Writing Center Journal

Writing centers are sites around which folklore circulates.Staff meetings, classrooms, newsletters, and journals are filled with tales of individual and collective actualization, celebrating one-to-one teaching as deeply social, collaborative, and empowering.Legends from the writing center also speak to the tensions inherent in the spaces, reflecting divisions of tutoring as prescriptive versus directive, banking versus dialogic, and peer-driven versus expertowned.Following their review of writing center theory, history, and practice, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner advise, "What is most important is to understand where our practices come from and to unravel the various influences on those practices" (154).Knowing these conditions of possibility makes for more effective tutoring, and this awareness also speaks to a politics about learning and the production of writers.Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills -building and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-50).For each domain, the tutorial and the social actors in and surrounding it are implicated in a certain identity politics.In the storehouse writing center, skill-building and knowledge transmission posit the writer as a vessel in need of filling, and identity becomes conferred as a sort of membership card or rite of passage.In the generative writing center, the writer emerges from social interaction, and identity becomes a negotiation of assimilation, separation, and subversion.In the critical/activist writing center, consciousness-raising produces writers aware of the constellation

The Activist WPA , by

research interests include disability rhetoric and the role of exigency in the teaching of writing. Her dissertation explores how information about students' beliefs

A Short Course in Writing provides a good occasion to ask what makes a textbook in rhetoric and composition a classic. The fact that Bruffee's book is among the first to appear in the Longman Classics in Rhetoric and Composition series cannot be attributed, after all, to its commercial success. In his review of the original manuscript of A Short Course , Richard Beai, the most prominent English editor at the time, told Paul O'Connell, who published the first edition at Winthrop in 1972, that Bruffee could either alter the book and sell a lot of copies or publish the book as is and make history.1 What Beai predicted has indeed come to pass. As A Short Course appeared in subsequent editions (the 2nd from Winthrop in 1980; the 3rd from Little Brown in 1985; and the 4th from HarperCollins in 1993), it has influenced, far out of proportion to its sales, the actual practices of writing instruction and, more broadly, of educational reform in U.S. college composition.

by

It has been over a decade since Irene Clark argued in

In Turkish. . .we pay attention to the fact that we need to have these essays look good, so we have different punctuations that

Nicolases book, Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom , I am still marveling at the impressive array of writing-group contexts represented by the articles included in this edited volume. As a writing center director whose program has made several fledgling (mostly failed) attempts at facilitating group work, I began the book eagerly, expecting an authoritative prescription for structuring meaningful writing-group experiences. When no such prescription emerged in the reading, however, I quickly adjusted my expectations. At times frustrated and at others enchanted by the scrumptious complexity, I savored the book as a meal, one layered with flavors that enrich my appreciation of writing groups in all their manifestations.

Perhaps the irony

Writing centers are sites around which folklore circulates. Staff meetings, classrooms, newsletters, and journals are filled with tales of individual and collective actualization, celebrating one-to-one teaching as deeply social, collaborative, and empowering. Legends from the writing center also speak to the tensions inherent in the spaces, reflecting divisions of tutoring as prescriptive versus directive, banking versus dialogic, and peer-driven versus expert-owned. Following their review of writing center theory, history, and practice, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner advise, "What is most important is to understand where our practices come from and to unravel the various influences on those practices" (154). Knowing these conditions of possibility makes for more effective tutoring, and this awareness also speaks to a politics about learning and the production of writers. Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills -building and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problempose institutional and social discursive practices (147-150). For each domain, the tutorial and the social actors in and surrounding it are implicated in a certain identity politics. In the storehouse writing center, skill -building and knowledge transmission posit the writer as a vessel in need of filling, and identity becomes conferred as a sort of membership card or rite of passage. In the generative writing center, the writer emerges from social interaction, and identity becomes a negotiation of assimilation,

Each book is distinctive. The Allyn and Bacon Guide is a textbook for a tutor-training course, guiding students through several weeks of activities such as observing tutorials, being tutored themselves, conducting their first conferences, and analyzing transcripts of conferences. The St. Martins Sourcebook is a

Writing center work is theoretically-messy business, so it should come as no surprise that shifting the tutorial scene from the center to the classroom is a similarly complicated affair. Such, at least, is my belief having now read On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring, for whether describing a semester-long writing fellows program in a flourishing WAG environment or a single visit of writing center tutors to a Communication class, each of the essays in this volume richly describes a range of issues to consider before embarking on any form of classroombased tutoring. Along with depicting a range of options, most of the essays use these locations either as a source of evidence to advance arguments concerning the development and implementation of classroom-based^utoring programs or as texts ripe for analysis to improve our understanding of tutoring and writing. Whether the reader is initially considering embarking on classroom-based tutoring or currently administering such a program, then, On Location offers a wealth of models as well as a variety of theoretical frameworks for understanding what goes on in these complex learning environments.

Reading The Center Will Hold makes me feel hopeful about writing

Technology makes many colleagues uncomfortable

The editors of this long-awaited volume have aimed "to open, to formalize, and to further" the writing center research dialogue in order "to encourage and guide other researchers," as well as to present the "new knowledge that has resulted from the studies it reports" (back cover). They have succeeded.

survey data Christopher Ervin provides in the September, 2002, edition of The Writing Lab Newsletter. Ervins survey reveals that of 194 writing center directors polled, only 46% reported having held their positions for more than five years, and, of the remaining 54%, roughly 12% had held their positions for less than one year. We've known all along that the writing center community is characterized by a large pool of transient student staff, but these data reveal that it is also characterized by an overwhelming percentage of relatively inexperienced, and perhaps transient, administrators as well.