Sense of Meaning: ESL 6 The Writing Center Journal

We are mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of. To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrative realities is, I believe, the intellectual and cultural challenge of moment.

Published on 01/01/99

Published on 01/01/99

Published on 01/01/99

Published on 01/01/99

In an Internet posting a few years ago, a former writing teacher, having abandoned the academic life in order to raise Arabian horses, observed that the process of teaching college writing was similar in many ways to the enterprise of "dressage," a term that refers to the guiding of a horse through a series of complex maneuvers by slight movements of the hands, legs, and weight. In particular, he noted the following:

I have tried to achieve a comfort zone with this project. Ithappened in 1997, on one of those days before a staff meeting when wewere tired and cynical, feeling used by the society of writing that exists inthe college. We began to kid around about the students who wanted us topunish them, the students who wanted a quick fix, those who wanted topunish us. That is when the idea of Madam Barnett’s Writing Emporiumwas born. It started as a joke, the idea that we in the University ofMichigan-Flint Writing Center were like hookers. Perhaps it should haveended there, but with my affection for odd comparisons, and VinceLocke’s (Vince is another tutor) idea for a paper on writing center myths,the idea just wouldn’t go away.During the summer, I checked out books, social and psychologi-cal studies of prostitution, to see if the similarities were mere jokes, or ifthere was something important in the idea that tutoring and prostitutionwere partially alike. I thought the exploration would be amusing. I did notknow that I would discover things that disturbed me about myself and howtutoring has affected me.

Published on 01/01/99

Published on 01/01/99

Published on 01/01/99

Published on 01/01/99

In “a letter to a friend,” the opening lines of A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway writes, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast” (title page). I like to think of a writing center as a moveable feast on a transient table—sweets and savories, an interesting mix of guests, perhaps unmatched place settings. An invisible table gathering ghosts of conversations, echoes of drafts, and old assignments. Writing centers lurk in a state of in-betweenness like Hemingway’s haunts in Paris. Writing centers house teachers who are students, writers who are readers, people who speak their written texts. Writing centers exist in an often uncertain present—but they work with a past brought in by writers thinking about a future. For years, writing center staffs have tried to define our place to ourselves, our administrators, and to our profession. We’ve attempted to create a definition that reflects our realities—our struggles as well as our successes—what we’ve been and what we may yet become. But definition eludes us. Writing center director/scholars, since we first had a forum in which to write, have considered this situation. Muriel Harris, looking over our recent history, writes of our “frill” status. Even the most successful writing centers, she notes, “may still have to contend with a diminishing minority who view them as unnecessary frills, sucking up

Over the past ten years or so, much has been written about whether writing center tutors should be generalists or specialists: when tutors help clients from other disciplines, is it an asset for the tutors to be familiar with discipline-specific discourse conventions? Scholarship attempting to answer this question has been bi-polar: either tutors should be generalists, or they should be specialists. On the specialist side, some scholars argue that tutors’ knowledge of discipline-specific discourse conventions is important to the success of tutoring sessions, since the tutoring should revolve around the rhetoric of the discipline (Kiedaisch and Dinitz; Tinberg and Cupples: Shamoon and Burns). Judith Powers and Jane Nelson, for example, argue that

The range of outreach projects recounted in recent journal articles, discussions on WCENTER’s electronic forum, and conference presentations indicate that collectively we as writing center professionals have indeed been working to extend the conversation about one-to-one work across our campuses. Writing across the curriculum partnerships with classroom teachers (Gill; Mullin, “Tutoring for Law Students”; Soliday), satellite writing centers in dorms or specific academic departments (“Advice on Satellite Centers”), on-line writing centers (Denny and Livesey), and administrative portfolios reflecting the complex combination of teaching, research, and administration entailed in the work of writing center directors (Olson; Perdue) are all examples of the expanding presence of writing centers at our institutions. Yet if we are to extend the benefits of one-to-one work to teachers, the individuals who most influence the type of writing our students do, we need to find ways of communicating with them directly and regularly. The conference summary—the record of a tutor’s interaction with a student, written up and sent to the instructor upon the student’s written request—offers one of the few ways we have to extend the discussion of one-to-one work beyond the center on a weekly basis. However, this form is not universally endorsed. Some writing center professionals—including those described as “sharers” by Michael Pemberton in a 1995 Writing Lab Newsletter “Ethics” column—perceive these reports as promoting “a unified educational experience for students” and “productive relationships with faculty” (13). Others—including those described by Pemberton as “seclusionists”—see summaries as just another instance of limiting tutors to the role of “service workers” for instructors (Pemberton 13).

Published on 01/01/98

Published on 01/01/98

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Published on 01/01/98

Assessing how our institutions, and, therefore, our writing centers are changing requires understanding how the larger culture has changed and continues to change. One literature that is obsessed with change is books on business and management. Metaphors of chaos and whitewater became fashionable in popular books in the early 1990s, written before "whitewater" took on new meaning in the Clinton administration. While I infrequently read popular books in the business section, the whitewater metaphors resonate for me because I have spent so much of my adult life in a kayak on moving water. Rapids are the reason I boat. The enjoyment of kayaking, unlike rafting, is not simply going through the rapids but what you can do in them. The greatest pleasure comes when you can balance on moving fluid and use it to do what you want to dosurf a wave, turn 360 spins, or pop up in the air, sometimes getting the entire boat out of the water vertically. But it took me a long time to get over some basic fears of rapids and to understand that until rivers become unrunnable with waterfalls and unavoidable hydraulics, going down most rapids is not much more difficult than driving on a mountain road if you can stay focused, read the water, react, and be decisive. The times I've gotten into trouble are when I stopped paying attention and floated into places where I didn't want to be. Every era has been a time of change, but river metaphors suggest that some times of change are more accelerated and more turbulent.

Writing centers, in the most general terms, provide tutoring to help students develop and organize writing assignments. Certainly, a writing center also encompasses other roles and responsibilities. Students mostly see it as a "safe place," a positive, supportive, and collaborative environment where tutors encourage and work with students on a one-onone basis (see also Murphy; Harris; Fitzgerald). Most writing centers also make sure that tutors don't judge student work and don't put a grade on the paper. While policies differ from center to center, students, in most cases, are also promised that their visits are confidential, and that generally instructors do not have access to the information collected in the writing center.

A trend beginning in academic literature that takes its cue from popular literature is the turn toward an examination of "spirit." The authors who are doing this are selling books "literally by the millions" (45) and are feeding what Paul Heilker calls a "collective hunger" (107). This need is not only felt outside of the academy but within it, although the idea of including "spirit" in the academy is highly controversial. I will not offer a broad argument for including spirituality in academic endeavors -this has been done elsewhere (see Foehr and Schiller or O'Reilley). Instead I will provide a synthesis of what some of the popular and scholarly literature says about spirit, and then narrate a writing center story in which the writer's text served as a vehicle for a transformation of the people involved. 1*11 follow this with an analysis of the experience grounded in the literature on writing and spirit.

Published on 01/01/98

Published on 01/01/98

Published on 01/01/98

Published on 01/01/98