Published on 01/01/08

Like many writing centers, ours trained us to respond to writers whose papers might involve plagiarism; we learned to show students

Published on 01/01/07

The last twenty five years have witnessed a number of profound changes in the landscape of higher education, changes that have been collectively described as a shift towards the "managed university." Although other terms have also been proposed to name this shift, there is wide agreement about some of the basic characteristics of the trend.1 The power of corporate interests to shape higher education funding and policy has grown, and many colleges and universities have themselves adopted overtly business-oriented models of management. Institutions are making aggressive efforts to cut costs and maximize revenues in the face of diminished state subsidies. Among the many results of such changes has been the emergence of a new kind of "academic capitalism" (Rhoades and Slaughter) that shifts resources away from a wide range of traditional, but economically marginal, university activities, and redirects them to activities that generate revenues and enhance the competitive position of US corporations in the global economy.

About the New Racism," Victor Villanueva issued an invitation and a challenge to writing center directors, scholars, and tutors. Villanueva urged us to examine and to address the ways in which race and racism shape writing center identity and practices; enable and constrain knowledge and knowledge production, teaching and learning; and are reproduced not only through the thought and action of individuals, but also and especially through

The Problem: The Divide Between Theory and Practice Like most writing center directors, we have always included in our tutor preparation an emphasis on differences students may bring to a session. Up until a few years ago, this approach mainly took the form of a unit on working with ESL writers and another on working with students who have learning disabilities. This approach to diversity was reinforced by the textbooks we chose for our tutor training seminar. The guides for tutors that we have assigned over the years (including Meyer and Smith's The Practical Tutor , Capossela's The Harcourt Brace Guide to Peer Tutoring, , McAndrew

by

It has been over a decade since Irene Clark argued in

Published on 01/01/07

iL Community Identification at the IWCA/NCPTW by Melissa lanetta Here are the ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B , A is "substantially one" with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time, he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another.

Why should writing centers embrace rather than simply comply with external mandates for assessment? As all of us know, writing center directors are already overwhelmed with duties, and any free time needs to be spent on improving our services and training our tutors, not facing the "math anxiety" brought about by collecting and analyzing assessment data. Even more important, many of us may equate externally mandated assessment with external accountability to conservative institutions not particularly supportive of our process-based pedagogy. My purposes are to argue that writing centers should move beyond mere compliance with externally mandated assessment and to describe a very general plan for beginning to expand our assessment efforts. To fulfill our daily responsibilities, writing center directors spend most of our time being concerned about the services offered in our centers -from tutoring students ourselves, to handling complaints from faculty members or students, to training tutors. Routine assessment allows us to move beyond our daily concerns so that we can consider our services from a more global perspective and better plan improvements or justify what is currently done.

7o be fully human is to know the joint construction of reality. Largely, for most people , this is constructed through discourse , because talk is central to everyday life....[I]nterweaving bits and pieces of your own and others talk is the pmary mode of creating a sense of your own place in the world

Discusses the importance of listening as a rhetorical activity to help tutors better understand and be sensitive to student needs, specifically those of ESL students.

Published on 01/01/06

In the absence of empirical data, writing center directors have relied on lore, anecdotal evidence, and advice from those who have been there before to help them imagine resolutions for immediate crises and possible long-term goals for their centers. While these sources of information have been invaluable, many directors (and the academic administrators to whom they report) have desired quantitative data about writing center operations nationwide.

I use my August vacation for escape, getting away from the heat of the central plains, traveling to places that let me recharge my head for the upcoming semester, seeking to rediscover the Kevin that works loose during a year of dealing with warped expectations, broken perspectives, close attachments. On these journeys, I've mentally recomposed syllabi while hiking, redesigned the writing center while looking at a glacier, rediscovered a sense of rhythm and flow while cruising the inside passage. For me, August is rollover time, a chance to look back and forward, a chance to cool down (mentally and physically).

Speaking Students," an article appearing nine years after Power's endorsement of a "more direct, more didactic" approach (41), Blau and Hall offer guidelines that affirm flexible priorities and the role of direct tutoring strategies. In the sessions analyzed in their study, directness proved helpful to meeting the ESL students' need for cultural information and for avoiding the related tendency for Socratic questioning to deteriorate into "trolling for the right answer" (33). Another notable finding was that line-by-line sentence-level tutoring tended to lead beyond surfacelevel errors to discussions of meaning and thus to the resolution of the frequently noted conflict between the agendas of ESL learners, eager for error correction (35; see also Harris and Silva 530-531) and the agendas of tutors, who are typically trained to focus first on whole-essay concerns. From these findings, Blau and Hall conclude that tutors should "be comfortable with the directive approach, especially with local concerns such as grammar, punctuation, idioms, and word usage," and with "working line-by-line" (42). They emphasize that their guidelines are not rules (43) and that tutors who find themselves "editing" have gone too far with the directive approach (41). However, they also suggest the unlikelihood that teachers and tutors would fall into the role of editor: "No good writing teacher would correct students' errors for them or appropriate their texts. Perhaps the true distinction here is between editing and teaching, rather than between directive and non-directive" (24-25).

Published on 01/01/06

In this world , there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding , predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along. -Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman Every now and then in our writing center staff meetings, I pile crayons, magic mark ers, colored pencils and a stack of white paper in the middle of the table. For the first fifteen minutes, the graduate student tutors draw pictures. There is no prompt beyon "draw a picture of a conference you're left thinking about from this week." Sometime the drawing time is silent. I watch the geographers and economists and women s studies scholars bite at their lips and furrow their brows as they work in an unfamiliar perhaps -forgotten medium.

Even as writing centers have proliferated across American campuses, writing center discourse has been characterized by deep uncertainty. In a provocative, signature moment, Terranee Riley in his 1994 article "The Unpromising Future of the Writing Center" took a retrospective look at the writing center movement and made a gloomy prediction of its future. What he feared most was that the revolutionary potential of writing centers was ending, about to be replaced by a bland era of "business as usual" (21). This would happen because writing centers would progress in finding an "institutional niche" (26). Riley noted that academic disciplines go through developmental stages before achieving institutional recognition, and he recalled how the early teaching of American literature lacked an academic status equal with the study of British and ancient classics. Unfortunately, in Riley's view, once American literature gained recognition as an academic field, it lost an initial, non-elitist, "revolutionary energy"

Aer they are admitted, many students find actually joining the university to be disorienting and even daunting, especially those whose socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or educational worlds differ markedly from the academic world they encounter in college. We know that writing centers play a key role in helping students make this transition, serving as crucial conduits of adjustment for otherwise marginalized students. But exactly how we help tutors to help these students is less familiar ground. Tutors are not usually considered when composition scholars characterize the ways in which writing professionals help students belong. Nevertheless, tutors as well as teachers are party to a process seen variously as assimilation, accommodation, separatism, acculturation, translation, or repositioning (Severino; Bruffee-, Lu, ''Writing as Repositioning"), and the students tutors work with must undergo a process that can be positively characterized as "going native" (Bizzell, "Cognition" 386), quizzically understood as invention (Bartholomae), or negatively viewed as conversion 0-Harris io3; Lu, "Conflict") or initiation (T. Fox). Clearly, there is no consensus among these many "camps"; rather, what we have is provocative, useful discussion on the pedagogical processes of belonging. But many a tutor who finds herself on the frontlines with a lost student will not have the benefit of knowing this discussion. As a writing center administrator who has worked in two urban institutions with ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations, I have struggled to formulate tutor training that urges tutors to consider the complexities of belonging. I believe the tutor needs to understand the paradoxical ways in which writing and academic literacy more generally are instruments of belonging that can constrain as well as liberate.

Nicolases book, Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom , I am still marveling at the impressive array of writing-group contexts represented by the articles included in this edited volume. As a writing center director whose program has made several fledgling (mostly failed) attempts at facilitating group work, I began the book eagerly, expecting an authoritative prescription for structuring meaningful writing-group experiences. When no such prescription emerged in the reading, however, I quickly adjusted my expectations. At times frustrated and at others enchanted by the scrumptious complexity, I savored the book as a meal, one layered with flavors that enrich my appreciation of writing groups in all their manifestations.

Published on 01/01/05

Wislocki, the author of the review, made this pointed observation: "Just skimming through the CD, I was struck by the unusual mix of texts and seemingly incompatible viewpoints" (71). Later in her review she remarks that " [o]n the other hand, I find the lively hodgepodge of different points of view in The OWL Guide reassuring.... I believe that a multiplicity of voices and opinions-as well as expressions of frustration and enthusiasm-are the healthy sounds of an engaged community talking the emerging field of OWLs into existence" (74).

Writing centers are sites around which folklore circulates. Staff meetings, classrooms, newsletters, and journals are filled with tales of individual and collective actualization, celebrating one-to-one teaching as deeply social, collaborative, and empowering. Legends from the writing center also speak to the tensions inherent in the spaces, reflecting divisions of tutoring as prescriptive versus directive, banking versus dialogic, and peer-driven versus expert-owned. Following their review of writing center theory, history, and practice, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner advise, "What is most important is to understand where our practices come from and to unravel the various influences on those practices" (154). Knowing these conditions of possibility makes for more effective tutoring, and this awareness also speaks to a politics about learning and the production of writers. Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills -building and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problempose institutional and social discursive practices (147-150). For each domain, the tutorial and the social actors in and surrounding it are implicated in a certain identity politics. In the storehouse writing center, skill -building and knowledge transmission posit the writer as a vessel in need of filling, and identity becomes conferred as a sort of membership card or rite of passage. In the generative writing center, the writer emerges from social interaction, and identity becomes a negotiation of assimilation,

Writing center work is theoretically-messy business, so it should come as no surprise that shifting the tutorial scene from the center to the classroom is a similarly complicated affair. Such, at least, is my belief having now read On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring, for whether describing a semester-long writing fellows program in a flourishing WAG environment or a single visit of writing center tutors to a Communication class, each of the essays in this volume richly describes a range of issues to consider before embarking on any form of classroombased tutoring. Along with depicting a range of options, most of the essays use these locations either as a source of evidence to advance arguments concerning the development and implementation of classroom-based^utoring programs or as texts ripe for analysis to improve our understanding of tutoring and writing. Whether the reader is initially considering embarking on classroom-based tutoring or currently administering such a program, then, On Location offers a wealth of models as well as a variety of theoretical frameworks for understanding what goes on in these complex learning environments.

Published on 01/01/05

Our heritage] stretches back... to Athens, where in a bus y marketplace a tutor called Socrates set up the same kind of shop: open to all comers , no fees charged , offering, on whatever subject a visitor might propose, a continuous dialectic that is, finally, its own end. -Stephen North, "The Idea of a Writing Center" Recent explorations of writing center research encapsulate the often -conflicting professional demands we face as administrators. On the one hand, we acknowledge the need for research to improve our understanding of the past narratives, present effects and future possibilities of writing center work. On the other hand, our individual identifications and disciplinary ethos often rely on the notion of a writing center director whose priorities include, as Harvey Kail writes, "teaching, service, service, service, and then research-on our service" (28). Added to this already-overburdened schedule is the privileging of place in writing center studies; if each center is uniquely shaped by its context, as the common argument goes, what kinds of research can speak across these myriad locations, moving beyond what Jeanette Harris has termed the "this -is -what -we -do -at -my-writing-center" genre? ("Review" 663). In other words, both our individual professional lives and the scholarship of our field are marked by our attempts to reconcile our identification as a highly communal professional group with our allegiance to the primacy of individual context.

Reading The Center Will Hold makes me feel hopeful about writing

Published on 01/01/04

Two scenes emerge as I revisit this piece: first, the excitement of the early-eighties Montana State University WAC/WC/FYC collaborations, and, second, the array of WC/WAC configurations that now enrich our campuses. This piece grew out of a "How can we do all that with these paltiy resources?" moment in Bozeman, Montana, a moment that John Bean, John Ramage, and Jack Folsom seized and renamed "an opportunity for conceptual blockbusting." They made us believe, and out of some wonderfully nave questions about writers, texts, instructors, and pedagogies came a revamped FYC program, a WAG program, and a writing center that functioned as the hub for campus writing. This pivotal activity remains for me a model of thoughtful, collaborative risk taking, one that I hope continues to inform the ways we in writing centers work with our present theoretical, political, and pedagogical possibilities.

As pink-bewigged Mrs

At many writing labs and centers, students offer feedback about sessions on some type of post-session evaluation form. In many cases, this feedback is overwhelmingly positive.

Published on 01/01/03

It will come as no surprise, perhaps, to say that writing centers have long been grounded in -some would say "bounded by" -the conventions of printed text. True, writing centers, like most of the rest of the world, have been influenced by advances in computer technology, most recently through the explosive growth of Online Writing Labs (OWLs) and computer-mediated conferencing with students, but fundamentally, most of the interactions between students and tutors still center on the handwritten or printed texts that are placed on a table between them or, perhaps, shared in a wordprocessed file. These texts are structured linearly and hierarchically, moving along a single path from beginning to end, following well-known and universally taught discourse forms that have emerged from a print -based rhetorical tradition.

ESL writers present a common dilemma to writing centers-the desire for sentencelevel interventions from their tutors.Our staff often experience such interventions as contradicting the aim of writing centers, formulated by Stephen North

Published on 01/01/03

Discusses general issues related to attitudes towards writing, which may be of interest to those working with English-as-a-second-language students, especially students coming from educational settings where writing is not traditionally taught. Presents the practice of the Writing Center at Central European University, one of the few centers in Eastern Europe, in dealing with students' attitudes towards writing

Published on 01/01/02