Where Do We Go From Here?

I hope everyone enjoys the Buffy, the Vampire Slayer reference of this post's title. The song is now running through my head.

While I don't foresee my tutors-in-training and I joining hands and bursting into song (and if you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out Once More With Feeling), I do find myself considering the future of our writing center. I've been working this week on an article about my experience teaching the tutor training course, reflecting on the lessons I've learned - most of them the hard way - about putting into practice the collaboration we aspire to in the writing center. We still have a long, uphill road for successful institutional collaboration here at our writing center, and certainly the 6% cut to the higher education budget in the state of Indiana won't help. But I feel like we've started down a good path this semester. And I'm thinking about ways we can keep moving in the right direction.

In the latest issue of The Writing Center Journal, Nancy Grimm describes her writing center's evolution into a place of "productive and flexible engagement with linguistic, social, racial, and cultural diversity" (15), a place recognized and financially supported by a corporate sponsor for its emphasis on the diversity that matters most in the modern, global workforce. Grimm writes:

"In fact, all of us, the old-timers like myself as well as the novice coaches, were learning and changing in this environment and fundamentally shifting our focus from an academic skills/writing process version of literacy to a consideration of epistemologies, power relations, identities, and ideologies that circulate in different discourses...The current version of the writing center I describe here developed from a process of asking questions about clientele, staffing, and institutional identity along with a willingness to question foundational assumptions that typically guide writing center practices." (16)

To end this semester's blog posts, I want to recap Grimm's three "frameworks" for modern, diverse writing centers. I hope my tutors-in-training will consider ways they can help our writing center progress in these directions, in terms of faculty education, marketing of the writing center, tutor recruitment, and tutor training.

1. Global Englishes: Grimm doesn't argue that writing centers should stop working with English as a primary language, but she does argue that writing centers need to promote "multilingualism rather than monolingualism as a conceptual norm" (17). I think of my tutors struggling with concerns about what professors would say to their ESL clients if their papers didn't read exactly like an NES student's; I remember Crystal's very pointed question: "How much can we expect professors to really change?"

I think Grimm offers us an intelligent way to address this problem by putting it in terms of the world's work: "The challenges encountered in today's workplaces often result from strained communication between people from diverse cultures, disciplines, languages, backgrounds, and perspectives...[Professionals] make connections across cultures and train themselves to listen harder because people's lives depend on it. That's the reality of globalized work, not the theme-park fantasy of multicultural menus, music, and costumes" (19).

Writing centers can and should hire tutors with diverse linguistic backgrounds, even if, as Grimm says, those tutors haven't always made As in English. Tutors need to be trained in the latest SLA theory, and they need to critique the culture of monolingualism that pervades the academy. Writing center directors need to recruit linguistically, culturally, and racially diverse tutors, and we need to educate university administrators and our faculty colleagues in the importance of respect for linguistic diversity.

2. Multiliteracy. Quoting the New London Group, an international literacy scholarship consortium, Grimm writes: "[T]here can no longer be one set of standards or skills that constitutes the ends of literacy learning. In fact, within a multiliteracies framework, there can no longer be an end of literacy learning but rather an ongoing effort to navigate a multiplicity of discourses" (20).

In the context of a multiliterate society, the students who need writing centers may no longer be those seen as "deficient" in academic discourse. Even those students we traditionally consider "good writers" will likely need help composing multimodal and multigenre texts, working with unfamiliar software, researching in digital forums, publishing in online communities, and communicating across cultures and languages. Writing centers that promote multiliteracy are no longer dealing only with basic writing or first-year writing students upset over a bad grade and looking for somebody to explain the rules of comma usage; multiliteracy writing centers offer assistance to students across the curriculum, at all grade levels, which means we need to market our writing centers to these students, remove the stigma of remediation and the conception of the grammar fix-it-shop all too often attached to writing centers, and train writing tutors to work with multiliteracies.

3. Designers of Social Futures. I find Grimm's third and final framework the most exciting for writing center work: "The New London Group...introduce[s] the notion that literacy education is not about having students learn to reproduce and recognize available designs but about having students enact the transformative possibilities in design. Within this conception of literacy education, students are not simply passive bearers of culture but...are understood as participating in social transformation. They are not waiting on the sidelines for adulthood and/or an institutional certification of having mastered a dominant literacy" (21-22).

This excites me because it is exactly the way I like to look at students - as active agents in their own intellectual, professional, and cultural development, not as empty vessels waiting to be filled or unmolded clay waiting to be shaped - and because it bodes well for our university's writing center. I have often lamented (as I have my tutors-in-training) that our writing center is primarily run by the tutors. But Grimm's framework puts a different spin on that set-up. If students are designers of social futures, and if writing centers exist to place peers (tutor/client) in conversation about writers and about writing, then who better to design a writing center for the future than our tutors?

That last point doesn't let writing center directors off the hook, of course. But one thing I have learned this semester is that my passion, my vision, and my dedication are not enough. Nor should they be. Wherever we go from here (and this again is a lesson from Grimm, taking her lesson from Toni Morrison), we can only get there together.

Grimm, Nancy. "New Conceptual Frameworks for Writing Center Work." The Writing Center Journal 29.2 (2009): 11-27. Print.

Connection Failed

I had to laugh this morning as I tried to respond to several of my tutors'-in-training blogs, and each time I would hit "post comment," my laptop would tell me: Connection Failed. My comments were lost, and after a few such occurrences, I gave up and stopped trying to comment. (Sorry, tutors!)

The irony, of course, is that my tutors-in-training this past week read about and then practiced online tutoring. Our readings concerned the "Anxieties of Distance" (Carlson and Apperson-Williams) and the unique challenges of "Responding Online" (Rafoth). In my tutors' blogs, I see a range of positions toward online tutoring, from C.'s wholehearted support of the online tutorial to Z.'s adamant denial that online tutoring can be as valuable as the face-to-face tutorial.

My own position falls somewhere in the middle. The greatest danger of online tutoring, of course, is that the connection will faill - not just in the sense that the technology goes wonky on us (although this does happen, I'm sure) but in the sense that we, as tutors, will fail to connect with our clients.

The writing center tutorial is all about connections, I would argue; the interpersonal relationship between tutor and client facilitates the verbal give-and-take that makes the writing center tutorial so valuable. If that connection fails in the online environment, especially in asynchronous tutorials like the "email tutorial" (which is all our writing center currently offers), what is the effect on the client?

I know some writing center directors see the online tutorial as a means of inviting clients into the face-to-face tutorial. The logic, simply, is that if the client has a good online experience, s/he will be less intimidated about coming to the face-to-face center. I'm sure this is true to some extent, that some clients choose online tutoring for its convenience ("You mean I can just email my paper to a tutor instead of spending 30 minutes in the writing center? Sweet!") or because it means they don't have to "face" their writing problems ("You mean I don't have to admit to another human being, face to face, that my writing sucks? Sweet!"). But in our technology-saturated world, I think many clients choose online tutoring because they have seen first-hand that excellent collaborations can take place online.

That is, many of our clients are fully immersed in online worlds like Second Life or MMORPGs like Halo; some of them no doubt blog or follow blogs; most of them probably use social networking sites like Facebook not just to keep up with old friends but to make new ones; a few of them may even contribute actively to messageboards on fansites or activist organizations, or possibly even compose and/or read fanfiction, a highly collaborative online activity, as I know from personal experience. Such techno-savvy clients come to the online tutorial with an expectation for how productive the online collaboration can be. But that doesn't mean that they are prepared to "connect" with a writing tutor.

How do we, as tutors, captialize on the willingness of our online clients to move the tutorial into a new, virtual realm, while also realizing that their online experiences may not have prepared them for the online tutorial anymore than being a student in a writing class has prepared them for the face-to-face tutorial? How do we ensure that the client-to-tutor connection that makes a good tutorial in any environment doesn't fail online?

I don't have an answer to this question. I think online tutoring is an area ripe for research; certainly The Writing Lab Newsletter devotes more and more of its pages to the online writing center these days, and we need even more formal research (my tutors rightly pointed out how dated the articles we read for class were - and I shudder at how quickly 1998 has become dated!).

In the meantime, my advice to my tutors-in-training would be to avoid the extremes of "technological determinism" - it will be a good tutorial because it is on the computer, as if the technology itself makes for a successful encounter - or "technophobia" - the online tutorial is always already inferior to the face-to-face tutorial because it takes place through technology. We need to recognize the online writing center as a REAL space; we need to take it seriously as writing center professionals, whether we are tutors and directors, by training our tutors to use the space effectively and by researching the problems and the potential of online tutorials.

Of course, the connection sometimes fails in face-to-face tutorials, too. But when it fails online, does it fail for the same reasons? And what can we do to make sure the connection does not fail in the online environment? These are the questions I leave my tutors-in-training with this week. I look forward to hearing (and reading) their ideas.

When the center doesn't hold

I began my tutor training practicum this semester with the penultimate comment on writing center ideology: Stephen North's "The Idea of a Writing Center." I did this with the best of intentions, believing it was absolutely essential to take this group of English majors - all good writers themselves, many of whom expressed a desire to tutor based on the irritation they felt when reading classmates' or friends' "crappy papers" - from a text-centered focus to a writer-centered focus. What I didn't appreciate at the time, despite my immersion in postmodern theory, was that in presenting my tutors-in-training with the "idea" of a writing center, I was asking them to create a center: one focused on the writer vs. one focused on the text.

Matthew Ortoleva's "Centering the Writer or Centering the Text: A Meditation on a Shifting Practice in Writing Center Consultation" offers a series of real-life tutoring vignettes that cause me to question how strictly we should adhere to North's idea of a writing center. Jacques Derrida once wrote that "the center" (by which he meant, to be incredibly reductive, an essential "truth" or core ideology that determines our thoughts, beliefs, and actions) may not be a reality - no Truth exists - but it is nevertheless an essential function: Before we can decide what we think or believe, before we can decide how to act, we have to establish for ourselves a "center" that will guide us. In the writing conference, we ask tutors to choose between one of two "centers." On the one hand, a tutor can "center" the writer; in this case, the tutor believes that the essential function of the writing center tutorial is to improve a writer, not to improve the writer's text. On the other hand, a tutor can "center" the text; in this case, the tutor believes the essential function of the tutorial is to improve the paper the client has brought to the center.

North's "Idea of a Writing Center" clearly locates a text-centered tutorial as outside the "ideal" of a writing center tutorial. However, as Ortoleva so aptly points out, and as my tutors have certainly experienced time and again this semester, clients quite often come to the writing center with a determined text-centered focus: The client has a text due in a few hours/days/weeks, and s/he wants a good grade on that paper/graduate school admissions essay/resume/etc. to be as good as it can possibly be. And as Ortoleva points out, a very unproductive session can ensue when the writer-centered tutor runs headlong into the text-centered client. In this situation, does the center hold?

Or, to pose a less existential question, who decides where the center should be - the client or the tutor?

Without promising that this will work in every case, Ortoleva offers some good advice: "We must realize that the text the student carries into the writing center is always the student's primary concern. As writing consultants, we must balance the student's desire to leave with an improved text and our desire to help students internalize the lessons learned during the improvement of that text...It may not always seem practical, but collaboration between writing consultant and student should start with a discussion and mutual agreement about the goals of a session" (4).

I want to suggest a way tutors can approach this "discussion and mutual agreement." Of course clients are always going to be concerned about their grades, but one thing we as tutors can do is point out to clients that, when they are writing for a class, the purpose of the writing assignment is both for them to demonstrate their knowledge and writing capabilities to their professors AND - this is the part clients often overlook - to learn about the subject of their writing and to improve as writers. The writing center tutorial cannot produce a perfect paper for clients while remaining writing-centered. But it can help the client realize the learning goals of academic writing assignments - and in so doing, prepare the client to do well on future writing tasks, in school and out.

When clients are writing for real-world purposes, however, such as the graduate school admissions essay or the professional resume for a job, I believe Ortoleva is right in pointing out that a text-centered focus may be appropriate. It is still important that we discuss this with the client; we need to be sure they understand that, given the real-life implications of this writing task, we are willing to focus more on the text, but that the writing center can be most helpful to them on their school-based writing tasks by working with them on their writing processes.

A successful writing center tutorial engages both tutor and client equally in a collaborative process. Whether that collaboration takes place on "the writer" or on "the text" may require negotiation - more negotiation that North's "Idea of a Writing Center" allows for. At the end of the day, it comes back to what I've been saying to my tutors-in-training all along: The value of the writing center tutorial is that it is individualized. That ultimately means we create "the center" anew with every client, in every session, every day.

Ortoleva, Matthew. "Centering the Writer or Centering the Text: A Meditation on a Shifting Practice in Writing Center Consultation." Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. http://projects.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis?q=book/print/209

Distinguishing difference

Reading through my tutors-in-training blogs this week, I notice that the overwhelming response to Julie Neff's article on clients with learning disabilities is: "We shouldn't be labeling people as disabled; we should be looking for ways these clients are (a) extraordinary or (b) not so different from our other clients."

I understand this impulse. Honestly, I even share it. Learning disabilities come with such a stigma in our society. I remember the Special Ed room at my junior high: It was in the same hallway as the cafeteria, which always reeked of grease and garbage, and as we all filed down to lunch every day, we would see the LD kids in there behind a big red door with a small square window, eating their brown bag lunches at long wooden tables. They weren't even allowed to eat with the rest of us. I remember the jokes the boys in my grade would make: "Oh, look, it's the retard room!"

Reading my tutors' blogs, I get the sense that what we want to do is protect our clients from this stigma. Being dyslexic certainly does not make a person stupid, but it DOES make that client different from the student who simply doesn't like to read. More importantly, dyslexia requires a different approach from the tutor: We need to understand what strategies could help a dyslexic student manage the reading and writing process more effectively and efficiently, because when working one-on-one with students, understanding their learning styles - including their learning disabilities - is crucial.

In other words, recognizing the disability allows us to tailor education to that student's particular needs. Now, again, tutors should be doing that with all clients; the individualized instruction is what makes a writing center so valuable, at least in part. But working with a client with a learning disability requires different strategies than working with a client who is not learning disabled. The difference doesn't imply deficiency; the difference is, simply, difference.

I believe tutors need to know more about learning disabilities and how to work effectively with clients who have a wide array of learning disabilities. I would like to see this be one "tier" of the training for the writing center at our university. I want us, as Neff says, to approach every client with respect and sensitivity. That doesn't mean denying that learning disabilities exist. It doesn't mean valorizing a client with a learning disability to the point that we say, "Oh, they don't need special help - look at how extraordinary this person is, to have been able to overcome so much!" Yes, being in college with a learning disability is a challenge, and we should praise our clients for their hard work and perseverance. But our job doesn't stop there. The fact of the client's hard work doesn't mean she or he won't need a different kind of help than our other clients.

The best way to advocate for fair, equitable treatment of clients with learning disabilities isn't too pretend that the disability doesn't exist or that it doesn't affect the way they learn. The best way to help them is, simply, to help them.

On focusing on "The Writer"

I know my tutors-in-training must find me a broken record, but I think they're finally starting to recognize the nuances inherent in what seemed a simple dictum when we read it in Stephen North back in August: Writing centers are there to help writers, not necessarily to improve a piece of writing.

This discussion was raised on P.'s blog last week and again in class yesterday. I hear it not only in the tutors' agony that their clients are still making Cs - shouldn't the writing center be able to get them to an A? what are we doing wrong? - but also in C.'s question: How much change can tutors really affect in the academy when it comes to things like convincing instructors that ESL writing doesn't have to sound like Native English Speaker (NES) writing in order to be effective?

Lying awake last night, puzzling over why yesterday's class felt like it fell so flat to me (aside from the fact that students are exhausted and living for Thanksgiving break at this point), I thought of all the points I really wanted to make but, stupidly, I thought were implicit in my simple repetition of "focus on the writer, guys, not the writing." So here's another try, which will bring me back to ESL writers in the end.

What does it mean to focus on the writer? A client comes to a session with an essay for Professor X's literature class. The essay clearly has no focus; the client has good ideas about "Why the Caged Bird Sings," but the essay is a mishmash of thoughts and insights without a controlling, overarching idea. The essay is due the next day, so the client has time for significant revision. As a tutor, what do we focus on? The fact that without a clear, recognizable thesis and substantial revision to connect relevant details back to that thesis (and to cut those that are irrelevant), Professor X is going to murder this essay? In a way, yes. But when we focus on the writer, we get beyond this essay, this professor, this assignment. As we patiently question the writer about what she really wants to say about Maya Angelou's work, we stress to her, "Ok, this sounds to me like your main idea. Do you understand that essays operate from controlling ideas, what we often call a 'thesis'?"

In that moment, we step back from this essay - and by extension, from the grade the writer will receive on this essay - and push outward to the writer herself. Does she understand what a 'thesis' is? Can we help her understand how to write one that a reader can recognize, and that will assist her in organizing her essays and choosing evidence that's appropriate for her overall purpose? If this writer can begin to learn that lesson (and in one session, she will probably only begin to learn it; she will still need practice), then she can apply it in her future essays, and abracadabra, we have focused on the writer, not the text.

Ideally, that tutoring session would also help this student get a good grade (or at least a better grade) on the essay. But let's say that in working with this client on her thesis and development, we realize we aren't addressing much about her grammar, and the essay she submits is still going to have some awkward phrasings, inelegant integration of quotes, and comma splices. Professor X marks down quite a lot for grammar. As tutors, have we not done our jobs because we didn't see to it that this client's text was absolutely, spot-on, just-the-way-Professor-X-likes-it perfect?

NO, IT DOES NOT. We worked with a writer; we focused on helping that client learn important lessons about academic writing - and, hopefully, about the writing process, as we should have made time to talk to her about strategies for finding, refining, and focusing a thesis at the end of our session. The client may be devastated that she didn't get an A on the essay. She may come back to us and cry on our shoulders about how unfair Professor X is. At that point, we pull out our interpersonal techniques, like the ones Christina Murphy describes, and we help the client overcome her emotional baggage so she can keep going on that arduous road to becoming a successful writer.

When we look at tutoring this way, we don't have to worry that we can't know every professor's expectations, or that some professors don't even seem to know their own expectations for student writing. It's a tall order in our product-driven society, but in the writing center, we are not interested in texts; we are interested in writers. (Gasp! I just used an idiomatic phrase. Hint-hint, nudge-nudge, wink-wink to my tutors-in-training.)

Now, how does this relate back to my less-than-stimulating presentation on cultural preferences in writing and ESL writers yesterday? Actually, I think this may be at the core of what made the lecture so...well, I'm not sure I really have words for how anti-climactic that discussion felt. But here's what came to me last night. When we work with ESL writers, we are still working with writers, not with their texts. A whole other dimension is added because we are also helping them to acquire a new language, and thus the tendency to focus exclusively on the text is perhaps even greater than it is with NES clients. I mean, ESL clients' essays just have so many errors sometimes, and we know Professor X's red pen is going to bleed all over that paper. What do we do? Where do we begin? How can we make Professor X and Company respect linguistic and cultural diversity so this student doesn't have to cast off her/his home culture and become just like every other Standard Edited American English academic automaton?

Well, what we do is what we do with every other client: We begin with the writer. Instead of worrying over the split between Higher Order Concerns and Lower Order Concerns, we try to figure out what would most help this client progress as a writer - not what would most benefit this particular text, but what this client doesn't seem to know, understand, or be able to control about her/his writing. No thesis? Let's talk about what a thesis statement is. Circular organization? Let's discuss American preferences for linearity, make sure the client understands our thousand-year-old rhetorical tradition "arrangement" (nod to J.). Missing articles? Let's explain to the client, in our own words, why non-count nouns (i.e., advice) don't get articles, but count nouns (i.e., the buses) do. Will this ESL client leave the writing center with an essay guaranteed to get an A? No. In fact, s/he may leave the writing center and turn that essay in to a professor who calls up the writing center director and fumes, "I thought your tutors were supposed to help ESL writers be able to sound more like American students! This kid can't even speak English! How am I supposed to read this?"

And the writing center director (or, in this case, the tutor-training professor) calmly replies, "First of all, my tutors are there to work with writers, not necessarily to improve their texts. And secondly, would you like me to send you some interesting articles about second language acquisition?"

And that's what it's all about.

Examining cultural assumptions in the writing center

For this week's class, I asked my tutors-in-training to respond to two discussion questions:

1. What kinds of cultural preferences do you think you have as a writer? Where did those preferences come from?
2. What do you do when you notice a cultural difference in how a student is writing or responding to an assignment? What kinds of things do you need to be aware of?

I want to take a shot at answering these myself, and also think through what I'm hoping students will get out of our assigned readings for this week, especially Jennifer Staben and Kathryn Dempsey Nordhaus' "Looking at the Whole Text" and the documentary "Writing Across Borders." So, here goes:

My cultural preferences as a writer run toward linearity, clarity, coherence, and concision. Or, it might be more accurate to say, I perceive linearity as clear, coherent, and concise. Years of training in reading, writing, and teaching academic prose in the field of rhetoric and composition have taught me to define "good writing" as that which quickly and clearly gets to the point and that which clearly and concisely connects all supporting material to a larger, controlling idea (or ideas). I suppose some of these preferences are personal, but in terms of cultural expectations, I suppose our Western culture's idea that "time is money" and "less is more" influence the ways I think about the work writers should do for readers. A writer who doesn't seem to know what s/he is saying, or doesn't seem able to convey that meaning quickly and clearly to readers, is wasting her/his time and her/his readers' time.

Staben and Nordhaus discuss the importance of connecting the process of writing to the product of writing, and I find this essential advice both for writing center tutors and future writing teachers. You see, although I have this cultural preference for linearity, coherence, concision, and clarity, I know that my writing process is anything but neat and orderly - which, I hope, my written products would suggest, in their neatness and orderliness. My writing process begins many times with lists, cluster diagrams, fastwrites, scraps of notes on napkins, bursts of dialogue or intuition scribbled in a notebook or journal, annotations in the margins of journal articles or textbooks. In teaching writing and working with writing center clients, one of my primary jobs is to make visible that process which leads, eventually, to a neat and orderly written product.

I find this an invaluable strategy for NES and ESL writers, but specifically when I encounter a cultural difference between an ESL client's written product and my own cultural expectations for good writing, I think it is essential to "make visible" the cultural expectations American academic readers bring to American academic prose. As Staben and Nordhaus say, this may translate into explaining (and modeling) the process of literary analysis to ESL clients, but I find it also means examining cultural assumptions about what it means to analyze, synthesize, argue, persuade, and respond. Some of my most productive ESL tutorial sessions happened when we pushed aside the text and discussed the cultural expectations my client and I brought to a seemingly innocent, simple assignment; when I engaged in a truly interactive session, as Staben and Nordhaus say, I learned a lot about what American academic readers believe it means to "analyze" or "respond" by contrasting my naturalized assumption (read: American analysis IS analysis) with the assumptions and definitions of another culture.

So what do I hope my students take away from our upcoming class and from their blog posts for this week? Most simply, I hope they take away the realization that writing is a cultural construct, and part of teaching writing, in a classroom or one-to-one, means examining and making visible those cultural assumptions. More importantly, however, I hope that examining cultural differences will help my tutors understand their own writing processes better, that they may begin to pay attention to what they are doing when they analyze, summarize, paraphrase, respond, or argue; I believe being a writing teacher or a writing tutor should always involve growing as a writer oneself.

Furthermore, I hope that this week and next we'll be able to start discussing the false binary of global, higher-order concerns and local, lower-order concerns. I want my tutors-in-training, like the field of rhetoric and composition, to start seeing writing as a whole package: What we say and how we say it should be intrinsically connected concepts, not separated along the artificial line of "meaning" and "grammar." Perhaps by examining our cultural assumptions about good writing, we can begin to see the breakdown of this binary - realizing, for instance, that as a college professor, my definition of "good writing" implies correctness in the seemingly innocent, unloaded terms "clarity" and "concision," and yet I see this surface-level, supposedly lower-order concern as integral to a successful academic product. Hmm.

For Clarification

Reading over my tutors-in-training blog posts this week, it strikes me that they're getting the wrong impression from our readings out of ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors that I or the authors we're reading somehow want to paint ESL clients as "lacking." I want to work against this assumption; I want my tutors to understand that ESL clients have many of the same needs and problems as NES clients, but because ESL clients are acquiring a second language and, in the case of international students, coming from a different culture, they're going to face challenges - and present challenges to their tutors - that NES clients don't.

In class, we're watching the documentary "Writing Across Borders." What I'd like my tutors to take away from class next week, and from their assigned blog posts this week, is the realization that our assumptions about what good writing is are culturally-constructed. I think this is an essential component of effective ESL tutoring. It takes us beyond the assimilationist/accomodationist/separatist stance and pushes us to recognize the inherently social nature of genre. Our conventions for organization, development, focus, syntax, even metaphor and argument are not "innocent" or "natural." They are shaped by social conventions, by cultural expectations, not only American but also academic and discipline-specific.

Just as we, as tutors, come to the writing center session with cultural expectations for what good writing is, so too do our clients. In knowing more about our own cultural construction of writing, we are better placed to figure out where/when an ESL client may be bringing cultural assumptions to her or his writing, and that gives us a place to intervene - not by insisting that the client "Americanize" her or his writing, but by talking with the client about the cultural expectations that contribute to the way she or he writes.

Accomodating Difference, Acknowledging Reality

In recent discussions about ESL writing center clients with my tutors-in-training, I've noticed a variety of responses ranging from the somewhat panicked, "there's just too much to deal with here," to the easy-going, "multicultural writing is just another tutoring challenge." By the end of the semester, I'd be thrilled if my tutors all fell closer to the latter end of the spectrum, but at the same time, I know that getting there means confronting not just our practices but the ideology that underlies our practices.

Paul Kei Matsuda and Michelle Cox hint at these ideological perspectives in describing three approaches to ESL writing, first defined by Carol Severino: assimilationist, accomodationist, separatist. Matsuda and Cox relate that while some writing center tutors "may note the richness of ESL writer's texts that come from their hybridity and alternativeness...not all encounters with ESL texts produce such generous responses. Readers with little or no experience in working with ESL writers may be drawn to surface-level errors and differences that they see as problematic...Because of these and other differences, ESL writing is sometimes seen as 'deficient,' especially when it is evaluated in comparison with texts produced by NES writers" (42, 43).

We are fortunate in our tutor training practicum to have an ESL writer amongst our tutors. I'm grateful that S. is already pointing out to us how she perceives NES writers' texts as more difficult to read than ESL writers' text - not only on a linguistic level, but on a conceptual or global level, as ESL writers tend to avoid the cultural references that often pervade NES writing, making it inaccessible to anyone not immersed in American culture. The ethnocentrism S. perceives in her American clients' writing - American students automatically assume an American audience, regardless of the fact that many of their professors and classmates come from other countries and other cultures - bleeds out into how many NES readers perceive ESL texts. "Difference," whether in syntax, phrasing, organization, or argumentative strategies, becomes "deficiency"; hybridity and alternativeness are not marks of sophistication and intelligence but evidence of the Other, and an ethnocentric perspective on knowledge and expression causes many NES readers to shudder at the "lack of Americanness" in an ESL text.

So you see the problem I anticipate my tutors-in-training having with ESL clients. On the one hand, we have to overcome the initial reaction Matsuda and Cox describe as a kind of well-meaning horror: "(Serverino) felt tempted to take [the assimilationist] stance after first reading Michael's writing because she felt 'stunned' by the number of errors in the text" (45-46). I've heard this echoed already in some of my students' questions ("How do you tutor someone when you can't even figure out what they're trying to say?"). The assimilationist stance is tempting to us as Americans because we see our culture and our language as The Way, and writing that violates our cultural expectations must, by definition, be wrong, deficient.

But even if we can overcome this perspective as tutors, learning to appreciate the richness of difference, are we doing our ESL clients a disservice if we avoid an assimilationist approach? After all, as Matsuda and Cox say, "the assimilationist stance may be an attempt to protect the ESL writer from other readers...Tutors...may try to represent what they consider to be the possible response from the intended audience of the ESL writer's text: the professor" (46). In other words, a writing center tutor who allows ESL "errors" to remain may feel that she or he is ultimately setting that client up to fail, because the text's ultimate audience - the professor - may penalize the writer for those differences the tutor has come to appreciate.

There is no easy answer to this problem, of course. (And I know none of my tutors-in-training are surprised by that by this point in the semester, though I imagine they're still frustrated by it.) But I do think it helps us to do our jobs as tutors effectively by remembering that ESL clients are no different from NES clients in that our goals for their tutorial sessions should not be to fix their texts but to help them improve as writers. To my mind, the accomodationist stance is best suited to achieving this goal: "The accomodationist, then, reads differences as, well, differences, explaining to the writer how some differences may be seen as deficiencies by some readers; it is up to the writer 'how much like a native speaker' she wants to sound" (Matsuda and Cox 45).

The accomodationist stance strikes a balance between ethnocentricism (which I believe the assimilationist stance reflects) and a fairytale world in which we pretend to our ESL clients that all readers will be actualized enough to appreciate difference as evidence of multicultural richness (which I think the separatist stance does). More importantly, the accomodationist stance gives us concrete strategies that harken back to best practices for working with NES clients: setting an agenda for what issues to focus on in the tutorial; encouraging active, collaborative learning in the writing center tutorial; keeping the client in control of her/his writing and ideas; focusing on long-term improvement of writing ability, not short-term improvement as a text, as the accomodationist tutor emphasizes the client's understanding of differences between L1 and L2 writing and allows the client to decide how, when, or if to make the text more like a native speaker's.

As my tutors-in-training learn more about ESL clients, I hope they come to advocate for a separatist stance, because I believe our world will be a much brighter place when we stop seeing difference as deficiency. But when it comes to acknowledging the reality of our current society, I think the accomodationist stance is the most ethical for dealing with ESL clients - and the most productive.

Matsuda, Paul Kei and Michelle Cox. "Reading an ESL Writer's Text." ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2009. 42-50.

Interlanguage (or, What We Can Learn from our ESL Clients)

I remember the first time I sat down with an ESL client in the writing center. I had finished my tutoring observations just a few days before, and I felt like I was still learning the ropes of tutoring native speakers. So when our receptionist walked over to my desk to ask if I was available for an ESL client who wanted a drop-in appointment, I remember waffling. Our writing center director had encouraged us not to take on clients we felt we weren't prepared to help, but in addition to feeling sorry for the young man (he looked really desperate, I recall, standing by the front desk rolling his essay into a long tube, flattening it out, rolling it up again), I figured, Hey, I've got to start sometime, right?

The client (I'll call him Samir) was from Saudi Arabia, and clearly as nervous as I was. I remember how he hesitated when I asked him to read his paper aloud. "I'm not so good at English," he said, in a heavily-accented voice. "Maybe you should read it."

My non-directive tutoring instincts kicked in: Did this client want me to take responsibility for his paper? I looked around the room, hoping a more experienced tutor would be free and could step in, but everyone was busy.

So I took a deep breath and pushed the paper aside. I asked Samir to tell me about where he was from. He was hesitant at first; he kept looking down at the paper, obviously wondering why we weren't getting on with things, but he trusted me, the tutor, enough to play along. He told me that this was his first semester in the U.S. He was an undergraduate, a freshman. He'd studied English in Saudi Arabia, he said, but his exam scores hadn't been high enough to place him into the mainstream first-year writing class, English 101, so he was in English 100, our university's basic writing class.

My tutor-senses tingled as Samir mentioned his basic writing class. It seemed to me that his self-esteem had taken quite a blow by being placed in what he no doubt perceived as a remedial course. "Were you a good student in Saudi Arabia?" I asked, and Samir nodded, smiling for the first time as he told me about how proud his family was that he'd graduated with nearly perfect marks and had been accepted to a university in the U.S.

"So tell me what this paper is about," I remember saying to Samir then. He explained that the essay (which was for English 100) was supposed to be about an important event in his life. He'd chosen to write about his father's death, from cancer, two years earlier.

I could see how much Samir cared about his topic as he described the experience to me: Clearly, this was not a disenfranchised student looking for a tutor to edit and proofread his paper. This was someone who really wanted to tell readers about his father and what it was like to lose a parent at such a young age.

After about ten minutes of talking, I slid the paper back toward Samir. "Why don't you read this to me?" I asked again. "Go as slow as you need to. I really want to hear this, in your voice."

And Samir started to read.

I tell this story because it gave me my first inkling that I'd been thinking about ESL clients in the wrong way. Even though Samir was from another country and English was not his first language, he'd come to the writing center with many of the same anxieties and emotional hang-ups as native-speaking American students: He was embarrassed by being labeled a "bad writer," even more embarrassed to need a tutor, and afraid both of those things meant he wasn't really cut out for college. What Samir needed wasn't so terribly different from what any other writing center client needed. He needed a tutor who would get to know him as a person, who would take the time to draw him out, who would work to create a friendly environment, and who would patiently support him in his development as a writer.

This is the point Ilona Leki makes in "Before the Conversation," when she reminds us that we do ESL students a disservice as tutors if we paint them all with a broad brush. Leki overviews some categories of ESL writers, pointing out the different challenges faced by, say, an ESL student who has grown up in the U.S. and a student like Samir who has only recently come here for college, but more importantly to my mind is her emphasis on the individuality of ESL clients, which our ethnocentric worldview may cause us to overlook:

"There is also a tendency among humans to see their own social and cultural group as highly nuanced and differentiated but to be less able to fully grasp that all social and cultural groups are equally nuanced and differentiated...[T]he most effective way for writing center tutors to experience these nuances firsthand is to take advantage of the visits of these multilingual, multicultural individuals to the writing center and show interest in their home language, country, or culture by engaging them in the kind of small talk that usually accompanies tutoring sessions, and so get to know them one by one" (13).

Too often as tutors (and writing center directors), we see the ESL tutoring session as a wholly different beast from a native-speaker session. We take the time to get to know our native-speaking clients; we don't automatically assume that their reticence to read their papers aloud signals a desire to push the work of writing or editing off onto us, the tutor. ESL clients become one homogeneous group, characterized primarily by their linguistic Otherness.

As the tutors in my practicum course begin to study theories of ESL tutoring, what I want most to convey to them, beyond theories of SLA (which I think our incredibly valuable and worth learning for any writing teacher, by the way), is the importance of treating ESL clients as clients.

I want my tutors-in-training not to Other ESL clients to the point that they see the tutoring session as a one-way exchange. That was how I looked at Samir in our first encounter: Not only was he a writing center client, which likely meant I knew more about writing than he did, he was also an international student and a non-native speaker, which meant he needed my understanding of American culture and the English language. And of course Samir did need those things from me. Yet over time, as Samir came back to the writing center each week that fall semester and through the spring term as well, I began to see that he had a lot to teach me, too. He had been places and experienced cultures that were as foreign to me as the United States was to him.

Looking back, I think some of the most valuable learning that took place during my sessions with Samir really didn't have much to do with writing at all. It had a lot more to do with two people from different parts of the globe sitting down, one-on-one, and sharing their stories.

Leki, Ilona. "Before the Conversation: A Sketch of Some Possible Backgrounds, Experiences, and Attitudes Among ESL Students Visiting a Writing Center." ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Boynton/Cook: Portsmouth, NH, 2009. 1-17.

Working within The System

How apropos that we are reading Elizabeth Boquet's "Intellectual Tug of War: Snapshots of Life in the Center" this week for our tutor training practicum, when I feel that I've been engaged in such a tug-of-war over writing centers all semester.

I won't lie to you: This is a difficult blog post for me to write. I've been wrestling with it all weekend, and by yesterday morning, I'd convinced myself that I didn't need to write it. It might be professionally or politically dangerous; it might offend somebody, cross a line, step on toes. Then yesterday morning I spent 45 minutes talking to an incredibly frustrated tutor, and even though I feel like I turned the situation into a good teaching moment, I still feel like I "turned the situation." I came at it obliquely, afraid to address it head-on, constrained (like all professionals) by concerns about professionalism and decorum.

Imagine my chagrin when I found myself implicated in the "impression management" Boquet writes of: "Tutors are generally intelligent people who quickly learn that the reality of life in the center is much different from that most often depicted in journals...[T]utors learn that, when they applied for a job at the writing center, they agreed to join a team whose members are concerned with what Goffman calls 'impression management'...[where] secrets that could give the show away are shared and kept" (119, 120).

Our writing center is undergoing change right now. On the one hand, these changes are exciting: Thanks to an incredibly supportive Dean, who sees writing as a cornerstone of education (and I don't mean writing-as-a-skill, but real writing, the kind of writing I like to teach and that ought to bring students to a writing center), the English Department and Academic Skills are collaborating to develop a center with a university-wide mission. This center has the potential to be the bedrock upon which a much-needed writing across the curriculum program is built at our university. These talks are still very preliminary, but we are making steady progress, and I honestly believe everyone involved wants what is best for our center's clients, writing consultants, and students who might become clients.

On the other hand, my tutors have been cast into a situation over which they have very little control and which, at the moment, is fraught with contradiction. What we discuss in class is not what they feel they see going on at the writing center. I see troubling antagonism growing between my tutors-in-training and the tutors already working in the center. I see (and hear) frustration from my tutors about the logistics of sessions and appointments, the demeanor of co-workers toward other consultants and toward clients, the content and approach of tutoring sessions. My ability to intervene in these situations is limited because I am not the writing center director - and, frankly, because these are troubled waters I've entered. I don't want to jeopardize the potential for collaboration described above by offending or alienating those with whom I need an effective working relationship if that collaboration is to succeed.

And yet, I refuse to participate in impression management. I think our writing center has the potential to be a remarkable resource on this campus, a true center of writing, reading, thinking, and learning. Right now, it has problems. Somehow, admitting that feels like posting a best friend's dirty secret here for the world to see; at the same time, I realize how silly it is to feel that way. Of course our writing center has its problems. Even if we had the most wonderful writing center in the world, it would still have problems. The "ideal" writing center doesn't exist. It can't. We create the writing center everyday - those of us who work within it, who use its services, who train its tutors, who secure its funding, who promote it to faculty and administrators. We will never reach some glorious ideal state in which every tutor adopts an approach we find palatable, or no tutor ever has a disagreement or falling out with another tutor, or the director smooths over each problem before it reaches the ears of an instructor, a department chair, or a dean.

Boquet reminds me that "too often we teach with the goal of eliminating confusion, opposition, and discomfort when our goal should be to delve more deeply into these issues" (123). To my tutors-in-training, I don't mean to say that your frustrations are insignificant or that we just need to get on with it, managing the impression of the writing center so our problems, disagreements, and concerns are safely hidden from the eyes of the world, only whispered about in the corner of a classroom before the teacher walks in. But I do want to say that this is where we are. We're at the beginning of a new venture. Changing a system from the inside-out, advocating for the kind of center I am trying to convince our university administrators we should work toward building, is fraught with frustration, irritation, set-backs and disagreements at the same time it promises excitement, satisfaction, rewards and new partnerships.

I use the term "system" here in a very particular way, as Boquet does at the end of her article, which I want to quote at some length: "Our educational system, based as it is on the industrial model, has production as its ultimate goal. We might not change that. But we can control what we (re)produce. We can strive to produce better writers, better tutors, more humane working conditions for everyone involved (tutors and students alike). Then we can stand back and realize that we have a product we can all be proud of" (128).

My gut instinct as a teacher is to never allow my students to experience "confusion, opposition, or discomfort." Yet I know from long experience that this is not the last time my tutors-in-training will find themselves working within a system they perceive as flawed - a system which they can't simply sweep away, or wish into a different state. Change is hard. It requires people who are committed to seeing those changes happen and people who realize that even if they succeed in making those changes, the system will still have flaws. It requires people who recognize that change can't come from one person railing at the storm; it must come from people sitting down together and coming to new understandings for agreed-upon courses of action.

And in the writing center, change must come from tutors. So to my tutors-in-training, I say this: Stick it out. Not just this semester, but for the rest of your time at this university. Bring the best practices we are learning about in class and your own commitment to developing a reflective practice to the writing center, and don't let anybody tell you that you're taking this too seriously or that you don't make a difference. Tutoring is serious business, because it affects students who are trying to learn, and learning is serious business. Even if your influence over those clients is limited, it is still important, and it does make a difference. Don't give up. We need you.

In the end, it doesn't matter what kind of a writing center I or any other university administrator wants to create if we don't have tutors committed to the mission of that center. I say "in the end," but the truth is, the journey we've undertaken as writing center professionals has no "end" point. Creating the kind of center we want will, as I've stressed in this post and others, take place everyday, in every interaction between tutors and clients, between tutors and tutors, between tutors and directors, between tutors and instructors. We have to work within the system we have right now, yet in those daily interactions, we can all advocate for change, for a writing center that we can be proud of.

Boquet, Elizabeth. "Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center." The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 3rd ed. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 116-129.

Affecting Change in the Writing Center Tutorial

"I would argue that, perhaps inadvertently, many of us who work in writing centers practice a form of censorship as part of our everyday duties," writes Steve Sherwood in "Censoring Students, Censoring Ourselves: Constraining Conversations in the Writing Center." "For the most part, we censor or urge self-censorship in the interest of helping students adjust to and succeed in the academic world. We want to protect students from the practical and political effects of their words. We want to show them that their opinions have consequences, that using sexist or racist terms, espousing particular political causes, speaking carelessly on topics they don't fully understand, and offending their audiences can cost them good grades and the esteem of their teachers and fellow students" (131).

I disagree with Sherwood. Not about the fact that writing consultants "censor or urge self-censorship" when a client puts forth a racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise oppressive idea, but about the reasons why we challenge these ideas - or, at least, the reasons why we should, after the first shock of, Did this client really just say that? wears off.

Sherwood and I have a different take on how the First Amendment applies to the writing center. I'm sure my husband the attorney would cringe at this, but I don't actually care about the legal space of the center. Sure clients have "the right" to hold (and espouse) whatever opinion they want to - in our writing centers, our classrooms, and their papers. Writing consultants can't technically "censor" anyone, because it isn't our paper: The client decides what to write and what to turn in. Of course, that's side-stepping the much more nuanced point Sherwood makes that, as moral authorities - the spokesperson of the academy in our clients' eyes, someone to be listened to - we censor students simply by telling them an idea, word, or anecdote is unacceptable. In that sense, I do agree that we censor students. More importantly, I believe that we should.

The argument I'm making isn't about free speech. Free speech is a given, in my book: Clients can write, say, and think whatever they want. But as an educated person, someone committed to the ideals of human rights, I have a responsibility to uphold a moral and ethical code that refuses to accept the legitimacy of racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise oppressive beliefs.

Sherwood quite rightly points out that "by encouraging self-censorship in the early stages of composition, we may prevent student writers from fully developing and expressing valid and valuable ideas and opinions" (131). If, as writing consultants, we say, "That's ignorant/racist/appalling/etc." and don't push the client to interrogate her/his own beliefs, we don't affect change. And affecting change is what we should be after: We should look for ways to engage our clients in a dialogue about ideas that offend us, rather than assuming a stance of institutional or moral authority that simply declares, "You can't say that."

But our motives have to be about more than fixing a paper up for an A or protecting a student from a teacher's wrath. (In fact, in tutorials where clients have refused to budge on their racist or sexist opinions, I've often sat back, rightly or wrongly, with a private glee that this student would no doubt be eaten alive by a professor.) Leading a student through the steps of argumentation, insisting that she prove her claims, consider her ethos, create effective emotional appeals for her audience, is an excellent means of prompting a client to question her ideas, but in so doing, what we should be focused on is bigger than the client's paper. We are focusing on the core principles at the heart of a liberal arts education, which seeks to build a diverse society founded not on an "anything goes" approach to ethics and morality but on respect for diversity. Such respect precludes hate speech - and, more to the point, hate thought, which is what we really want to challenge in our students.

So the point is not self-censorship in the sense that we convince clients their true opinions have to be hidden, if they want to get a good grade or avoid being taken to task by a teacher. The point is acting as a member of the client's educational system, upholding the beliefs and morals a liberal arts education tries to instill in future citizens of a global society, and thereby hopefully affecting change in our clients' ways of thinking. I disagree with Sherwood again when he tries to make this an argument about "literacy." Refusing to agree with a client that the Holocaust didn't happen or that all Muslims are terrorists has nothing to do with valuing a client's home culture or "discourage[ing] diversity and independent thinking" (133). Nor does it have anything to do with playing into notions of "ideal texts" or "ideal students" who always-already fall in line with the academy's ideological stances. It does have a lot to do with helping students become critical thinkers. Even if they ultimately decide they disagree with our views as writing consultants, at least they've been challenged to think.

I am speaking from experience here, both good and bad, but Sherwood's article always makes me think of perhaps my greatest success story as a writing teacher. I was teaching first-year writing at a small, private community college in rural southern Illinois in my last year of MA coursework, and a young woman (I'll call her Sally) wanted to write her argumentative paper against legalizing gay marriage. Her first draft had the requisite number of sources - all from fundamentalist Christian groups. In conference, I explained to her that the academy is secular; if she wanted to use evidence her audience would find convincing in this instance, she had to find sources that weren't based in any religion, not just Christianity. To make a long story short, Sally took up my challenge. She wrestled with that paper for four weeks; she came close to switching topics more than once. But she stuck with it. And when she presented her final draft to the class, she explained that even though she still believed that homosexuality was a sin, she had changed her mind about legalizing gay marriage: The fact that she couldn't find any non-biased, non-religious sources arguing against gay marriage, and that she had been forced to truly read the arguments in support of legalizing gay marriage, had convinced her that private morality should not infringe upon gay couples' rights to enjoy the benefits of marriage.

Sally and I had a good working relationship in that class. She knew my religious and political views, and I knew hers. I never allowed myself to be angry over or offended by her opinions, and she in turn accepted my authority as a representative of the academy to insist that she argue in certain ways in an academic paper. Did I censor Sally or urge her to self-censorship? Absolutely. But the end result wasn't that Sally went away grumbling about having her right to free speech suppressed by some bleeding-heart liberal who could only tolerate ideas she considered to be "p.c." The result was that Sally came to a personal theory of the contested issue of gay marriage, one that didn't change what she believed personally but that did change how she looked at the world and the rights of others different from herself.

To me, that's the point.

Sherwood, Steve. "Censoring Students, Censoring Ourselves: Constraining Conversations in the Writing Center." The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 3rd ed. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 129-137.

Beyond Technique: The Ideology of Writing Centers

I have a confession to make. As a writing center tutor and now as a writing teacher, I help students write their papers.

I don’t mean that I sit down and dash off a paper for students that they then hand in as their own work. I do offer critiques that involve saying things like, “What if you put the thesis statement here?” or, even more directive, “I think this third paragraph would work better up here. The idea just doesn’t fit down there, do you see?” And I have been known to brainstorm with writers, jotting down ideas of my own as well as recording theirs, even drawing connections between ideas the writer is coming up with and pointing out how those could be connected in the actual paper. In short, I have done just about everything Jeff Brooks’ “Minimalist Tutoring” warns against.

Brooks’ “Minimalist Tutoring” represented a revolution in thinking about writing center work, not unlike Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center.” North argued that writing centers can and should be more than grammar fix-it shops. In presenting techniques of minimalist or non-directive tutoring, Brooks extends North’s ideology, recommending a rigid dichotomy between tutors/consultants and students/clients: “Ideally, the student should be the only active agent in improving the paper” (173), while the tutor should act as “merely an interested outsider” (171).

Brooks, writing in 1991, was probably reacting in part to the depiction of writing centers as the grammar fix-it shops North abhors. But I see an underlying ideology of individualism in Brooks’ argument; after all, his article is subtitled, “Making the Student Do All the Work.” I think underneath Brooks’ ostensible concern about clients misusing the center (essentially “tricking” or “forcing” tutors into writing or revising their papers for them) is a deep-seeded belief that tutors can’t directly intervene in clients’ writing processes because if the client receives any sort of direct help, the client will not be learning, since knowledge is the product of an individual mind.

Consider how Brooks scripts the roles of consultants and clients: “[W]e need to make the student the primary agent in the writing center session…The tutor should take on a secondary role, serving mainly to keep the student focused on his own writing” (169). The consultant’s job is to guide the client to knowledge she or he already possesses; the consultant is not to be an “active agent” in the learning process, but “merely an interested outsider.” I know many writing centers continue to operate on this model. Even ours does, from what I have observed and what my consultants-in-training report. And on the surface, minimalist tutoring makes sense. I was certainly trained in this fashion in graduate school: Don’t tell the client what to say; don’t write the thesis statement for the client; don’t suggest ideas; don’t put words in the client’s mouth; don’t, whatever you do, edit the client’s paper.

So do I feel guilty about going against minimalist tutoring techniques, whether as a tutor or as a teacher? Do I think we should do away with minimalist techniques entirely? The answer to the first question is, sometimes. Sometimes, I think I have done too much, and after the first rush of exhilaration Brooks describes – the paper is better! yea! – I’ve experienced a kind of tutoring let-down, realizing that I overstepped, got caught up in the text and lost focus on the writer. So the answer to my second question is, no, I don’t think minimalist techniques are worthless. I feel I’ve helped many clients by being hands-off, by insisting that they come up with ideas, they make the revisions, they learn to proofread and edit their own work. Their papers may not have been the best, but they did improve as writers.

Yet I firmly believe that I have helped students improve as writers by working more closely with them than minimalist tutoring allows, by being an “active agent” in the writing or revising of a particular text. Andrea Lunsford describes a shift (one that has occurred since Brooks’ article was published) “from viewing knowledge and reality as things exterior to or outside us…to viewing knowledge and reality as mediated by or constructed through language in social use,…as, in short, the product of collaboration” (48). Collaboration only works if we “reject traditional hierarchies” (50) and involve all participants equally in the learning. The collaborative tutor can’t sit back, hands off the paper, refusing to offer any help besides heuristic questions designed to lead the client to knowledge she or he already possesses; the collaborative tutor has to get involved, ask and answer questions, model thesis statements, suggest improvements – in other words, the consultant works with the client, instead of the client “doing all the work.”

Lunsford tells us that “creating a collaborative environment and truly collaborative tasks is damnably difficult. Collaborative environments and tasks must demand collaboration” (50). Thus I wouldn’t recommend my consultants adhere to a strict ideology of collaboration anymore than I would encourage them to adhere to a strict ideology of minimalism. In fact, I don’t think tutors do themselves (or their clients) any favors by adhering to any strict ideology. Rather, we need to be flexible in our practices, recognizing that some clients are going to benefit from minimalist techniques, and some are going to benefit from collaboration, and as the client isn’t likely to know which, we as tutors have to be able to make those judgment calls. And those judgments are based, in part, on the ideology that informs our practice.

If we believe, with Brooks, that knowledge is “exterior” to us, that the client must “discover” it for her or himself, then we can’t be comfortable with collaborative tutoring. If we believe, with Lunsford, that knowledge is “always contextually bound” and “always socially constructed” (52), we can open ourselves up to the “damnably difficult” challenge not just of collaborative tutoring (minimalist tutoring is difficult, too, just in a different way) but to the task of creating reflective practice that goes beyond technique, beyond ideology, into the realm of student-centered, assistive practice that makes writing centers a valuable resource for everyone involved.

Brooks, Jeff. "Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work." The St. Martin's Source book for Writing Tutors, 3rd ed. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 168-173.
Lunsford, Andrea. "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center." The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, 3rd ed. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 47-53.

Of Trickster Tutors

Every time I read Christina Murphy’s “Freud in the Writing Center,” my hackles go up. I hate the idea of looking at our clients as “broken.” I see this tendency in everyone whose work connects to developmental education, like the basic writing instructors I talk to: They see that their students lack confidence in their writing, that they dislike writing (for school, anyway), and that they mistrust writing teachers, and those qualities are interpreted as “brokenness.” Even though those attitudes have likely been engendered by some thoughtless (or, worse yet, well-meaning) English teacher, writing is not the sum of these students’ lives. They aren’t coming to our writing centers with the same problems that drive people to seek a therapist, a line Murphy seems all too willing to blur, suggesting at one point that we simply substitute “writer” for “client” and “tutor” for “therapist” when applying psychotherapy to the tutorial.

Our writing center clients come to us as highly-functioning, intelligent, capable individuals (they are in college, after all) who need help with their writing, and if we interpret their alienation from writing or even from learning as “brokenness,” we will never understand our clients well enough to help them. I think this is the lesson from Anne DiPardo’s “Whispers of Coming and Going,” which tells the story of a Navajo client, Fannie, and her consultant Morgan’s inability to really get to know her, to step outside of her own preconceived notions of a basic writer/writing center client and see Fannie for who she was.

I much prefer Murphy’s emphasis on the affective component of learning, for “learning is not simply a cognitive process” (97). From my own research on metacognition and self-regulation, I know learning involves much more than thought, and a writing center session involves much more than “a paper”: It involves two people, client and consultant, each of whom brings to the table personal, cultural, linguistic and educational histories that have shaped what Linda Flower calls their “personal theories of writing.” I find DiPardo gives a much more nuanced treatment of the interpersonal dynamics consultants have to navigate: “Often placed on the front lines of efforts to provide respectful, insightful attention to these students’ diverse struggles with academic discourse, writing tutors likewise occupy multiple roles, remaining learners even while emerging as teachers… - a stance existing somewhere along a continuum of detached toughness and warm empathy, and, which like all things ideal, can only be approximated, never definitively located” (101).

In The Everyday Writing Center, the editors (all writing center directors) talk about the value of a “trickster tutor,” one who, like a Hermes or a Loki, thrives in the unstable, shifting environment of the writing center tutorial. As a teacher, I don’t get to be a trickster very often. My emphasis is on curriculum, achieving goals I have established for entire courses and individual class periods, measuring my students’ success against standards I haven’t always determined for myself. As a tutor, I reveled in being a trickster. I had my fair share of frustrating moments, and I don’t pretend that I always “got it right” (whatever that is) with every client. But looking back on my work in the writing center, I see that I learned early on a lesson that DiPardo’s tutor Morgan never did: “More than specific instructional strategies, Morgan needed the conceptual grounding that would allow her to understand that authentic collaborative learning is predicated upon fine-grained insights into individual students” (114).

What I want my writing center consultants to understand is that we are not therapists, but we do have a responsibility to get to our know our clients as people, to have the patience, the interest, the empathy, and just as importantly, the techniques to get past shyness, reticence, apathy, disconnection, even belligerence. We can use the talk in the writing center tutorial to open clients up, to glimpse those individual histories that make this writer who she is. Murphy insists that we must always be warm and genuine; I like DiPardo’s take that we have to parry and joust, attack and retreat, morphing to meet this client where she is at this moment. Being a trickster only works if the trickster understands her moves. Tricksters are reflective. They step back, even in the moment, to evaluate what is happening, why it might be happening, and how it can be effectively addressed. That’s how they know what form to assume. That’s how they learn to approximate an ideal.

DiPardo, Anne. “Whispers of Coming and Going: Lessons from Fannie.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Tutors, 3rd ed. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 100-116.

Geller, Anne, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth Boquet. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Logan Utah State UP, 2007.

Murphy, Christina. “Freud in the Writing Center: The Psychoanalytics of Tutoring Well.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Tutors, 3rd ed. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 95-100.

The Ecology of Writing Centers

This week, as the writing consultants in my tutor training practicum start exploring "the idea of a writing center," we're reading North's seminal essay of that same title. I've spent this summer wondering how, 20 years on from North's essay, the writing center on my campus can still be viewed as the kind of grammar fix-it shop he abhors. This is not a situation unique to my institution, I discovered in conversations with writing center directors from around the country at the 2009 IWCA Summer Institute. Despite being post-modern, post-cognitive, and post-process, composition studies doesn't seem to have had much success making the writing center "the physical locus for the ideas and ideals of college or university or high school commitment to writing" (North 46). We're still proofreaders, and we're still here to serve only "bad" or "developmental" writers.

In rereading North through the lens of ecocomposition, I was struck by his emphasis on place, the "physical locus." It got me thinking that writing centers are an area ripe for ecocomposition theory, because as North argues, "the only composing process that matters in a writing center is 'a' composing process, and it 'belongs' to, is acted out by, only one given writer" (39). North's emphasis on the context-driven, environmentally-situated process consultants deal with in our centers leads me to consider that a revolution in the "idea of a writing center" may take place only when composition studies embraces ecological metaphors for writing and writing instruction.

I want to keep exploring that possibility this semester, but as I prepare to meet my writing consultants for our second class tomorrow afternoon, I have three observations about the ecology of writing centers I want to highlight for them:

1. Writing centers are part of the university ecosystem as well as part of the ecosystem of composition studies as a whole. North points out that how we conceive of and fund our writing centers reflects how writing and writing instruction are viewed by our individual universities. On our campus, the writing center is not part of the English Department; it is operated, funded by, and located in Academic Skills, where the emphasis is on developmental education and remediation. If we look at the ecosystem of this institution, the placement of the writing center in Academic Skills tells us quite a lot about how instructors view writing, writers, and the teaching of writing on this campus (which is so non-selective as to be essentially open-access).

I fear this may become an on-going area of concern in our tutor training course because the English Department (of which I am a member) wants to expand the mission of the writing center here beyond developmental education - and that means changing the "place" of the writing center in the minds of our university faculty and administrators.

2. Each writing center client is part of a larger ecosystem that includes the assignment or text she brings to the session, the instructor of the course in which that text has been assigned, our university campus, the client's previous teachers, her attitude toward writing, etc. Tutoring, Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood tell us, is "contextual" and "individualized": "Tutoring takes place [there's 'place' again] within a number of sociocultural and intepersonal contexts that lend richness and complexity to the tutor's role...If there is any one truth about tutoring, it is that no single method of tutoring, no one approach, will work effectively with every student in every situation" (1).

My writing consultants can't do much about the institutional wrangling currently happening over our writing center's place, but they can promote the kind of center that deals with each individual client in her/his context, not "based on where the student ought to be because she is a freshman or sophomore" but "begin[ning] from where the student is, and mov[ing] where the student moves" (North 39).

3. Writing consultants are part of the ecosystem of writing centers. This connects to my second point: Tutors impact the environment of the writing center by how they deal with each individual client. I want my writing consultants to create the kind of writing center they would like to see on this campus. This doesn't mean rigidly adhering to what they (or I) think a center "should be." It means responding to their clients in context, developing the kind of reflective practice Murphy and Sherwood describe as drawing from the richness of writing center and composition theory:

"As a tutor, you will discover that tutorials are rarely, if ever, exclusively the product of any one paradigm. Instead, they are often a creative, highly individual, mix of approaches, as the needs of the student dictate" (7).

References:
Murphy, Christina and Steve Sherwood. The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 1-24.
North, Stephen. "The Idea of a Writing Center." In Murphy and Sherwood, 32-46.

Leadership at an angle

So I'm about to embark on a new journey this fall semester: I will be teaching the tutor training practicum at my institution, the required course for all undergraduates who want to serve as paid peer tutors in our university's writing center. In some ways, this is a return to my roots; writing center work is what made me passionate about teaching writing in the first place, and honestly, without those hours every week to sit one-on-one with a writer during my first horrifying semester as a graduate teaching assistant, I likely would've thrown in the towel on the whole teaching career entirely. At the very least I would have retreated into something far less pedagogical, like being a professor of medieval literature, where the fact that I was a terrible teacher might have been misconstrued as the fact that I was teaching a difficult, esoteric subject matter.

I'm deeply committed to writing center work, and frankly, I'm concerned by the state of my university's writing center. The center is managed by Academic Skills, and I believe the folks who manage it have the very best of intentions. But the center reaches very few students; those it does reach are generally considered remedial, so despite decades of writing center research and growth, our center is still seen across campus as at best a grammar fix-it shop (and at worst, the last place you want to send your students because they might come away with some totally screwed-up essay that in no way reflects the assignment you gave, and this is considered the tutor's fault). I'm taking a first step toward ameliorating this problem by taking over the tutor training course. My hope is that, as I help the new tutors (writing consultants, as we call them) create a reflective community of practice, I'll gradually assume more influence in the mission of the center, until I'm able to shape it into the kind of place writers of all levels want to come - and a place their professors heartily encourage them to seek out.

But coming at this leadership position from such an angle gives me pause. It feels underhanded, somehow, not like the frank way I've declared myself to be the director of the National Writing Project site we're applying to establish at my university. Although here again, if I really think about it, I still feel like I've approached that position sideways, too: My real reason for wanting an NWP site at my university is because I see ways we can make writing so much more meaningful in the curriculum, at my university and at the elementary and secondary institutions in my area, and because I'm again appalled at the preparation (or lack thereof) for teaching writing at all levels.

So I'm thinking about leadership tonight. And as I'm boning up on my writing center research and theory for this fall's class, I came across a powerful description of leadership in a golden little text titled The Everyday Writing Center, which distinguishes between "structural leaders," who "have a leadership role by virtue of their position within an institution" (10), and "functional leaders - those who assume a leadership role out of a sense of mission, of need, of purpose and who require the participation of others to accomplish this purpose" (11). Without placing a value on either of those leadership roles, the authors go on to argue - and here is the meat of the passage, and this post:

In order for leaders in the post-secondary context to instigate, promote, and effectively sustain institutional transformation, [John] Tagg writes that structural leaders must also be functional leaders who 'will use the authority of their offices to achieve the mission of institutional transformation' (339). He proposes that we move beyond maintenance mode, beyond filling the squares on the organizational chart, and embrace the mantle of institutional leader as well. (11)

I suppose I'm proud to consider myself a functional leader. My interest in writing program administration, whether that be with the first-year writing program or the National Writing Project or our underused writing center, stems from my "sense of mission, of need, of purpose," and I've always recognized that I can't achieve that mission alone - I don't have the unilateral power of a dean, a provost, or a department chair. And I'm pleased that as a move into structural leadership roles, especially with the NWP, I'm going to have the attitude of a functional leader who won't be satisfied with the status quo, who won't be afraid to rock the boat if necessary to achieve real, necessary change.

Some thoughts on being a writer

Sometimes I think the most difficult part of being an English professor is understanding what it means "to be a writer." I'm convinced that 99% of my students do not think of themselves as writers; they don't write poetry or short stories, they write only when forced to for school, so they don't consider the hours they spend blogging, emailing, commenting on YouTube videos, or instant messaging "writing."

The same is also true for my colleagues in the academy, though: Our jobs depend on our writing, yet few of us talk about ourselves as writers. That's a domain held for the creative writing faculty, those who publish poetry and fiction. The rest of us wouldn't dare be so bold as to assume the label "writer," which means, in effect, that we don't consider what we do - whether it's putting together a research prospectus, a grant application, a syllabus, a lesson plan, a course website, an academic article, or a conference presentation - "writing."

This subject is on my mind more than usual because in two short weeks I'm co-directing a scholarly writing institute for 25 of my faculty colleagues. The goal of the institute, to speak concretely, is for participants to produce a text that is ready for publication. That's a tall order for five days, no doubt, although most everyone is coming in with something already written. But my goals for the institute are even loftier: I want the participants to leave the institute valuing their work as writers, seeing the texts they produce as writing, and being committed to the continual cultivation of their craft.

And so, I'm thinking of the advice I want to give to these writers. Here's what I've come up with as I reflect on my experiences as a writer and what has motivated me, since the age of eight, to write nearly every day of my life:

Write everyday, even if it's only for a few minutes.
Write because in the act of writing, I find the words, words I didn't even know were there, inside me.
Write to know that I am still real. I have substance and thought. I have ideas worth writing down.
Write because it is in the writing that the idea lives, not in the thinking of the idea or the imagining of the idea or the best intentions to give life to the idea.
Write, even if it is only for five minutes, because five minutes over and over during a day will add up to hours, and the ideas will multiply with the minutes.
Write because someday I won't be able to, and I'll miss it. Write everyday.

The challenge of teaching to learn

So this week I've been helping to lead a teacher's institute for university faculty who teach in the "core curriculum," a.k.a. general education classes. From moment one of the institute, these two themes have repeated:

1. How do we engage students with learning?
2. How do we make time for active learning while still presenting content?

I see these two problems as linked. Too many of the young teachers I'm working with seem to believe their job is to present information; they see themselves as repositories of knowledge and students as (to borrow Paolo Freire's banking metaphor of education) empty vessels waiting to be filled with that knowledge. I well remember the lectures I sat (suffered?) through as an undergraduate, and it felt to me at the time like some pompous know-it-all showing off everything he knew that I didn't. I certainly wasn't "engaged" with learning in those classes. And even in the classes in which a professor was an entertaining or inspired lecturer, I mostly memorized information for a test - I certainly didn't "learn" it in any way that would have helped me to apply it later in life. (Which is why, after two semesters of college-level plant biology, I still don't know the difference between an oak tree and a maple tree.)

Tomorrow, I'm presenting a session entitled "Teaching Writing (Not Just Assigning It)" to the teachers. My main point? That teaching and learning must take place at the same time. We can shove an entire textbook chapter's worth of information onto a PowerPoint slide and spend 50 minutes (or, for our poor Tuesday/Thursday schedule students, 75 minutes) reading that information to students, pointing out the bits that are likely to show up on the exam. Or, we can structure activities that help students learn how to learn.

For instance, in my first-year writing classes, I used to drive myself crazy figuring out ways to make students read assigned essays so we could discuss and analyze them in class. I tried hard to assign essays I thought students would enjoy - everybody's head comes up off the desk when Michael Moore asks "Why Doesn't GM Sell Crack?" - but even still, I would always get the same one or two people able to answer my questions and provide thoughtful insights, despite the fact that 25 hands would go up when I demanded to know who actually read the assignment.

One day, out of utter frustration, I just told students to open their books (this was 10 minutes into a dead-silent "discussion" of "Letter from a Birmingham Jail") and called upon volunteers to read the essay aloud. As we read, I told students to circle anything that seemed to them like a main point, to put a check-mark beside passages they found especially moving or eloquent, and to place a question-mark over anything that confused them. When we finished reading what they all swore they had read prior to class, I then had them take out a sheet of scratch paper, choose one of their circled passages, and write down first of all the passage and secondly what they thought the passage meant.

For around 10 minutes, the room was quiet as students worked diligently on this exercise. (I worked, too, because hey, Dr. King warrants a second or third or fourth close reading.) And when the pencils stopped moving, we went around the room sharing what we'd identified as main points.

It was like a miracle occurred. Even the most reluctant, arms-folded-over-chest, one-eye-on-the-clock-and-the-other-on-the-door student had something to say. Students argued over the meaning of passages. Without any prompting from me, they started to volunteer the passages that had confused them - which often turned out to be passages a classmate had understood, circled, and clarified for the class.

We repeated this process for a few readings over the next several class periods, and eventually, I started assigning students to complete this type of double-entry journal as homework. What I found was that not every student was willing to put in that kind of time outside of class; some still tried to duck under their desks whenever I asked for volunteers to "discuss the reading." Yet many students - most, I can say - did this work because they found it useful. It helped them to read closely and critically, something they had not been trained to do, something that doesn't come naturally to any of us, something we all had to learn.

My course evaluations from that class convinced me that I needed to keep doing what I was doing even though it meant we spent less time on grammar exercises, rhetorical theory, and the research process, because almost every single student commented that she or he was using those close reading techniques from our class in other courses. To me, the point of a general education is not simply to make a "well-rounded citizen." Let's face it, we can mostly get through our lives just fine without knowing the history of Western civilization (or the rhetorical appeals to logos, pathos and ethos, to point a finger at my own self-important discipline). But learning how to learn - how, without the guidance of a teacher or a tutor, to dig into a complicated text or tear apart a complex idea and really grasp it - that's a crucial skill. That's something worth going to college to learn.

Of course, the challenge of teaching so that students can learn is, in the first place, convincing university administrators (and on down the chain high school, middle school and elementary school administrators) that curriculum can't be so jam-packed that all teachers feel able to do is shove facts down students' throats, hoping they can hold at least a fraction of it in long enough to spit it back out on an exam. The goal of education has to be helping students become self-directed, critical thinkers, which leads me to the second part of this challenge: Teachers who understand that teaching is about learning, not about content, should be the ones setting the curriculum.

True educational reform in this country doesn't require new legislation. It requires an understanding of what education really is, at bottom. I hope tomorrow I can offer my fellow teachers some tips and tools for teaching "writing to learn," but more importantly, I hope I can persuade them that, as a wise colleague of mine said, if a student doesn't really learn, then the teacher didn't really teach.

Last Day of English 100 (a teaching poem)

I tuck the fat brown envelope with the carefully-typed instructions
into my bag bulging with textbook, gradebook, notebook,
manila folder containing instructions for the final portfolio.

Reflect, I say, that's what I'm looking for, that you know yourself,
and seven blank faces stare back at me. Seven
out of ten who held out almost until this, the last day. Seven

Out of twenty-five who started the term. Six were lost
in the first four weeks, before the first essay was due,
another half-dozen or so when midterm grades came down and they saw

no hope of making the necessary C. Two I lost just last week,
telling them no, not even with an A on the portfolio can you pass,
and both asked, Are you teaching this class again in the fall?

I don't know whether to be flattered or heart-broken.

Seven out of twenty-five, that's all I've kept for sixteen weeks;
I am left with seven faces gazing suspiciously at me and this word - reflect -
on the board, silent, heavy, stark.

I'm not trying to trick you, I say, have I tried to trick you all semester?
No, they agree, but still don't seem to understand
this word, reflect, this ability to make knowledge out of themselves,

to have something worth saying they didn't read in the textbook
and to be asked not to SAY it to but to WRITE it in two hours -
How long do you want this to be, Miss? How many pages?

Whatever is in you, I think, while silently I take the fat brown envelope out
and tell them, Now it's your chance to evaluate me,
and they clamor to tell me again how much they have learned

before I can ask them to write a single word.

Saving English Studies education: Teachers at the center

[My apologies for being so long away - nearly a month! Hopefully this post will explain some of what I've been up to.]

Starting with the fall 2008 presidential election, we've heard a lot about the need for education reform in this country. I certainly see some major hurdles ahead for the future of English education, at the elementary, high school, and college/university level. But I'm convinced that we don't need another national initiative to overhaul our school systems. Instead, what we need to do is change the way we teach teachers to teach.

As Assistant Director of Composition at a four-year university, the majority of my administrative work requires me to work with English teachers on their teaching. I observe adjunct faculty teaching first-year writing at the university, collaborate with these and tenure-line faculty to plan and revise writing curriculum, and design workshops for our writing faculty. I also work with secondary instructors who teach advanced placement English courses students can take in our area high schools to bypass one semester of first-year writing. This is the work I love to do. It's what I cut my teeth on at my alma mater, SIU, as an Instructional Assistant mentoring, observing, and training new graduate assistants (the ranks of the unprepared, underpaid writing teachers common to most research institutions in the US).

But I haven't enjoyed the success I wanted in this position because I haven't put teachers at the center. I suppose it goes back to my training (or lack thereof) in teaching writing: I took a graduate-level pedagogy course wherein a wonderfully knowledgeable professor told me what to do; I was observed by a more experienced graduate assistant who told me what (not) to do; I read comp theory and literary criticism, took classes in the history and theory of rhetoric, all of which assumed that I, despite an ever-growing classroom experience to draw upon, had nothing to bring to the conversation. What could a teacher possibly have to teach anyone else about teaching?

In my early teaching days, I remember camping out on Friday nights in my crowded, cluttered communal office with at least eight other GAs talking about what we were doing in our first-year writing classes that next week. We'd Xerox somebody's super-cool worksheet on untangling fused sentences, or design assignments that couldn't be easily plagiarised off the Internet, or come up with discussion questions to get students beyond the surface of Malcolm X's "Homemade Education." I learned a great deal in my pedagogy course and from my GA mentor, don't mistake me. But I learned more in these informal late-night "survival sessions," as my friend Katie called them, because instead of somebody telling me what to do, I was talking with other teachers about what worked, what didn't, what might work, and why it might be good for some students but not others.

Once I became the Instructional Assistant, though, and certainly once I was touched by the magic academic wand and became an Assistant Professor With a PhD, I was suddenly seen (even by myself) as the only one in the room with something to offer. I was convinced that my job was to bestow my knowledge and experience upon other teachers, most of whom didn't share my PhD and therefore couldn't have much worthwhile to say on the subject of teaching (even if they'd been in front of a classroom since before I started junior high).

The result? A lot of fed-up teachers who don't see the point in my so-called "workshops" 0 and rightfully so, since they probably have two excellent ideas for my every adequate one. Unfortunately, I never asked them to share these, so all anybody got to hear was me.

Luckily, I've learned my lesson, and I have some ideas for next year to ensure that I respect - and draw upon - what the wonderful teachers I'm so fortunate to work with can teach me and everyone else about the art of teaching writing. More importantly, I've decided to take my mission to the masses: I'm working to organize a National Writing Project site at my university.

The NWP is all about teachers teaching each other, at inservice programs and summer institutes; it's the bedrock of the program, beautifully articulated by James Gray in Teachers at the Center: "There were great classroom teachers in the schools who knew how to teach writing; they knew what they were doing and why they were doing it...and...they would teach one another their best practices. In the process, they would learn how to teach other teachers and then go out and do it. It would be a teacher-centered model" (35).

We hear a lot of bemoaning these days about the state of education in the US. I've been guilty of the "blame game": Our college writing classes could be more effective if high school teachers just did a better job preparing students; our high school teachers don't do a good job because our education programs in college aren't preparing people to teach writing. It's easy to place blame. It's a lot harder - yet far more worthwhile - to tackle the problem head-on, to say that teaching is not a solitary game where every teacher is alone in her/his classroom, trying desperately to keep her/his above water - or enjoying phenomenonal successes no one else ever knows about or can replicate. Rather, teaching is a communal venture that puts successful teachers in charge of teaching other teachers.

In this teacher-centered model, our classroom experiences are the foundation for better teaching - not by prescribing how other people should teach, but by interrogating our practices, considering why they work for our students (and why they might not work for others), and offering those successful strategies to other teachers who can try them out and report back on their successes (and failures). I believe that if we want to really improve education in this country, especially the teaching of reading and writing, then we have to put teachers back at the center, where they've too often been shoved aside by concerns about high-stakes testing, remedial education, and standard curricula.

Students are the heart of a classroom, no doubt. But teachers must be at the center - of curriculum development, of teacher education, and of education reform. No Child Left Behind and other well-intentioned movements have made the fatal error of casting teachers aside. I'm not saying we should all be left alone to do as we please in our classrooms. Quite the contrary. I'm saying if we really want a dynamic, innovative English Studies curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels - the kind of curriculum that will keep our students at the forefront of language and learning - then we have to put teachers in charge of what gets taught and support those efforts with meaningful, collaborative, local ventures that bring together the wonderfully creative, student-centered pedagogies that already exist.