Vol 9, No 1 (2011): Raising the Institutional Profile of Writing Center Work (part 2)

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9.1 (2011): RAISING THE INSTITUTIONAL PROFILE OF WRITING CENTER WORK

FROM THE EDITOR – PRAXIS LAUNCHES PEER REVIEW JOURNAL

Andrea Saathoff Managing Editor, Praxis [email protected]

Praxis is proud to announce the first issue as a peer-reviewed journal. The transition has been a lengthy process with plenty of hard work from everyone involved. The ability for Praxis to evolve into a peer-reviewed journal stands on the shoulders of years of hard work since Praxis began in the Fall of 2003. Rich history lives within the articles and columns published and they are still available on the vintage Praxis website.

We would like to thank the individuals who graciously agreed to join the Praxis National Review Board. The reviewers lent invaluable insight and constructive feedback to both authors and editors. Praxis would like to extend appreciation to the talented writers who submitted articles to be considered for publication. We received many strong papers and the final selections were not easy decisions to make with such a competitive field. Praxis would like to thank the Undergraduate Writing Center administration team and consultants who helped with every step of the transition to peer-review, and publishing the journal from start to finish. Additionally, the Liberal Arts ITS department at UT was invaluable with designing and navigating the technical components of the new Praxis website. Finally, I would personally like to extend an enormous amount of gratitude to Peg Syverson, Alice Batt, Vincent Lozano, and Tony Fassi for their vision of what Praxis could be and for supporting me as a first-time managing editor. This journal could not be published without a team effort!

The current issue, “From Triage to Outreach: Raising the Institutional Profile of Writing-Center Work,” is the second of a two-part series; the previous issue garnered so much attention that Praxis chose to continue the theme. The Focus Articles in this issue reflect upon the concept and role of writing centers’ institutional profile from a variety of settings. The

talented authors who chose to showcase their work in Praxis contribute creative and inspiring work, including anecdotal, personal, and research driven articles. We invite our readers to supply comments or reactions as they read the thought provoking Focus Articles, Columns, and Reviews of this new issue of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 1 (2012)

SUPPORTING STUDENT-ATHLETES Alanna Bitzel

UT Intercollegiate Athletics

[email protected]

Introduction I did not know what to expect when I started

working at the Football Academics Center (hereafter referred to as the “Center”) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) as a part-time tutor in 2009 even though I was not new to the academic center world, having worked at the Undergraduate Writing Center (UWC)1 for six years beforehand. As an undergraduate and graduate student at UT Austin, I had heard stereotypes surrounding student-athletes (e.g., student-athletes are not interested in academics, student-athletes do not work hard at academics) and rumors of the advantages they receive, including that tutors or mentors are “fix-it” people who make academic miracles happen. What I learned upon starting work at the Center is that the reality is quite different and that such stereotypes, as is the case with all stereotypes, about student-athletes do not patently apply. This piece aims to situate the Football Academics Center within the writing center community by describing the Center, the unique population we serve, and the strategies we use to support student-athlete writing.

About the Football Academics Center The Center serves a very specific population—UT

student-athletes. The students with whom we work are part of the larger team comprised of the 51,000 students at UT. They may be bigger in some cases than the average college student, but they are still young adults in their late teens and early twenties, attempting to navigate college life at a large and complex university.

Our Center is part of a community of centers at UT Austin that support students’ academic endeavors. Some of these centers are open to all university students: the Sanger Learning and Career Center2 as

well as the UWC. The Peter T. Flawn Academic Center “offer[s] flexible study spaces, multimedia services, and upgraded computer labs . . . designed to support the academic and research goals of the entire campus community.”3 Other centers work with specific populations within UT. For example, the LBJ School of Public Affairs offers a writing center for the graduate students enrolled in its school.4

Writing centers serve as refuges for students to develop their writing in accepting, supportive, and confidential spaces. So too is the Center a refuge for UT's student athletes—they come to the Center to get away from the public’s attention and focus on their studies. The Center focuses on the academic (and to some extent the personal) side, the less visible side of our student-athletes, and so it is not very visible at UT. It is removed from and not accessible to the rest of campus, emphasizing that at least one part of the student-athletes’ lives is not available for perusal.

Student-Athlete Demands The students with whom we work have athletic

demands (i.e., football) and goals (e.g., contributing to a winning football team) that often compete with their academic ones. Our students are busy, very busy, often starting and ending their days when it is dark outside. They divide their days among various tasks— weightlifting and training sessions, classes, practices, games, travel, and academic work—and they do their best to deal with that busy-ness.

To be sure, having various demands is true of all students. Students balance work, family, extracurricular activities, and social obligations, making it difficult for them to focus on academics all the time. The demands on our guys’ time are distinct in the sense that they result in students’ faces appearing on the front page of multiple newspapers and in a variety of media outlets and in students playing in front of

Supporting Student-Athletes • 2

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 1 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu

hopeful fans every week. Their time in the spotlight may be greater now that UT has a 24-hour television network, called the Longhorn Network, affiliated with ESPN that is devoted to covering University events, including intercollegiate athletics.

Ensuring Academic Integrity I developed a firm belief in non-directive and

non-evaluative writing center pedagogies, in the importance of providing students with strategies for navigating the writing process and improving their own writing, during my time at the UWC. I brought these beliefs with me to the Center. But even beyond my personal commitment to writing center principles, the Center must adhere not only to University policies on plagiarism, collusion, and scholastic responsibility5 but must also comply with NCAA rules6 that prohibit student-athletes from receiving extra benefits (for example in the form of too much assistance from a writing tutor) that other students do not receive.

If student-athletes are unable to maintain certain grades and grade point averages, they may lose athletic scholarships that allow them to afford higher education, or they may not be able to play. The pressure to achieve a certain academic standing may tempt student-athletes, just as it may tempt students in the larger university population, to commit academic dishonesty, such as plagiarism or collusion, especially given their time constraints. University and NCAA policies remind students of their commitment to high academic standards, no matter what stressors or pressures they may experience, and emphasize student accountability and responsibility.

Such policies exist in part to respond to the high-stakes situations in which student-athletes find themselves. They bump up against the triage model of writing centers and strictly specify that our Center is not and cannot be a writing hospital. Academic centers are able to exist on campuses because they uphold high ethical standards and follow rigorous conduct when working with students.

Strategies for Working with Student-Athletes

In working with students on writing, we often informally refer to the students at the Center as “guys,” as they are all male, and we see the same group of students on a daily or weekly basis. Unlike at other academic centers, the population with whom we work is a constant during the year, not changing until a new group of student-athletes begins their first years at UT. However, like our fellow writing center practitioners, to assist these students in tackling their academic obligations, our tutors and mentors have an arsenal of strategies, ones that we in the writing center world typically use but have tailored to working with student-athletes. I describe some key strategies below: We create agendas for each session At many academic or writing centers, when a student comes in for assistance, he wants to work on a particular assignment or cover the material for one class. He will meet only with the tutor or consultant and then be on his way. When the guys come into the Center, they have various assignments for several classes, and they may need to divide their time among different tutors and mentors. This time pressure is felt not only by students but by the tutors and mentors at the Center who recognize that they have a limited period with the guys and may need to work with others tutors or mentors on apportioning that time. Prioritizing, discussing what is feasible during a session, and creating action plans are critical when tutors and mentors work with a student. We are emotionally sensitive Our tutors and mentors must motivate and get students on task to do productive work, often after the guys have engaged in football-related activities. Emotions on the field can carry over and impact work and vice versa. We take the time to check in with our guys, acknowledge the stresses and feelings that they may be carrying, and help put them in a positive headspace for their studies. Since we see the guys at the Center on a regular basis, our tutors and mentors are able to develop rapports and relationships of trusts with students that facilitate such conversations. Although we want students to become comfortable with tutors and mentors, our staff helps to prevent a



student from becoming dependent on any one person by advising students working on writing to meet with different writing tutors to mitigate risks of dependency. We modify our approach to respond to different learning styles Many of the guys with whom we work do best with active approaches to learning, so we use hands-on strategies and multi-modal strategies with them; making learning as active as possible can assist students with switching gears from practice, where they are so physically involved, to academics. Writing is a process It can be frustrating for our guys to work on writing because it is time-consuming, and time is a scarce resource. Tutors and mentors advise the guys to start their work early and stick to agendas, to not procrastinate or allow work to pile up. They also, when appropriate for the class and assignment, encourage the guys when possible to write on topics about which they feel passionate. For some students, this means writing about sports-related topics or controversies. However, not all of our student-athletes connect with such an approach, and we instead engage with their unique interests—service work in the community, creative writing, music, or leadership issues. The key, as in any writing center, is to meet each student where he is and tailor our approach to his distinct personality and needs. We hold students responsible When a student is also an athlete, a very real consequence of his not doing well academically could mean that he cannot play his sport. Regardless, tutors and mentors must actively resist acting as those “fix-it” folk and delineate boundaries for students. It may be hard, especially since the guys have much to do in a limited amount of time, but our goal is to improve the student (the writer), not a particular assignment (the writing).

Conclusion Unlike many other academic centers, our goal at

the Center is not to attract a larger clientele or to

address writing in the larger community; we exist to respond to the needs of a particular population and encounter unique challenges in doing so. But, like other academic centers, we share concerns that other writing and academic centers face. We work, through staff training and clear communication to students about our roles, to ensure that the services we provide are student-centered, high-quality, and ethically responsible. We may not be the most public of our fellow UT centers, but we serve an important role at the University and are diligently contributing to the goals of the writing center community at large. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Notes 1. The Undergraduate Writing Center. Department of Rhetoric and Writing – The University of Texas at Austin, n.d. Web. 15 Aug. 2011. 2. The Sanger Learning and Career Center. Division of Student Affairs – The University of Texas at Austin, 2011. Web. 15 Aug. 2011. 3. Peter T. Flawn Academic Center. Information Technology Services – The University of Texas at Austin, 2011. Web. 15 Aug. 2011. 4. LBJ School of Public Affairs Graduate Writing Center. Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs – The University of Texas at Austin, 2011. Web. 15 Aug. 2011. 5. Student Judicial Services. The Office of the Dean of Students – The University of Texas at Austin, 2010. Web. 15 Aug. 2011. 6. Athletics Compliance Services. Athletics Department – The University of Texas at Austin, 2011. Web. 15 Aug. 2011.

Works Cited Athletics Compliance Services. Athletics Department – The

University of Texas at Austin, 2011. Web. 15 Aug. 2011.

LBJ School of Public Affairs Graduate Writing Center. Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs – The University of Texas at Austin, 2011. Web. 15 Aug. 2011.

Peter T. Flawn Academic Center. Information Technology Services – The University of Texas at Austin, 2011. Web. 15 Aug. 2011.



!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Student Judicial Services. The Office of the Dean of Students –

The University of Texas at Austin, 2010. Web. 15 Aug. 2011.

The Sanger Learning and Career Center. Division of Student Affairs – The University of Texas at Austin, 2011. Web. 15 Aug. 2011.

The Undergraduate Writing Center. Department of Rhetoric and Writing – The University of Texas at Austin, n.d. Web. 15 Aug. 2011.


AS EFFECTIVE AS ASPIRIN OR DARK CHOCOLATE: THE WRITING CENTER AS

PREVENTATIVE MEDICINE Jenn Q. Goddu

Queens University of Charlotte [email protected]

In the fight against heart disease, the popular

media regularly report that an ounce of prevention—an aspirin a day, for example, or a piece of dark chocolate—goes a long way. The preventative approach applies equally well in the fight against underdeveloped writing skills among college students: the earlier inexperienced writers seek help, the better off they are likely to be. However, the medicinal value of a visit to the Writing Center is woefully under-reported.

Students and faculty tend to view the campus-writing center as a hospital, a place where specialists are expected to “make things better” (Pemberton 14). Yet, we in the writing center prefer helping to make writers themselves better. As part of ongoing efforts at Queens University of Charlotte to counter misperceptions of our Writing Center as solely a “fix-it shop” (North 35), we have endeavored to raise our profile as a preventative-medicine provider.

Our oft-repeated message to students and faculty focuses on providing “friendly feedback at any stage in the ongoing process of writing” (“Writing Center”). Yet, following writing center maven Muriel Harris’s proposal to use positive “sticky prose” to foster awareness of the center’s benefits is not always enough (49). Sharing this message at student and faculty orientation events, in classroom presentations, and in our internal and external communications to students, faculty, and staff does not guarantee understanding.

To help give the message traction, we have begun cultivating relationships with faculty encouraging them to involve our Writing Center in their students’ composition process. We already enjoy strong support from many in the English department, where the composition courses are readily employing group peer review and encouraging awareness of writing as a recursive process. So, we instead have turned our attention to communications, history, psychology,

anthropology, and sociology faculty to offer our services to their students in a group setting.

Before faculty members set their syllabi for an upcoming semester, I make contact by email outlining the advantage to students of working with our Writing Center tutors early in the writing process. I reiterate this pitch often, verbally, when I have an opportunity in the campus cafeteria or while attending faculty development luncheons.

I propose faculty work with us to schedule group sessions in the Writing Center. They might encourage their students to join tutor-led brainstorming sessions soon after assigning a paper so that tutors can help students work together to identify targeted approaches to their topics. Alternatively, we might work with the students a little later in the assignment cycle, but before drafts are due, to outline papers. For one course, we helped students differentiate between summarizing and evaluating sources through guided discussion and compare/contrast writing activities. In another instance, which also demonstrated the mobility of Writing Center services, a peer tutor attended class on a day introducing the library’s database search tools. The tutor helped students decide how to frame and focus search queries and research questions.

Inviting students to the Center as a group for a session endorsed by faculty and arranged specifically to meet the needs of the students in that course at that moment has many benefits. (The only drawback, really, is the scheduling headache of trying to find mutually agreeable times for student groups and tutors to meet—cause to take the aspirin or chocolate mentioned earlier.) The group setting makes the visit to the Center less intimidating—students are with friends, or at least classmates, when they first venture in. They don’t feel singled out for special help because they see faculty members encouraging every student to

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benefit from our services. As a result, we gain access to an entire class of students. If at least a few of them observe that they now have a better grasp of the assignment, greater confidence in their ability to write a paper, or a stronger sense of what they want to say, then the effort is a success. A positive experience with a Writing Center tutor, in the unintimidating group setting, also helps elicit individual visits by students on their own, even when unprompted by their professors. After a group session, a student not only realizes what help the Writing Center can offer early on in writing an assignment, but the student also has a familiar, friendly face to look for when seeking individual assistance.

This group tutoring initiative also raises the center’s exposure among faculty members. For instance, faculty members who haven’t incorporated our services into their students’ writing assignments have still shown greater interest in what we do after receiving my proposal. For example, simply reaching out to suggest group tutoring led to invitations to meet individually with two history professors, esteemed members of the Queens community. We met to discuss how they might better evaluate student writing and address specific writing concerns. One of these distinguished professors later attended a Writing Center workshop on APA style and was enthusiastic about its usefulness. The other began requiring weekly Writing Center assistance for several students. These connections began with the invitation to tailor a writing initiative to the needs of the professors’ students.

The tutors benefit as well. Knowing that they had not been trained in group-tutoring when I launched the initiative, I incorporated a new assignment into our Level Two Training program under the College Reading and Learning Association. Returning tutors research group tutoring in general, then provide me with bulleted action plans applying their research. This individual study project refines their knowledge of tutoring, broadens their awareness of relevant resources available online and in the library, and enables them to apply the concepts they’ve researched. At the same time, it provides the Writing Center, with a resource library for group tutors.

The tutors also respond favorably to working in a group environment. They welcome the opportunity to do something different, interact with students before the “my paper’s due in an hour” stage of the writing process, and help students work together as a group to come up with ideas for approaching their assignments. One tutor noted, “As paradoxical as it might sound, I often find that group sessions better provoke self-teaching and self-learning. Instead of providing some of the background to a given problem, I will silence myself and let the other members of the group answer the question” (Johnson). Stepping back and enabling the students to self-learn and think aloud in a group leads to better learning and will likely result in improved classroom dynamics.

Even though students might not self-select for group tutoring, if they are prompted while here to take ownership of the discussion and to work together collaboratively with tutors acting only as guides, their wariness or resentment may diminish. After all, their peers are doing it—and benefiting—so why not join in and get something from the experience too?

Alaina Feltenberger and Allison Carr favor the physical therapist as a fitting medical metaphor for the writing center consultant, as “over time, consultants can help clients learn to stand on their own” (“Framing Versatility”). Yet a patient typically visits a physical therapist only after a diagnosis of injury. If we wait for students to receive such diagnoses from faculty or to self-diagnose their own writing maladies, we are doing nothing to combat the negative perception of the Writing Center as merely a place where writing gets fixed. Instead, a more proactive approach of working with students early on, empowering them to generate ideas they can be excited about pursuing, and helping them to visualize alternative ways of organizing their material, helps alter the proofreading shop perception. Our aim, of course, is not to prevent students from coming to our Writing Center with papers later on, but rather to emphasize the added benefit of early assistance in generating and organizing ideas.

These efforts are in their early stages at Queens, but the prognosis thus far is good. Group sessions early in the writing process benefit both students and

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tutors, while raising Writing Center awareness overall. We hope this initiative proves an effective inoculation against writing center misperceptions on campus, helping to spread the word of our tutors’ good work in helping students become better writers.

Works Cited Feltenberger, Alaina, and Allison Carr. “Framing Versatility

as a Positive: Building Institutional Validity at The University of Colorado at Boulder's Writing Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 8.2 (2010): n.pag. Web. 3 Aug. 2010.

Harris, Muriel. “Making Our Institutional Discourse Sticky: Suggestions for Effective Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal. 30. 2 (2010): 47-71. Print.

Johnson Jr., Matthew J. Letter to the author. 1 Dec. 2010. TS.

North, Peter. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. 3rd ed. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 32-46. Print.

Pemberton, Michael A. "The Prison, the Hospital, and the Madhouse: Redefining Metaphors for the Writing Center." Writing Lab Newsletter 17.1 (1992): 11-16. Web. 10 Aug. 2010.

Writing Center. The Center for Academic Success. Queens University of Charlotte, n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2010.


SOMETIMES IT’S OKAY TO MEDDLE: OR, HOW TO ENCOURAGE FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS TO VISIT THE WRITING CENTER

Valerie Pexton University of Wyoming [email protected]

When I was a kid, I loved the original Star Trek.

Every time I heard “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” I got goosebumps. As I got older, besides realizing the ungrammatical nature of the construction (and the inherent sexism behind it), I began thinking about some of the show’s chief plot points; namely, the United Federation of Planets’ altruistic “Prime Directive” which prohibited interference with other civilizations. This directive, supposedly ironclad, was consistently violated by the Enterprise crew and usually on Captain Kirk’s orders. However, most of the violations were well intentioned and generally resulted in a positive outcome for whatever group of aliens was the object of the Enterprise’s meddling. This tendency of course only reinforced Kirk’s unstated philosophy that interfering in others’ affairs is sometimes the best way to get things done.

What do Star Trek, the Federation’s Prime Directive, or Captain Kirk have to do with writing centers? At the University of Wyoming’s Writing Center, where I have worked for the last ten years, it has become increasingly evident that one group could use a bit of meddling in their affairs—namely first-year students. While our surveys show that the need for writing center assistance remains steady, visits to our center by first-years have decreased by more than 25 percent over the last two years of available data. First-year enrollment fluctuated very little during this same time span and the course for which a large percentage of our students seek help, Freshman Composition, actually increased its offerings each semester. The decrease in visits we’ve witnessed, then, seems to be the result of choice or lack of knowledge about services, neither of which is something Captain Kirk would have accepted.

The reasons first-year students, especially those coming right out of high school, don’t come to our writing center for help are fairly well-known: they struggle to adjust to the pace of college coursework and often wait too long to get help; they think of extra help as something akin to special ed; they aren’t used to finding resources on their own and don’t always follow up on the information they do get; they don’t manage their time well and are unable to get to the Writing Center during open hours. This last reason is especially relevant to our center. Due to funding and staffing constraints, we are not open at night or on weekends—times students have strongly indicated they’d like to have available. However, even with all of these reasons in play, the decrease in first-year visits isn’t fully explained.

There are some trends on our campus I believe help explain the situation. First, the number of international students has greatly increased over the last several years. Between spring 2008 and spring 2010, there was a massive 43% increase in the number of international students attending the University of Wyoming. Secondly, the university has experienced a marked increase in students taking outreach courses (“Student Enrollment Continues to Grow at UW”). These two developments have had a significant impact on our operation. International students, unlike first-years, are very good at finding and using resources and outreach students make good use of the Online Writing Lab we provide. The increase in these two groups has inevitably led to an increase in appointments made, but we are unable to increase the number of available appointment slots. We are open Monday-Friday, 9:00 am-4:00 pm and have, at most, two people working at a time providing the traditional 30-minute session. This means we can serve roughly

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20 students per day. We are unable to accommodate walk-ins except for the very beginning of a semester when students haven’t yet begun to make appointments. By the second week of any given semester, our appointment book is full, and it stays that way for the rest of the term. First years often find themselves looking at an appointment book with no empty spaces. While it is impossible to know for sure, it appears that once these students cannot immediately get an appointment, they simply give up. Our center is consistently busy, and therefore successful, but in a strange way our students are suffering because of this success.

The question is this: if we are not serving everyone that could benefit from using the writing center, are we truly successful? If first-year students don’t make use of our services in the “traditional” way (making an appointment), then do we just follow our own Prime Directive and leave them alone? In response to our findings, we had to rethink how we reach out to students, especially first-years who need more encouragement than other groups. To reach these students, we had to widen our approach beyond the 30-minute, make-an-appointment model, and do so without an increase in budget or staff.

In the spring of 2009, I channeled my inner Captain Kirk and decided our decrease in first-year visits warranted some meddling. A few months later, we started a new program specifically for the Freshmen Composition students. Since the appointment system was not working, we opened up a three-hour block of time one afternoon a week just for these students. Our decision to focus on Freshmen Composition was purely practical. In three hours, with what we assumed would be a large group, there was simply no way only two or three consultants would be able to handle a wide variety of writing projects. All Freshman Composition classes at UW follow the same syllabus, so we knew we’d be able to focus on one type of writing each week. Because the classes are taught solely in the English department, informing instructors and students of the new program would be fairly simple. For the first semester, we visited almost every composition class with a presentation about the program, which we dubbed “Wednesday Writing

Workshop.” Our public relations blitz put a face to the program and forced students to feel specifically invited to come to the center. For the first two weeks, we didn’t have much business, but as the semester progressed, we got busy. One day during workshop we helped twenty-four students!

Our workshop model has little resemblance to the traditional one-on-one appointment. Students may come in at any time during the three-hour block; they may come in groups or alone, and they may stay for as little or as much time as they like. Obviously, when we have a large number of students in the room, we can’t engage in the traditional one-on-one session, so we have devised a different system. When students enter, one of the consultants greets them, asks them to sign in, and then assigns them to a group working on the same issues as the student—thesis statement, developing ideas, paragraphing, etc. Our consultants then “work the room,” moving from table to table, sitting down with a student for a few minutes at a time, offering suggestions and often giving mini assignments. For example, after talking to a student for a few minutes about his/her thesis statement, I might say, “Okay, now that you have a thesis you like, make a list of five reasons that support that thesis and I’ll be back in ten minutes.” We also encourage students to help one another and to discuss what they are working on while we are away from their table. What we’ve observed so far is that students quickly adapt to being of a writing community and even learn they can become better writers by discussing their ideas with others. When they are left on their own for a few minutes, we see them becoming better problem solvers, and they are secure in the knowledge there is an “expert” in the room if they get stuck.

During that first semester, we recorded 90 visits by Freshmen Composition students. Spring 2010 showed 61 visits, and fall 2010, 108 visits. Our workshop has become a writing studio for many students. They bring their laptops, find their favorite chair or corner, and they just write. Sometimes they ask for assistance, but often they come in to work on their own. Students like having a quiet place where they can concentrate on their writing and feel more comfortable knowing assistance is available if needed.

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Many pencil our workshop into their schedules. Another positive, not directly related to writing, is that students become better at planning ahead, whether that means starting a writing project earlier, or getting the help they need, when they need it.

We continue to try different formats, schedules, and days of the week to increase participation. Ultimately, we would like to expand beyond composition students; it is important to find ways to invite all first-years into the Writing Center, no matter what the writing project. If the invitation means some slight meddling, then Captain Kirk was right: it is simply what we have to do. In order to affect the best outcome, sometimes the best strategy is to interfere.

Work Cited “Student Enrollment Continues to Grow at UW.” University

of Wyoming. University of Wyoming, 4 Mar. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2011.


PRIVATE WRITING, PUBLIC DELIVERY, AND SPEAKING CENTERS: TOWARD

PRODUCTIVE SYNERGIES B. Cole Bennett

Abilene Christian University [email protected]

From 1951 to 1955, Edward R. Murrow hosted

This I Believe, a daily radio program that reached 39 million listeners. On this broadcast, Americans—both well known and unknown—read five-minute essays about their personal philosophies of life, sharing insights about individual values that shaped their daily actions. The first printed collection of This I Believe essays, published in 1952, sold 300,000 copies—more than any other book in the U. S. during that year except the Bible. These Murrow broadcasts were so popular that a curriculum was developed to encourage American high school students to compose essays about their most significant personal beliefs (Bennett and Dickson 1). The present-day This I Believe website elaborates on the effort, having recently experienced a rebirth, as

an international project engaging people in writing and sharing essays describing the core values that guide their daily lives. Some 100,000 of these essays, written by people from all walks of life, are archived here on our website, heard on public radio, chronicled through our books, and featured in weekly podcasts. (1) In 2007, one of my colleagues at Abilene Christian

University and I published a curriculum for university writing teachers, available online at ThisIBelieve.org.1, intended to yield such essays at the post-secondary level. Compositionists will immediately recognize its pedagogical underpinnings as emanating from expressivist or “personal writing” proponents, but with pointed emphases on audience, universal relevance, suitability for oral performance, and scope (many students will learn for the first time how to reduce their essays to a 500-word maximum, often giving rise to productive discussions of pith and word economy). Many students will also make careful choices regarding the degree to which any religious rhetoric—which often informs closely held creeds—appears in their drafts.

My overarching goal in this essay is to join the emerging call to return the canon of delivery to rhetorical education, specifically within the composition classroom. To do so, I wish to call attention to three items related to the This I Believe (TIB) curriculum as it was employed at Abilene Christian University: the complexity of the final product, which is an oral reading of an essay broadcast over our local NPR affiliate; the expanding community role of the Writing Center in the process of completing these essays; and emerging symbiotic relationships with the Speaking Center, a partner in our “Learning Commons” structure, which helps students develop speeches and presentations. I will also, along the way, discuss what I see as the theoretical and civic significance of such symbiosis. It is my contention that this curriculum responds to and illustrates the benefits to be had by appropriate attention to rhetorical delivery.

One of the more recent arguments exhorting our field to reconsider delivery is Cynthia Selfe’s “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing,” wherein she argues for wider inclusion of aural literate practices (among others) within rhetorical education. Against a rich backdrop of contemporary scholarship extolling the use of digital media in university classrooms, Selfe emphasizes the value of the aural component and laments its demise in 20th-century English education. She argues that teachers should “encourage students to deploy multiple modalities in skillful ways—written, aural, visual—and that they model a respect for and understanding of the various roles each modality can play in human expression . . . .” (626, emphasis original). Of particular interest to my present claim is Selfe’s continual gesturing toward “the importance of aurality and other composing modalities for making meaning and understanding the world” (618), as well as for the “formation of individual and group identity”

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(626). The TIB curriculum contends that a student’s final essay will be suitable as both a written and spoken public product, pedagogical goals that I find immediately valuable for precisely the reasons that Selfe has articulated. Giving students real-world consumers of their texts is virtually always a boon to writing instruction, documented copiously in, for example, the scholarship of service-learning and professional writing-for-community models. What’s more, this assignment sequence brings into sharp relief the complicated relationship between the public and private identities of the writing student as it adroitly emphasizes delivery as an important facet of writing. Aside from the opportunity to explore—and challenge—one’s identity (individual and communal), and to both textually and orally present an essay, I believe this attention to delivery inheres certain ethical and civic consequences, which I will discuss near the conclusion of this essay. First, however, I will explain the way this curriculum unfolded on our campus.

When the This I Believe national project began cultivating renewed interest on NPR, our campus affiliate, KACU, regularly broadcast the essays as part of its weekly programming. This led my colleague, Kyle Dickson, and me to begin exploring ways we could enrich our first-year composition sequence, especially the essays that draw on first-person experience. We developed a writing prompt, based on ideas of creed and belief, whose formal parameters fit those of the national TIB project. Here is an excerpt from that prompt:

In the 1950s, journalist Edward R. Murrow hosted a weekly radio series inviting listeners “to write about the core beliefs that guide your daily life.” At a time of political and cultural anxiety, the show asked Nobel laureates and everyday citizens to articulate their personal articles of faith even as it called them to listen carefully to the beliefs of others. Tens of thousands of Americans have written in to join Colin Powell, Gloria Steinem, and Tony Hawk in returning the dialogue of beliefs to American broadcasting.

For this essay you will write a 3–4 page personal essay describing an idea or principle you believe

in. Your final essay should attempt to add your voice to this discussion.

For this exercise to be meaningful, you must make it wholly your own. This short statement isn’t all you believe; it’s simply a way to introduce others to some things you value. In spite of the name, your belief need not be religious or even public. You may decide to focus on commitments to family, service, political action, or the arts. As you look for a focus, try to choose concrete language and to find something that helps others understand your past, present, and future choices. After a small pilot group of writing faculty

adopted the prompt for their classrooms, we approached the KACU program director, who agreed to record and broadcast our best results as a local version of the national TIB segment. With this infrastructure in place, we decided then to invite the community at large to participate; I volunteered for the Writing Center, which I direct, to initiate the marketing of such efforts.

Our Writing Center’s attempt to serve the citizens beyond our university walls has been challenging at ACU. Abilene is a quiet, conservative, west-Texas city where three universities tend to be seen as entities unto themselves, separate from the “townsfolk.” Repeated invitations via our website, flyers, and newspaper ads “to help any writer with any text” have resulted only in occasional non-student clients writing memoirs, updating resumes, and starting amateur novels. But in tandem with this renewed interest in the national TIB radio program, we initiated a public service announcement on KACU that solicited brief essays of personal belief from all listeners, directing them to email them or bring them physically to the ACU Writing Center. This effort not only generated TIB essays from the community for my tutors and me to vet and move toward broadcast radio, but it also provided a free PSA every morning to advertise the Writing Center’s broader mission to Abilene at large. Our facility is located in a Learning Commons environment, one floor away from the Speaking Center, an entity staffed with tutors from the Communication department whose goal is to help students work on speeches, PowerPoint slides, group



presentations, and any other assignment that involves disseminating information via public performance. Their consultants will even sit and listen in a private room while a speaker delivers an oration in order to give feedback on diction and effectiveness to an audience. As the campus became more familiar with the Speaking Center’s services, I began imagining the ways it could join the Writing Center to serve citizens outside the university; the “TIB Abilene” assignment provided the perfect foray.

Here is the procedure we initiated: an Abilenian in the public radio listening audience hears the PSA invitation to email an essay of belief to the ACU Writing Center, then submits one. I make copies and give them to a couple of my tutors. They email their comments to me, I synthesize them, then send them back to the writer. The revised essay comes back, I offer additional suggestions, and the process repeats. When the writer sends in a final draft—appropriate in both content and scope—I send his or her name to the Speaking Center, whose consultants coach the writer on the best way to deliver a personal manuscript reading over broadcast radio. The director of the Speaking Center was careful to inform me that this step could easily require further revision. For instance, some sentences might be fine for silent reading but too long for oration as the reader will run out of breath before the end; or, for another example, lengthy textual chunks that carry complex thoughts and are usually aided visually by paragraphing may need shortening or splitting for oral presentation. This additional cycle of revision initially seemed daunting, since my tutors, the essayist, and I would have worked so hard already. But I believe precisely such matters were attended to by the ancients, and I (along with scholars like Selfe) am buoyed by a return of attention toward classical delivery in this rhetorical task.

Over the two years of focused solicitation, our writing center received dozens of entries, mostly from college students whose teachers had employed the TIB curriculum as a major essay in the first-semester composition course—at both Abilene Christian University, as well as the nearby Cisco College. However, we also received submissions from several local townspeople, some of which were remarkable,

and which, after proceeding through the process outlined above on our campus, were recorded and broadcast on KACU (the final version of one such essay can be read on the official This I Believe website, at www.thisibelieve.org/essay/47979). These essays covered a wide array of subjects: participants wrote about somewhat expected topics (diversity, travel, love) but also of atypical ones (flat soda pop, lost socks, death, and anti-depressant medication). In what might be described as a closing of the rhetorical loop, selected broadcasts from this effort have been archived on iTunes U for permanent audio availability.

As stated above, one of the most valuable consequences arising from the TIB curriculum is that it refocuses the composer toward delivery as an indispensable consideration of the rhetorical process. In an edited collection entitled Delivering College Composition, Kathleen Blake Yancey discusses the importance of our reviewing this forgotten canon, both as a productive metaphor for routes toward university credits as well as an important consideration for contemporary and ever-emerging rhetorical tasks. She writes:

While the nature of composition . . . is contested, faculty continue to introduce new tasks, to be created in new genres, composed not only on the screen, which suggests a kind of planar approach, but also within new environments, which suggests a place for composing that in its three-dimensionality is like the classroom that they seek to extend, expand, and complicate. (7) And a bit later, she ends her introduction by

asking salient heuristic questions, including, “How does a particular physical space position teacher, learner, materials, and composing?” (10, emphasis mine). I would argue that the TIB university curriculum introduces new tasks that come to fruition within new environments, adding new dimensions to our rhetorical milieu and to our entire composing process. These essays, based on a student’s successful navigation of private and public orientations, do indeed position the elements of rhetorical instruction within a new space—not just the literal site of a radio station’s broadcast booth, but the new plane of public delivery, the agora, where elements of speaker, writer,



and world turn out to be more than abstract points on a rhetorical triangle. In Yancey’s terms, these elements combine to produce extra dimensions to the writing classroom and the textual artifacts themselves. I would maintain that such dimensions were not considered “extra” by traditional rhetors, nor should we consider them such. And here, I want to touch on two important emphases of returning delivery to the writing classroom—voice and ethics—as additional evidence of this assignment’s benefit.

It would be nearly impossible to discuss oral delivery of texts in a composition arena without attending to voice. In a November 2007 article from the “Reconsiderations” section of College English, Peter Elbow writes, “The concept of voice (without quotation marks) keeps not going away. [. . .] Students at all levels instinctively talk and think about their voice, or their voice in their writing, and tend to believe they have a real or true self—despite the best efforts of some of their teachers” (170). Elbow’s article goes on to highlight the poignant difficulty of discussing voice in writing, an element fraught with contradictory opinions and schools of criticism; yet, he argues, the “slumbering” subject must be awakened because the yield to our work is so productive. Later, in the February 2008 edition of College Composition and Communication, Elbow addresses delivery directly as he publishes his Exemplar Award acceptance speech. He writes,

Virtually every human child masters the essential elements of a rich, intricate, and complex language by age four; but somehow it turns out. . . that this language is not considered acceptable for serious important writing. [I work toward a goal] to show that even for “correct” edited written English, speaking and spoken language are full of virtues that are badly needed. (522)

Elbow’s lifelong attempt to reify and celebrate the connections between spoken and written language crafts a larger argument that moving from spoken to written and then back to spoken word can recover a certain rhetorical sophistication and aesthetic authenticity. Such attributes are, in fact, what I would argue to be the ideal outcomes of a writing center’s intentional partnering with a speaking center for the

TIB project. As a result of their coordinated efforts, a writer finishes with both a polished written text and a spoken audio file, memorialized as both a radio broadcast and a podcast stored on a permanent medium. These particular end products of the writing process capture the importance of voice that Elbow emphasizes—both in its internal use as a tool to more deftly compose texts as well as the manifestation of felt sense.

Thus, returning auditory delivery to the composition classroom (in this case, auditory delivery) helps solidify the often nebulous subject of voice in writing, and it is here that I believe the contrasts between public and private performances are most valuable. Theresa Enos argues, in “Voice as Echo of Delivery,” for a pedagogical return to classical delivery to illustrate the important ties between voice and ethos. Harkening back to ancient Greece and Rome, Enos reminds us that “ethos in rhetorical theory is paramount; the speaker in a text needs to project the three qualities of good sense, moral character, and goodwill in order to achieve credibility and thereby effect persuasion” (184). However, Enos is quick to bring her point to a contemporary context, reminding us that much 20th-century rhetoric asks speakers and writers to identify with their audiences, not win arguments against them, to create assent rather than objective Truth. Here, Enos argues that writers’ stylistic choices must be valued as much as the elocutionary choices of old, and contemporary rhetoric must value the interactive performances of all actors involved to truly analyze voice and ethos. Drawing on the work of William Kennedy, Enos writes,

Writers shape their personal voices by lexical choices, syntactic combinations, figurative language, and devices of rhythym, pacing, and tone. Voice functions to highlight linguistic traits that establish the writer’s character. (188) In other words, Enos argues that delivery remains

an important factor in the rhetoric of identification, but in text, the writer’s stylistic choices provide her voice. Since voice is so closely tied to ethos and is normally associated with oral delivery, Enos syllogistically concludes that a writer’s style effectively



delivers her ethos. Hence, when students write essays that will, in the end, be read to listeners and then permanently archived, they must contend with words that not only match a felt sense toward their core beliefs but that also create an ethos that will successfully identify them with their audience (in the Burkean sense) to create assent. The intricacy of this task seems as sophisticated as any I’ve imagined in a writing classroom, not least because it requires students to grapple simultaneously with both their foundational beliefs and their exacting, nuanced articulation. What’s more, along the journey of this composition assignment with its prewriting and peer review activities, students’ beliefs are undoubtedly challenged—both by their classmates and themselves (as a result of having deliberately and objectively articulated such beliefs). Ultimately, both essays and ideologies get revised, updated, or even replaced.2

Requiring a radio broadcast as a final product in a composition class thrusts the writing student onto the public rostrum, a position of undeniable and self-conscious ethical consequence. Martin Jacobi explicitly argues that “delivery [is] a sorely neglected canon, at least among . . . postsecondary required and general education courses” (21), and that ending this neglect can produce students who become more participatory and virtuous citizens (23-26). Pointing to the writings on virtue by classical Greek and Roman rhetors, Jacobi builds the thesis that a student who becomes accustomed to repeatedly constructing a persuasive delivery ethos, especially toward honorable causes, begins to think and behave more virtuously herself. Thus, his argument concludes, a return to rhetorical delivery in general education can actually yield students possessing higher moral ethics.

With Jacobi’s point in mind, I want to briefly make explicit the complex positions simultaneously occupied by student writers at Abilene Christian University. In the first place, they are enrolled in a private Christian university whose very existence is based on creating a place apart from the public scene of higher education. Yet, ACU’s mission statement is very public: “Educating students for Christian service and leadership throughout the world.” Thus, in enrolling in an English course that includes the TIB

sequence, these students simultaneously inhabit a course within a private curriculum that asks them to address the public citizenry, but in a manner that places heavy emphasis on their personal stake in writing that will eventually bypass their professor and be publicly disseminated via broadcast radio. While some students capably navigate this strange journey quite seamlessly, I believe that the pressure of simultaneously completing an accurate, entertaining, mature, formally accurate spoken essay with a sophisticated, instructive, yet delightful narrative payoff opens new doors for discussions about ethics and virtue. How and to what end, after all, is the student attempting to persuade her audience? How does her essay reflect—or not—the typical (or even desirable) ACU student? To what degree does our mission statement bear on her writing processes?

Here, I wish to remind us of our field’s resurgence of interest in personal writing, not merely because the TIB essays can be regarded as fitting that genre, but also because such interest has led to productive conversations regarding the position of the writer that begin to address the questions above. Thomas Newkirk and Russell Durst, for example, called attention in the mid 1990s to the blurred lines and political realities associated with the concept of “self” in composition pedagogy. Newkirk’s The Performance of Self has been especially fruitful to my own pedagogy at a faith-based institution, as have articles by Lizabeth A. Rand, Amy Goodburn, Lorraine D. Higgins, and Lisa D. Brush, and a 2005 “Special Focus” edition of College English. While all articulate claims urging a sophisticated regard of the personal, some of these scholars directly address the need to value the positions of evangelical students whose religious zeal can manifest across their academic writing. This stance is increasingly important in the face of an academy that remains “openly hostile to their faith-based ways of knowing, being and expressing themselves” (Carter 573), and composition scholarship that tends to vilify them or render them one-dimensional (see, for example, Sharon Crowley’s recent Toward a Civil Discourse). In short, while many vociferous critics have decried the existence of a self at all, seeking instead mostly to rescue a writer’s socially constructed subject



position, compositionists are now more willing to reconsider the possibility that the path to critical thinking and de-emphasis of oneself can actually be accomplished through personal writing, written by an actual self—admittedly fraught with cultural trappings and even performances—but real nonetheless. The TIB curriculum asks students not only to tap into closely valued individual creeds and beliefs and to articulate them, but also to ultimately present them to a listening radio audience, using illustrations from their own lives. These multidimensional tasks move students away from the penchant to invoke grand narratives to the more subtle undertaking of choosing representative, inductive vignettes. In the process, I would argue that writers are forced to examine their core beliefs, religious and otherwise, from multiple angles, simultaneously private and public, envisioning the reading and aural audiences to whom such beliefs will be parlayed. Through such examinations, these writers are given multiple opportunities to construct and reconstruct their own narratives and creeds, an intricate negotiation of public and private spheres yielding a rich rhetorical endeavor.

However, these considerations are important in all types of colleges and universities, not just faith-based ones. These are conversations about positionality and the troubling pseudo-distinctions between the terms “public” and “private,” and I believe we should continually strive to see them as so, especially in light of ever-increasing related scholarship (cf. Ellen Cushman, Susan Wells, Linda Flower, Newkirk, and Jane Danielewicz, for example). We are called to re-believe that a student’s writing reflects her agency in forming an opinion, then engaging text to advance that opinion—whether in a researched argument designed to overtly persuade a single reader or an essay of personal creed to be read aloud to the world.

To conclude, then, I would argue that the TIB curriculum, which should include a productive relationship with both writing center and speaking center resources (as well as a radio station, when available), necessarily presents rhetorical tasks that cause students—as citizen writers at large—to occupy a variety of private and public stances as they move toward the final canon of delivery, ultimately

providing them with skills and critical abilities that go beyond the traditional understandings of composing paradigms. It seeks to value private writing (or personal writing, or authentic writing, or even expressive writing) as a particular manifestation of an ethical social position of the writer—an authorial performance that, whether intentional or subconscious, reifies a self-image that the academy often seeks to dismantle.

Notes 1 Neither the author of this article, the co-author of the TIB curriculum, This I Believe©, nor any of the related universities profits in any way from the downloading or dissemination of these materials. 2 This strikes me as a ripe subject for further phenomenological research. How would students writing TIB essays describe changes in their belief systems (particularly religious beliefs) before and after the writing process?

Works Cited Bennett, B. Cole and Kyle Dickson. “This I Believe: College

Curriculum.” ThisIBelieve.org. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. Carter, Shannon. “Living Inside the Bible (Belt).” College

English 69:6 (July 2007): 572-595. Print. Crowley, Sharon. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and

Fundamentalism. Pittsburg: UPP (2006). Print. Cushman, Ellen. “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning,

and Activist Research.” College English 63:1 (Jan. 1999): 328-336. Print.

Danielewicz, Jane. “Personal Genres, Public Voices.” CCC 59:3 (Feb. 2008): 420-50. Print.

Durst, Russel K. Collision Course: Conflict Negotiation and Learning in College Composition. Urbana, IL: NCTE (2000). Print.

Elbow, Peter. “Three Mysteries at the Heart of Writing.” Composition Studies in the New Millennium. Eds. Bloom, Lynn Z., et al, Ed. Carbondale, IL: SIUP. 10-27. Print.

—. “Reconsiderations: Voice in Writing Again – Embracing Contraries.” College English. 70:2 (Nov. 2007). 168-188. Print.



—. “Coming to See Myself as a Vernacular Intellectual.” College Composition and Communication (Feb. 2008): 520-523. Print.

Enos, Theresa. “Voice as Echo of Delivery, Ethos as Transforming Process.” Composition in context: Essays in honor of Donald C. Stewart. Eds. Winterowd, W. Ross and Vincent Gillespie. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 180-196. Print.

Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale: SIUP, 2008. Print.

Goodburn, Amy. “It’s a Question of Faith: Discourse of Fundamentalism and Critical Pedagogy in the Writing Classroom.” A Journal of Composition Theory. 18.2 (1998). 333-40. Print.

Higgins, Lorraine D. and Lisa D. Brush. “Personal Experience Narrative and Public Debate: Writing the Wrongs of Welfare.” College Composition and Communication 57:4 (Jun 2006): 694-729. Print.

Jacobi, Martin. “The Canon of Delivery in Rhetorical Theory: Selections, Commentary, and Advice.” Delivering College Composition. Ed. Kathleen Blake Yancey. New York: Boynton/Cook: 2006. 17-29. Print.

Newkirk, Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997. Print.

Rand, Lizabeth A. “Enacting Faith: Evangelical Discourse and the Discipline of Composition Studies.” CCC 52:3 (Feb. 2001): 349-367. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia. "The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing." College Composition and Communication. 60:4 (June 2009): 611-663. Print.

Wells, Susan. “Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want From Public Writing?” CCC 47:3 (1996). Print.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Ed. Delivering College Composition. New York: Boynton/Cook: 2006. Print.


TOWARD AUTHENTIC DIALOGUE: ORIGINS OF THE FISHBOWL METHOD AND

IMPLICATIONS FOR WRITING CENTER WORK

Kristen Garrison

Midwestern State University

[email protected]

Nicole Kraemer Munday

Salisbury University

[email protected]

Dialogue is central to a writing center’s mission. Whether we think of dialogue as the literal exchange of words between two people or as a method for prompting a creative openness to others’ perspectives, writers, tutors, and writing center administrators rely on dialogue to collaborate and learn from one another. While we may be able to agree on its value, less clear is the best route for achieving authentic, open dialogue. Furthermore, as we export writing center pedagogy and push beyond the physical boundaries of “the Center” to work online, in libraries, in satellite centers, in writing fellows programs, or with community partners, it will become increasingly necessary to expand our field’s traditional focus on dyadic, writer-to-tutor exchanges to explore the dialogic potential of larger group configurations. In writing center work, we often speak of such potential in terms of collaboration, and with this essay, we’d like to explore the benefits—and acknowledge the limitations—of the fishbowl method for initiating the kind of dialogue necessary for building collaborative relationships within a campus community.

Our field’s commitment to collaboration reveals our fundamental belief that working with others is better than working alone. We’ve long accepted the premise that students learn better when they work with each other or a peer, but more recent explorations of collaboration focus on the untapped potential for working productively with other administrators and faculty on our campuses. In

“Breathing Lessons, or Collaboration is…” Michele Eodice explores how we might extend the collaboration that occurs “every day in our writing centers” to include the rest of the institution (119). Once we recognize the many ways in which we collaborate with students, with consultants, and with each other, she suggests that we “let our ‘insider’ inquiry get turned outward” (120). If we are collaborators, if we are writers, then we can/should be writers beyond the writing center and beyond our discipline. She emphasizes that “we should not ‘maintain a critical distance from the institution’—we should, in fact, become integral as models for its leadership through collaboration” (122). As leaders, we must “lean in” and embrace the potential of our status as “intellectual bureaucrats” (122). Because collaborative learning, writing, reading, and thinking form the foundation of writing center practice, those of us who spend our time in such rich environments can and should share with the rest of campus what we know about working with others. The challenge lies in figuring out effective means of doing so.

The growing popularity of the “unconference” model at regional and national writing center conferences is one expression of the field’s interest in discovering and testing strategies for promoting dialogue and building collaborative relationships. Following the lead of its regionals, the International Writing Centers Association solicited proposals for roundtables, round-robin discussions, and fishbowl

Toward Authentic Dialogue •


www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu

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conversations for its 2010 and 2011 Collaboratives; traditional paper and panel presentation proposals were, for all intents and purposes, banned. The Call for Proposals explained that unconference formats allow for greater interactivity, granting participants the opportunity to “explore new modes of collaborating and making meaning” (“IWCA”). Theoretically, unconference formats offer an escape from the hierarchical structure inherent in traditional conference papers and panels; presenters in the unconference model speak for only a few minutes to frame the conversation, and participants spend the rest of the time engaging in interactive, facilitated discussion.

Intrigued by the dialogic potential (and the novelty) of the fishbowl format, we organized a fishbowl for the 2010 IWCA Collaborative at the CCCCs in order to facilitate a discussion about academic culture vs. writing culture.1 The fishbowl can be configured a number of ways, but its defining characteristic is the use of two concentric circles. For the 2010 Collaborative, we chose an “open fishbowl” format, which meant that participants had the ability to move between the circles.2 When sitting in the exterior circle, participants listened; when sitting in one of the five chairs in the interior circle, participants spoke. To encourage a flow of movement and conversation between the rings, we asked participants to leave an open seat in the inner ring; once a newcomer took that seat, one of the individuals occupying an inner chair returned to the outer ring. The fishbowl format, then, establishes a physical layout symbolic of the kind of behaviors and energy we wish to nourish if we are to engage in authentic dialogue. All participants are equal, yet the rules prevent a free-for-all, in which all talk and none listen, or a free-for-one, in which one or a few dominate and silence others. Instead, the very layout emphasizes talking and listening, both necessary for collaboration.

Detailed analysis of the conversation itself exceeds the scope of this essay, but the range of comments revealed that some of us interpreted academic culture and writing culture differently: some viewed the

interrelationship as incompatible, others as inevitable, others as a potentially productive tension. The participants’ post-session comments, collected via surveys administered at the end of the session, prove more relevant to this exploration, as they illuminate the ways in which the fishbowl format created a generative environment for dialogue. Andrea Alden Lewis described the fishbowl as a “non-threatening environment for sharing ideas” and Moira Ozias compared it to “group brainstorming, but with an emphasis also on listening.” Other participants noted the inclusive nature of the format; Elizabeth Beard shared that she “love[s] the way that lots of participants can share thoughts/insights in an organized way that lets us hear one another.” Amber Jensen was likewise impressed with the fishbowl as “a way to engage multiple perspectives in an energizing, dynamic manner.” A participant who wished comments to remain anonymous wrote that, in addition to promoting listening and inclusion, the format generated “great energy,” and Ellen Kolba observed that the format “[kept] the conversation flowing.” Additionally, the format provided a better forum for “people to respond to one another and not just to a discussion leader,” Kolba wrote on her post-fishbowl survey.

Although the fishbowl certainly encouraged more talking and listening and provided a comfortable, engaging field for most, two of the 27 participants expressed concerns about the degree to which someone might have “felt left out.” Specifically, one participant wondered if anyone felt that “their opinion was too different from the train of conversation and therefore kept quiet.” Another participant worried about the pace: “I like the emphasis on listening . . . but felt the conversation moved from one topic to another too quickly. When I wanted to contribute, my chance passed before I had the time to work up the nerve.” Such comments are instructive, as they remind us of the difficulty of ensuring that dissensus, as well as consensus, is voiced and respected. Despite such limitations, we were encouraged by this experience and concluded that the fishbowl has great




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potential for initiating dialogue and prompting a first step toward productive collaboration.

After listening to the fishbowl participants’ insightful comments at the 2010 Collaborative and reflecting upon how writing-center-led fishbowls might be used to promote large group dialogue and institutional collaboration, we reexamined the origins of this particular dialogic method and discovered that fishbowls—more specifically, the T-group (training group) movement that gave rise to fishbowls—have a rich, yet troubled history. Therefore, in addition to exploring the potential for fishbowl use among writing center professionals, this article offers background information about fishbowls to illustrate the need to fully understand the historical and theoretical grounding of any method we choose to import.

In Scott Highhouse’s comprehensive history of the rise and fall of T-groups, he describes what appears to be the nativity of the fishbowl format.3 Following World War II, a group of behavioral scientists led by Kurt Lewin searched for methods that would decrease interpersonal conflict and facilitate collaboration. In 1944, Lewin created the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and two years later, he and his colleagues were commissioned by the Connecticut Interracial Commission to conduct training sessions to help community leaders reduce racial tensions (Highhouse 278). This assignment provided Lewin with an opportunity to pursue his own interest in the dynamics of intergroup behavior, so in addition to the session participants, Lewin included several teams of non-participant observer researchers who took extensive notes on the daily group discussions and met each evening to discuss their observations (White 473-474).

Lewin had planned to maintain a boundary between the conference participants and the researchers; however, one evening, three curious conference attendees walked into the researchers’ debriefing meeting and asked if they could watch the proceedings (Highhouse 278). One of the conference organizers recalls that “Lewin was initially embarrassed

by the awkwardness of the situation but was intrigued by the idea of having [conference participants] sit in” (278). At first, the researchers discussed their perceptions of the day’s discussion without any interruptions from their research subjects (the three conference participants sitting in their midst). Then, one by one, the participants interjected to disagree with the researchers’ interpretations; subsequent joint meetings evolved when all of the conference participants began attending nightly meetings and when the trainers prompted participants to share their perceptions of one another’s daytime group behavior. Lewin and his colleagues noticed that participants were gaining metacognitive awareness and experiencing personal growth after reflecting upon their own behavior in relation to the behavior of their fellow participants. When the New Britain conference concluded, Lewin and the other trainers turned their attention to developing structured behavioral feedback in a group setting, thus spawning the T-group movement and the birth of the fishbowl format.

Fishbowl conversations assumed a prominent role throughout the late 1940s until the peak of T-group workshops in the late 1960s. During this time, fishbowls were “characterized by a lack of structure and a passive facilitator who occasionally intervenes to put someone in the ‘hotseat’” (Highhouse 288). A facilitator would provide no direction other than telling the newly gathered T-group members that they were responsible for setting the agenda and facilitating each other’s learning. Typically, the group dynamic would devolve into chaos as participants struggled to define their mission and negotiate intergroup power relationships. These earliest fishbowls put participants off-balance and made them question their customary ways of interacting with others; although many of the participants described the fishbowl as a type of “conversion experience,” others felt frustrated by what they viewed as a “mischievous enterprise and an anxiety-producing enterprise” (as cited in Highhouse 283). Lack of direction, consequently, resulted in something other than the intended dialogue.

As the T-group movement progressed, some of




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the trainers’ idiosyncratic practices had the unfortunate effect of stifling dialogue, undermining the tone and purpose of the fishbowl. Others, however, resisted the impulse to tinker and found ways to maintain the integrity and purpose of the method. Instead of using the fishbowl as a laboratory in which facilitators sparked artificial conflict to teach group members effective problem-solving skills, two prominent T-group trainers, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton from the University of Texas, established fishbowls as collaboratories in which groups who were in genuine conflict with one another could put aside their biases and learn from one another.4 Rather than creating conflict to promote self-knowledge, Blake and Mouton’s fishbowl stressed open communication, collaborative problem solving, and egalitarianism among participants. This iteration of the fishbowl holds the most promise for writing center work and most closely aligns to the version that the International Writing Center Association and its regional affiliates have imported to their recent conferences.

Achieving authentic, productive dialogue on our campuses depends on creating an environment that encourages talking and listening. Because the fishbowl format can create the necessary conditions for authentic dialogue, it can help us continue the necessary work of building collaboratories with our campus colleagues. For example, assessment presents a tremendous challenge for universities and colleges, and often we find ourselves responding or reacting to demands for accountability rather than participating in conversations about the best purpose or mission for our institutions. One productive theme for a fishbowl might be “what do we want our students to learn,” a prompt that invites each participant to reflect on his or her values and priorities, to express them clearly, and to listen to others’ views and perspectives. Given external demands on higher education for accountability, collaborative relationships seem especially crucial if we are to have the proverbial “say” in higher education curriculum and leadership.

Even more important, authentic dialogue is a

necessary ingredient for creating the kind of culture of responsibility Linda Addler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington describe in their critique of accountability rhetoric. They rightly argue that our current model of assessment locates knowledge about teaching and outcomes in employers, government officials, and administrators; according to this model, “teachers . . . don’t possess this knowledge” (85). To correct such a doomed approach to education, they encourage educators to take the initiative and reframe assessment in terms of responsibility. This frame “draws on actions and literature attending to three key ideas: identifying and working from principle and best practice; building alliances with others; and engaging in (and assessing) shared actions based on common interests” (86). These three strategies correspond to the central goal of the fishbowl: promoting authentic dialogue among egalitarian participants who focus on problem solving to achieve positive change.

Fishbowls can create productive environments for initiating important, yet potentially charged, conversations, and we can imagine a number of topics (in addition to assessment) that would work well within the fishbowl format. For example, at a faculty development event, one of the authors facilitated a fishbowl conversation about teaching multilingual writers. As an alternative to the agonistic, performative rhetoric found in some traditional question-and-answer discussions, the fishbowl approach created a more relaxed atmosphere. Faculty members appeared more willing to “lean in” together as they discussed their own difficulties in writing and expressed a desire to learn more about writing pedagogy. Within the fishbowl, fears were spoken, concerns were voiced, and, ultimately, values about writing and grading were negotiated in a collaborative, public forum.

Collaboration and dialogue are integral to writing center work, and as a discursive method that values both talking and listening, the fishbowl has great potential to help writing center practitioners nurture the collaboration already taking place on our campuses, as well as build new relationships. Fishbowls can promote authentic dialogue and




6

consequently help the writing center community—as well as the larger academy—avoid the type of egocentric thinking that inhibits critical thinking and blinds us to others’ insights and perceptions. With richer knowledge of the fishbowl’s theoretical and historical background, writing center practitioners will understand better how to utilize the method. If facilitators create a fishbowl that maintains a generative openness to others, this dialogic format can help us achieve more productive conversations with our colleagues, even as we recognize and minimize the limitations inherent to the method. Like all collaborative practices, the fishbowl approach should not be imposed or forced; rather, we should recognize its value as one of many methods for engaging in a higher level of not only talking but listening to one another. As our exploration of its history revealed, putting people in a circle will not guarantee authentic dialogue, and future scholarship should continue to explore not only productive methods for creating the right physical environment for authentic dialogue, but strategies for developing our own ability to listen genuinely to others.

Notes

1. We would like to thank Michele Eodice for introducing us to the fishbowl concept and for facilitating our session at the 2010 IWCA Collaborative at the CCCCs. We would also like to thank our fishbowl participants, whose thoughtful comments informed our work greatly. 2. Since both of us were new to the fishbowl format, we found it helpful to watch videos demonstrating possible fishbowl configurations. In “Fishbowl—Collaboration” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOzpZDDoQmU&feature=related), five educators participate in a norming session in which they articulate and negotiate their interpretations of a shared rubric; this video illustrates a “closed fishbowl” format and shows how those seated in the outer circle gain an insider’s view of their colleagues’ thought processes. The addition of a facilitator creates a very different dialogic dynamic for the fishbowl conversation at the 2009 Lasa Circuit Rider Conference, “Fishbowl part1 - Clip1 of 2” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5PI_lQZ88&feature=related).

3. In his historical treatment of the T-group movement, Highhouse employs the subheading “One Night in Connecticut” to underscore his view that those who

participated in the first accidental fishbowl responded as if it were a conversion experience—for participants, this “one night” marked a significant moment in the history of training group research. Once introduced to this method of group interaction, proponents of the fishbowl exhibited enthusiasm for the method with something like evangelistic zeal.

4. Blake and Mouton rarely use the term “fishbowl,” even though they are cited by other scholars (Fisher 87) for popularizing fishbowls. In their book Managing Intergroup Conflict in Industry, Blake and Mouton, along with their co-author Herbert Shepard, describe fishbowl meetings among workers involved in corporate mergers. Although fishbowl practice undergirds much of Blake and Mouton’s work on consensus-building through large-group dialogue, the authors’ discuss the term “fishbowl” on only two pages of their monograph (Blake, Mouton, and Shepard 149-50).

!

Works Cited

Addler-Kassner, Linda, and Susanmarie Harrington. “Responsibility and Composition’s Future in the Twenty-first Century: Reframing ‘Accountability.’” College Composition and Communication 62.1 (2010): 73-99. Print.

Blake, Robert R., and Jane S. Mouton. “Union Management Relations: From Conflict to Collaboration.” Personnel 38 (1961): 38-51. Print.

Blake, Robert R., Herbert A. Shepard, and Jane S. Mouton. Managing Intergroup Conflict in Industry. Houston: Gulf, 1964. Print.

Eodice, Michele. “Breathing Lessons, or Collaboration Is . . . .” The Center Will Hold. Eds. Michael A. Pemberton and Joyce Kinkead. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2003. Print.

“Fishbowl—Collaboration.” North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership. YouTube. 3 Feb. 2010. Web. 14 Feb. 2011.

“Fishbowl Part1 - Clip1 of 2.” Lasa Circuit Rider Conference 2009. YouTube. 17 Aug. 2009. Web. 14 Feb. 2011.

Fisher, Ronald J. “Third Party Consultation: A Method for the Study and Resolution of Conflict.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 16.1 (1972): 67-94. JSTOR. Web. 2 Feb. 2011.

Highhouse, Scott. “A History of the T-Group and Its Early Applications in Management Development.” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 6.4 (2002): 277-290. Print.

“IWCA @ CCCC Collaborative (March 17, 2010).” International Writing Centers Association. 8 Feb. 2010. Web.




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22 July 2011. White, Karl R. “T-Groups Revisited: Self-Concept Change

and the ‘Fish-Bowling’ Technique.” Small Group Behavior 5.4 (1974): 473-485. Print.


BEYOND TUTORING: MAPPING THE INVISIBLE LANDSCAPE OF WRITING CENTER WORK

Rebecca Jackson

Texas State University [email protected]

Jackie Grutsch McKinney

Ball State University [email protected]

In their call for papers for this special issue of

Praxis, the editors speculate that most writing centers assume various roles beyond those implied by the triage model of fix-it consultations. We agree. As the call suggests, writing centers have long sought to “carve out a broader purview” for themselves—to extend writing center efforts both beyond the center’s physical space and beyond enduring writing center master narratives about the primacy of individual instruction. Still, much of the writing center’s extra curriculum, or what we call here non-tutoring work, remains hidden: for example, writing center scholarship provides anecdotal evidence of writing centers’ work with faculty, but the scholarship rarely tells us just how prevalent such efforts are across the board or what other kinds of non-tutoring work we are engaged in. To borrow from the field of landscape architecture, what our field lacks is an aerial—and ultimately generative—vision of our non-tutoring activities, one that would “reveal aspects of the landscape that are invisible from the ground and offer an alternative to pictorial [read “local”] practices so common in landscape representation” (Czerniak 111). There are consequences to invisibility. We cannot theorize what we cannot see, although theories are always already there, shaping our identities and practices in ways that might or might not be acceptable to us if only we could see and name their contours. Viewing the writing center landscape from a different vantage point, then, gives us much more than an updated map: it challenges us to re-theorize who we are and what makes our work valuable.

To get at a global perspective on writing center work, we report here on data from our 2009 IWCA grant-supported national survey of writing center non-tutoring activities. Survey results indicate that writing centers across the board engage in a remarkable array of non-tutoring activities. Not surprisingly, at least some writing center non-tutoring work is designed to support what many consider a writing center’s primary mission—the individual tutorial (creating a tutor handbook, for example). Much non-tutoring work, however, exceeds the boundaries of individual tutoring as both disciplinary narrative and practice and suggests a more expansive or simply different writing center mission and identity. To return to our landscape metaphor, the survey results helped us map writing center territory beyond the artificial, yet firmly entrenched, boundaries of tutoring and exposed contours in the landscape that challenged any fixed notion of a writing center. Thus, the survey findings invite us to wrestle with, perhaps re-conceive, as Jeanne Simpson suggests, what a writing center is, might be, or could be (4). From Questions to Methods: Designing the Research Project

We began our project by wondering: “What kinds of non-tutoring activities do writing centers engage in?” Using our own experience and writing center colleagues’ feedback as guides, we identified nine specific categories of non-tutoring work: resources, services, publications, hosting/sponsorship, instructional programming, research/assessment, digital community building/social networking, tutor

Beyond Tutoring • 2


training, and collaboration/coordination. We then built an online survey listing seventy-two different activities under those nine categories. We also composed open-ended questions to query respondents about fund-raising efforts, non-tutoring activities they might drop, develop, or increase, and non-tutoring work they considered most important and successful.

After seeking and receiving IRB approval, our next task was soliciting participation from as many US writing centers as possible.1 We decided that the best strategy would be to ask for participants on the Writing Center Listserv (WCENTER) and the Secondary School Writing Center Listserv (SSWC-L). On both lists, we posted a request to participate, a link to a video explaining our interest in the topic, and a link to take the survey. We requested that only directors complete the survey to avoid duplicate answers from the same institution. A few weeks later, we posted a second request for participation to both listservs. In all, we received 141 responses from a range of institutional types. (See Table 1: Institutional Affiliations.) Though not comprehensive—the St. Cloud Writing Center Directory lists over 1,500 US writing centers—we believe our sample is sufficient to provide a glimpse into an important facet of writing center work and identity (see Table 1). Findings and Discussion

As we suspected, writing center professionals engage in many activities beyond the one-to-one tutorial. Respondents indicate doing activities in all of the nine categories and all but one of the seventy-two different activities we listed under these categories. Table 2 summarizes the number and percentage of responses to each activity (see Table 2).

Local variability narratives within writing center scholarship can lead us to believe that institutional contexts vary to such a degree that the only thing writing centers have in common is tutoring. And yet our survey findings certainly call those narratives into question. Over 60% of respondents indicated engaging in activities in eight of the nine categories (resources, services, publications, hosting/sponsoring, instructional programming, research/assessment, tutor training materials, and collaboration/coordination),

with resources, publications, instructional programming, research assessment, and collaboration/coordination garnering a colossal 93% or higher. The only category that fewer than half of respondents indicated participating in was digital community building.

Each category yielded results worthy of detailed discussion; however, given space limitations here, we will focus on the two most compelling trends—writing centers as sites of pedagogical diversity and writing centers as sites of record keeping. We wanted an aerial view of writing center work, zooming out to see what was and was not happening across the country. The trends discussed below reflect the complexity of our findings as related to writing center missions and identities: pedagogical efforts demonstrate our (perhaps surprising) commitment to teaching writing in multiple sites, with multiple methods, and for multiple audiences, while our fastidious record-keeping hints at internal and external tensions surrounding appropriate and acceptable writing center work. Writing Centers Embrace Pedagogical Diversity

As we have suggested, writing centers are often conceptualized as merely sites for one-to-one tutoring and thus as leaders in individualized instruction. Our survey results do not dispute that notion, but do call into question the received notion that writing centers only provide one-to-one instruction. In fact, directors responding to our survey report using a wide variety of pedagogical practices in their centers, which far exceed the boundaries of one-to-one instruction. One-to-many instruction, for example, is widely used in centers: 84% of respondents indicated their centers offer student workshops, 59% offer faculty workshops, 13% offer community workshops, 17% host lectures, 22% offer credit-bearing courses, and 13% offer non-credit bearing classes. Collaborative group pedagogy, where participants teach one another, is less frequent, but still present: 18% have language-learning conversation groups, 10% have graduate student writing groups, 8% offer faculty writing groups, and 13% offer some other type of writing group. Writing centers also create and distribute



handouts (89% of centers surveyed), offer ESL or grammar drills (39%), and tutoring manuals (69%), all of which might be used by a learner in the absence of a tutor or teacher.

Thus, the aerial view provided by the survey allowed us to see some universality or diversity in writing center work that is sometimes hard to distill from individual accounts. For example, the use of student workshops in writing centers was the activity that received the third highest response rate (only record keeping and handouts received higher responses). Descriptions of writing center workshops appear in some of the earliest writing center publications and continue throughout the decades.2 Yet the anecdotal nature of such scholarship has never clearly demonstrated the overwhelming popularity of one-to-many instruction in writing centers. Moreover, in our open-ended questions, respondents occasionally indicated the degree to which workshops trumped tutoring work. For instance, one respondent noted: “We consider consulting only one of a suite of services we provide. We reach far more writers through workshops than we do through consultations.” Thus, the survey results have provided us with a different perspective on the work, or the primary work, of writing centers. Writing Center Records and Research

Of the seventy-two activities we listed in the survey, none gained a greater response than record keeping (93% of directors indicate their centers keep records of tutorials). Like the popularity of workshops for students, the push for record-keeping in writing centers began early in writing center publications with admonitions “to adopt a systematized form of record-keeping, including not only a record of time spent, but also the nature of remedial study or assignments, with specific page references or descriptions where possible, and some assessment of the progress of the individual student in these specific exercises” (Walker 7).3 Writing centers have heeded the calls for keeping track of tutoring sessions—frankly, we were surprised that the number of centers keeping records was not closer to 100%.

However necessary internal reporting is, we could not help but feel frustration at the gulf between those writing centers that collected records, often for internal reporting (46% of writing center directors publish reports), versus those writing centers where administrators or tutors were collecting data or interrogating practices in the name of research. The number of writing centers that collect data for record-keeping purposes far exceeds the number of writing centers in which faculty (39%), graduate students (24%), or undergraduates (35%) conduct research on writing center theory, pedagogy, or administration. In these data, we hear the perennial story of writing center directors caught between the desire to conduct knowledge-making research and the imperative to “keep good records.” We are reminded of The Everyday Writing Center in which the authors write, “we can discern that at the heart of meaningful writing center administration lies not efficiency, marketing, or record-keeping (these are peripheral matters in fact), but the leaderful, learningful, stewardship of a dynamic learning and writing culture and community” (Geller, et al. 14). We understand and yet regret that institutional practices might force directors’ hands in this case by rewarding impressive numbers—not impressive scholarship—with increased funding. Many a writing center director, we suspect from these numbers, sacrifices research for those activities like record-keeping which bear more immediate fruit, but which prevent us (and others) from (re)imagining writing centers as sites of leadership rather than support.

Our data also revealed that others shared our frustration: though 131 writing centers indicate that they keep records, only eight respondents indicated in the open-ended responses that such record keeping is “important.” For us, these numbers raise several important questions. First and perhaps most obvious, if we do not consider record-keeping valuable or important, why do so many of us spend valuable time doing it? Are we expected to do such work? Or do we do such work primarily because others are doing it? Second, if we do such work and/or are expected to do such work, why do we continue to do it in such a way that renders it “unimportant”? Are we, as the authors



of The Everyday Writing Center caution against, neglecting to present our work as “more than simply nuts and bolts” (Geller et al. 115)? If so, how might we begin to write the kinds of reports that we value—the kinds of documents that report “the things we want our institutions and our profession to value,” reports that do transformative rather than structural (status-quo) work (Geller et al, 121)? We do not have the answers to these questions, but we think the data make such questions hard to ignore.4

Conclusion

We presented our survey’s initial findings at the IWCA@CCCC Collaborative in San Francisco, and one audience member in particular from that venue has remained in our minds as we crafted this article. After patiently listening to what we found interesting and important about our project, she questioned our entire premise. Quite politely, she asked: “Why do you want to know about this? What’s wrong with tutoring?”

For the record, nothing is wrong with tutoring. We are both avid readers and contributors to the scholarship on tutoring and tutor training. As Harvey Kail admits in an article in which he questions the burgeoning discipline’s exclusive focus on one-to-one tutoring, “tutoring works” (2). And yet tutoring is not all we do. We wanted to know about non-tutoring activities because they are part of the landscape of writing center work, albeit a largely invisible terrain until now. While it is not up to us to say whether writing centers ought to engage in (more) non-tutoring work or not, whether they should or not is a question raised by our findings and one we think is worthy of discussion. The point is that we are engaged in a range of non-tutoring activities, and our findings give us a

mirror with which to see this work. How does non-tutoring work fit with our goals and missions? How might it alter our goals and missions? How might it alter our identity?

Should writing center professionals find a fit between non-tutoring activities and their aims, as we think they might, we would like to see these non-tutoring activities more fully theorized. Much of the existing literature on non-tutoring activities (where it does exist) would fall under Stephen North’s definition of lore: it simply describes what works (23). What the discipline needs is empirical, historical, and theoretical discussions that render experience more complex and ultimately more usable. Along the same lines, we need scholarship on training writing center professionals to engage in non-tutoring activities effectively. If, for instance, workshops are key to our mission, we ought to know best practices for planning and executing workshops in order to train our staffs accordingly. Likewise, if record-keeping is something we must do, then we must figure out how to make this endeavor worthwhile.

We suspect this decade might mark a turning-point in writing center history, one in which writing center identities and roles expand. The first step, one we hope this survey encourages, is recognizing that the “purity” of the writing center mission—the focus on one-to-one tutoring—is already more complicated than our disciplinary narratives suggest. Ultimately, we would like to see a richly-textured and nuanced vision of writing centers and writing center work: one that accounts for practice on the periphery, that pushes writing center professionals to pay critical attention to such practices, and that prompts potential revision of writing center theory, theorizing, practice, identities, and missions. In other words, we seek a richer (and more realistic) map of the writing center landscape.



Table 1: Institutional Affiliations of Respondents (N = 76)

Type of Institution % of respondents

Public College or University (4 yr +) 39%

Private College or University (4 yr +) 38%

Community College (2 yr) 14%

Public and Private High School 8%

Table 2: Summary of Survey data (N = 141)

Type of Resource Respondents

Writing Handouts (Online or Paper) 126 (89%)

Online links to other Writing Centers or Writing Resources 112 (79%)

Computer Use in Center 103 (73%)

Lending Library for Writing and Reference Texts 65 (46%)

ESL/Grammar Drill Resources 55 (39%)

Room Rental or Use by Other Groups 32 (23%)

Plagiarism Detection Programs 10 (7%)

Laptop/Equipment Checkout or Lending 8 (6%)

Other 24 (17%)

Total offering at least one resource 139 (99%)

Type of Service Respondents

Editing/Proofreading 26 (18%)

Language-Learning Conversation Groups 25 (18%)

Grammar Software/Equipment for Individual Learning 25 (18%)

Grammar Hotline 21 (15%)

Test-Taking Station or Test Monitoring 15 (11%)



Photocopying, Printing, Binding 14 (10%)

Other 19 (13.5)

Total offering at least one service 86 (61%)

Type of Publication Respondents

Website 102 (72%)

Brochures 96 (68%)

Bookmark, Stickers 78 (55%)

Reports 78 (55%)

Posters 60 (42%)

T-shirts, Pens, Pencils, Mugs, Promotional Items 48 (34%)

Bulletin Board 47 (33%)

Newsletter 33 (23%)

Video, Slidecast 22 (16%)

Blog 11 (8%)

Podcast 10 (7%)

Newspaper Column, Articles 8 (6%)

Other 20 (14%)

Total offering at least one publication 132 (94%)

Type of Hosting or Sponsoring Respondents

Parties, Open Houses 55 (39%)

Writing Contests 26 (18%)

Lectures by Faculty, Visiting Scholars 24 (17%)

Conferences, Research Symposiums 24 (17%)



Other Writing Groups 19 (13.5)

Readings, Open Mics 16 (11%)

Dissertation/Thesis Writing Groups 14 (10%)

Faculty Writing Groups 11 (8%)

Summer Camps 3 (2%)

Spelling Bees 1 (1%)

Other 26 (18%)

Total involved in at least one 102 (72%)

Type of Programming Respondents

Workshops/Presentations for Students 119 (84%)

Workshops/Presentations for Faculty 82 (59%)

Workshops/Presentations for Staff 41 (29%)

Classes for Credit (Taught in writing center) 31 (22%)

Workshops/Presentations for Community 21 (15%)

Non-Credit Classes 18 (13%)

Other 7 (5%)

Total offering at least one type of programming 131 (93%)

Type of Research or Assessment Respondents

Record Keeping 131 (93%)

Student Satisfaction Surveys 109 (77%)

Director Evaluation of Tutors 89 (63%)

Student Demographics 81 (57%)

Research by Faculty on Writing Center Theory, Practice, or 55 (39%)



Administration

Independent/In-house Assessment 54 (38%)

Research by Undergraduates on Writing Center Theory, Practice, or Administration

49 (35%)

Research by Graduate Students on Writing Center Theory, Practice, or Administration

34 (24%)

Research on Writing Center and Retention, GPA, Pass/Fail Rates

32 (23%)

Other 12 (9%)

Total conducting at least one type of research/assessment

136 (96%)

Type of Digital Community Respondents

Facebook 25 (18%)

Wikis 13 (9%)

Blogs 12 (8%)

Social Photo Sharing 5 (4%)

Social Video Sharing 5 (4%)

Myspace 3 (2%)

Twitter or similar 3 (2%)

Social Bookmarking 0 (0%)

Other 15 (11%)

Total offering at least one type of digital community 52 (37%)



Type of Training Product Respondents

Manuals or Handbooks 97 (69%)

Lesson Plans 42 (30%)

Videos 21 (15%)

Other 24 (17%)

Total offering at least one type of training product 111 (79%)

Type of Collaboration or Coordination Respondents

Individual Faculty or Departments 110 (78%)

First-Year Composition 92 (66%)

Other Tutoring or Support Services 90 (63%)

WAC, WID, or CAC 86 (61%)

University Library 83 (59%)

Disability Services 54 (38%)

TA Preparation 34 (24%)

Student Groups 34 (24%)

Residence Halls 27 (19%)

Teacher Education 20 (14%)

National Writing Project 8 (6%)

Other 13 (9%)

Total writing centers involved in at least one of these 136 (96%)


Notes

1. Though there is a vibrant international writing center community, we decided to focus this initial study on US centers.

2. See Nairn; Devet; Patton; Siegele; Wolcott; Loris; Stroud; Richardson; Mills and Nesanovich; Einerson; Fishbain; Truscott; Covington, Brown, and Blank; Arkin; LeBlanc; Dvorak; Adams and Adams; LeBlanc and Nelson; Keil and Joyhanyak; Bauso; and Kail. 3. See also Harris; Bird; and Alexander.

4. One answer that comes from our data involves comparing the number of centers collecting data on sessions (93%) versus those centers that are engaged in assessment (38%). If centers assess student or staff learning outcomes rather than just count bodies and hours—as suggested by Joan Hawthorne in “Approaching Assessment as If It Matters” and Isabelle Thompson in “Writing Center Assessment: Why and a Little How”—the work might become more meaningful, useful, and valued.

Works Cited Adams, Katherine, and John L. Adams. “The Creative

Writing Workshop and the Writing Center.” Intersections: Theory-Practice in the Writing Center. Eds. Joan Mullin, and Ray Wallace. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994. 19-24. Print.

Alexander, Joan. “Some Tutoring Guidelines.” Writing Lab Newsletter 4.4 (1979): 5. Web.

Arkin, Marian. “Special Projects in LaGuardia’s Writing Center.” Writing Lab Newsletter 3.2 (1978): 3. Web.

Bird, Penny C. “Program Assessment and Reporting: Counting, Analyzing, and Developing.” The Writing Center Resource Manual. Ed. Bobbie Silk. Emittsburg, MD: NWCA Press, 1998. III.6: 1-13. Print.

Bauso, Jean. “Bringing in Business.” Writing Lab Newsletter 7.3 (1982): 5-6. Web.

Covington, David, Ann Brown, and Gary Blank. “A Writing Assistance Program for Engineering Students.” Engineering Education 75.2 (1984): 91-94. Print.

Czerniak, Julia. “Challenging the Pictorial: Recent Landscape Practice.” Assemblage 43 (1998): 110–120. Print.

Devet, Bonnie. “Workshops that ‘Work.’” Writing Lab Newsletter 11.5 (1987): 8-10. Web.

Dvorak, Kevin. “Creative Writing Workshops for ESL Writers.” ESL Writers. Eds. Shanti Bruce, and Bennett A. Rafoth. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004. 39-50. Print.

Einerson, Allen. “Writing Center Workshops for High Risk Students.” Writing Lab Newsletter 13.6 (1989): 1-5. Web.

Fishbain, Janet. “Write with Confidence: A Writing Lab Workshop for Returning Adults.” Writing Lab Newsletter 13.9 (1989): 1-4, 10. Web.

Geller, Anne Ellen, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth Boquet. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2007. Print.

Harris, Muriel. “Managing the Services in the Writing Center: Scheduling, Record-Keeping, Forms.” The Writing Center Resource Manual. Ed. Bobbie Silk. Emittsburg, MD: NWCA Press, 1998. III.2: 1-9. Print.

Hawthorne, Joan. “Approaching Assessment as if It Matters.” The Writing Director’s Resource Book. Eds. Christina Murphy, and Byron Stay. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. 237-247. Print.

Kail, Harvey. “The Best of Both Worlds.” Writing Lab Newsletter 9.4 (1984): 1-5. Web.

Keil, Majorie, and D. Joyhanyak. “The Writing Center: An Idea Beyond Containment.” Writing Lab Newsletter 20.2 (1995): 1-4. Web.

LeBlanc, Diane. “Teaching Creative Writing in Writing Centers.” Writing Lab Newsletter 19.9 (1995): 1-4. Web.

LeBlanc, Diane, and Jane Nelson. “Writing Center Outreach Programs.” Writing Lab Newsletter 23.1 (1998): 5-7. Web.

Loris, Michelle Carbone. “The Workshop Skills Center.” Writing Lab Newsletter 9.4 (1984): 6-8. Web.

Mills, Eva B. and Stella Nesanovich. “Helping the Reluctant Student.” Writing Lab Newsletter 7.8 (1983): 7-9. Web.

Nairn, Lyndall. “Workshop on Note-taking.” Writing Lab Newsletter 13.7 (1989): 7-8. Web.

North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1987. Print.

Patton, Vicki. “Mini Course: How to Use the Dictionary.” Writing Lab Newsletter 8.8 (1984): 1-4. Web.

Richardson, Linda. “What Can You Do Except Tutor?” Writing Lab Newsletter 3.1 (1978): 6. Web.

Siegele, Milton. “Mini-courses at Emporia State.” Writing Lab Newsletter 4.4 (1979): 3. Web.

Simpson, Jeanne. “Whose Idea of a Writing Center is This, Anyway?” Writing Lab Newsletter 35.1 (2010): 1-4. Web.

Stroud, Cynthia K. “Writing Center Workshops: A Way to Reach Out.” Writing Lab Newsletter 5.2 (1980): 1-3. Web.

Thompson, Isabelle. “Writing Center Assessment: Why and a Little How.” Writing Center Journal 26.1 (2006): 33-61. PDF.

Truscott, Robert Blake. “Tutoring the Advanced Writer in a Writing Center.” Writing Lab Newsletter 9.10 (1985): 14-16. Web.



Walker, Jim. “Record Keeping and Specific Feedback: Prerequisites to a Realized Potential in Writing-Lab Function.” Writing Lab Newsletter 5.2 (1980): 5-7. Web.

Wolcott, Willa. “Establishing Writing Center Workshops.” Writing Center Journal 7.2 (1987): 45-52. Web.


CHANGING ATTITUDES: WRITING CENTER WORKSHOPS IN THE CLASSROOM Holly Ryan

Pennsylvania State University, Berks [email protected]

In a recent WPA-L discussion thread initiated by a

“newbie writing center director,” Christopher Ervin offers the following suggestion: “I guess my best advice, if you want to grow your writing center, is to develop relationships with various potential stakeholders across campus. Doing so would help you do a lot that you might find more difficult if you don't branch out.” Ervin’s advice is practical and valuable for a writing center director, but it is also a daunting task for new faculty members. Trying to understand the historical, political, social, and economic landscapes of a new university is difficult enough, but add to that the administrative work and relationship-building necessary to effectively run or develop a writing center, and new directors can feel like they have an insurmountable challenge ahead of them. However, with a combination of inquiry-driven conversations and effective demonstrations of writing center practices, a writing center director can forge relationships with faculty across campus that lead to productive and engaged conversations about writing. In doing so, writing center directors are positioned to move their centers beyond the image of the “fix-it” shop and into a cultivator of intellectual engagement on campus. Using my interactions with a business faculty member, I hope to offer other writing center administrators and practitioners a trajectory to follow as they begin to create their own networks on campus.

In 2010, I began work as a tenure-track writing center director at a small, branch campus of a large, state institution. Prior to my hiring, writing tutoring was conducted as part of the learning center, which offers tutoring in all subjects. At the time of my hire, the writing center employed one professional tutor, who also acted as the interim coordinator, and offered one-on-one (and occasionally group) 30-minute tutoring sessions. My position drastically changed the relationship between the writing center and the learning center: the writing center became an autonomous space, with its own budget, hiring

practices, assessment procedures, research agenda, and vision. The learning center coordinator graciously helped me make this transition, providing me with the contacts, advice, and support needed to break away. As the center became its own space, it also attracted positive attention from the campus community.

The news of the new writing center coordinator spread, not out of discontentment with the previous direction of the center, but because new blood often breeds new interest in familiar scenes. I found myself stopped in the hallway by senior faculty members who welcomed me to campus and, sometimes in whispers, shared their stories of student writing. Usually, to my chagrin, these anecdotes were about the problems with students’ spelling, grammar, syntax, and a general disinterest in producing “good writing.” It’s unfair to make too much of these interactions, since this faculty-speak about writing is an all too common trope in writing center lore, but it does characterize a vision of the writing center as a place that will teach students how to fix the errors in their writing. Many of my interactions concluded with some indication that the faculty member was happy to be able to send students somewhere to work on their poor grammatical skills.

For those of us who have been doing writing center work for some time, this interaction is not new; we’ve become all too accustomed to the “fix-it” perception of writing tutoring.1 More frustratingly, we have come to expect that some faculty will send their students to use the writing center instead of teaching writing themselves. Instead of dismissing these perspectives or falling into finger-wagging mode, we need to find ways of understanding these ideas and, when appropriate, challenging them. As Jeanne Simpson writes, “We need to accept a simple principle: people’s perceptions come from their legitimate experiences and reference points, even if they lead to conclusions we don’t share. Just as we do in tutoring, we need to find out what people actually know, how they know it, and what they believe about

Changing Attitudes • 2

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 1 (2012) www. praxis.uwc.utexas.edu

their knowledge” (1-2). It is our responsibility, along with our composition colleagues, to listen to our peers, understand their perspectives, and engage potentially reductive views of writing and writing centers. If we do so with respect and care, we can build valuable allies across campus who will continue to spread a rich, nuanced understanding of writing and the writing center.

My first opportunity to build a new network occurred in my first month on the job. I received an email from a colleague, whom I will call Bob. He teaches the senior capstone writing-intensive business course and respectfully wanted my opinion on sending his students to the writing center to have their papers “reviewed” (personal email). He had concerns about their writing and hoped that a visit by them to the writing center would help manage those issues. Knowing our limited resource pool and some of the challenges of required tutoring sessions, I countered his request with another: could we sit down and discuss if a workshop might be a more effective strategy for meeting his needs? He agreed. In this meeting, I wanted to respond to Simpson’s call to find out what Bob knew about the writing center, how he knew it, and what he believed about writing. I asked him to explain his reasons for asking for a required visit, what he hoped to achieve by sending his students to the center, and what he saw as the strengths and needs of his past student writers. He conveyed to me that he hoped that the writing center would provide a place for students to receive support for their writing needs since he did not feel as though he could spend time on certain writing issues in his classroom, specifically clarity, conciseness, and organization. In our discussion, it became clear that as a businessman and a teacher of the senior-level course, Bob values the final product, which is hardly surprising since many of my colleagues share this perspective. As a way of preparing students to write effective final products, Bob spends quite a bit of class time discussing audience with his students because he feels that if the students understand who they are writing for, they will do it better. Furthermore, he designs assignments that are modeled on “real-world” business situations so that students will feel motivated

to produce texts they would actually write in a business setting. He rarely has students revise their work as part of the course because he believes students will not have that opportunity in the business setting; he expects the revision to be done before they turn in the final product. I would describe his teaching of writing as a “pedagogy of authenticity”: he models his teaching on realistic situations students might encounter in their jobs.

While listening to Bob and discussing his views on writing, I was not silent about my own perspectives. It is important not to passively allow others to construct visions of the writing center and writing; as scholars and researchers, we are responsible for sharing our disciplinary knowledge. We bring a perspective that people are interested in, and Bob came to the writing center seeking my expertise. It would have been unfair and unproductive for him to leave without me holding up my end of the conversation. I conveyed to Bob that as a rhetoric and composition scholar, I typically take a different approach to teaching writing in my classroom. With an eye toward process, I tend to emphasize a writing-to-learn pedagogy. Students use writing not only as a final means of communication, but also as a mode of learning.2 This perspective, of course, does not mean that I ignore the final product nor does it mean that I pretend that product-based writing is not the norm in situations outside of my classroom.

Bob and I discussed our epistemological frameworks for writing instruction and our views of the writing center. The exact details of the conversation escape me now, a year later, but the feeling of the meeting sticks with me. The conversation was productive and engaged. I remember at one point Bob said that he liked the idea of doing more writing-to-learn exercises in his classroom. We even discussed how he might incorporate more low-stakes writing and peer review exercises into his courses. For me, Bob’s interest to adding more writing-to-learn opportunities for his students is significant. Bob made a commitment to do more of the teaching of writing to his students. He acknowledged how he could work with student writing even more in his own classroom and made a



commitment to incorporate more writing instruction. In my opinion, this addition does not detract from his pedagogy of authenticity; it provides more opportunities for students to get feedback from someone who knows the field. He will have more opportunities to provide students with feedback so that they can more effectively write those final products. Through our conversation, Bob saw how he could take more control of writing.

While Bob was open to these structural course changes, he still was not sure how to support his student’s ongoing struggle with organization and clarity, which was why he initially turned to the writing center for our expertise. I suggested classroom-based workshops instead of required visits to the writing center as a way to share my knowledge and prevent marginalizing writing instruction to the writing center space. By agreeing to set aside class time to two workshops, Bob would be showing his students the centrality of writing for his course. While this may seem like a small gesture on his part, I believe that it is an important investment of his time and resources. Also, by going into Bob’s classroom to do two workshops, I would be demonstrating what we do in the writing center. The information the students would be receiving would be very similar to what they might get individually in a writing center session, but Bob would also see what the writing center has to offer. By modeling a writing-center pedagogy, I would be teaching Bob about what we do to support writing on our campus.

Creating the workshops would be another moment of collaboration for us. Unsurprisingly, Bob had expertise that I did not, and I needed to figure out his expectations and disciplinary conventions for the kinds of writing he assigned. I relied on Carol Haviland’s valuable advice for writing center practitioners who engage in Writing Across the Curriculum endeavors:

Moving into others’ classrooms is not a license to set up soapboxes to advance their own agenda. Writing Center staff needs to discover how their colleagues perceive writing and what functions of writing they want to incorporate into their existing courses. And these discussions must continue

frequently and candidly, in both the design and implementation stages, to make certain that the projects are truly departmentally-based and are appropriate to the discipline. (6)

Asking Bob to share what made “good” writing gave him the opportunity to teach me about how he and his colleagues see writing as a tool for effective communication. Bob’s discussion of disciplinary conventions helped me to better understand how to tailor my workshop for his students. I feared teaching them something that would be frowned upon, so my collaboration with Bob was absolutely necessary to create a useful workshop.

As an outsider to their classroom, these workshops allowed me to engage the students in a dialogue about their own knowledge about writing. While Haviland’s advice is directed at working with colleagues, it is equally applicable to working with students in these classrooms. It is not my job and it would be counterproductive “to set up soapboxes to advance [my] own agenda” (6). Instead, I began the workshops asking students questions about what they already knew about writing with clarity and concision. I encouraged them to discuss why this kind of writing is important in business. I asked them to imagine the impact of “fuzzy” writing, and we brainstormed a couple scenarios in which that kind of writing could have ill effects. By finding out “what [they] actually know, how they know it, and what they believe about their knowledge,” I gained a rapport and trust with the students (6). Furthermore, I demonstrated to Bob how the writing center does not assume that students are empty vessels. We believe that students have rich writing experiences that our tutors need to know in order to successful help student writing.

Modifying an existing workshop3 developed by the Duke Writing Studio staff, I developed a presentation that required inductive reasoning from the students. Students revised sentences for clarity and conciseness and then extrapolated the strategies they used to make those changes. This process mimics work we do in the writing center. Tutors do not offer a top down approach to writing. They usually do not tell the writer any specific “rules” about writing. Through dialogue, collaboration, and critical thinking,



the students and tutors come to an understanding about how writing works. Again, this workshop showed Bob and his students that writing center tutors do not need to be experts on writing rules, but that they are willing to learn them alongside the writer.

Since the first presentation offered students a workshop on sentence-level revisions, I developed the second to emphasize a higher-order concern. In this workshop, I taught students about reverse outlining. This strategy4 asks students to create an outline after they have written the paper. The outline summarizes the content and purpose of each paragraph. This process requires that students decide what belongs in each paragraph, what needs to be deleted, and if a paragraph advances the paper’s claim. When I arrived in class, I shared the strategy and provided students with a sample paper written by a student who took the capstone business class the previous year. The energy in the room was palpable! Working in small groups, the students quickly found it difficult to summarize the first three or four paragraphs of the paper because of the multiple and underdeveloped ideas, but they breezed through the paragraphs that nicely cohered. The strategy proved successful for the students, but I think it also taught Bob how he could help students identify organizational issues.

This workshop, like the previous one, was meant to represent a possible writing center session. Sometimes tutors share a strategy with students-writers and then together apply the strategy to the paper. Our writing center encourages strategy-building as a way of developing the writer. In North’s words, we want to “to produce better writers, not better writing” (438). At our writing center, we hope writers will transfer what they learn in tutoring sessions to other writing situations. By modeling writing center pedagogy, I hope these workshops showed Bob that the writing center is not a fix-it shop, but a space for intellectual engagement.

Since developing these workshops for Bob’s class, I have conducted several similar ones for other contexts on campus (first-year composition classes, chemistry seminars, and psychology training sessions). Often these workshops were developed in response to requests from faculty members on campus who

wanted their students to use the writing center in a similar way as Bob. In each of the situations, I had a similar conversation with the faculty about their pedagogy, their goals, and how the writing center might support their students. Then, when I would run the classroom-based workshops, I envisioned myself not only teaching the students but the faculty member as well.

Our campus does offer WAC training, but, as I am learning, faculty want much more help teaching writing. Even though we can cynically assume that faculty members just want writing centers to do the work of teaching writing, I honestly believe that many of these requests come from instructors that do not know of other options. They do not feel confident enough to teach writing and, because of their anemic views of the writing center, think we can do it better. My work with Bob and a few other faculty members on campus have helped demonstrate how the writing center can support faculty on campus. In doing so, we can teach faculty more about what the writing center has to offer.

Bob’s request for required tutoring in my first month of employment encouraged me to increase the number of ways students and faculty are exposed to our work. The impact these presentations have had on student writing and student perceptions is the focus of another study we are conducting on campus. However, I know the impact on Bob was significant. Following these two workshops, he wrote the following to the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs:

I have been so pleased and excited by the contributions Professor Ryan made in my classroom that I would be remiss in not passing along my feedback to you. She did an exceptional job. Her information was right on point and she presented it in an engaging and inspiring style. The best gauge for success was student behavior during Professor Ryan's presentations. I'm pleased to say they appeared to be completely receptive, engaged in learning, and appreciative of the knowledge she provided. I feel so strongly in the importance of the contribution that Professor Ryan made that I have asked her to consider providing similar presentations in my future



BA422W classes. (“Professor Ryan and the Writing Center”)

I am not sharing this email to toot my horn, although the compliment is certainly flattering. More importantly, I think this email indicates the importance of treating faculty across campus with respect and honest communication. When Bob writes that my information was “right on point,” he is saying that I was able to convey his discipline’s writing conventions effectively to the students. We had frank discussions about my lack of business experience, but the conversations and wisdom he provided during our initial conversations provided me with confidence and credibility in his classroom. His perception that the students were receptive, engaged, and appreciative indicated to me that the students did not feel as though I had set up a “soapbox.” Finally, the fact that Bob invited me back to do additional workshops in subsequent semesters tells me that he saw the value in what I did in his classroom, even though it did not match his initial request of sending students to the writing center to have their writing “reviewed” (“Use of Writing Center Resources”).

The work that I did to develop a wonderful relationship with Bob was one of the best things I did during my first year as the writing center coordinator. Not only did I develop an ally and collegial relationship with faculty outside of my academic division, but I also generated good buzz about the practices of the writing center. In his book on leadership, Michael Watkins writes, “One common mistake of new leaders is to devote too much of their transition time to the vertical dimension of influence---upward to bosses and downward to direct reports—and not enough to the horizontal dimension, namely peers and external constituencies” (186). Watkins is right. As administrators we have to be careful not to lose sight of the importance of peer relationships. I never expected such a positive email to be sent on my behalf, and I am sure that it had much more of an impact on the dean than the workshop will have as a line on my tenure dossier.

While this almost goes without saying, my relationship with Bob represents the best-case scenario when we try to shift our reputation away from the fix-

it shop. And, of course, engaging with one faculty member will not shift the entire campus perspective on writing and writing centers. Nor should it. There will inevitably be ineffective tutoring sessions, unimpressed faculty, and complicated socio-political dynamics. However, by modeling our writing center practices outside of the writing center and with our peers, we can hope to influence the perception of the writing center. When we collaborate with faculty across campus and demonstrate our services to students and faculty, we have the capacity and agency to influence how people position the writing center.

Notes 1. See North’s well-cited “The Idea of a Writing Center”. 2. See Janet Emig’s work “Writing as a Mode for Learning”. 3. The Duke Writing Studio website offers a series of handouts and tutorials on a variety of writing-related topics. The page can be found at: http://uwp.duke.edu/writingstudio/resources/workshop-resources. 4. Many Writing Center websites offer handouts on reverse outlining, but I particularly like Purdue’s handout on the OWL.

Works Cited Emig, Janet. “Writing as a Mode for Learning.” CCC 28.2

(1977): 122-128. JSTOR. Web. 6 November 2009. Ervin, Christopher. “Best Advice for Newbie Writing

Center Director?” WPA-L. Arizona State University. Web. 11 July 2011.

Haviland, Carol. “Writing Centers and Writing-Across-The-Curriculum: An Important Connection.” Writing Center Journal 23.2 (2003): 5-13. Writing Centers Research Project. Web. 5 August 2011.

North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English 46.5 (1984): 443-446. JSTOR. Web. 8 July 2008.

“Professor Ryan and the Writing Center.” Message to Paul Esqueda and the author. 23 Nov. 2010. Email.

Simpson, Jeanne. “Whose Idea of a Writing Center Is This, Anyway?” Writing Lab Newsletter 35.1 (September 2010): 1-4. Print.

“Use of Writing Center Resources.” Message to author. 19 Aug. 2010. Email.



Watkins, Michael. The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003. Print.

“Workshop Resources.” Thompson Writing Program. Duke University. Web. 8 Aug. 2011.


REVIEW OF MULTILITERACY CENTERS: WRITING CENTER WORK, NEW MEDIA, AND MULTIMODAL RHETORIC, EDITED BY DAVID M. SHERIDAN

AND JAMES A. INMAN

Catherine Gabor San Jose State University [email protected]

While writing center directors will certainly want

to read Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric, a new collection edited by David M. Sheridan and James Inman, this book is equally important for writing program administrators, WAC (writing the curriculum) directors, and other academic professionals charged with composition pedagogy. The book explores the current and future potential for writing centers in light of the “multimodal turn,” which arose from three intersecting conditions:

• the “proliferation” of online composing tools,

• the ease with which non-specialists can engage in “multimedia production and distribution,” and

• the “increasing cultural acceptance of multimodal compositions as ‘serious’ and useful forms of communication” (1,2).

The editors and authors promote the notion of the “Multiliteracy Center” (MLC) in response to the multimodal turn.

In five sections, the collection describes, defends, and imagines how MLCs might be structured in terms of:

• physical and online spaces (section one: “Space”);

• tutor training (section two: “Operation and Practice”);

• outreach within and beyond the university (section three: “Connections”);

• services provided (section four: “Production”); and,

• budget (section five: “Reality Check”). The chapters in all five sections encourage readers to take on “a bit of utopian thinking” (6) regarding fashioning writing centers as campus sites of multimodal and multimedia literacy tutoring, while

also providing concrete suggestions about where to get resources—both intellectual and fungible.

The “Space” section starts off the collection very practically, with Inman’s “Designing Multiliteracy Centers: A Zoning Approach.” Inman introduces the notion of “zones” in the writing center that facilitate different kinds of multiliteracy tutoring (from video/audio editing to “old-fashioned” face-to-face conversation). The next chapter in this section reiterates Inman’s claim that MLCs need “zones” for tutoring different aspects of the composing process and showcases Clemson University’s “Class of ’41 Online Studio” (“Composing Multiple Spaces” by Morgan Gresham). Gresham walks readers through the four iterations she designed for Clemson’s online MLC before arriving at the final site. She wrestles with how to replicate and expand on a multiliteracy center in an online environment, seeking to provide both static information and interactive communication.

The “Space” section transitions nicely to the first essay in the “Operation and Practice” section by keeping the focus on Clemson’s Class of ’41 MLC. Teddi Fishman, a colleague of Gresham, describes how the team at Clemson designed the physical Class of ’41 Studio in the chapter “When It Isn’t Even on the Page: Peer Consulting in Multimedia Environments.” Fishman provides readers with a blueprint of the center and discusses how each “zone” (with its unique equipment and layout) facilitates “orientation practices,” “theoretical practices,” “technology practices,” and “tutoring practices.” The next two chapters in the “Operation and Practice” section, Sheridan’s “All Things to All People: Multiliteracy Consulting and the Materiality of Rhetoric” and Richard Selfe’s “Anticipating the Momentum of Cyborg Communicative Events,” focus

Review of Multiliteracy Centers • 2


more directly on the tutors themselves and their capacity to serve multimodal composers. They argue that tutoring cannot be effective without critical decision-making about mode/medium of production and delivery. For example, Sheridan’s chapter ends with an impressive heuristic designed to foster (traditional) tutoring conversations about purpose and audience, as well as considerations of how students should deliver the text they are composing (printed page, photo-intensive website, brochure, etc.). Selfe, like Sheridan, asserts the need for MLC tutors to be technologically and rhetorically literate; he calls such a tutor an “advanced literacy practitioner.” Advanced literacy practitioners are adept at understanding “cyborg communicative events,” described as composing processes that account for human agents (author, audience) and non-human agents, such as hardware and software. The human and non-human together—the cyborg—function as the cornerstone of multiliteracy for Selfe.

The “Production” section is comprised of two chapters casting the MLC as a site of knowledge construction. (The “Connections” section falls between “Operation and Practice” and “Production”; I discuss it in depth below.) This section mirrors the “Space” section with a more general, theoretical chapter followed by a specific example from one university. Christina Murphy and Lory Hawkes (“The Future of Multiliteracy Centers in the E-World: An Exploration of Cultural Narratives and Cultural Transformations”) argue that writing center professionals must be retrained as “digital content specialists” with knowledge of XML (or other Web text authoring tools) so they can produce online tutoring content and “assume their rightful and credible role as a knowledge-making academic resource that fosters the major educational and societal goals of multimodal literacy” (174). Sheridan’s chapter “Multiliteracy Centers as Content Producers: Designing Online Learning Experiences for Writers” features a tutor-produced video about developing thesis statements. As an alternative to the traditional instructional lecture, the group at Michigan State created a narrative of a student talking to a tutor, to

friends, and others, as she strives to write a thesis statement.

Jackie Grutch McKinney’s chapter, the final essay in the book and the only entry in the “Reality Check” section, is a “timely . . . cautionary warning” to writing center administrators about the need to embrace multiliteracy tutoring and co-construct “the new media ecology on our campuses” (219), lest it fall to “other campus entities” without pedagogical goals or expertise. With that said, she does urge us to recognize that large-scale change is nearly impossible to achieve quickly, but that it is feasible in small steps that stretch but do not overburden budgets and staff.

The collection provides an introduction to vanguard MLCs—cutting-edge models; however, readers may wish for some chapters to address small campuses, campuses with severe budget challenges, or community colleges. One other shortcoming of note is the lack of discussion of gender, race, or class—they go virtually unmentioned. Given the vexed history of literacy, technology, and gender/race/class, one might expect the editors to have sought a chapter that explicitly addresses how multiliteracy centers can serve historically marginalized students.

In Jo Koster’s informative and insightful review of Multiliteracy Centers (Writing Lab Newsletter September/October 2011), she supposes that two chapters—Sheridan’s “All Things to All People” and Selfe’s “Anticipating the Momentum of Cyborg Communicative Events”—will become the stand-out essays of this collection: Sheridan’s for its useful appendix and Selfe’s for its controversial argument. These two chapters, found in the “Operation and Practice” section, are certainly well worth reading, but the chapters in the second half of the book (especially in the “Connections” and “Reality Check” sections) focus more explicitly on collaboration across campus and beyond, which is the most promising theme of the collection.

I see “Connections” as the heart of the book for its long view of collaboration. The two chapters in this section focus on the role a multiliteracy center can play in composition classes using service learning (George Cooper’s “Writing Ain’t What It Used to Be: An Exercise on College Multiliteracy”) and in an

Review of Multiliteracy Centers • 3


MLC-sponsored summer institute for local K-12 teachers (“Multiliteracies Across Lifetimes: Engaging K-12 Students and Teachers Through Technology-Based Outreach” by Troy Hicks). Readers might fret, “Not only do I have to transform the Writing Center into an MLC, but now I also have to sponsor service-learning and K-12 training!” But, as McKinney suggests, centers can grow slowly into MLC-hood, taking smaller steps as budgets and collaborative opportunities allow. For example, if writing centers collaborate with local high schools to enhance critical literacy, these high school graduates may end up working in our burgeoning MLCs as “advanced literacy practitioners” (Selfe). Likewise, service-learning and community engagement centers are often directed by seasoned grant writers willing to collaborate with aspiring MLCs on funded projects.

As a former writing center director and a current writing program administrator, I see Multiliteracy Centers as a series of essays that make explicit (again) the fundamental need for collaboration among rhetoric and composition professionals (writ large) and the wider public. For me, the most generative question the book raises is: who is capable of/responsible for multiliteracy instruction?

Works Cited Sheridan, David, and James A. Inman, eds. Multiliteracy

Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric. New York: Hampton Press, 2010. Print.

CALL FOR PAPERS Praxis: A Writing Center Journal is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published biannually by the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. As a forum for writing-center practitioners, Praxis publishes articles from writing-center consultants, administrators, and others concerned with issues related to writing-center training, consulting, labor, administration, and initiatives. Our editorial board welcomes clearly written, scholarly essays on writing-center consulting, research, administration, and training. Submissions may be based in theoretical and critical approaches, applied practices, or empirical research (qualitative or quantitative). Article submissions are sent out to our national review board for a double-blind review. Praxis also welcomes responses to previous issues' articles (in the form of letters to the editor), column essays on tutoring and consulting, and book reviews on subjects pertinent to writing-center work. These submissions do not go through the peer review process. For information about submitting an article, the journal's blind review process, or to suggest themes for future issues, please visit praxis.uwc.utexas.edu. Guidelines Recommended length is 3000 to 4000 words for articles and 1000-1500 words for column essays and reviews. Please include Works Cited and footnotes as you do a word count (and use endnotes rather than footnotes). Articles should conform to current MLA style (7th edition). Please use double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12pt. font and one-inch margins. Please only use one space after a period. Do not format your paper in any other way. Images and tables should be formatted as both a jpeg and word doc/excel file and uploaded as supplemental files. When submitting your document, please indicate if your article is to be considered for our “Focus Article”, “Column”, or “Book Review” section. Please include an abstract (under 250 words) along with your submission. Please include a brief author bio to be included if your article/column/review is accepted for publication. Deadlines Please submit your essay before January 15 to be considered for our Spring issue. Please submit your essay before June 15 to be considered for our Fall issue.

Vol 9, No 1 (2011): Raising the Institutional Profile of Writing Center Work (part 2)

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Transcript of Vol 9, No 1 (2011): Raising the Institutional Profile of Writing Center Work (part 2)