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.