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.