...FROM THE EDITOR...

This issue is a blend of new technology and perennial questions. Kathy Evertz recalls the “liberatory” view of our work raised fifteen years ago by Tilly and John Warnock and explores the question of whether a writing lab that is now also a WAC center can still maintain its liberatory role. In the “Voices from the Net” column, Libby Miles and her tutors use the electronic listserv WCenter to raise a question we constantly ask ourselves: “How much tutor talk is too much?” They bring together for us a summary of that discussion with their added suggestions.

On page 8, you’ll find ordering information for the new Writing Center Directory compiled by Paula Gillespie.

...INSIDE...

Can the Writing Center Be a Liberatory Center When It’s Also a WAC Center?

• Kathy Evertz 1

You Pays Your Money and You Takes Your Chances: Selecting Software to Enhance and Reinforce Writing Consultations

• Marilyn Lutz, Brian Dukes, and Adam Hall 9

Voices from the Net

• Carol Kaufman, Trissa Luzzi, Libby Miles, and Christine Fox Volpe ¹⁴

Can the writing center be a liberatory center when it’s also a WAC center?

In “Liberatory Writing Centers: Restoring Authority to Writers,” Tilly Warnock and John Warnock write that “the philosophy of liberatory learning requires that students take responsibility for themselves. Thus, students take an assertive role in deciding what happens to them and to their texts when they come to the center” (20). In other words, by keeping a distance from students’ texts, we are empowering the students.

Marilyn Cooper has something else to say about the business of agency, though, and it’s her argument around which my essay will pivot. In “Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers,” Cooper inverts the sort of liberatory aspirations that the Warnocks describe. She explains:

“Agency in writing depends not

on owning or taking responsibility

for a text but on understanding

how to construct subject positions

in texts. . . . [T]utors can best help students become agents of their own writing by helping them understand how and the extent to which they are not owners of their texts and not responsible for the shape of their texts.” (101).

I find Cooper’s ideas both inspiring and challenging. And while I endorse in many ways the agenda Cooper is promoting, I’ve wondered, too, whether her goal is a viable one when a writing center is in fact the center of a writing-across-the-curriculum program.

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As most of you probably know, writing centers that work with WAC faculty often conduct workshops for, or in collaboration with, those in other disciplines. Writing centers assist instructors across campus with writing assignments and writing instruction. And writing centers often work with those instructors’ students on their writing. Many writing centers survive because of the good will they have earned—because of the good will they often need to earn—from faculty across the disciplines. In this essay, I’d like to think a bit about the ways in which liberatory pedagogies and notions of agency might converge and conflict with the aims of a writing center when it’s also a WAC center.

The questions I’m struggling with go like this. If we can agree that the writing center’s goal is to help students achieve agency, how can we achieve that within the WAC environment? Is the goal of liberatory pedagogies possible when a writing center works closely with WAC faculty who rely on the center’s tutors to promote and teach rules, and to offer instruction in disciplinary conventions? When the writing center is a WAC center, can it be anything but the conservator of the academy’s value system: is such a center really a conservative, rather than a liberatory, force?

Before I try to deal with those questions, I want to acknowledge the tremendous diversity of writing centers and WAC programs. The local variations are tremendous. And I think those differences testify to the adaptability of writing centers. Having used the word “adaptability” to describe writing center people, rather than faculty across the disciplines, I’m getting at an issue that I think needs to be addressed when we talk about liberatory pedagogies. Most of the literature about writing centers’ relationships to WAC programs articulates for us that the writing center is a support service, that it exists to help instructors in the disciplines use or teach writing in their courses. I suspect you all know the general tune: writing center tutors sometimes act as consultants for faculty who feel uncertain about how to teach writing in their courses; and the writing center often functions as a referral service for students who need help (Freisinger and Burkland 167, 176; Wallace 195; McCall 33).

By reading the literature and talking to each other—at conferences and on the electronic listserv WCenter—we can get a sense of the range of “services” different writing centers provide. The image I want to stress here is one in which the writing center serves others (i.e., students and faculty). Were the writing center not in the service business, we’d probably be outta business. Now I’d like to return to Marilyn Cooper’s essay—one that is so rich, I’m afraid I can’t do it justice in this essay. But I want to make some connections between the idea of the writing center as a service station, and Cooper’s characterization of the writing center as a place for radical intellectuals.

Cooper explains that “students and tutors [here, she’s referring to undergraduate peer tutors] know how institutions coerce them in writing classes” (102). She says, “Students and tutors respond—quite rationally—by trying to make the papers match as perfectly as possible the specifications of assignments while at the same time—quite irrationally—trying to believe that in doing this students are asserting ownership over their texts and learning to write” (102). And now for the liberatory twist: “Agency,” Cooper argues, “is not a matter of simply taking up the subject positions offered by assignments but of actively constructing subject positions that negotiate between institutional demands and individual needs” (102).

How is this supposed to happen? Cooper turns to John Trimbur’s discussion of cultural studies and the role of the radical, or “organic,” intellectual— that is, someone who, because of his or her “contact with everyday practice[,] ensures that the philosophy of the group more accurately represents the real historical situation” (105). In this framework, writing center tutors are best suited to become “organic” intellectuals (as opposed to “traditional” intellectuals, who defend the status quo in the face of a changing society) (104). Cooper argues that tutors’ daily contact with student writers and their everyday reality positions tutors to do the work of the organic intellectual, which is to produce “what Richard Johnson has called really useful knowledge, knowledge that arises out of everyday practice.” (105).

Cooper says that writing center tutors who both learn from their student-clients and “critique theories of writing and language in light of their practice are better positioned to be organic intellectuals. . . . [tutors], along with their students, develop really useful knowledge of writing practices and of ways of teaching writing that help students achieve agency” (106). And certainly, Cooper writes, “the main prerequisite of empowering students as agents of their own writing . . . is, as Freire has long pointed out, having some idea of what students’ purposes and experiences are” (106).

To my mind, this is all great stuff. I embrace Cooper’s notion of the writing center as a place where students’ public and private lives meet and collide, as a place where tutors-as-organic-intellectuals can work with students in mediating between institutional demands and the students’ own needs and goals. That notion is right in line with Ira Shor, who explains, “The teacher is the person who mediates the relationship between outside authorities, formal knowledge, and individual students in the classroom”(13), and, one might say, in the writing center.

Cooper says that the writing center’s marginalization “in relation to the central institutional structures of writing pedagogy” makes it possible for tutors to critique the practices of the dominant group of composition theory on the basis of their own experience with students. She writes that “one of the benefits of being excluded from the dominant group is that in this position one has less to protect and less to lose. Undergrad students who serve as tutors have little investment in disciplinary beliefs and practices, and they are thus less responsible to its standards and expectations than they are to the needs and experiences of their peers” (106).

While the Warnocks, like Cooper, endorse the idea of a marginalized writing center, Peter Carino offers a word of caution: “In opposing the center to both classroom and institution,” he writes, “the Warnocks construct a false binary of inside-outside, suggesting that the practice they endorse can exist only covertly.” (28).

But what about writing centers that are linked in all sorts of administrative and institutional ways to WAC programs? Earlier, I noted the prevailing notion that the writing center is often seen as a support service for WAC programs. At my own school, The University of Wyoming, where Writing Center tutors do a tremendous number of outreach activities—including classroom presentations, workshops, and Writing Center introductions—there’s a lot of pressure to give the teachers what they want—and “what they want” can range from Writing Center tutorials with their individual students, whom they’ve required to make one or two visits to the Writing Center . . . to classroom presentations on, say, the writing process or “how to write a critical analysis,” or how to write a “college paper.”

Cooper asserts that the marginalized status of writing centers can be thought of positively—as a situation that encourages critique of the dominant group of composition theorists and practitioners. In the writing center/ WAC setting, one might extend that to include critique of dominant beliefs and practices of other disciplines, as well. Yet I think it’s important to recognize that writing centers that serve as support centers for WAC programs must be aware of the consequences of such critique; they must be aware that they often need to give the faculty what they want, which doesn’t always dovetail with what “we” want, with what we think they need and perhaps “should” want.

And so I want to come back to liberatory pedagogies, as I understand them from reading the work of Paulo Freire, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux. What I’d like to do is focus on the central role that dialogue plays in these pedagogies. Ira Shor says that students need to be authorized to speak; otherwise, they’re too weak to enact language, too weak to “utter.” In liberatory pedagogies, the mechanical transferal of information is not as important as the act of cognition. Shor echoes Freire’s emphasis on resolving the teacher-student hierarchy through dialogue. In his discussion of the “banking” concept of education, Freire says,

Through dialogue, the teacher-of

the-students and the students-of

the-teacher cease to exist and a

new term emerges: teacher-

students with students-teacher. The

teacher is no longer merely the-

one-who-teaches, but one who is

himself taught in dialogue with the

students, who in turn while being

taught also teach. They become

jointly responsible for a process in

which all grow. (218)

What I want to suggest is that, in institutions where the writing center is also a WAC center, where the writing center must support WAC faculty’s efforts to incorporate writing in their courses, the liberatory goal of helping students achieve agency cannot be achieved unless we revise the way we usually conceive of the teacher-student relationship. I agree with Cooper that tutors can and should become teacherstudents—that they need to critique their practice by learning more about their clients’ needs and goals. But what I’m thinking about is a situation in which writing center tutors and WAC faculty are teacher-students and student-teachers. In our writing and in our conversations about liberatory pedagogies and this thing called “agency,” we tend to focus, I think, on the tutor-student relationship. But if we’re going to work with WAC faculty, to “support” them—however that might get defined in specific contexts—the tutors and WAC faculty need to become, in the words of Freire, “critical co-investigators” (219). In other words, writing center tutors need to have a dialectical relationship with WAC faculty, especially if the local WAC context wishes to go beyond the write-to-learn strategies championed by scholars like Toby Fulwiler. If the writing center is going to “support” WAC faculty and, at the same time, strive to help students achieve agency in their writing, there has to be a dialogue in which all parties are authorized to speak, to “utter,” to enact language.

If we have a situation in which the writing center is operating as an extension of disciplines, as a place where students come to learn the conventions of writing in a given field without understanding why they should follow conventions (and without being encouraged to interrogate that practice), there’s no real agency, either on the part of the writing center tutor or the student. The discipline instructor remains the authority—and thus one might say the discipline instructor is the real “author” of the student’s writing; neither the writing center nor the student/client has the opportunity to question or learn, to become critically literate.

I absolutely agree with Cooper when she argues that writing center tutors can help students achieve agency in their writing by showing them the ways in which they do not own their own writing, and then showing them that agency does have to do with “actively constructing subject positions that negotiate between institutional demands and individual needs” (102). It seems to me that the best way for writing center tutors to understand the negotiable subject positions available to students is to converse actively and constantly not just with students, but with WAC faculty. At Wyoming, we have made changes over the past couple of years in the ways in which we think about our outreach programs. We’ve instituted policies that now require faculty across the curriculum to collaborate with us well in advance of our outreach activities—so we (that is, writing center tutors and directors) can tell them what will and won’t work, how students might respond to an assignment, how students might respond to a presentation as a faculty member has envisioned it. We also want to learn something about the boundaries of that discipline’s knowledge-making and writing; we want to learn what the constraints of the discourse community might be, and we want to learn how students might traverse that unfamiliar territory without getting lost.

I’m talking about a situation in which writing center tutors become “critical co-investigators” with WAC faculty into the theory and practices of different discourse communities. In those outreach collaborations and conversations, writing center tutors can and should discover just what WAC faculty thinks “literacy” means, and to teach them what we know about multiple literacies, student writers in general, and student writers in those disciplines. It’s through multiple conversations, between us and WAC faculty, between us and students, and between WAC faculty and students, that agency might be achieved.

Kathy Evertz

University of Wyoming

Laramie, WY

Works Cited

Carino, Peter. “Theorizing the Writing Center: An Uneasy Task.” Dialogue 2.1 (1995): 23-37.

Cooper, Marilyn M. “Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers.” Writing Center Journal 14.2 (1994): 97-111.

Freire, Paulo. “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education.” From Ch. 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum Publishing Group, 1970. Rpt. in David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, eds. Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. 4th ed. Boston: Bedford, 1996. 212-223.

Freisinger, Diana, and Jill Burkland. “Talking About Writing: The Role of the Writing Lab.” Language Connections: Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Eds. Toby Fulwiler and Art Young. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1982: 167-178.

McCall, William. “Writing Centers and the Idea of Consultancy.” Writing Center Journal 14.2 (1994): 165

171.

Shor, Ira. “Educating the Educators: A Freirean Approach to the Crisis in Teacher Education.” Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Ed. Ira Shor. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987. 7-32.

Wallace, Ray. “The Writing Center’s Role in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program: Theory and Practice.” Writing Center Journal

8.2 (1988): 43-48. Rpt. in Landmark Essays on Writing Centers. Eds. Christina Murphy and Joe Law. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1995. 191-195.

Warnock, Tilly, and John Warnock. “Liberatory Writing Centers: Restoring Authority to Writers.” Writing Centers: Theory and Administration. Ed. Gary A. Olson. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1984. 16-23.

Wiring the Writing Center, Ed. Eric Hobson. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998

Reviewed by Cindy Johanek, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana

Putting a “human face on complex skills”: The hidden (human) message in Wiring the Writing Center

Reviewed by Kelly Lowe, Mount Union College, Alliance, OH

The new year is upon us, and while most folk look at 1999 and begin to contemplate the end of a century, most of us in the writing center community are focused on more pragmatic concerns—the start of a new academic term.

1998 was a busy year for the National Writing Centers Association. Our regional affiliates met and continue to flourish. We went international with the addition of the European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) as a regional organization. Many of us came together at the CCCC or NCTE meetings. And, we rushed to get our proposals in the mail for the 4th National Writing Centers Association Conference at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, April 15-18, 1999. Likewise, 1998 was a great year for writing center research and scholarship with six new books about writing centers and tutoring and many great articles published.

As in past years, the NCTE conference in Nashville, TN was a busy time for NWCA. At the invitation of NCTE, NWCA once again hosted the conference’s Active Writing Center, housed at the NWCA booth. In addition to working with the writing projects of conference attendees who requested such assistance (for example, we worked with a group of three secondary school teachers to plan and draft a book prospectus for a new teacher’s survival guide), we displayed available writing center materials, including informational flyers, books, and journals of interest. This service was made possible by the strong volunteer spirit in the writing center community. Our friends and colleagues Sonja Bagby, Pamela Childers, Al DeCiccio, Peggy Ellington, Paula Gillespie, James Inman, Francie Jeffrey, Neal Lerner, Jim McDonald, Michael Pemberton, and Donna Sewell gave their time and enthusiasm while they worked to provide conference attendees access to all that NWCA has to offer language arts educators working at all educational levels.

The minutes of the NWCA Executive Board Meeting held at NCTE demonstrate the variety of items on the organization’s active agenda: recommendations for a name change; up-dating of the Constitution; creation of a NWCA Research Grant; final decisions on writing center accreditation, etc. You will see more about this in the next few weeks. Because several items recommended by the Board require ratification by the NWCA membership, I will be sending a mailing packed full of NWCA information, activities, and ballots for voting on important initiatives. Please take time to read and respond to the information contained in that packet. Your voice is essential in helping the organization move in directions that meet the needs of everyone who makes up NWCA.

1999 promises to be a great one for NWCA. We will come together in Bloomington, IN for the National conference in April. We will meet as regional groups with Southeast Writing Centers Association kicking off the year’s meetings with a 20th Anniversary celebration February 3-6 in Charleston, SC. My New Year’s resolution is to be as much a part of all this activity as I possibly can. As such, as NWCA President, I want to be available to provide whatever support I can to everyone in the writing center community—just let me know what you need.

Happy New Year.

Eric Hobson Albany College of Pharmacy hobsone@panther.acp.edu

Writing Center Directory Available

Paula Gillespie has compiled a current Writing Center Directory that is now available for $21 per copy. In the continental U.S., the price includes shipping and handling. For orders from Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and abroad, special shipping arrangements (including added cost) can be made with the company. Orders can be placed by phone or FAX from Metagraphix, 5499 Westridge Court, New Berlin, WI 53151. Phone: 414-641-5700; FAX: 414-641-5711. Complete credit card information can be sent to the company. To order, please call or fax your order with the following information:

Phone: FAX: No. of copies requested:

You pays your money and you takes your chances:

Selecting software to enhance and reinforce writing consultations

Tutors are an odd species. To many, our roles in the writing process are unclear, but it is because of our efforts that many students feel confident enough to sit down at their computers and write a paper without experiencing a single reservation. Student empowerment is a top priority at the University Writing Center. We empower students in simple ways; we give the students positive feedback on what they arrive with, involve them in their conferences, allow them to maintain ownership of their papers, and make sure they leave with a clear sense of direction on where the paper needs to go. These may all seem like insignificant details in the tutoring process, but they are vital in giving the students their writing wings.

Positive feedback is perhaps the most important aspect of empowering a writer. Students often come to the writing center carrying with them the idea that they cannot write. At least once every shift I hear, “I can’t write,” or “I’ve never been any good at writing.” In response to these comments I say, “Everyone can write, but just like anything else, it takes practice.” Generally, people like to do only the things they do well. For many students, writing is not one of those. No matter how bad a paper is, I can always find something good to say about it; that is how I start my list of comments on the paper. Every time I have started off with something negative, I have lost the student for the remainder of the conference. We, as tutors, must realize that given the same situation, we would react in much the same way.

Involving students in their conference is the second important element in empowering students. Allowing them to co-conduct the conference makes them more likely to voice their ideas on where they want the paper to go. It also helps in building a good working relationship between the tutor and student. Encouraging students to become involved in the conference helps remove the mystery from the writing process for them. Each person comes to the realization that writing is simply getting ideas from the brain to the paper. There is no big secret involved.

Student involvement in the conference also ensures they maintain ownership of their paper. This is a difficult concept for many tutors and students to grasp. Conferences should be collaborative instead of instructional, but students are often quite satisfied if we, as tutors, insert our own words, sentences and even ideas into their papers. Once this happens, their paper no longer belongs to them; it has become a joint venture in writing. It is unethical for us to take the ownership of a paper away, and it is not at all beneficial for the student.

Letting a student do all the work on her paper with only some direction from a tutor accomplishes three major things: the student’s confidence is built up because she knows she can do it, she maintains ownership of her paper, and it fosters a sense of independence on her part. Every tutor at the Writing Center has heard, “Can I do this here,” or “Can I say that?” Students often do not realize that their paper belongs to them, because so many times, teachers and tutors have taken over ownership of their papers.

I have reviewed papers where a teacher or tutor inserted words or sentences, and the student had no idea what they meant. For many students, it is enough to tell them they need to work on transition sentences or they need a word that would work better in a particular situation; others need a little help. Because there are so many egos involved in the writing process, it is hard to let the ones who can do it go. All of us, teachers and tutors alike, seem to think that no one can do it like we can; therefore, we put our words or sentences in where we think they belong. In doing this, we show the student that we do not trust them enough with their own paper to do it themselves.

Eventually students begin to think they must ask permission to say what they wish to say in their own paper. When I am asked that question, I tell them that it is their paper, and they can say what they want as long as it is relevant to the topic. It usually takes a great amount of encouragement, but they will sometimes do it. When I can make a student feel comfortable at this point, I feel as though I have really accomplished something.

When I get them to where they can finally say what they want, I must make sure they are motivated to finish what they have started. This task is handled in different ways for different people. Some students are clearly motivated from beginning to end; these are the easy ones, because all they need is a little positive reinforcement and they are on their way. Others are a different story.

Throughout the conference, I make sure that students understand what I say and that they can explain it to me. Making a “to do” list on the paper is how I keep students focused on where they must go next. Clear direction is something most writers need, and it is important in every stage of the writing process. If students have a clear sense of what needs to come next, motivation to complete their papers is normally not a problem.

If students come in for a brainstorming session, we work to develop an outline. That piece of paper will serve as their map from the time they start on the introduction until they finish the concluding paragraph. If these students return to me to have their rough drafts reviewed, I usually see well focused and well organized papers as well as students who are not frustrated with the whole idea of writing.

All aspects of student empowerment are intertwined, and it is hard to discuss each one as a separate entity. The secret to successfully empowering students is to not break the process up into parts but to combine them into one smooth technique that, if used during every conference, will become second nature. Of all the ideas behind student empowerment, there is one that needs to be remembered above all the rest. As long as students are dependent on teachers and tutors in every stage of the writing process, they will never feel comfortable enough to try it alone. Trust the students enough to let them do it on their own.

Christy Hicks Western Carolina University Cullowhee, NC

(After an extended online conversation about “how much tutor talk is too much” on WCenter, the following message appeared from Libby Miles, Director of the Writing Center, University of Rhode Island, and her tutors. Neal Lerner’s bibliography referred to in the message is appended here.)

Writing/Reading Center Coordinator/English Instructor Riverside Community College

Riverside Community College Dis-ing English at a community college or trict, located 70 miles from Los Ange-baccalaureate-level institution is also les in Southern California, is seeking a required. Writing center experience Writing & Reading Center Coordina-and knowledge of computer networks tor/English Instructor to facilitate the are preferred. District’s large-scale, three-campus Writing and Reading Center. The Cen-Application Deadline: February 11, ter serves English composition, ESL, 1999. and reading students who work each week in self-paced or collaborative For a detailed job description and its learning opportunities as part of their qualifications, as well as a required required course of instruction. District application form, write to Riv

Qualifications: In addition to pos-Human Resources Office, 4800 Magsessing qualifications for an English nolia Avenue, Riverside, CA 92506instructor at a California community 1299, or call (909) 222-8588, TDD

college, experience with and knowl-(909) 222-8014, Fax (909) 222-8035, edge of computer-aided instruction is or visit our website at <http:// required. Successful experience teach-www.rccd.cc.ca.us>.

Writing Center Director Columbus State University

Assistant Professor of English, tenure-track, to help develop a university writing center and teach courses in professional writing and freshman composition. Candidates should have a Ph.D. with specialty in rhetoric and composition. Experience in and/or knowledge of writing centers would be a great asset.

Apply by sending an application letter and vita to Daniel W. Ross, Chair, Department of Language and Literature, Columbus State University, Columbus, Georgia 31907. CSU is a part of the University System of Georgia and is an AA/EO employer.

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