An English instructor and a science instructor collaborate to inject real-world experience into an introductory content classroom.

People who work in writing centers often fall prey to professional insecurity. We feel misunderstood and unappreciated in our own departments (if we even have department) and in the larger academy. Our marginal status makes us feel exploited by those with more institutional power and vulnerable in times of retrenchment. Our insecurity has led, as Thomas Hemmeter observes, to ongoing attempts at self-definition. Since no one else recognizes or understands us, we feel the need to continually announce and invent ourselves. And we do so, says Hemmeter, through "a discourse articulated in dualities," the fundamental one being a "contrast of writing center instruction to classroom instruction" (37). To give ourselves a distinctive identity, we oppose ourselves to something with which everyone is familiar: the classroom.