Published on 01/01/92

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

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

In an article entitled "Talking to the Boss," which appeared in the Fall/Winter 1988 Writing Center Journal , Diana George makes a valiant attempt to "mend the damaged path between the English department and the writing center." George rightly sees this damaged path as the result of poor communication between writing centers and English departments -of misunderstandings held by English departments as to what goes on in writing centers, how it goes on, and why. Her method of mending the damaged path is to talk: to tell our colleagues in English departments (and perhaps in colleges and universities at large) what we do. She talks well, isolating two basic inequities that she feels are the cause of the damaged path: inequities of purpose and inequities of staff. To mend the broken path, George implies, is to mend those inequities: first, it is essential that the "writing center's philosophy of composition . . . should reflect [the department's] philosophy of composition" -in other words, the philosophies of teaching writing held by the department should mirror or equal those of the writing center; second, it is essential that the staff of the writing center be perceived by the department and by the college or university at large as equal partners in the teaching of composition.

came into the Writing Center "clueless." The comment on his paper read: "A fine idea in response to the assignment. Can you be more specific? Add details!" As we talked, it was clear that John wanted to revise his paper but was unsure of how to proceed. He did not understand how his teacher could like his idea but still expect more of the writing itself; "style"' and "texture" were foreign concepts. Details, to him, were the facts one needed to support or prove one's opinion

When those of us who run high school writing centers got started, we learned quickly to make it up as we went along. We used scotch tape and handmaids until something better appeared. Few rules existed. The references available to people establishing writing centers contained some good concepts, but none presented the whole picture. In The High School Writing Center Pamela Farrell gives us a guide book that shows ways to put together places where "a community of writers" might gather (ix).

observes that "although writing centers have always been diverse in their pedagogies, philosophies and physical makeups, the writing center's period of chaotic adolescence is nearly over. Center directors are slowly articulating common goals, objectives, and methodologies; and writing centers are beginning to take on a common form to evolve into a recognizable species" (vii). Olson views writing centers' emergence from "chaotic adolescence" in a positive light, since he interprets it as an important step toward adulthood, that is, as a sign that writing centers are finally becoming part of the academic mainstream. Now, although I share Olson's interest in the enhanced status of writing centers, I am nevertheless a bit wary of the possibility that writing centers will soon take on a "common form" in the profession, a common form verging on dogma, and it is in response to this idea of a "common form" that I advocate the maintenance of chaos. When I think of the terms "common form" and "recognizable species" in the context of writing centers, I recall the preface to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg , Ohio , which tells of a time when the world was young and all about were truths and they were all beautiful -And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them

Collaboration between student writers appears in various guises: small groups discuss each writer's paper in turn; a pair of classmates exchange papers to read and critique; a whole class evaluates a few students* papers based on an established set of criteria; a student shares her paper with a peer tutor at a writing center. All of these situations attempt to capture and build on the energy and shared learning that occur when students work together. And yet, while both the writing center and the classroom aim for collaborative learning, each context places the students in a different relationship. In the classroom, the students work together as peers under the teacher's guidance; in the writing center, students must work to overcome the disparity of authority inherent in their given roles of tutor and tutee. The difficulty for writing tutors lies in balancing their more powerful position as tutor with the goals of peer collaboration. Thus, collaboration in writing takes different forms and requires different skills in the contexts of classroom and writing center. This paper will use a study of a high school writing center program to illustrate and explain these differences. We hope that this discussion will provide insight into how writing tutors perceive and cope with their roles in a writing center and how the collaboration that occurs in a writing center affects students as writers and as people. Kenneth Bruffee's definition of collaborative learning provides a framework for understanding the difference between classroom and writing center collaboration. In his article, "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind,1 " Kenneth Bruffee explains that " Collaborative learning provides a social context in which normal discourse occurs: a community of knowledgeable peers" (644). Adapting Thomas Kuhn' s theories about the scientific community, Bruffee emphasizes that a group of people together determine the accepted knowledge, the "normal discourse"

The empowering of writers touches close to interests common to writing centers -no one associated with one-to-one conversation can ignore the benefits of collaboration, the reality and effects of interpretive communities, and the intellectual respect and consideration owed to students by teachers. Yet empowering writers should mean more than simply acknowledging social backgrounds and encouraging self-disclosing discussion and listening (though both activities are of course vital). It should also create opportunities and methods for students to speak powerfully in discourse appropriate to the academy.

When I speak about the move from expressive to academic discourse, I realize I am perpetuating a notion which may interfere with the proper understanding of either of these modes.That is, my statement implies that there's a one-directional movement, that academic discourse is somehow higher up on a hierarchical scale.I do not, in fact, believe that to be the case."Academic Discourse" as it occurs in practice in many undergraduate courses, may be among the least useful, least authentic forms of language use.Required term papers or critical papers often function as tests rather than as explorations.They are performances of certain required skills: use of sources, correct documentation, proper formulation of someone else's ideas.Writers are often actively discouraged from expressing their own points of view, from participating in their own reading, or indeed, from "appearing" in the paper at all.Yet if the expressive mode is truly the matrix from which other forms of discourse evolve as James Britton has claimed, then writers, in order to work successfully in academic modes, must move back and forth on the continuum from one form to the other, keeping the self always at the center.The "will to learn" which Jerome Bruner asserts is an intrinsic motive in all of us, may be stifled when rigid and formal demands prevent students from engaging in more tentative, exploratory prose."What the school imposes," say Bruner, "often fails to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning -curiosity, a desire for competence, aspiration to emulate a model, and a deep-sensed commitment to the web of social reciprocity" (127).In the Writing Lab at the University of Iowa we try very hard to engage -or perhaps to rekindle that will to learn in our students.

Chaos reigns.Or does it?When uninitiated visitors walk into our Apple Lab (which is a part of our Writing Lab) at Hazelwood West High, their first impression often is "How do you work when there is so much noise going on?"But when the fifteen printers stop, visitors are even more amazed by the quiet diligence and concentration of the students who are working at the computers.Our Apple He Lab often accommodates twenty to twenty-five students and teachers, all or most of whom will be working on very different kinds of writing activities.For example, a typical class hour might include a home economics teacher composing a newsletter to parents on the Newsroom program, five to ten students typing various parts of research papers on Applewriter, a student or two making a cover sheet for a paper on Print Shop , three to five journalism students composing stories for the school newspaper, a student using the Sensible Speller to check a paper for misspelled words or to count the number of words in a contest paper, a student writing a paper for a political science class, a teacher assistant making a crossword puzzle on Crossword Magic for a vocabulary lesson, and the Writing Lab assistant updating Lab records on PFS : File .And while all these people are working, if no one is having problems, I may sit down at a computer myself to work on a grant proposal or to write an article. Getting StartedWe did not set out to have a computer lab.