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.