Agenda:
- Review Syllabus
- Review Model Wikis
Assignments for 09/16:
- Send me an e-mail – to jeffpruchnic (at) wayne (dot) edu – identifying your top 2-3 interests/concerns about your preparation for teaching at WSU (i.e., the primary worries you have about teaching and/or the primary topics you want to make sure we address in this class).
- Read short essays (linked here) by Brooks, Clark/Healy, Harris, Haselwander, Ineich, Lunsford, Mullin, and Stephenson.
- Choose at least two of the above to focus on in composing a response for next week’s class (bring it with you next week); your response should be approximately the length of a single-spaced page.
Assignments for 09/23:
- Read Finding Our Way
- Compose a single-spaced page response to FoW and bring it with you to class on 09/23; you may focus on one or more essays in the volume. Ideally said response should end with a question or provocation that will encourage further discussion.
- Register your own wiki via pbworks. At minimum, you should create a frontpage for your Winter course(s), as well a roster page that includes an entry for you (see the roster page and my entry for the 1020 section I’m currently teaching). Consult the video embedded above as well as the pbworks manual for wiki formatting instructions. Drop a link to your wiki as a comment to this post when you’ve completed these items.
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September 10, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Derek Risse
Here’s the sample 1020 site that I developed for class:
http://risse1020.pbworks.com/
September 15, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Andrew Winckles
http://winckles1020.pbworks.com/
September 15, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Andy Engel
http://1020engelw10.pbworks.com/
September 16, 2009 at 10:44 am
Aaron Pellerin
My cleverly-named wiki:
http://pellerin1020.pbworks.com/
September 16, 2009 at 11:53 pm
Joe Paszek
http://winter1020paszek.pbworks.com/
September 19, 2009 at 12:49 pm
newmediasres
Amy Metcalf
http://metcalfwinter10.pbworks.com/
September 21, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Joe Paszek
Joe Paszek
ENG 6001
Jeff Pruchnic
Fall 2009
Interventonism/Non-Interventionism:
Thinking More About Writing Center Ethics
In her 1992 article, “Collaboration is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups,” Muriel Harris explores the relationship between the role of the peer-response group and that of a writing tutorial. While the bulk of her paper parses out the various similarities and differences that these two forms of “collaborative learning,” Harris also hints at an ethically questionable mode of “collaborative writing” which she defines as “writing involving two or more writers working together to produce a joint project” (369). The question of writing center ethics specifically involving collaboration between student and tutor becomes the central subject for Irene L. Clark and Dave Healy in their 1996 article, “Are Writing Centers Ethical?” Where Harris leaves the role of the writing center tutor as heavily “non-interventionist,” Clark and Healy both challenge this ethically imposed form of service claiming that the sole use of non-interventionalist practices in the writing lab “overlooks the possibility that for some students, an interventionist, directive, and appropriative pedagogy might be more effective” (37). In both cases, non-interventionalist and directive, ethical issues arise that demand further attention.
If we as tutors begin to assist our students beyond the point of what Jeff Brooks terms “minimalist tutoring,” but with the hopes of still achieving that goal of making our student better writers (as opposed to supplying them with a solitary better paper) we run the risk of committing a wide variety of negative collaboration faux pas (i.e. plagiarism, editing papers, revocation of student “ownership”). Yet, on the other hand, as Clark and Healy expound upon, if we are to only use non-interventionalist techniques the student may never acquire the skill sets that he or she may in a directed setting. This seems to be a very distressing double bind. As members of a writing center, to whom do we owe the most responsibility? Is it to a department (or more broadly, a university and/or society) which demands that students should always maintain sole ownership (however fictitious or constructed that notion may be) of the product? These establishments cannot easily be neglected or ignored as they are the financial lifeblood of the writing center. Or should our allegiance be to the direct and necessary development of those students who come into the lab? Clark and Healy provide a variety of sources claiming that it might be beneficial to “work on ‘functions that have not yet matured’” (Vygotsky qtd in Clark and Healy 38) through direct and interventionist methods, but how do we delineate which students actually learn more effectively in this manner and which students are simply looking for an easy fix to their single paper?
Ultimately, the most promising negotiation (and perhaps the only safe compromise) of both styles may lay in the continued interaction with the students that come into the writing center lab. If we are to remain flexible as we learn from the student what they need from us we can continue to adjust our methods to best suit the learning situation at hand. One session with a student may require a very hands off approach while the next the student may need to be shown more direct models of paper construction. If it remains our duty to assist our students in becoming better writers for all of the papers that they will have to “own” then perhaps at times collaboration needs to take a variety of incarnations in a variety of contexts and moments.
Works Cited
Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work.”
The Writing Lab Newsletter 15.6 (1991): 1-4.
Clark, Irene L. and Dave Healy. “Are Writing Centers Ethical?” WPA 20.1 (1996): 32-48.
Harris, Muriel. “Collaboration is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups.” College of Composition and Communication 43.3 (1992): 369-83.
Vygotsky, Lev. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978.
September 21, 2009 at 4:56 pm
newmediasres
Amy Metcalf
Pruchnic
ENG 6001
Among all the theoretical and pedagogical issues surrounding tutoring, the dominant question seems to be some variation of “to what degree do we impart our knowledge and ideas onto a student and their paper.” This issue is prevalent due to the debate over what actually constitutes plagiarism, and how it could potentially become a problem within any Writing Center.
Both Brooks and Clark/Healy discuss the idea of whether or not tutoring should be a particularly invasive process, or a “minimalist” one (as suggested by Brooks’ essay.) Tutoring should not be an hour’s worth of telling a student what a good paper should sound like, but rather giving them small pieces of advice that they may incorporate into future writing. Though this is a good strategy, it is important to remember that not all students are going to respond to one type of instruction in a uniform way. Clark/Healy offer different tutoring scenarios that a student could flourish within, mainly a “textual noninterventionism” (Clark, Healy 37) and an “interventionist, directive, and appropriative” (Clark, Healy 37) approach. Both methods can be effective, but deciding what method would benefit each student seems to limit itself to an intuition that not all tutors may possess. However, there are strategies for deciding what method may benefit your student the most.
Near the end of his essay, Brooks suggests that as tutors it could be beneficial for us to “borrow student body language.” (Brooks 4) Brooks’ piece of advice can lead to an important discussion of how each student is treated as an individual within the Writing Center. In the spirit of efficiency we may want to develop a formulaic way to help students, but unfortunately this approach doesn’t take into account that all students have a different way of learning. That said, as tutors it is important to find the fine line between catering to a student’s way of learning and establishing the tutor/student relationship, which by nature can feel very rigid and structured. Discovering the ideal way to encourage students to take responsibility for their own writing and doing so within a 50 minute session is a necessary challenge.
In regards to taking responsibility for writing, Brooks and Clark/Healy are correct in highlighting yet another important issue in writing centers. Along with the decision of whether or not we begin to “co-author” student’s papers by “telling” instead of “showing,” is the battle between the editor and the tutor. It is clearly defined to us that we are, in fact, tutors – however – Clark/Healy ask why we would subject our students to a different experience than we might expect for our own work. Clark/Healy point out that “In refusing to write on a student’s paper…writing center personnel are withholding from clients precisely the kind of directive, appropriative intervention that is routinely offered to publishing academics by colleagues and editors.” (Clark, Healy 42) One could make the argument that as a “publishing academic” you’re not in the business of learning how to write, but I would suggest that being a writer is to be in a constant state of progression. Are we doing our students a disservice by asking them to contribute information that may not be a part of their knowledge base?
September 21, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Danny Sain
http://SainWinter2010.pbworks.com
September 21, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Andy Engel
Andy Engel
9/16/09
Tutoring Articles (Clark & Healy, Harris)
Writing centers, write Irene Clark and Dave Healy, should be proactive: “The people who work in writing centers should be confident of their own expertise and insight and should be willing to use their unique position in the academy to challenge the status quo by critiquing institutional ideology and practice” (Clark and Healy 43). How much of our time should we be using to critique or challenge the “status quo” as Clark and Healy put it? While needing clarification on an unclear assignment is one thing, actively challenging a teacher’s reasons for a particular assignment does not wise or productive. Rather, taking the role espoused by Muriel Harris seems more valuable for the growth of the tutor. Harris writes, “Tutors must be selected and trained and, in the process, become a hybrid creation—neither a teacher nor a peer” (Harris 371). Instead of using our positions as novice tutors and educational community member to dive into the conversation, we would serve our students and ourselves better by absorbing information and practices at this stage rather than generating critique. That said, in what instances would critique come in to play for the tutor or new teacher?
In her essay, Harris raises the notion of spontaneous collaboration as a desirable end goal when working with students (Harris 370). How are we to incorporate or facilitate spontaneity into our classes and tutoring sessions? If we describe this as a discussion of agency, then, how are we to challenge the hierarchical structures of both 1020 and the Writing Center to achieve this? In an answer to this, Harris discusses the differences in methods and capabilities between peer response and tutoring sessions (Harris 372-3). In comparing the two she states, “Unlike peer response then, which emphasizes informing, tutorials emphasize the student’s own discovery” (Harris 377). By linking peer response to informing and tutoring to a student’s discovery, Harris is positioning the student as passive and active respectively. These classifications appear to be connected to who is helping direct the student. How would joint tutoring sessions, work-shopping papers in small groups with the teacher, fit into Harris’s models? Is there a format, medium, or location that would inspire these interactions to occur more organically or spontaneously?
Clark and Healy discuss the ethical complications of tutoring centers and specifically “western culture’s emphasis on intellectual property rights, an emphasis manifested in the number of lawsuits concerned with issues of copyright and authorship” (Clark and Healy 33-4). Through further elaboration, we see that this is essentially a discussion of ownership (Clark and Healy 36-37). With this in mind, how are we at WSU to address the issues not only of copyright but also of intellectual property (IP)? Clearly, with the use of wiki’s and media-production technologies in the classroom means that not just literary documents and text will be in danger of improper usage. How should we address these topics both in our own work and with peers, and in the classroom with our students? When and how it is acceptable to, as Clark and Healy say, embrace the relationship between “imitation and learning” (Clark and Healy 39)?
September 21, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Aaron Pellerin
Aaron Pellerin
Dr. Jeff Pruchnic
ENG 6001
16 September 2009
Reading Response: On Student Authorship, and On “Differance” in the Writing Center
In “Are Writing Centers Ethical?”, Irene L. Clark and Dave Healy oppose a hands-off approach (in which tutors are cautious not to manipulate or influence students’ text) to student writing in the writing center, arguing in part that “textual non-interventionism … perpetuates a limited and limiting understanding of authorship in the academy” and that, “By privileging individual responsibility and accountability and by valorizing the individual writer’s authentic ‘voice,’ the writing center has left unchallenged notions of intellectual property that are suspect at best” (36). The limited and suspect notion which Clark and Healy question here is the idea that writing is an intellectually solitary endeavor – that a finished work of writing is, or at least ought to be, the original and individual product of the writer’s mind. Yet, as Muriel Harris also observes, academic writing, as practiced professionally, is inherently collaborative; in the course of writing a scholarly piece, a writer typically consults many times, formally and informally, with academic peers whose feedback is integral to the final published text (Harris 370). Clark’s and Healy’s arguments raise a question, then: shouldn’t writing center tutors and directors, with their academic experience, know better than to apply to student writing an approach divorced from the practices of the academy?
In addressing this question, I would argue that the disconnect between academic practice and writing center pedagogy might not simply be a result of “defensiveness” about the writing center’s role and fear of allegations of plagiarism, as Clark and Healy claim. First of all, though the idea of intellectual ownership may be flawed, it is very much a reality. While scholars generally do recognize the input they receive from peers (for example, in acknowledgments, forewords, and the like), we do not usually think of a single-author book or article as being collaboratively written. However aware we are of the collective effort behind a finished product, once a text is published, it becomes – legally and customarily, at least – the property and product of its named author(s). Thus, the paradox of academic authorship that Clark and Healy see in the writing center exists in the academic world itself. Furthermore, the collaborative nature of academic writing may undermine a traditional notion of solitary authorship, but it does not do away with the idea of authorship altogether. An author may not have “individual responsibility” for creating knowledge, but he or she is certainly responsible for deciding what ideas and words make it into a text. An academic writer’s “voice,” then, refers simply to the decisions the writer makes. It is exactly this decision-making ability that a writing center should help students develop, and tutors should indeed be wary about taking over the decision-making process for the student, in which case, they are no longer collaborating, but co-opting the student’s academic voice. Perhaps the best way to walk the line between collaborating and co-opting is, as Clark and Healy suggest, simply to explain the nature of academic collaboration to students in order to demystify academic writing.
On a different (differant?) note, in “Differance: Aiding the Writer to Reader Shift,” Anne E. Mullin uses Derrida’s concept of differance to argue that “A reader’s relation to writing is – has to be – Different, Other than a writer’s” (4). While I agree with Mullin’s overall point that writers must be able to separate themselves from their writing in order to see it as a reader will, I have trouble with some of her specific applications of her ideas. At one point in particular, she recommends getting the writer to look at the form of the text rather than its content – a useful technique – and uses the example of a student who cannot “see” three passive constructions in a row because he or she notices only that the content of the sentences is correct (5). In my experience, the problem in such cases is not that the student is still reading as a writer and is therefore concerned only with content. The problem is that the student is not experienced enough as a reader or as a writer to understand why the problematic constructions are rhetorically and/or aesthetically weaker than other options. Because of their inexperience, such students are not aware of all of the choices available to them as writers, nor will they have any basis for making such decisions. And because reading and writing are such closely linked skills, I am not sure that Mullin’s attempt to separate and differentiate the two is the most effective solution. I think instead that students should learn the interactive relationship between reading and writing (how and why readers respond to different elements of writing) and should think of the two as intimately linked. Ideally, students should be able to slip seamlessly between the roles of reader and writer as needed during the writing process, and ultimately to embody both roles simultaneously.
Works Cited
Clark, Irene L., and Dave Healy. “Are Writing Centers Ethical?”WPA 20.1/2 (Fall/Winter 1996): 32-48. Print.
Harris, Muriel. “Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups.” College Composition and Communication 43.3 (October 1992): 369-83. Print.
Mullin, Anne E. “Differance: Aiding the Writer to Reader Shift.” The Writing Lab Newsletter February 1995: 4-5. Print.
September 22, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Sue Muecke
Sue Muecke
Dr. Jeff Pruchnic
ENG 6001: Pedagogical Practicum
16 September 2009
The Writing Center: Where Collaboration Really Is Not Collaboration
The job of the Writing Center seems clear – “to produce better writers, not just better writing.” This seminal statement by Stephen North seems to have been adopted as the mantra for Writing Center development. Yet there has not been nearly the same consensus as to how we should go about producing those better writers. In her “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center”, Angela Lunsford traces the progression of Writing Center practices: from Storehouse Centers which operated as “information station[s] or storehouse[s], prescribing and handing out skills and strategies to individual learners” (2) to Garret Centers which saw their “job as helping students…find their unique voices, their individual and unique powers” (2) and finally to what Lunsford calls Burkean Parlor Centers where learning is achieved through collaboration between student and tutor. Although Lunsford sees collaboration as the latest evolution in Writing Center theory, I would argue that collaboration is ineffective in a Writing Center setting.
Now, it’s worth noting that I am not opposed to collaboration on principle. On the contrary, I think collaboration in the classroom can be a powerful learning tool. As Muriel Harris details in “Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration”, the guided collaboration of peer response groups often proves to be an effective means of improving both students’ writing and their critical response skills (371-372; 377). Collaboration between professional colleagues can be equally beneficial. Certainly Lunsford is a proponent of this, since much of her own research and writing has been done in collaboration with Lisa Ede (1).
In both of these instances, however, the scholarly collaboration was done between groups of peers. I don’t believe collaboration is nearly as effective (or even possible) when the individuals attempting to collaborate are on unequal footing. And such is the case in a Writing Center where, by definition, the tutor is more skilled, more knowledgeable and / or more experienced than the tutee. Harris believes that “good tutors must be fellow learners as well as fellow writers.” That’s a nice sentiment in theory, but what are the chances of that actually happening in practice? Is a tutee likely to teach his or her tutor an element of grammar, sentence structure, or paper organization of which the tutor was previously unaware?
The fact of the matter is that most students who make use of the Writing Center do so either because they are forced to by their professors or because they recognize that their writing is in need of professional assistance. While Writing Center staff may encourage students of all writing ability levels to make use of Writing Center resources, it is rare for skilled writers to do so. With whom, then, are Writing Center tutors supposed to be collaborating (with all the mutual learning that that term implies)?
I realize that such an opposition to collaboration may smack of scholastic snobbery, a sense that we as educators have nothing to learn from the untried young minds with which we’ve been entrusted. Such is not the case. As previously mentioned, I firmly believe that classroom learning can be enormously collaborative (particularly in the discussion format favored by Literature classes) and enriches both students and professor alike. But the tutor / tutee interaction has an entirely different dynamic, one that I feel makes it singularly unsuited for collaborative learning.
I will grant that my Writing Center experience to date is incredibly minimal – I had my first and so far only tutoring session two days ago. So I am more than willing to concede that my views on Writing Center collaboration may change as I gain greater and more varied tutoring experience. But at present, despite the writings of Harris and Lunsford, I remain unconvinced that the best way “to produce better writers” is through tutor / tutee collaboration.
September 22, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Sue Muecke
Okay, so I’m a little late jumping on the wiki bandwagon…
http://muecke1020.pbworks.com/
September 23, 2009 at 9:24 am
Katrina Newsom
Pragmatically Speaking: A Tutor’s Proximity to the Student
The Writing Center as in the case of the classroom where transferring knowledge from one individual to another or many others is a complicated place. As in most instances of learning, theoretical, political and pedagogical questions become important considerations in an effort to ensure that standards of learning don’t impinge on the policies of the school, the ethnics of teaching, and the development of the student. In this week’s reading, there was an array of discourses engaging these questions as writers attempted to articulate the most effective practices of tutoring. Although each promoted the agency of the students and their writing, the ideology that informed their thinking varied.
From Clark and Healy whose article covered the evolution of the Writing Center including the discussion of the ethical and theoretical questions imposed upon tutoring practices to Andrea A. Lunsford who acknowledges the systems of control that are always in play when pedagogy is structured and implemented, the underlined concern appeared to form the question: where is the tutor in proxy to the student? While many of the authors agree with the proxy of the student in relation to the paper, many differed on the proxy of the tutor in relation to both the student and the paper. I am speaking both literally and figuratively. Essentially, what I am trying to get at is in what ways should I incorporate or at least allow the discourse of tutoring impact/ informs my approach? I agree with Muriel Ineich and Lunsford that the ways I should approach tutoring should be as a collaborative effort. By thinking about tutoring as an effort on both the tutor and tutee, the interaction shifts from expert to inexperience to two people sharing a common goal. They are positioned equally; side by side. If we look at it this way, we may consider the student an expert, maybe not in writing, but definitely in the subject matter of the paper. This can be more beneficial in some instances than a directive approach. I also recognize that it all depends on the student. Some students want the tutor to approach the session from a position of authority. In this case, the student will be more responsive to a direct approach in tutoring.
I think it is important also to recognize that the atmosphere of the Writing Center has a strong impact on the ways we tutor. There are director(s) and other tutors whose tutoring styles effect that ways in which an individual tutor. One could argue that their views about tutoring are ubiquitous. Tutors depend on each other for information and they share in the processes of tutoring. Tutors often work with the same student in the course of a semester. All of this has on an effect on the tutor’s approach to writing. Some tutors may take an authoritative approach positioning themselves as experts, while others may situate themselves as partners working together. For this reason, I am left to ponder, pragmatically speaking, where am I to position myself in proxy to the student?
September 23, 2009 at 11:00 am
Danny Sain
Two of the articles to which I had the strongest reaction this week were Jeff Brooks’ piece “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Students Do All the Work,” and Andrea Lunsford’s “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center”. Both these articles dealt largely with the issue of a tutor’s correct place in the writing center relative to one’s students and one’s students’ writing, and these are issues that I find my mind settling on quite frequently. While I feel that the two articles do not necessarily speak to one another, they do inform one another, and together articulate a particular way of viewing our work in the writing center that I feel is potentially constructive and beneficial for both tutors and students. Brooks, as the title of his piece would suggest, argues that the role of a writing center tutor is (and should be) necessarily minimal, leaving the maximum amount of authority possible in the student’s hands, and forcing the student to take control of and responsibility for her/his own work. I believe that this is correct and, as well, is the only responsible position we can assume as tutors in the writing center. After all, as Brooks suggests in his article, our role is not and should never be to make a better piece of writing, but to assist in producing better writers. Though Lunsford never discusses these issues as ethical concerns and doesn’t really focus on what a tutor of writing ought to do, she does draw out three models of tutoring (of Writing Centers themselves, actually, according to their primary function) that serve to suggest more and less effective ways of tutoring. The first model she presents—the “Storehouse Center”—is precisely that model of a Writing Center that Brooks argues against, which supposes that the tutor is a fountainhead of all knowledge dealing with composition and rhetoric, and so it is the tutor’s responsibility to relay that information to the student in a more or less dictatorial manner. Lunsford won’t denounce the “Storehouse Center” model, though she does hold, throughout her piece, that the more effective Writing Center model is that of collaboration, wherein the tutor and student work together with the aim of producing something.
While I find myself largely in agreement with what both Brooks and Lunsford are saying in their respective pieces, and especially in agreement with the way that their arguments combine themselves (I have to say that the aim of a tutor should be to produce writers, not writing, and the necessary course that one’s efforts need to take to achieve that end should be largely collaborative), I find myself somewhat uneasy about what we are left with. If one believes, as I do, that a tutor should not dictate how a paper should be written, but feels, as I do, that most students do not possess or are unable to access the sort of internal genius that Lunsford speaks to in her “Garret Centers” model (and I include myself in that non-genius lot), then what, exactly, are we collaborating with our students to produce? To put the matter differently: one collaborates with one’s peers, who one acknowledges can contribute equally on a given plane of knowledge. The established order of the Writing Center goes against this as, try as some of might to deny it, students walk in our doors with the understanding that they are coming to see a figure of authority on the subject in question and who leave, despite all our efforts to keep power over the paper in their hands, with that exact same impression. How, then, can we genuinely collaborate with students when they come in assuming a certain hierarchy, and we do nothing to effectively remove it (and let’s face it, for all that we believe or talk ourselves into believing we believe, it takes a very rare tutor indeed not to assume that s/he knows more about writing than anyone who comes in looking for assistance). How, then—and I suppose this really gets to the matter I am concerned with here—are we ever to genuinely move past the Writing Center as Storehouse of knowledge model and the notion of tutor as giver of that knowledge?
September 23, 2009 at 11:53 am
Katrina Newsom
I feel like Alice in Wonderland… I am most did not escape…
http://newsomeng1020.pbworks.com/FrontPage
September 23, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Derek Risse
Outside of “Revolution”: Towards a Pedagogy of Pragmatic Resistance in Writing Center Practice
In “Are Writing Centers Ethical,” Irene Clark and Dave Healy produce an extended, and in some ways, invaluable critique of the preeminent mode of contemporary writing center practice; a pedagogy of “noninterventionism” that is, at best, limited by precautionary sentiments relating to a complex nineteenth century hangover that prizes, “the romantic notion of the solitary creative genius.” In a rather simplistic and not entirely useful sense, Clark and Healy proceed to critique this form’s failure to comprehend or incorporate important techniques that foster productive mimicry. This is to say, that a large part of their text is constructed as a restorative attempt. To this end, Clark and Healy work to espouse the relatively short history of intellectual property rights and the idea of plagiarism, while simultaneously locating what can only be read as an extended human history of learning entailing elements of borrowing and emulation crucial to education and advancement. In a more complicated and productive sense, this text works to comprehend the very forces of power at play in any university (i.e. university curricular requirements or the format of class assignments). For those familiar with the cannon of discourse on power and its manifestations, a discourse that would have to include, but would not be limited to, the work of authors like Deleuze, Guattari, and Marx, the language that Clark and Healy reference is quite familiar. Specifically, these authors make important use of terms like “regime” (i.e. the “modern regime of writing”) and “revolution,” instantly invoking Foucault’s genealogical inquiry into various historical modes of power in Discipline and Punish. Unfortunately, though these authors contribute importantly to a discourse of writing center procedure by invoking a familiar and particularly useful history of political discussion, they fail to comprehend the inherent complexities of the power play they introduce.
Perhaps, in the long run, what will be most useful to our work with regard for the writing center will be a model that incorporates, as my title suggests, a serious “pedagogy of pragmatic resistance.” Here, as alluded to previously, such political maneuverings should remain attentive to a more codified and useful understanding of power and its manifestations or, to use a popular Deleuzian term, “flows.” This is to say, that although Clark and Healy start us on the right path in terms of thinking about the political ramifications of a pedagogy of noninterventionism, the language they use to describe power and resistance is lacking. Although these authors adequately refer to the “larger political reality of which all of us—teachers, students, and tutors—are a part,” the text fails to really comprehend what this reality entails. Unfortunately, it is Clark and Healy’s rather old school notion of authority and resistance that debilitates the argumentative standing or potential of their text as a whole. In order to understand why this might be problematic it seems important to consider the overview of power they provide near the end of the text.
Referencing some of Nancy Grimm’s more notable observations, Clark and Healy foster the image of the writing center as a place of “critical exile.” The writing center, for Grimm, Clark, and Healy, is a “semiautonomous space” that is, “uniquely positioned to challenge business as usual in the academy” (11). These authors provide that such a space fosters what is often referred to as “revolutionary” activity. As they highlight in point one of the second to last section, the typical writing center employee should be challenging the status quo and helping the student to critique ideology and practice. As conceived, the writing center becomes an autonomous political colony replete with veterans of the writing game willing to take on, in quite an old school sense, the “man.”
Although I think it particularly useful to begin thinking about the ethical and political complications that perhaps problematize current writing center practice, we need to consider the political model being used. Here, in courtesy to the space given this assignment, this paper turns briefly to the work of other notable theorists to delineate a more critical model of power. Specifically, looking at the work of Deleuze and Foucault, one might have to consider reading the university and its manifestations not as simply hierarchical or “sovereign” models of power, but as places completely and utterly saturated by the complex flows of power and its exactations. Viewing the system this way, one would have to approach student writing and its important political potential quite differently; not as blatant revolutionary action (kind of a “fuck the man” sentimentality”) but as infinitely more complex and, to use a keyword “resistant.” Though perhaps a simple difference in term, it is this author’s hope that we might construct a more complicated understanding of what university power means and entails, and an even more complex method for dealing with resistant efforts from a more pragmatic perspective. Though I understand that Clark and Healy are hardly advocating student lawlessness, I’d like to reread, in and outside of their model, an opportunity for a more calculated and pragmatic form of resistance.
September 23, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Andrew Winckles
In reading over the assigned writings for class, two specific articles jumped out at me as being especially apt descriptions of the issues and tensions inherent with working in a writing center. These two pieces, “Minimalist Tutoring,” by Brooks and the Haselwander article on tutoring ELL students seemed to be very representative of the ideas I have been thinking about related to writing center tutoring.
The “Minimalist Tutoring” article was interesting to me because, as someone who has worked in writing centers for some time now, it is an issue that I am constantly struggling with. As someone who has always been good at writing and proof-reading, it is always a temptation to take over a student’s paper, thus making it my own in some ways. It took me awhile to realize that the student’s writing process takes time to develop and that by correcting every little detail in a paper myself, I am not really helping them grow. What I liked about this article was that it emphasized the importance of realizing that it is the student’s paper and they have to take ownership of it. This also means that we, especially as highly successful students ourselves, have to reassess our notions of success and failure. Just because a student we help does not get an “A” on a paper does not mean that they, or we, have failed. Success is thus not measured by a bright-line grade based standard, but by progress. A student may get a “C” on a paper I help them with, but if this is progress from a “D” then that is good and means that, over time, we can progress to a “B” and beyond. By adopting minimalist tutoring practices, then, we are thus assisting the student to take ownership of their writing and the writing process, thus helping them long term, even if on a single assignment they may not receive the grade they wanted.
In dealing with ELL writers, we face some similar, and yet some significantly different issues. Haselwander chooses to focus on the especially important issue of articles, but it could be several consistent issues with ELL students, such as subject-verb agreement, etc. It seems to me that the main problem in dealing with these issues is the tension between the need to provide intensive help and instruction on consistent grammatical problems that are common to most ELL students, and the need (mentioned above) to let the student maintain ownership of their writing. I thought that Haselwander provided some excellent concrete solutions to this tension. First of all, his focus on understanding the proper grammatical use of articles is useful. What I found when working with ELL students on this issue was that, some of the time, I had very little idea about why we use articles the way we do in English – it just sounds right. Thus, gaining a basic understanding of how articles are used is the first step to helping our students. I also really liked his point about scaffolding our interactions with ELL students over a period of time. I found this technique to be especially effective working with ELL students at the last writing center I worked at. They would often come back to me multiple times and each time they had a better idea of how to deal with article issues and needed less and less direct input from me. Having them read their paper out loud was especially effective in getting them to here problems in their writing.
Though these issues in writing center tutoring are persistent and problematic, I feel that the ideas presented in these articles provide and excellent framework for helping students gain a better understanding of their writing process and really take ownership of their writing.