Center Will Hold

Michael Pemberton

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780874215700
• eBook ISBN: 9780874214840
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges.

Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.

1
THE WRITING LAB NEWSLETTER AS HISTORY

Tracing the Growth of a Scholarly Community

MICHAEL A. PEMBERTON

In her May 2001 review of five recently published writing center books for College English, Jeanette Harris begins by noting how remarkable it is to see so many such texts published in a single year. “For a long time,” she says, “the writing center community considered it a good year if more than two books focusing on writing centers made their way into print. . . . In fact, for a while it looked as if the term writing center scholarship might be an oxymoron” (662). Harris’s observation, just pointed enough to make many writing center professionals wince, is not so much a lament over the dearth of reputable scholarship as a tacit recognition of the relatively short history writing center studies have as a specialized area of inquiry. For the first few decades of the community’s existence as a community, most writing center directors were more interested in surviving annual funding uncertainties than conducting directed research or pursuing publication, and there was often very little institutional support for writing center research even if a director were so inclined. Writing center work was generally looked upon as a service function, geared toward remediation, and not worthy of much regard academically or institutionally.

There was not much support to be found in a network of colleagues with similar interests, either, largely because such a network did not yet exist. Though a great many colleges, universities, and high schools contained writing centers or learning centers—some of them with histories that extended back to the 1930s or earlier—contact among these centers was very limited. As late as the mid-1970s, there were no formal writing center organizations, no publications with writing centers as their focus, and relatively few opportunities for tutors and directors to gather together and discuss issues of mutual concern.

By the late 1970s, however, the number of people interested in writing center work had reached a critical mass. At a pivotal panel presentation at the 1977 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in St. Louis, Muriel Harris, Mary Croft, Janice Neuleib, and Joyce Steward met to present papers and lead a discussion on writing lab theory and administration.

[T]heir audience was so large that many had to listen from the hallway. . . . [P]articipants recognized that their vigorous exchange of ideas could help them in the development of their own writing lab programs and that they needed a means of continuing their useful exchange. The enthusiasm of their discoveries ran the Writing Lab session head-on into the next presentation. Harris remembers that as participants for the next presentation tried to push their way into the room, she suggested that a newsletter would be the best way to continue their collaboration. She also realized that they needed each other’s addresses and passed around a sheet of paper [to collect them]. (Ballard and Anderson 1989, 7)

Even with a critical mass, a group has no power, no clout without an organ to communicate its platform and mission. Harris’ innate sense of the need for such an instrument led to the creation of The Writing Lab Newsletter (WLN), a manifesto through which writing center personnel could find a voice. Robert Connors once described the newsletter as a kaffeklatsch for its informal, welcoming nature; underlying that coziness was a political action instrument that led to the increased professionalism of the writing center community.

LAUNCHING A MOVEMENT

Muriel Harris—beginning assistant professor at Purdue University, faculty wife, Renaissance scholar, director of a brand-new “experimental” writing lab (all markers of a fairly powerless position)—voluntarily produced the first issue of The Writing Lab Newsletter and distributed it to the 49 people on the original mailing list in April 1977. No one at the time, least of all Harris, could have predicted what the eventual results of that initial effort would be—that the WLN would continue regular publication for over 25 years, eventually attract more than 1000 subscribers, become the principal means of communication among writing center tutors and directors, help to found a growing writing center community, and usher in an new era of writing center professionalism, scholarship, research, and theory.

With the prophetic words “WE ARE LAUNCHED!”, volume 1.1 of the WLN proclaimed that a new specialization within the growing rhetoric/composition community had been established, and over the course of the next quarter century, the WLN has given voice to its members’ concerns, interests, ideas, and fears, chronicling the growth of the developing writing center field on a monthly basis. The Newsletter and the community have evolved together, interdependently, and the changes that have taken place in one have quite often been reflected by or been a reflection of changes that have taken place in the other. For this reason, then, the WLN—perhaps more than any other resource—provides a unique window into the evolutionary process that has made the writing center community what it is today.

ETHOS AND THE PHATIC SHIFT

When Robert Connors wrote a review called “Journals in Composition Studies” for College English in 1984, The Writing Lab Newsletter was singled out for special attention, partly because it represented the recent emergence of a new constituency within composition studies—writing center specialists—and partly because of the unique ethos it embodied:

As Lisa Ede has pointed out to me, most of the content of newsletters is phatic communication, a sort of “Hey, I’m out here too and we’re all facing the same kinds of problems” halloo from some colleague previously unknown. The Writing Lab Newsletter illustrates this, remaining today what it has been since its inception—a classic and admirably useful newsletter without pretense to scholarly importance. . . . WLN acts like a bulletin-board for writing lab administrators, keeping them in touch, announcing who’s had a baby or lost a relative, offering help at home and handy-dandy tips. Though WLN remains a very specialized publication, useful only to writing lab administrators and tutors, it serves its special purpose well. It is, in addition, the most personalized and informal of all the journals covered here, strongly imbued with the character of its editor, Muriel Harris. It is the only writing journal that makes its readers feel like friends. (359)

Some aspects of this description, notably the “bulletin-board” function and friendly ethos, are as true of the WLN today as they were in 1984. But the nature of the bulletin board and its ethos have changed somewhat over time, due largely to the changing face of the profession and the subtle evolution of the WLN itself. The Newsletter’s communicative stance slowly became less personal and more professional, shifting away from birth announcements and brief requests for help, and moving toward calls for proposals, conference announcements, and job advertisements. All these forms of communication work to build and maintain community within a field, but they make different assumptions about the nature of the community and the best mechanisms for maintaining cohesion.

Tracking the points where the first type of phatic communication (personal/direct address) began to fade away in favor of the second (professional/indirect address) is difficult, given that the personal has never disappeared completely from the WLN. Many current articles use personal address or take the form of personal anecdotes. Harris’s introductory editor’s column in each issue, for instance, is always very personal, addressing readers directly and making friendly appeals from time to time. Still, it is possible to identify two of the regular features in the Newsletter’s earliest issues—features with purely personal phatic functions—that have either completely vanished or that no longer appear with any regularity. These are (1) lists of new subscribers’ mailing addresses and (2) “letters to the editor” that make suggestions or requests.

Sharing names and addresses was, perhaps, the WLN’s most important function in its early years. Growing directly out of the CCCC session that gave the newsletter its start, the publication of address lists reflected how critical it was for members of the nascent community to know who they were, individually, and where they were all located. As Harris proclaimed at the start of volume 1, issue 1:

Here is the first issue of THE WRITING LAB NEWSLETTER proposed at the CCCC’s, and our first order of business is to have each other’s names. Enclosed is an initial list, but as you spread the word and encourage other lab people to join us, supplementary lists will be included in future newsletters. (1)¹

These supplemental lists appeared in every issue for the next three years, but before long they became an impractical burden on the Newsletter’s very limited printing space. In September 1981, because of the “stack of manuscripts waiting to appear” and because during the previous summer over 50 people had joined the newsletter group, Harris announced it would no longer be possible to continue listing the names and addresses of all the new members in the Newsletter (6.1, 1).² The mailing list at that point exceeded 1000 subscribers, and the one-time “small community” of writing center specialists was no longer quite so small anymore. The Newsletter was clearly achieving its intended goals: to create and build community and to provide a place for scholarly output.

In a similar fashion, one of the Newsletter’s earliest staple features—short letters and announcements from members of the newsletter group—was gradually crowded out by longer, more substantive articles and extended reports on professional meetings. In volume 2.5 (January 1978), for example, short pieces of correspondence almost completely fill the issue. Paul Bator (Wayne State) asks to hear from people with experience in basic writing and/or proficiency testing, Ken Bruffee (Brooklyn College) provides a short bibliography on training peer tutors, and a new “Editor’s Mailbag” prints four short letters announcing, among other things, new writing labs at Brigham Young University and Southern Methodist University; another of the letters asks whether the Newsletter might consider publishing job announcements for qualified “lab people” (3). A mere two years later, lengthy program descriptions and professional announcements take up a majority of the publication’s available space. Short letters from readers linger for a long time; at least one is printed in every issue through November 1986 (11.3). After that date, they appear only sporadically, the next one not showing up until June 1987 (11.10).

Still, despite its increasingly professional tone, Harris believes that the core ethos of the Newsletter has remained essentially unchanged. It continues to be personal, practical, and accessible, providing an important mechanism for new tutors and directors to enter the writing center community and immediately feel a part of it. “The Newsletter is still a way for people to keep in touch, new people in particular,” she says. “A lot of people express gratitude for the Newsletter’s role in doing this—they don’t read listservs or go to conferences. I still try to keep it open to people at all levels of expertise. . . .I think of it as a conversation rather than a publication with a head editor. The Newsletter is a community for keeping people in by mentoring them” (Harris 2001).

BUILDING A COMMUNITY OF PROFESSIONALS

Besides publishing information about its subscribers and generating a sense of community through the concrete act of identifying them by name, the Newsletter also functioned, then as today, as a news service, publicizing conferences and professional meetings that would allow the community to gather face to face. Unsurprisingly, the first conferences announced in the WLN were not focused on writing centers per se. Volume 1.1 included an announcement for “SET IT WRITE—A Conference on the Teaching of Writing” at Illinois State, and volume 1.2 publicized the sixth annual Wyoming Conference on Freshman and Sophomore English. The March 1978 (2.7) issue did forecast an upcoming “Special Interest Session on Writing Labs at the CCCC’s” (1), but the first actual writing center conference announced in the WLN was the Ohio Writing Labs Conference, hosted by the English department at Youngstown State University, Nancy McCracken coordinating (January 1979, 3.5). In later issues, conference announcements and calls for manuscripts appeared frequently, eventually being given their own section in March 1981 (5.7).

In keeping with the philosophy that “if it’s not written, it didn’t happen,” early issues of the Newsletter documented “conference reports” from CCCC and other meetings, and these reports are striking, not only for what has changed but for what has remained the same. Consider the following list of “the most important areas discussed” in a special CCCC session on “The Writing Lab as Supplement to Freshman English” by James S. Hill:

1. continuity of instruction in the classroom and lab, 2. the use of grammatical exercises in the lab as opposed to composition, 3. general expense of operating a lab, 4. accountability to the English Department, 5. the importance of effective communication between the lab and classroom, 6. the psychological implications of the lab as a place of learning rather than for “bad” students, 7. referral procedures—drop in or appointment, 8. the lab as one hour credit in addition to the classroom, 9. the importance of having a rhetorician in the English Department who can oversee and organize the format of the lab, and 10. the use of teaching assistants in the lab. (May 1978, 2.9:1)

These early conference reports also display a fair amount of drumbeating and revivalist enthusiasm, promoting both the strength of the community and the growth of the profession. Harris was particularly adept at displaying this sense of excitement. In her report on the 1979 CCCC, she begins by saying:

Writing labs are thriving and, while still in a state of growth, have already become one of the major areas of concentration in the field of composition. In the 1979 CCCC’s program, writing labs were listed as one of the seven major topics dealt with in multiple conferences sessions. In addition to the five sessions on writing labs so adeptly coordinated by Janice Neuleib (Illinois State University), there was also the Special Interest Session on Writing Labs which attracted over 150 people! From all this, I have a strong sense not only of the continued growth of labs but also of the establishment of labs as integral parts of composition programs. (May 1979, 3.9:1)

For writing center specialists, many of whom were “at the periphery of the academic structure” with “less pay, less job security, and no access to tenure” (Harris, 3.9:1), the existence of a vital, thriving organization that shared professional interests while working to address these inequalities was an exciting prospect indeed.

Job announcements gave concrete evidence to the growing sense of professionalism. The first such advertisement to appear in the WLN was for a full-time, tenure track, assistant professor position directing the writing lab (half time) at Central Connecticut College. The February 1980 (4.6) issue published four such job announcements—though not all were specifically for writing lab specialists—and subsequent issues regularly included job ads, gradually focusing more and more on writing center director and tutorial positions.

ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY FOR ACTION

As the newsletter group grew, so did the impetus to establish more formal, independent, professional organizations, and the WLN was an important mechanism for publicizing these groups as they coalesced, established charters, and held conferences. The early 1980s were especially active in this regard. The April 1981 (5.8) issue announced the upcoming third annual conference of the Writing Centers Association (later to become the East Central WCA) as well as the formation of the Southeastern WCA with Gary Olson as president.³ In September 1982 (7.7), the Rocky Mountain WCA announced its first conference, and in November 1982 the National Writing Centers Association (NWCA) was recognized by NCTE and awarded assembly status (first announced in a short note in issue 7.4, December 1982). January 1983 (7.5) saw notices for the first Midwest WCA conference; the initial meeting of the Texas Association of Writing Center Directors, organized by Jeanette Harris; and a “Calendar of Writing Lab Conferences” that listed six regional events scheduled between February...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Author
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Writing Lab News Letter as History
• 2. In The Spirit of Service
• 3. Writing Center Assessment
• 4. Separation, Initiation, and Return
• 5. Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring
• 6. Breathing Lessons
• 7. (RE) Shaping the Profession
• 8. Administration Across the Curriculum
• 9. An Ideal Writing Center
• 10. Mentoring in Electronic Spaces
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Contributors