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