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.

The editors of this long-awaited volume have aimed "to open, to formalize, and to further" the writing center research dialogue in order "to encourage and guide other researchers," as well as to present the "new knowledge that has resulted from the studies it reports" (back cover). They have succeeded.

Preview this article: Review Essay: Composition and Campus Diversity: Testing Academic and Social Values, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/50/2/collegecompositionandcommunication1330-1.gif

Although generally optimistic about the effect of writing center instruction, writing center staff commonly remain frustrated with the "fix-it shop" role that writing centers so frequently must assume, a role that presses staff to spend disproportionate time with the cosmetics of writing and to neglect the thinking/ writing skills that build confident, competent writers. Drop-in, last-minute service will always be necessary and important. However, both writing-across-the-curriculum research and the projects to be reported here suggest that writing center instructors can better solve fundamental writing problems if they spend some of their time outside of the writing center,