Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers

Jackie Grutsch McKinney

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780874219159
• eBook ISBN: 9780874219166
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers aims to inspire a re-conception and re-envisioning of the boundaries of writing center work. Moving beyond the grand narrative of the writing center—that it is solely a comfortable, yet iconoclastic place where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing—McKinney shines light on other representations of writing center work.

McKinney argues that this grand narrative neglects the extent to which writing center work is theoretically and pedagogically complex, with ever-changing work and conditions, and results in a straitjacket for writing center scholars, practitioners, students, and outsiders alike. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers makes the case for a broader narrative of writing center work that recognizes and theorizes the various spaces of writing center labor, allows for professionalization of administrators, and sees tutoring as just one way to perform writing center work.

McKinney explores possibilities that lie outside the grand narrative, allowing scholars and practitioners to open the field to a fuller, richer, and more realistic representation of their material labor and intellectual work.

1 INTRODUCTION Cognitive Dissonance Are we afraid that no one will do it if we talk about the real deal? —Beth Boquet (2002), Noise from the Writing Center

A typical day for a writing center director might include any of the following:

• Writing job ads, posting job ads, answering questions about job ads, asking for references for applicants, interviewing applicants, hiring applicants

• Preparing for staff meetings, discussing tutoring needs with staff, finding guest speakers

• Training tutors, observing tutors, giving tutors suggestions for improving practices, locating readings for tutors, distributing copies to tutors, listening to tutors’ self-assessment and their suggestions for improving the writing center

• Answering questions about commas or APA or kairos while walking past a tutoring session, answering questions about commas or APA or kairos while getting mail in faculty mailroom or at retirement dinners or on airplanes

• Writing or proofing copy for writing center advertisements, giving an interview to the school paper on the usefulness of a writing center

• Writing conference proposals or presentations, drafting articles, tracking down out-of-print books from interlibrary loan

• Coaching tutors or graduate students in writing proposals, articles, theses, dissertations, or job letters

• Meeting with student groups and faculty who want to know how the writing center can help them, meeting with student groups and faculty who want to know all the “secrets” to being good writers in an hour or less

• Writing memos articulating needs for more space, better equipment, more tutoring bodies; writing reports on utilization of space, equipment, and tutoring bodies

• Scheduling tutors, rescheduling tutors, taking calls from sick and delayed tutors, finding replacements, telling students their tutor is late or their tutor is not coming

• Tutoring student writers from all levels on all sorts of projects, consciously hoping to model “good tutoring practices” to others in the room

• Answering emails and phone calls from disappointed students who want more appointments, answering emails and phone calls from faculty members who want miracles

• Meetings: all kinds

• Delegating: as much as possible

• Reading latest (or thereabout) issues of the Writing Center Journal, the Writing Lab Newsletter, Praxis, Writing Program Administrator, College Composition and Communication, College English, and other related publications

• Maintaining careful records; maintaining the writing center website, blog, Twitter, and Facebook

• Ordering supplies, books, equipment, furniture, pens, bookmarks

• Meeting with students or faculty who are researching student writers in the writing center, discussing ethical research practices, methodologies, and historical approaches to writing center research

• Troubleshooting computer problems, software programs, network problems

• Responding to posts from other writing center professionals on WCENTER

• Running for a regional writing center association board, voting in board elections, hosting regional or national writing center conferences, packing up for travel to a city-wide, mini-regional, regional, national, or international meeting with other writing center professionals

• Cleaning tables, chairs, keyboards; tidying up resources and desk drawers

• Meeting with university assessment and accreditation committees to negotiate assessment plans

• Talking with tutors and students about their weekends, classes, money and relationship problems, and favorite YouTube videos

• Worrying about what is not getting done, what is not getting done well, or what the university’s financial crisis might mean for the students, tutors, and you

Since many writing center directors are also faculty, days may also be full of teaching tasks: reading, lesson planning, syllabus writing, conferences, going to class, grading, responding to emails, as well as faculty meetings and committee work. For some faculty writing center directors, doing research is essential for keeping a job and being promoted, so days are also full of drafting proposals, communicating with co-authors, writing, researching, and revising. Since it is not uncommon for a writing center director to maintain a research agenda in a different subfield (say, Early Modern English or Basic Writing), some must keep current in two areas of study: writing center studies and their research area.

Writing center tutors have equally complex lives. As tutors, they have many of the responsibilities that directors do, in addition to other tasks. They must get to work, clock in, answer phone calls and emails, work with students in tutoring sessions, work with students who walk in with any number of questions, work with faculty with any number of questions, complete records or paperwork, troubleshoot computer and software problems, prepare for and attend staff meetings, work on writing center training materials or publications, complete peer or self-assessments, track down obscure rules for manuscript guidelines in Chicago style or gerunds or resumé formatting, provide cultural insider insights on American academic expectations, negotiate highly charged sessions or, alternatively, apathetic students, and teach students how to research and revise. Tutors are often students as well. They may be undergraduates carrying eighteen-credit hours each term with classes all over campus or they might be graduate students with intense reading, writing, and research workloads.

In addition, all directors and tutors are immersed in a workplace with colleagues, histories, and expectations, all of which may be easy or difficult to manage depending on their contexts. And, as all writing center directors and tutors are also humans, days are permeated with personal and familial relationships, responsibilities, and the daily minutia of keeping ourselves and maybe others fed, well, clean, and rested.

Yet, if I’m invited to talk about what happens in a writing center or what I do as a writing center director, I don’t typically talk about much of this. I say something about how a writing center is a place for all students to get feedback on their writing and how I supervise the tutors. To be sure, when asked what I do, no one really wants to hear a laundry list like the one above. And, of course, writing center directors and tutors do not necessarily have it any easier or harder than others in terms of the work they do. However, I’ve started to listen to how I talk about the work of the writing center, and I’m curious how I select from this list of what to say. What can be understood from that rhetorical choice?

The main argument of this book is that writing center work is complex, but the storying of writing center work is not. By and large, the way that writing center scholars, practitioners, and outsiders talk about writing center work fits into a relatively familiar pattern, similar to mine above. In the following chapters, I examine that familiar pattern. I call it the writing center grand narrative, which goes something like this: writing centers are comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing. Like any grand narrative, there is some truth in this description of writing center work. Throughout this book, I am not concerned with arguing that this narrative is patently untrue. It’s not. Instead, I am making the case for considering two things. First, by telling this story, what story am I not allowing? What story am I censoring, to use Salman Rushdie’s words from the epigraph? Second, by telling this story, what do I gain and what do I lose?

This book, then, addresses the cognitive dissonance between the work we do and the work we talk about. There are moments when I get five minutes, fifty minutes, or maybe even more to spin whatever story I would like about our writing center, and up until lately, I have to admit, I have not told my writing center story with much foresight or much afterthought. I have borrowed the story from the discipline; this story is committed to my unconscious memory. Like how a rosary bead compels one to a particular prayer, on an occasion for talking about writing centers, I return to the same story. Aside from getting this off my chest, none of this would be particularly important to air publicly, no less in book-length form, except for the fact that I am not the only one using this narrative, and for those of us who use it, I think the telling has become so naturalized, so transparent, that we no longer recognize our tellings and retellings as one of many possible representations. Instead, telling the familiar writing center story is just what we do.

Muriel Harris has written that there is no easy way to communicate to others in our institutions about the work we do. She writes, “The types of work accomplished in writing center tutorials are so complex and varied—and individualized—that we have not yet been able to come up with sound bytes that illuminate what we do” (Harris 2007, 75). And though I think she is right that it is too difficult to condense all that we do into a few sentences—certainly items get lost in the condensation—I do think the grand narrative is the way many of us have tacitly agreed to talk about our work and that outsiders do get a general, legible picture of writing center work from what we say.

Furthermore, telling the writing center grand narrative story makes me feel like I belong, although not locally. I do not feel more connected to those in front of me when I tell these stories; instead I feel more connected to those in writing center studies. Though in Facing the Center Harry Denny says the writing center community doesn’t “have a code or widely agreed consensus about performativity” thus “nearly anyone can claim our identity” (Denny 2010, 149), I disagree. I think the story we keep about our work is one of our membership badges; we can discern outsiders by those who stray from the narrative. Like any other community, those in the writing center profession share some common beliefs, rituals, and lore and learn/teach others how to shape these experiences into words—members learn “rhetorical habits,” in Kris Fleckenstein’s (2010) terms. Knowing these habits and making them mine make me feel like I belong—all the more so if I can talk about my telling among other insiders who will validate me, laugh with me, or commiserate with me.

I do think, as I illustrate throughout, that the story is both beneficial and constraining to writing center studies. Having a grand narrative has united us, given us a “purity of purpose,” as Terrance Riley (1994) asserts. Yet, the story has worked in less positive ways—like all stories have the potential to do—by changing the ways we see. It has given us a frame for seeing and evaluating writing center work. If writing centers are comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing, then certain activities take center stage, certain activities are legible as writing center work and others are not. Consequently, this affects job training: those entering the profession may not be prepared for the work they will be asked to do. Michael Pemberton explains, “On one particularly frustrating day, while wrestling with a writing center schedule that seemed to change every five minutes and fielding calls from faculty who wanted me to give class presentations in ten minutes, it suddenly struck me that my graduate school training and coursework had completely failed to prepare me for the parts of my job that routinely demanded the most time and energy” (Pemberton 2011, 256). I believe that because we are preoccupied by the writing center grand narrative, we routinely do not prepare future administrators for actual writing center work.

The writing center grand narrative also shapes others’ views about what is writing center work. A brief anecdote might illustrate this point. During my first month on the job as a writing center director in 2003, I complained to the writing program director that the computers in the writing center were ancient and mostly unusable. The writing program director agreed and went to the department chair to ask for replacements. As I waited outside the office (in retrospect, I have no idea why I was not invited in), I hear the writing program director make the case, and I hear the chair respond: “I’m sorry, but it’s not a computer lab. You know?” The chair’s internalization of the writing center story—what a writing center does and thus does not do—did not include computers and, as a result, that first semester we were stuck with our ancient and unusable equipment.

The effect of the writing center grand narrative can be a sort of collective tunnel vision. The story has focused our attention so narrowly that we already no longer see the range and variety of activities that make up writing center work or the potential ways in which writing center work could evolve. Thus, the title of the book reveals its aim: peripheral vision. I would like us, myself especially, to be more conscious of the formulaic ways we story writing center work because the stories give us frames, or what Kris Fleckenstein (2010) calls “visual habits,” for interpretation. In The Everyday Writing Center, Geller et al. note that writing center professionals are often too busy (with the sorts of tasks listed at the beginning of this chapter) to notice the everyday ways in which our writing centers are already communities of practice. They assert “the most interesting moments of our workday might have not demanded our attention at all” (Geller et al. 2007, 5). We’ve been conditioned not to notice these everyday moments by the interlinked rhetorical and visual habits the writing center grand narrative provides. To come to peripheral visions, we need to become aware of the narrowness of the writing center grand narrative and the tunnel vision that it enables. By doing so, we can complicate the writing center narrative in ways that include what now lies at the periphery of our work.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

If the writing center grand narrative is a cloth woven from various strands and strings to appear as a whole, in each of the chapters that follow, I pull at one strand at a time, not to dismantle it entirely but to show how easily it unravels under pressure. Each chapter takes a small piece of the grand narrative (writing centers are comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing) under consideration in order to discuss how piece by piece the entire narrative is merely a representation and simultaneously a misrepresentation of writing center work. The first chapter outlines the theoretical assumptions the book relies on. There, I connect the dots between stories and vision using ideas and scholarship from within composition and writing center studies, as well as from outside of these academic areas.

After establishing the theoretical frame for my argument, I take the grand narrative apart in three chapters, each digging deeper into our most naturalized and cherished common-sense assumptions about writing center work. I imagine a reader who might get increasingly uncomfortable as he or she continues through these chapters. Yet, at the same time, although uncomfortable, that same reader might hear the collected peripheral stories of writing center work and finally be able to point to his or her own cognitive dissonance between what is said and what is enacted, what marks belonging and what does not.

In the second chapter, a revision of an article published in Writing Center Journal originally titled “Leaving Home Sweet Home” (Grutsch McKinney 2005), I tackle the idea that writing centers are or should be comfortable spaces. Though often described in that way—as cozy, homey, friendly, safe, and comfortable—I think of these descriptions as stories. I review some of these depictions and make the case that (1) the readings of spaces ought to consider multiple interpretations (the centers are not cozy simply if we insist they are); (2) the ideal of a cozy center might not be universally held; and (3) telling the story of our centers as cozy spaces does less to describe the lived, material realities and does more to reveal our loyalties to the writing center grand narrative. We story the physical spaces of our centers in particular ways to show our allegiance and our belonging to the writing center community.

After drafting the first version of that article, I began to wonder if there were other stories writing center professionals told one another and outsiders that painted writing center work in a particular (positive) light but did not seem to account for the whole picture of lived, material realities of writing center work. It was a small step from thinking about how writing center spaces are represented as alternat...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Cognitive Dissonance
• 2 Story Vision
• 3 Writing Centers Are Cozy Homes
• 4 Writing Centers Are Iconoclastic
• 5 Writing Centers Tutor (All Students)
• 6 Conclusion: The End of the Story or the End of the Center?
• Appendix: Survey Results
• References
• Index
• About the Author