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While resilience often defines writing center survival strategies, resistance offers a familiar stance in relation to dominant classroom and institutional practices. However, both resilience and resistance are indexed to a perceived “normal,” and violations of normativity have consequences not always imagined in individual tutoring sessions or theoretical discussions.

Originally published in a 1984 issue of College English, Stephen North’s article “The Idea of a Writing Center” has over the years been much cited in writing center scholarship. Even so, this scholarship as a whole did not proceed to gain much presence in CE and other broadly-oriented composition journals. Reconsidering North’s piece, the authors argue for greater attention now to writing centers as sites for potentially valuable scholarly inquiry.

The use of visual representation to learn science can be traced to Louis Agassiz, Harvard Professor of Zoology, in the mid-19th century. In Agassiz's approach, students were to study nature through carefully observing, drawing and then thinking about what the observations might add up to. However, implementation of Agassiz's student-centered approach has struggled with the conflict between science as a form of developing “mental discipline” in which mastery of scientific facts is the goal and science learning as a socially situated activity with an emphasis on the process of learning, not merely its products. Present-day attempts to have students draw to learn science often succumb to these same conflicts, limiting their full realization.

“Branding” a university in an effort to attract student applicants and alumni dollars is increasingly commonplace. The history of the Dartmouth Writing Clinic attests to the ways student writers represent an institution’s brand and provides a troubling picture of a world in which under-prepared students are branded out of existence.

The history of writing to learn college science is tied to the development of laboratory methods. Such student-centered learning was widely hailed in the 1890s as student enrollments increased dramatically and a backlash grew against lecture and recitation methods. However, as the author shows using archival examples from Dartmouth College, Amherst College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, science educators have too often relied on reductive measures of students' grasp of content rather than the kind of argument about scientific findings that is the stuff of real scientific writing and of real science. Although some contemporary science educators continue to tout the value of writing to learn science, the laboratory report or research article itself is a genre that dominates student activities but still largely suffers from the ills of its predecessors. Ultimately, the author calls for a renewed focus on laboratory writing, for both science education and writing studies, to fulfill the promise of previous reform efforts.

The history of the writing-center movement at two-year colleges appears to be a fairly brief one. Evidence suggests that it may be time to reconsider that notion.

Tracing the literature on writing conferences during four tension points in higher-education enrollments--the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1970s--the author suggests that conferences have been championed primarily at those moments when students were both more numerous and more diverse, an urge countered, however, by faculty working conditions. Looking at the present, then, he argues that the need for conferencing and the pressures that preclude extensive one-to-one work seem an amalgam of these earlier eras and continue to threaten the teaching-learning ideal that conferences represent.