Published on 01/01/11

Published on 01/01/11

Published on 01/01/11

All of us involved in writing centers (indeed, all of us in education) must recognize that the educational community of the 1990s 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.Multicultural 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 Bleich's The Double Perspective , Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman's

In her essay "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center," Andrea Lunsford offers a much-needed critique of the traditional "garret" and "storehouse" models for writing center instruction, and she argues for a collaborative model in which students work together in groups to discuss, question, write, and revise.In contrast to the storehouse and garret models that reinscribe rigidly authoritarian or naively libertarian beliefs about language use, this collaborative model dramatizes the "triangulation" or "dialogism" that theorists such as Donald Davidson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ann Berthoff place at the heart of composing: as students seek to join in a conversation that precedes and takes place around them, as they seek to understand, complicate, and communicate their perceptions with and through others.In the collaborative writing center, Lunsford writes, students learn how knowledge and reality are "mediated by or constructed through language in social use . . . the product of collaboration" (4).Through collaboration, Kenneth Bruffee writes, students come to internalize those social conversations; they develop "reflective thought" and learn to play "silently, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation" as they write and reflect (5).While these aims of collaborative learning are ones I enthusiastically support, I find myself resisting jumping on the "collaboration bandwagon" (Lunsford 4) if by collaboration we mean only and always peer-group writing and response or conversation with another person.Peer groups can produce discussion, negotiation,

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 expertowned.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 problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-50).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, separation, and subversion.In the critical/activist writing center, consciousness-raising produces writers aware of the constellation

Published on 01/01/10

Published on 01/01/10

Published on 01/01/10

Published on 01/01/10

Published on 01/01/10

Her current research interests are in the areas of the effectiveness of writing center rhetoric and the implications of individualized instruction as a defining writing center principle.

In Plato's famous critique of writing in the Phaedrus , Socrates declared writing a deficient form of communication next to speech, for any piece of writing, should it fall into the hands of an unintended reader, is susceptible to misinterpretation. He likened texts to orphans, who, upon separation from their authorial progenitors, wander about as message -bearing waifs. Obligated to stay on script, they can but parrot their parents' words, having no recourse to gloss, emendation, or retort.1 One of the virtues of writing centers is that they compensate for the alienation of writing. If the canonical literate encounter is one where writer and reader, separated in time and space, meet only through the medium of the text, then the writing center consultation restores immediacy to written communication. In its traditional form, the tutorial brings

The Activist WPA , by

Published on 01/01/10

Published on 01/01/10

Published on 01/01/10

Published on 01/01/10

Joanna Wolfe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville where she teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, human-computer interaction, and research methods. She is author of the forthcoming textbook Team Writing from Bedford-St. Martin's, a guide to writing collaboratively and working on a team. Her previous scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Written Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

Published on 01/01/09

Published on 01/01/09

Published on 01/01/09

Published on 01/01/09

We cannot remake the world through schooling , but we can instantiate a vision through pedagogy that creates in microcosm a transformed set of relationships and possibilities for social futures , a vision that is lived in schools.

in technology and other influences may necessitate re-evaluation of writing center theories and pedagogies.She lives in Muncie, Indiana with her husband, two little boys, and feisty cat.At the turn of the century, John Trimbur predicted that writing centers would become "Multiliteracy Centers," drawing on the terminology of the New London Group (30).These re -envisioned centers, he suggested, would provide help for students working on a variety of projects: essays, reports, PowerPoint presentations, web pages, and posters.His prediction has proved true to some degreemost notably in the state of Michigan.The University of Michigan's Sweetland Writing Center opened a Multiliteracy Center in 2000

important to you." Tiffany nods agreement."I couldn 't have a friend that wasn V loyal to me-and Id

Ronesineeds, as training literature has yet to address contexts outside North America.Indeed, the few articles that describe writing tutoring outside North America dismiss peer tutoring as inappropriate

research interests include disability rhetoric and the role of exigency in the teaching of writing. Her dissertation explores how information about students' beliefs

Published on 01/01/09

Published on 01/01/09