Welcome back! I hope your summer has been a pleasant one and hasn’t zoomed by too rapidly to finish at least half the items on your “to do” list.

The rest of the newsletter contains news about conferences; a report from Al DeCiccio, NWCA president; announcements; and a ballot to select new NWCA Executive Board members.

I suggest you refill your coffee cup, find a quiet tutoring table to retreat to, and enjoy the valuable insights you’ll find in this issue.

The Writing Center as Managerial Site

• Ronald Heckelman 1

Writing Center Outreach Programs: Shaping a Collaborative Role

• Diane LeBlanc and Jane Nelson 5

NWCA Executive Board Ballot 8

Writing Center Ethics: “Tutorial Ethics: Student Personalities”

• Michael A. Pemberton 10

The writing center as managerial site

We writing center folk may not be accustomed, or even quite comfortable, thinking about the writing center as a multi-dimensional site of management. In this essay I’d like to speculate about who and what is managed and why it is useful to think of the writing center, its mission, and its director this way. My aim is to demystify the concept of management as it applies to writing and especially writing centers. Management need not be a dirty word for those of us who make our livings in the writing business.

Our word manage derives from the Latin, manus, hand. To manage is to have in hand, as it were. However, this does not mean hierarchically to hold, control, or limit. To manage is more properly to guide, direct, empower, nurture, or to teach. In early modern Europe the manage, forerunner of present day dressage, was a way to teach a horse to realize its full potential by learning discipline and self-control, to increase its courage and confidence. The metaphor of horsemanship and horse training as teaching goes back, of course, to Plato’s Republic.

It has always seemed to me that what we do in the writing center is to help writers learn to direct their impulses and manage their anxieties so that they can negotiate assignments and think and write clearly. This usually translates into “success.” Our aim is to help students/writers learn to manage their own thought and creative processes. This is also what management is all about. It is the efficient organization of work processes. Although it is not by a long shot all we do, we teach what amounts to forms of self-management and rational decision making. Isn’t this what the familiar strategies of inven-

The Writing Lab Newsletter, published in ten monthly issues from September to June by the Department of English, Purdue University, is a publication of the National Writing Centers Association, an NCTE Assembly, and is a member of the NCTE Information Exchange Agreement. ISSN 1040-3779. All Rights and Title reserved unless permission is granted by Purdue University. Material will not be reproduced in any form without express written permission.

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tion, planning, implementation, and evaluation (revision and proofreading) are? We help writers manage on many levels at once—psychoanalytic, institutional, discursive, and cultural. The bottom line in the “business of writing,” as in other “economic” domains, is productivity and customer satisfaction. Here the customer is first the student/writer and second the audience he/she is writing for. We help writers exercise a modicum of control—or what Foucault calls “care”—over what we all realize is fundamentally mysterious and unmanageable—thought itself. Nevertheless, our guiding assumption is that learning to manage words is learning (ideologically) to manage or take “care of the self.” To paraphrase Peter Elbow, if writing is power, it is clearly an instrument of management. Elbow himself implies as much in the subtitle to Writing with Power, which is Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. To master something does not mean to exert full control over it. It means to understand the limits of control; that is to know when and how to channel, direct, and manage forces much larger than we are. Management is knowing when and why to “go with the flow,” as it were.

Although there is much more to be said about writing and rhetoric as essentially managerial technologies, I’d like to focus the rest of this brief essay on the writing center director as manager. What does it mean to think of ourselves this way? What are the features of “good” or effective writing center management? And finally, are we adequately prepared by our educations to become effective managers?

If we think about what we do everyday, and our role within the university, there can be no doubt that we are in fact managers. We are responsible for a facility or unit within a larger complex. We are decision makers. We hire and occasionally have to fire. We train and empower employees. We teach. We budget. We struggle to balance a variety of resources—human, print, and computer. We keep statistics and write annual reports. We deal with complaints. We “sell” our service through public relations (posters, bookmarks, workshops, etc.). We engage in outreach projects. We deliver a service and are in a sense part of a “service industry.” We measure our success in part by the number of repeat customers we have.

We are academic middle managers par excellence, positioned between dean or provost and an often recalcitrant English department. As a result, the successful and surviving writing center director must be someone with very strong interpersonal communication skills needed to navigate this treacherous middle ground. He/she must know how effectively to talk to people both above and below him/her within the institutional pecking order, all the while silently decrying the existence of such a structure. It is important to know how and when to be assertive without stepping on toes. We need to know how and when to coach, to cheer, to facilitate, to coordinate, to direct, and hopefully to lead.

What makes a successful writing center manager? In his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey outlines the following general characteristics of an effective manager which I believe we can usefully relate to writing centers.

1. “Be proactive.” Anticipate possible problems such as budget shortfalls or inappropriate tutor conduct. Don’t just react. Create policies for possible contingencies. Communicate these to everyone in the center. Cultivate relationships—especially with sympathetic administrators and senior faculty across the university that may prove helpful in a pinch. This is not a Machiavellian tactic. It is just proactive networking.

2. “Begin with the end in mind.” Have a vision of the paradigm through which you would like the writing cen

ter and yourself to be perceived by colleagues, students, and the institution. Be patient. It takes a few years to shift a local paradigm, say from “grammar ghetto” to “Burkean parlor.” It is important to keep this in mind at every moment—in every tutorial, in every staff meeting, in every budget request. Try not to lose sight of the “big picture.”

1. “Put first things first.” Remember that the writing center is indeed a “service.” It is first and foremost about people, about writers, not mere grammatical correctness or placating those who insist on seeing us as grammar and punctuation doctors. It is not “about” record keeping or statistics per se, although without the latter we cannot compete for funds or function very well. By the same token, it is important not to become “servile,” seeking to please for its own sake. This reduces the writing center to a second order “fix-it shop” or clinic role we have all been fighting for years.

2. “Think win/win.” Although it is often easy to do, avoid thinking in terms of us versus them, especially with respect to those unsympathetic to our true mission. Try to make everyone feel good about what they are doing or have to do. Sharing “ownership” of the center with as many people as possible enhances commitment and loyalty. Inviting guest faculty to make presentations and give WAC workshops is one way to accomplish this. Delegate responsibility whenever possible and try to foster a horizontal rather than vertical organization. Learn to “let go” of authority. Isn’t this what we often advocate to novice writers who are “blocking”?

3. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Learn creatively to listen to what people—administrators, colleagues, tutors, students— say. Always try to see things from the other person’s point of view before offering your solutions, no matter how correct you know you are.

1. “Synergize.” Remember that the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. The writing center as a concept is much more than the collection of all the tutors and computers and software. As a “safe” place to share one’s writing it necessarily takes on a nurturing and even spiritual dimension. It is a place for taking risks. Obviously this cannot be quantified, and it is imperative therefore to develop some ethnographic evaluation techniques (e.g., testimonials, student/faculty questionnaires) to “measure” the center’s effectiveness.

2. “Sharpen the saw.” Keep a balance between the physical, socio/emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of the managerial enterprise. Good writing center management typically amounts to such a balancing act. In this way the process of managing, not unlike the process of writing itself, becomes a process of learning. Keeping the saw sharp means allowing all four of these components to inform and continually renew management practice.

In Managing as a Performing Art, Peter Vaill describes the process of managing as the negotiation of “permanent white water” (2), a struggle against forever unresolved turbulence and uncertainty. Sounds like a writing center, doesn’t it? Vaill goes on to delineate what he identifies as seven key myths or misconceptions about the role of the manager (11-14). All seven nicely complement Covey’s points, are fairly self-explanatory and relevant to the writing center:

1. “The myth of a single person called “the manager” or “the leader.” The writing center director needs to be a team player. He/she plays on a faculty team with the Director of Composition/Writing, other writing teachers and relevant administrators, and on the tutoring team he/she “captains” in the center. The business of writing is definitely a collaborative effort.

1. “The myth that what the leader leads and the manager manages is a single, freestanding organization.” The writing center, especially as linked to a WAC program, needs to be seen as serving the entire university community. It is important that no single department or academic discipline be seen to dominate or call all the shots.

2. “The myth of control through a pyramid chain of command.” The director is only as effective as those with whom he/she surrounds him/herself. This is why it is important to delegate responsibility, to empower assistants and student tutors in order to foster as much as possible a horizontal structure of authority.

3. “The myth of the organization as pure instrument for the attainment of official objectives.” The center needs to be a safe place for writers to take risks. It is important therefore that it not be perceived as merely an extension of the traditional composition class, in which the tutors serve as unofficial teaching assistants for the classroom professor.

4. “The myth of the irrelevance of culture.” The mission and local ethos of every institution is different, and writing center tutoring methods, procedures, and policies need to be suited to particular situations. For example, in some schools the faculty may expect regular feedback from the center about how students are developing, and in other schools this kind of accountability may not be necessary or even desired. The size of the ESL program at a given school also will effect tutoring styles.

5. “The myth of a product as the organization’s primary output.” The writing center exists to assist writers. What the center hopefully produces more than anything else is increased competence and especially “playful” confidence to manage a variety of writing situations.

7. “The myth of rational analysis as the chief means of understanding and directing the organization.” There is a definite rational component to what the center offers. For example, we afford writers an opportunity to enhance their repertoire of rhetorical strategies so that they know they have more choices. On the other hand, often what we do is just “be there,” sometimes just to listen and nod.

I wonder how many writing center directors come to their first job adequately prepared to manage. We know all about theories of tutoring, the history of rhetoric and composition but often little about the essential managerial component of what we are expected to do within the institution. There has been an unfortunate bias in the humanities, where most composition programs are housed, against acknowledging the appropriateness of the managerial metaphor for writing as well as writing center directing. This is ironic considering that becoming a writing center director and/or writing program administrator, a professional middle manager, is what many in composition studies aspire to. It is generally considered, in fact, the mark of a successful career. Yet how many of us have ever studied management or organizational behavior as part of our formal graduate educations? At least one course or practicum in theory and practice of management should form part of the required curriculum for those pursuing graduate degrees, and especially doctorates, in composition studies. The more we know about the institutional “white water” we will encounter as writing center directors, the wider our own range of choices will be, and the greater chance we have to hit the ground running.

In sum, we can become more effective managers on all levels if we embrace the idea that writing and rhetoric are indeed forms of management and management is essentially rhetorical and pedagogical in nature.

Ronald Heckelman Montgomery College Conroe, TX (Formerly at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, TX)

Works Cited

Covey, Stephen R. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. New York: Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.

Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self. Vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality. Tr. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Vaill, Peter B. Managing as a Performing Art: New Ideas for a World of Chaotic Change. San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 1989.

First-year students at the University of Wyoming are required to take a one-credit orientation course as part of University Studies, a general studies program. One of the purposes of this course, University Studies 1000 (UNST 1000), is to introduce students to campus resources. As a major resource on campus, the Writing Center has had significant and direct involvement in the design, evaluation, and continuing development of this course. In return, the Writing Center has experienced a major impact from the increased requests by the instructors of this course for specific classroom assistance. At times this impact has threatened to overwhelm us, but we have learned to positively manage our own destiny by developing policies and procedures consistent with the collaborative philosophy of writing centers.

Instructors of UNST 1000 seek Writing Center involvement in their classes for excellent reasons. Although several pages in the required textbook describe the theory and practice of the Writing Center, instructors who desire a more lasting impact on their students schedule an actual visit to the Writing Center for an introduction to its services by a Writing Center consultant. In addition, many instructors incorporate writing assignments into their classes. The UNST 1000 course coordinator encourages active learning through writing assignments such as journals and short response papers. Furthermore, instructors know that many students will not take the required one semester of first-year composition until their second semester. To ensure that students experience college writing in the first semester, they often require writing that will be graded for content and form. In fact, writing assignments, both informal and formal, frequently comprise the bulk of the graded assignments for the course. As a consequence of the high profile that writing takes in this course, instructors seek additional Writing Center assistance, both in the design of the writing assignments and in the presentation and teaching of writing in their classrooms.

When the Writing Center started to offer the variety of outreach presentations and workshops requested by UNST 1000 instructors, problems surfaced that we now know correlate with the assumption that we were presenting guest lectures. Although the instructors themselves seemed satisfied with our guest appearances in their classrooms, the Writing Center consultants frequently reported negative results. The students seemed bored. The presentations that the Writing Center consultants so carefully designed in retrospect seemed disembodied, unconnected to anything else going on in the course. The Writing Center consultants felt that instructors expected them to “cover” writing instruction in the one day devoted to this topic. Sometimes the instructors introduced the Writing Center guest as the “expert” on writing; sometimes they announced that the Writing Center consultant would “entertain” the class. On some occasions, the instructors scheduled two guest speakers for the day without informing the Writing Center. The instructors themselves often appeared bored and disengaged. Some disappeared into the hall during the presentation or announced ahead of time that they would not show up at all. Others sat in the back of the room, grading assignments, preparing lectures, and even conferencing with students. After an accumulation of these kinds of experiences, we realized that we should either cease offering Writing Center outreach programs altogether or change our approach.

To confirm our support of writing for first-year students, we opted for the latter, and we can now report a higher success rate for our UNST 1000 outreach program. Our first step in designing a new approach was to clarify what we could offer instructors to help them decide whether or not to request Writing Center involvement. We defined specific outreach activities to help faculty see how a Writing Center consultant could enhance rather than appropriate the teaching of writing in the course. We designed a brochure to advertise our outreach programs in such a way that faculty who want Writing Center involvement can participate in determining their specific needs and work with the Writing Center to create a presentation or a workshop. Our second, subsequent step was to insist that every presentation be designed and delivered in collaboration with the instructor of the course. We developed procedures to ensure that faculty will be centrally involved. Through this approach, we have been able to both assist faculty with the design of their writing assignments and advise students on producing more satisfactory writing.

In defining our outreach policy, we narrowed our offerings to introductions, presentations, and workshops. To prevent interchangeable use of these terms, our brochure defines each and clarifies how instructors might use them. When faculty call to request an outreach program, we now have a common language to help focus their needs.

We define an introduction as a fifteen-minute talk, usually held in the Writing Center, that familiarizes students and instructors with Writing Center services and resources. The introduction is a popular choice for UNST 1000 instructors, and we are happy to give these upon request, since they constitute such good advertising for the one-on-one services of the Writing Center.

A presentation is a collaborative effort between instructors and our Writing Center which focuses on writing assignments or questions specific to the class. Instructors work with the Writing Center to design presentations that help prepare students for writing assigned in the course, including journals, response essays, evaluations, memos, persuasive letters, and reports. By offering presentations about these specific types of writing, the Writing Center has helped to define the role of writing in the course. In helping to prepare these presentations, faculty have learned, for instance, that the kinds of writing assignments they might assign have very different purposes and that they require very different kinds of evaluation criteria.

Like presentations, workshops are collaborative efforts between instructors and the Writing Center. We recommend workshops when students are engaged in the writing process and are ready to share their writing with peers in the classroom. A Writing Center consultant attends and co-directs a workshop with the instructor of the class; the content may involve focusing and developing ideas, supporting ideas, seeking audience response, and editing drafts. Many of the faculty and staff who teach UNST 1000 (usually as volunteers and as overloads) do not have significant time for preparation and grading of writing assignments. They often have little experience in teaching, specifically in the teaching of writing. The co-directed workshops thus help faculty to think about how to teach writing as well as help students to learn how to write.

To foster collaboration and to eliminate some of the problems of being a guest in the classroom, we have created a questionnaire to accompany the brochure. The questionnaire is either sent to instructors for completion or completed over the telephone in conference with the Writing Center consultant who will conduct the presentation or workshop. Focusing on purpose, specific goals, Writing Center participation, and structure, the questionnaire asks the following key questions:

What specific assignment in your class will this presentation/workshop address?

How would you like this presentation/workshop to help you implement this assignment?

What new understanding of the writing assignment would you like students to gain from this presentation/workshop?

What role will the Writing Center consultant play in the presentation/ workshop—e.g., facilitator, moderator?

What introductory information will be necessary? Who will present it?

What activities will participants engage in, and what will be the end product of the presentation/workshop?

The development of these outreach materials now enables us to be more effective, active participants in the course. Every spring, when faculty for the upcoming fall UNST 1000 courses meet for orientation and training, we present our brochure and questionnaire, and we highlight some of the successful writing assignments developed by instructors. We also have conducted workshops devoted to the evaluation of writing during which instructors discuss the relationship between an assignment and its evaluation. If instructors value highly emotive writing, we suggest that they assign journals, a genre which typically values expression over effective communication to an academic audience, and we also suggest that they avoid grading these journals on an A F basis. If instructors want students to learn to write an essay, we suggest that they create a multi-step process in the classroom, and we encourage a Writing Center presentation or workshop as part of that process.

To illustrate the positive outcomes of our new policies and procedures, we offer this example of a collaborative workshop we created for a seasoned instructor of the course. This instructor has always enthusiastically supported the Writing Center and typically requests some kind of Writing Center presentation because he wants his students not only to write but to improve their writing. Despite his enthusiasm, during our presentations in past years he exhibited many of the problematic behaviors we listed above. This year, we tried our new approach by developing a collaborative workshop. In response to the questionnaire, he specified two goals: (1) he wanted students to see exactly what happens during a one-to-one Writing Center conference;

(2) he expressed frustration with the response essays his students write— they contain far too much description and far too little reaction or analysis. In order to help this instructor assume more responsibility for the teaching of writing, one of us, Diane, requested his direct involvement in the workshop. In compliance, he brought to the class session a memo which he had written. As we would do with any Writing Center client, Diane asked him to read the memo out loud. After reading several sentences, he began to comment on their tedious length. This observation, as well as his concern with tone and audience, provided the focus for a ten-minute Writing Center conference.

After this live demonstration of a writing conference, Diane distributed a double-column journal to students, asking them first to describe what they had just seen. After discussing their descriptions, students then wrote reactions in the second column. Comparing the two, the students were able to distinguish description from reaction. The instructor participated in this discussion by stressing several times that he was expecting students to develop their response papers from reactions (column two) rather than from description.

This successful Writing Center workshop, defined as such by its interactive nature, reflects two important changes in the instructor’s attitudes toward writing and Writing Center involvement in his course: he genuinely wanted to introduce students to the Writing Center, and he wanted to improve the quality of writing in the course. During the 50-minute workshop, the instructor was centrally involved in the activities. The students watched him take risks by exposing his own writing to public scrutiny, and they learned the difference between description and reaction by responding to his risk.

Admittedly, our efforts to shape outreach programs have not completely eliminated problems. We still struggle with faculty who call at the last minute to say that they will be absent from class, leaving us to do more than facilitate writing in the course. They still make scheduling mistakes and ask us, in front of class, to cut short our presentation in order to make room for “an important guest speaker.” There are those who undermine our efforts by announcing during a presentation that students need not take what we are saying “too seriously.” We now know that next time, next year, we can rely on our strengths and on our commitment to collaboration to help minimize the problems.

Diane LeBlanc and Jane Nelson University of Wyoming Laramie, WY

Tutorial ethics: Student personalities

Calendar for Writing Centers Associations

Sept. 25-26: Pacific Coast Writing Hawley Academic Resource Centers Association, in Center, Simpson College, 701

Pullman, WA North C St., Indianola, IA Contact: Lisa Johnson-Shull, 50125; phone: 515-961-1524; WSU Writing Center, Avery fax: 515-961-1363; e-mail:

Hall 451, Pullman, WA james@storm.simpson.edu 99164-5046; phone: 509-Feb. 3-6: Southeastern Writing Center 335-7695; fax: 509-335-Association, in Charleston, SC 2582; e-mail: Contact: Tom Waldrep, Director, ljohnson@mail.wsu.edu The Writing Center, The

Oct. 8-10: Rockey Mountain Medical University of South Writing Centers Association, Carolina, AA 113 Harper in Salt Lake City, UT Student Center, 45 Courtenay

Contact: Jane Nelson, U. of Street, Charleston, SC 29401. Wyoming Writing Center, Fax: 843-792-9179; e-mail: Center for Teaching Excel-motenb@musc.edu.

lence, Coe Library, Laramie, April 15-18: National Writing Centers WY 828071; phone: 307-Association, in Bloomington, IN 766-5004; fax: 307-766-Contact: Ray Smith, Campus 4822; e-mail: Writing Program, Franklin 008, jnelson@uwyo.edu. Indiana University,

Oct. 23-24: Midwest Writing Bloomington, IN 47405; phone: Centers Association, in 812-855-4928; e-mail: Milwaukee, WI wrsmith@indiana.edu; http:// Contact: Allison James, www.indiana.edu/~wts/ecwca.

Conference on the
Teaching of Writing

Taking a second first glance

Observations from the writing center

5. Don’t do the writers’ work for them.

It is very tempting for me to just start re writing or editing a part of someone’s paper myself. But while this may make for a better paper, it does not help the writer of the paper to improve at all. It is also not ethically right. It is fine for suggestions to come from the tutor, but it must be left to the writers to do the actual writing and revising. Only then will they become better writers.

It is fine, for example, for a tutor to fix writers’ spelling and grammar mistakes or help to improve the syntactic quality of a paper. But the tutor must not just go through and fix everything. The objective of all tutors is for the writers they are helping to become better in the long run. So when fixing things in a paper, the tutor needs to accompany the correction with explanation and instruction. The “how” and “why” of correction can not be overlooked by tutors as steps on the way toward the long-term goal of improved writing by students.

These five ideas have all become standard procedure for me as I have spent more and more time helping students with their writing. I believe that I am much better prepared to help a student going into a tutoring session now than I was eight months ago. I hope that you will all find these suggestions to be as helpful as I have.

Adam Hanson

Gordon College

Wenham, MA

It seems as if just yesterday I was wishing you a summer full of much-deserved reflection and relaxation. It seems much too soon to be welcoming you to a new academic year. Yet, here we are about to face 1998-1999. Given the late spring and summer publications in The Writing Lab Newsletter and in The Writing Center Journal as well as some of the WCenter posts this summer—plagiarism and intellectual property; writing center liminality; what we should call ourselves; generalist and specialist tutors; conference summaries; software programs for writers and for record keeping in the writing center—we seem to be more engaged than ever in the issues of our field. From my perspective, such engagement will be necessary this year as we bring to conclusion several pending issues and as we plan NWCA’s presence at NCTE and at CCCC, and as we plan the Annual NWCA Conference.

First, while we tried, the Executive Board did not succeed in holding regularly scheduled MUD meetings this summer to conduct NWCA business. However, the Board is working to resolve the issues involving accreditation so that you may have an informed and balanced proposal to consider soon. At the NCTE Convention in Nashville this coming November 19-24, NWCA will again host an Active Writing Center. Also at NCTE, on November 21, NWCA will hold its business meeting; among the agenda items will be the transfer of the presidency from my hands to the very capable hands of Eric Hobson. At the time of my writing this column, I have not heard officially of

NWCA’s place on the program for the CCCC Convention. I do know that Neal Lerner submitted a proposal for a pre-convention workshop in the tradition he started at last year’s CCCC Convention and that Michael Pemberton worked on the NWCA Special Interest Group session. As far as the NWCA Conference scheduled for Bloomington, Indiana, next April 1518, there will be a flurry of activity in the upcoming weeks to put together the program. I am indebted to Ray Smith and his colleagues who will help us to offer another outstanding conference.

It will be a busy year for the NWCA membership and the Executive Board. Plans for the International NWCA Conference will be forthcoming, as will be plans for increasing the NWCA membership. Until my term ends, I will keep you apprised of these plans and of other issues; I will urge Eric Hobson to continue writing the column when he assumes the presidency.

There is one action you can take now before your schedule becomes too crowded. We are scheduled to present the NWCA Outstanding Service Award at the Annual NWCA Conference in Bloomington. NWCA members may submit nominations to Eric Hobson by December 1. Nominations should be accompanied by a description of the individual’s contributions and by an explanation of why the nominated person, in particular, should be recognized for his or her contributions. Include in your nominating letter the names of three other people in the writing center community who would support your nomination. You may send your nomination to Eric Hobson, Associate Professor of Humanities, Albany College of Pharmacy, 106 New Scotland Avenue, Albany, NY 12208; email: hobsone@panther. acp.edu.

Albert C. DeCiccio

Merrimack College

adeciccio@merrimack.edu

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