Where Do We Go From Here?

I hope everyone enjoys the Buffy, the Vampire Slayer reference of this post's title. The song is now running through my head.

While I don't foresee my tutors-in-training and I joining hands and bursting into song (and if you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out Once More With Feeling), I do find myself considering the future of our writing center. I've been working this week on an article about my experience teaching the tutor training course, reflecting on the lessons I've learned - most of them the hard way - about putting into practice the collaboration we aspire to in the writing center. We still have a long, uphill road for successful institutional collaboration here at our writing center, and certainly the 6% cut to the higher education budget in the state of Indiana won't help. But I feel like we've started down a good path this semester. And I'm thinking about ways we can keep moving in the right direction.

In the latest issue of The Writing Center Journal, Nancy Grimm describes her writing center's evolution into a place of "productive and flexible engagement with linguistic, social, racial, and cultural diversity" (15), a place recognized and financially supported by a corporate sponsor for its emphasis on the diversity that matters most in the modern, global workforce. Grimm writes:

"In fact, all of us, the old-timers like myself as well as the novice coaches, were learning and changing in this environment and fundamentally shifting our focus from an academic skills/writing process version of literacy to a consideration of epistemologies, power relations, identities, and ideologies that circulate in different discourses...The current version of the writing center I describe here developed from a process of asking questions about clientele, staffing, and institutional identity along with a willingness to question foundational assumptions that typically guide writing center practices." (16)

To end this semester's blog posts, I want to recap Grimm's three "frameworks" for modern, diverse writing centers. I hope my tutors-in-training will consider ways they can help our writing center progress in these directions, in terms of faculty education, marketing of the writing center, tutor recruitment, and tutor training.

1. Global Englishes: Grimm doesn't argue that writing centers should stop working with English as a primary language, but she does argue that writing centers need to promote "multilingualism rather than monolingualism as a conceptual norm" (17). I think of my tutors struggling with concerns about what professors would say to their ESL clients if their papers didn't read exactly like an NES student's; I remember Crystal's very pointed question: "How much can we expect professors to really change?"

I think Grimm offers us an intelligent way to address this problem by putting it in terms of the world's work: "The challenges encountered in today's workplaces often result from strained communication between people from diverse cultures, disciplines, languages, backgrounds, and perspectives...[Professionals] make connections across cultures and train themselves to listen harder because people's lives depend on it. That's the reality of globalized work, not the theme-park fantasy of multicultural menus, music, and costumes" (19).

Writing centers can and should hire tutors with diverse linguistic backgrounds, even if, as Grimm says, those tutors haven't always made As in English. Tutors need to be trained in the latest SLA theory, and they need to critique the culture of monolingualism that pervades the academy. Writing center directors need to recruit linguistically, culturally, and racially diverse tutors, and we need to educate university administrators and our faculty colleagues in the importance of respect for linguistic diversity.

2. Multiliteracy. Quoting the New London Group, an international literacy scholarship consortium, Grimm writes: "[T]here can no longer be one set of standards or skills that constitutes the ends of literacy learning. In fact, within a multiliteracies framework, there can no longer be an end of literacy learning but rather an ongoing effort to navigate a multiplicity of discourses" (20).

In the context of a multiliterate society, the students who need writing centers may no longer be those seen as "deficient" in academic discourse. Even those students we traditionally consider "good writers" will likely need help composing multimodal and multigenre texts, working with unfamiliar software, researching in digital forums, publishing in online communities, and communicating across cultures and languages. Writing centers that promote multiliteracy are no longer dealing only with basic writing or first-year writing students upset over a bad grade and looking for somebody to explain the rules of comma usage; multiliteracy writing centers offer assistance to students across the curriculum, at all grade levels, which means we need to market our writing centers to these students, remove the stigma of remediation and the conception of the grammar fix-it-shop all too often attached to writing centers, and train writing tutors to work with multiliteracies.

3. Designers of Social Futures. I find Grimm's third and final framework the most exciting for writing center work: "The New London Group...introduce[s] the notion that literacy education is not about having students learn to reproduce and recognize available designs but about having students enact the transformative possibilities in design. Within this conception of literacy education, students are not simply passive bearers of culture but...are understood as participating in social transformation. They are not waiting on the sidelines for adulthood and/or an institutional certification of having mastered a dominant literacy" (21-22).

This excites me because it is exactly the way I like to look at students - as active agents in their own intellectual, professional, and cultural development, not as empty vessels waiting to be filled or unmolded clay waiting to be shaped - and because it bodes well for our university's writing center. I have often lamented (as I have my tutors-in-training) that our writing center is primarily run by the tutors. But Grimm's framework puts a different spin on that set-up. If students are designers of social futures, and if writing centers exist to place peers (tutor/client) in conversation about writers and about writing, then who better to design a writing center for the future than our tutors?

That last point doesn't let writing center directors off the hook, of course. But one thing I have learned this semester is that my passion, my vision, and my dedication are not enough. Nor should they be. Wherever we go from here (and this again is a lesson from Grimm, taking her lesson from Toni Morrison), we can only get there together.

Grimm, Nancy. "New Conceptual Frameworks for Writing Center Work." The Writing Center Journal 29.2 (2009): 11-27. Print.