Published on 01/01/93

Published on 01/01/93

As aman without hair, he did not identify the rhythm of three strands, the whispers of coming and going, of twisting and tying and blending, of catching and of letting go, of braiding.

I built that paper, like a painting. You can't do a painting at one sitting; if is just whipped offyou can tell. Some artists can do that, just like some people can do a paper the night before is due, but some people have to work harder, and I'm one of them. -Marianne.

Try, if you will, to imagine yourself around a campfire late on a dark night. You are with a group of English literature teachers, and they begin swapping horror stories about their students, some true, others probably

During the past fifteen years, I have also worked closely with writing centers, watching them evolve from places which emphasize skills and drills to places which provide sophisticated and supportive counseling about the range of writing processes.While my education is

Published on 01/01/92

Published on 01/01/92

"When our writing lab became a center mean their centers have matured, "come of age" in Muriel Harr Harris; Addison and Wilson). I can't help being a little dist belitding of lab and extolling of centers the better word, when I bland and meaningless the word "center" has become on so campuses. At Boise State University, I can count twenty "cen even looking in the directory, from the Quick Copy Center campus to the Outdoor Rental Center at the other. IVe rece

In our teaching and research in writing centers and classrooms, we need to identify and rhetorically analyze "collaboration" in its multiple forms. When we overuse this catch-all term to mean any kind of mutual help or working together, we not only demonstrate what Frederick Erickson calls our current "crush on collaboration" (43 1 ), but we also confuse people inside and outside the profession. When "collaboration" is bantered about in education, business, and politics, it is unabashedly unmodified, unclassified, demonstrating by its nakedness that it serves too many purposes and has too many referents, not to mention the historical ones such as Benedict Arnold and Vidkun Quisling who "collaborated" with the enemy. As Andrea Lunsford notes, ". . . collaboration is hardly a monolith. Instead, it comes in a dizzying variety of modes about which we know almost nothing" (7).

Writing center people prefer to use words like "teaching" instead of "pedagogy"; "tutoring," not "individualized instructional session"; "what works," rather than "effective educative strategies." This simple diction is one feature of our linguistic practice we have celebrated across the writing center community. However, behind this facade of pragmatism, of action over theory, we have been actively involved in debates concerning the epistemologies to which we as a community should pledge our allegiance and on which we should build our instruction. We have been involved because, as James Berlin reminds us in Rhetoric and Reality, "every rhetorical system is based on epistemological assumptions about the nature of reality, the nature of the knower, and the rules governing the discovery and communication of the known" (4). While the academy has argued vehemendy about ways of knowing, with factions taking stands under such banners as structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, pragmatism, neo-pragmatism, postmodernism, we too have been involved in much the same inquiry.

Published on 01/01/92

Published on 01/01/92

Published on 01/01/91

The triple focus of my title reflects some problems I've been concentrating on ás I thought about and prepared for the opportunity to speak last week at the Midwest Writing Centers Association meeting in St. Cloud, and here at the Pacific Coast/Inland Northwest Writing Centers meeting in Le Grande.Til try as I go along to illuminate -or at least to complicate -each of these foci, and I'll conclude by sketching in what I see as a particularly compelling idea of a writing center, one informed by collaboration and, I hope, attuned to diversity.

All of us involved in writing ccnters (indeed, all of us in education) must recognize that the educational community of the 1 990s will continue to grow more diverse culturally, linguistically, scholastically. Given this diversity, students, teachers, and tutors will become more, not less, interdependent. The ready, predictable answers and assumptions that existed once in a monocultural classroom or university don't exist anymore. "Success" will not be meted out by one authoritative figure, but will be measured by the mutual nature of the success, hinging on the degree to which all members of this threesome of tutor, student, and teacher can become what Paulo Freire calls the "subjects" of their own learning process. Our hopes for these redefined social relationships in the writing center carry with them hopes for a redefined sense of academic literacy as well. Multi-cultural student populations will not only change social relationships but challenge monolithic conceptions of academic literacy. We will need to seek out views of student literacy that will emphasize interdependence, such as the ones articulated in David Blcich's The Double Perspective , Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman's Writing as Social Action^ and Deborah Brandt's Literacy as Involvement. By situating literacy in social relationships and communal action, these studies have begun, as the title of a recent article by Bleich makes

Despite the advent of computerized spelling checkers, being a poor speller is still asignificant burden for a writer. Spelling errors are stigmatizing, considered a mark of illiteracy both in academia and in business. Occasions for spelling errors are far more frequent than are opportunities for other errors, and misspellings arc more noticeable. Relatively few readers respond to comma splices or dangling participles, but virtually everyone reacts to "dosen't" or "stuped" or "thair." For the poor speller, writing, particularly in impromptu situations, is a gamble; spelling errors always threaten to sabotage the communication. Since spelling instruction is usually not part of the firstyear composition curriculum -even in a basic writing course, only some students will be poor spellers -assistance with spelling problems should become a regular part of a writing center program; it may be the only resource available to students who need help.

Writing center administration, a highly complex task as is, has an added complication in that so many new directors plunge in with an almost total lack of preparation. Undertaking their new responsibilities with the best of intentions but with high levels of anxiety, they normally begin by seeking out the books, journals, and conferences that will help them, and they journey to other writing centers to take notes and ask questions. They inquire about all kinds of specifics on the size of the budget, ways to select staff, methods of evaluation, types of computers and other materials that should be purchased, and so on. All of this is apparently useful as hundreds of thriving writing centers around the country have directors who followed that route. And they have learned from those who traveled the same roads before them.

Published on 01/01/91

Published on 01/01/91

Any writing center coordinator soon finds that a good portion of her job involves efforts to build, maintain, and increase the number of writers using the center's services. Nevertheless, articles on writing centers rarely focus on promoting services and referral issues. Jim Bell's analysis of The Writing Lab Newsletter for a four year period, for instance, shows a dominant interest in tutoring methods (65 articles) with far fewer articles concerned with administrative issues (37 articles), and only 1 1 of those 37 articles focus on promoting the lab (2-3). To find a sound discussion of this issue, I turned to a 1984 survey by Gary Olson, which illustrates just how important an instructor's referral can be in developing a student's attitude toward writing center visits. Olson reminds us that the instructor who threatens students with a referral can devastate a writer who already has a poor self-image ["Johnny, if you don't show some improvement, I'm just going to have to send you to the writing center" ( Further, such demeaning oral referrals in front of a classroom of reluctant students enforces the myth that ". . . the writing center is merely for remediation" (Olson 160). Additionally, in his article "Collaborative Learning in Context: The Problem with Peer Tutoring," Harvey Kail explains why normally well intentioned colleagues might work against their own best classroom interests. Kail reminds us that writing centers threaten the traditional roles of English department members since, through their discussions with students, tutors and coordinators gain clear insights into the workings of an instructor's classroom. Instructors who are threatened by such a possibility may be those who believe the center should perform by what Kail calls the