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.