21.3 Telling Stories & Building Histories in the Writing Center
VOL. 21, NO. 3 (2024): TELLING STORIES & BUILDING HISTORIES IN THE WRITING CENTER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS
Editors’ Introduction: Telling Stories & Building Histories in the Writing Center
Alexandra Gunnells and Samantha Turner
FOCUS ARTICLES
A CHAT Analysis: Narrating the Writing Center’s Formative Period
Don Moore
The Global-Local Dualism in Writing Center Studies
Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson
What Do Students Learn and Expect to Learn From Consultants and Faculty in Courses Supported by CourseEmbedded Consultants?
Julia Bleakney, Julia Herman, and Paula Rosinski
Telling Stories and Growing Up: An Autoethnography of Writing Center Storytelling
Melanie Doyle
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Don Moore is a graduate of the University of Memphis with a PhD in composition studies whose dissertation focuses on Activity Theory and the history of writing center development. Don is the Writing and Communications Center Coordinator and Writing Program Coordinator at SUNY Polytechnic in Utica, NY.
Jo Mackiewicz is a professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State University. Her recent book, Writing Center Talk over Time: A Mixed-Method Study, won the International Writing Centers Association’s Outstanding Book Award.
Isabelle Thompson is Emeritus Professor of Technical and Professional Communication and former director of the English Center at Auburn University.
Julia Bleakney is Director of The Writing Center within the Center for Writing Excellence and Associate Professor of English at Elon University, NC. Her teaching and research focuses on writing center theory and praxis, mentoring, and professional development. Her recent publications include the co-authored “Timely, Relevant, Practical: A Study of Writing Center Summer Institute Alumni Perceptions of Value and Benefits" in Writing Center Journal (2023) and the co-edited collection Writing Beyond the University: Preparing Lifelong Learners for Lifewide Writing (2022). She is co-editor of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship.
Julia Herman is an undergraduate student at Elon University, NC, class of 2024, majoring in Public Health Studies and minoring in Professional Writing Studies. She was a Disciplinary Writing Consultant for a Public Health Studies course in 2023.
Paula Rosinski is Professor of Professional Writing and Rhetoric and Director of Writing Across the University in the Center for Writing Excellence at Elon University, NC. Her teaching and research focus on multimodal and visual rhetoric, writing beyond the university, transfer between academic and professional contexts, AI-enhanced writing strategies, and faculty development.
Melanie Doyle is an educational developer and sessional instructor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador where she is also completing her PhD. She has been teaching critical reading and writing courses for nearly seven years, and her research interests include reading instruction in writing-in-the-disciplines courses.
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: TELLING STORIES & BUILDING HISTORIES IN THE WRITING CENTER
Alexandra Gunnells University of Texas – Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com
As Praxis’s incoming managing editors, we have spent much of this summer’s publishing cycle trying to find our place within the story of Praxis, and within that of the larger writing center community. We were reminded of the complexity of this task by the authors you’ll read in this issue; each approaches the (hi)stories we tell about our work in unique ways, asking questions like how our stories of the writing center–macro or micro–change over time, and to whom these stories are accountable. Decades of writing center scholarship tell us such reflections powerfully impact the how and why of what we do, over time shaping and sustaining what we consider our disciplinary histories. In this summer issue of Praxis, scale, scope, method, and context vary, but each reveal some of the rich and kaleidoscopic (hi)stories that propel us today.
In this issue’s first focus article, Don Moore analyzes a century and a half of writing center history through a cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) framework. Moore considers the writing labs implemented in late-nineteenth century composition classrooms in the United States, arguing that they demonstrate the “Formative Period” of writing center development. By applying CHAT to the historical development of the writing center, then, Moore identifies the roots through which we can trace contemporary writing center practices.
Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson narrow the scope by tracing how writing center practitioners employ the global-local dualism when framing text components. As Mackiewicz and Thompson demonstrate, the global-local dualism–or the distinction between Higher Order Concerns and Lower Order Concerns–has occupied a privileged position in writing pedagogy since the mid- to late-twentieth century. By illuminating the shortcomings of the global-local dualism (while still acknowledging its benefits), Mackiewicz and Thompson provide a model for how
Samantha Turner University of Texas – Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com
reconstructing our histories can inform our future work.
Julia Bleakney, Julia Herman, and Paula Rosinski then shift our attention to student perceptions of learning and writerly growth in courses with embedded writing consultants. Evaluating student learning in course-embedded writing programs is historically challenging, and the authors offer the results of a longitudinal survey-based study wherein students self-reported their expectations for and perceptions of learning from faculty and writing consultants. This method of storytelling–localized yet replicable–offers opportunities to amplify stories we don’t always hear.
Finally, Melanie Doyle zooms us even further in via an autoethnography of her experiences across a decade of writing center work. As Doyle’s roles shift, so do the stories that she tells herself and others about the writing center. In reflecting on the lore of her labor, Doyle reveals the material and affective impressions of the self-in-relation built in the writing center. Concluding this issue with an invitation to reflect, readers are sure to hear echoes of their own histories with writing programs across a range of contexts.
We here at Praxis are deeply grateful to the reviewers and authors who helped make this issue a reality, especially as we begin our tenure as the new CoManaging Editors. Ali Gunnells is a second year doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing researching digital rhetorics, archival theory, and composition pedagogy. Sam Turner is a third year doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing, with research interests in feminist rhetorical methods and disability studies. We look forward to growing with Praxis, and to continuing the exciting conversations our authors, reviewers, and readers have invited us into.
A CHAT ANALYSIS: NARRATING THE WRITING CENTER’S FORMATIVE PERIOD
Don Moore SUNY Polytechnic Institute mooredr@sunypoly.edu
Abstract
From the recognized beginning of the “laboratory” movement in composition instruction, teachers have sought to employ new and more practical methods useful in developing student writing. Such trends continue today as new generations of students enter the academy and new challenges emerge. From such conditions, we might see how components within a system of activity work together to meet objectives and develop outcomes within the shared dialectic of an activity system. With this idea in mind, this article reviews writing center-related scholarship from the late 1880s through the early 1940s to trace emerging contradictions in laboratory teaching’s praxis. Through the evaluation of laboratory teaching’s textual artifacts using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), I present a narrative about the development of the earliest writing center praxes: The Formative Period.
With this article, I look to narrate an epochal beginning for writing center activity and present the development of guiding principles we find in our writing center work today. Through the process of revealing historical impulses, this article offers a view of writing center praxes in their elemental stage: The Formative Period, early 1890s-early 1940s. Ultimately, this article will show how the writing center is an activity that, over time, has mediated old system contradictions and developed new methods born of self-reflection, debate, evaluation, and progressive mediation, which continues to evolve. As communities like writing centers re-create themselves through pushing and pulling, conflict and resolution, tension and release they birth new realities, which all begins with the Formative Period.
Over the last one-hundred and fifty years or so, writing center history has unfolded and developed in some predictable and unpredictable ways. As each new generation enters the writing center diaspora, new conversations have helped shape our ever-evolving scholarship; however, many of these conversations unintentionally remain absent from notable writing center histories. Thus, an historical lineage that exposes important but otherwise forgotten discussions, which may provide important nuance to writing center pedagogies, seem to only exist within a larger, unspoken framework of ideas. These are the frames under which many writing centers operate, yet their full histories and inclusion into writing center lore are not quite understood. In fact, Neal Lerner recognizes this reality in his 2003 Composition Studies article “Punishment and Possibility: Representing Writing Centers, 1939-1970”: “For some,” he says, “writing center history simply doesn’t exist” (53). Outside of Lerner’s work, there is a relative lack of research that demonstrates the historical growth of the writing center as we know it today. With this in mind, it may be time to narrativize the evolution
of writing center history in order to gain a fuller understanding of where our most salient guiding principles originated.
Such an investigation, I suggest, follows Peter Carino’s argument in his 1996 article, “Open Admissions and the Construction of Writing Center History: A Tale of Three Models.” Carino makes the claim that writing center studies “need[s] to construct an elaborately detailed and historiographically sophisticated model that would more effectively account for the complexity of writing center development than has previous historical work” (30). For further study, Carino suggests a cultural frame may best serve as a model for developing the historicity of writing center work. In fact, a cultural frame may help expose the subtleties of composition’s history that have contributed to the development of writing center pedagogy. Additionally, just as Carino’s work opens the door for charting writing center praxes and scholarship, so too does Elizabeth Boquet’s 1999 College Composition and Communication article “‘Our Little Secret’: A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-Open Admissions.” Arguing that early writing laboratory scholars “framed the work of the writing lab as encouraging dialogue, even dialectic, much as we in the writing centers do today” (45), Boquet’s recognition of the “dialectic” in writing center praxis expands the possibilities for identifying how a pedagogical dialectic has helped shape enduring writing center praxes. Both Carino and Boquet, then, pave the way for today’s researchers to identify how a cultural dialectic exists on the periphery of our immediate writing center spaces. In other words, what are the historical origins of a writing center dialectic? How might we find the origins of the writing center in composition’s history? What do tensions and resolutions found in composition’s history have to tell us about our current conceptualizations of writing center space?
In his 2009 book The Idea of a Writing Laboratory, Neal Lerner begins to answer these questions by focusing on late nineteenth-century composition instructors who employ writing labs. “In science,” he says, “hands-on learning was meant to overcome the problem that Louis Agassiz of Harvard described in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘The pupil studies nature in the classroom, and when he goes out of doors he can not
[sic] find her’” (3). Thus, Lerner focuses on the “laboratory method” (or the hands-on approach) in writing classrooms as it began to take shape at the end of the nineteenth-century. Therein, he identifies Preston W. Search as an instrumental figure in the writing laboratory movement:
I first came across Search’s concept of “laboratory methods” in my quest to find the first college-level writing center. It struck me then and now that Search’s description of the ideal teaching conditions one-on-one instruction tailored to students’ particular needs echoes the rationale for writing centers as ideal places for learning and teaching writing.
(The Idea 5)
Lerner’s discovery helps identify “tensions between pedagogy and curriculum through the experiences of one late 19th century educational reformer, Preston W. Search” (4). With this note, Lerner demonstrates how Search became one of the leading practitioners of laboratory teaching and provides a specific view of laboratory instruction’s as well as the writing center’s beginnings. My article, then, looks to find other rich historical figures like Search existing on the periphery and in the archives of writing center lore whose episodic observations continue to inform our work today.
In the end, Carino, Boquet, and Lerner each offer new avenues for research and historical analyses. Carino offers the view that a cultural frame for analysis may be most appropriate as we look to analyze a totality (beginning with composition pedagogy) of writing center history. Similarly, Boquet opens the door for analysis by recognizing the social construction and dialectic inherent in activity, and in doing so, she offers opportunities to discover a dialectical history between composition studies and writing center pedagogy which continues to inform writing center work today. Finally, Lerner’s rich historical work invites a holistic approach to trace the lineage of writing center history. Providing a starting point with Search, Lerner’s work invites further opportunities to include other forgotten conversations as part of the ancestry of writing center development.
Part of what I look to accomplish with this article, then, aims to take over where Carino leaves off. Viewing the history and development of the writing center through the lens of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) resolves Carino’s dilemma of an either/or dichotomy, for CHAT represents both an evolutionary and dialectical model of analysis. Therefore, I posit that CHAT, a cultural model like that which Carino advocates, will “begin to elaborate, more
than previous models have, a history accounting for the multiple forces at play at various moments” in writing center history (Carino, “Open” 39). Situating the cultural-historical development of the writing center squarely within the frame of CHAT may also help expose those rich meta-dialectical contributions to historical writing center lore Boquet intuits as they emerge throughout composition’s history. Further, responding to Nancy Grimm’s address to the International Writing Centers Association Conference in Las Vegas in 2010, I argue that a framework like CHAT that interrogates the movement of history has the “potential to bring divergent perspectives into contact with one another for the possibilities of transforming perspectives and generating new understandings” (“New” 26). With this, I look to provide an interpretation of history through which I believe writing centers have emerged, specifically, through the impetus of composition’s model of laboratory teaching.
Certainly, writing centers did not pop out of thin air, so to demonstrate how they began to develop, I offer a careful look at the first fifty years (or so) of laboratory teaching as a precursor to writing center work through the lens of CHAT. It is important to begin with composition practices, i.e., laboratory classrooms, to illustrate the beginnings of writing center work, for these classroom practices foreground the guiding principles found in today’s writing center spaces: laboratory/writing center work is experimental, studentcentered, and collaborative. The work (including that of teachers and consultants) is flexible, and environmental factors and technology play an instrumental role in laboratory/writing center work. As this article will demonstrate, when the composition community engages in the pushing and pulling, conflict and resolution, tension and release of pedagogical change, they birth new realities. Through the process of revealing historical impulses that established laboratory writing practices in composition classrooms, this article argues that the development of current writing center praxes began during the laboratory classroom movement of the late nineteenth-century, thus establishing the first stage of writing center development: The Formative Period.
Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)
Rooted in Vygotsky’s original conceptualization of activity as a model of development, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) acts as the interpretive agent for my work. Specifically, I employ third-generation activity theorist Yrjö Engeström’s
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framework of nested triangles to conduct a robust inquiry of writing center practices. In order to uncover trends and situate the development of writing center work through composition studies’ organically active, creative, and mediational laboratory model, I explore what Vassily Davydov argues in Perspectives on Activity Theory are “the historical conditions for activity that transforms reality according to the laws of its own perfection” (43). Thus, I view writing center activity as that, which over time, has been born of self-reflection, debate, improvement, and evaluation, specifically through the composition community’s dilemmas. Much like early laboratory classroom practitioners crossappropriated the concept of the laboratory from the realm of the sciences to that of the composition classroom, writing center practitioners have also adopted the laboratory method from composition as that which guides writing center practice. In turn, each generation’s dialectical contributions inform the burgeoning practices that follow, and, as they expand, practitioners share strategies, create connections, and further craft a lasting blueprint for the writing center’s future.
Beginning with Lev Vygotsky’s subject-objectmediating artifact triad, Vygotsky aims to illustrate the “means by which human external activity is aimed at mastering, and triumphing over, nature” (55). With “human external activity” in mind, leading CHAT critic Andy Blunden, in his 2010 book An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity, argues the implication of sociality exists in Vygotsky’s original triad, for “social entities and individual personalities mutually constitute and form one another . . .” (171).1 However, second-generation activity theorists including Vygotsky’s contemporary psychologists Alexei Leont’ev and Alexander Luria argue “collective object-oriented activity is of central importance” (Engeström, “Expansive Visibilization”
65). Therefore, rather than merely accepting sociality as an inherent component of the human experience, Leont’ev and Luria build on to Vygotsky’s original frame to illustrate how collective activity may be imagined. For second-generation activity researchers like Leont’ev and Luria, the shared dialectic between individuals and groups (i.e., early compositionists and emerging writing center practitioners), must exist for any activity to exist; therefore, the community must be an external component of the analysis.
Today, third generation activity theorists such Engeström apply the expanded CHAT model of Luria and Leont’ev to the workplace with Engeström’s model derivative of the concept of dialectical activity: “The whole . . . [is] perceptible in every part” (Blunden 27). With this frame placed in the context of workplace development, I subsequently use Engeström’s CHAT framework to analyze composition’s model of laboratory teaching from which, I argue, modern-day conceptualizations of writing centers have emerged. Illustrated in Figure 2, with seven distinct concepts, the subject is the central figure in the system of activity. For this study then, laboratory teaching, the student, the consultant, or the writing center itself may be the subject. The object, or objective, is that which the system of activity aims to accomplish with mediating artifacts comprising those tools which the system employs to help the subject meet its goals with rules guiding the activity. Finally, those in the community i.e., students, consultants, faculty, and administrators, all have a role to play as a division of labor among members coalesces to meet objectives and realize outcomes of the activity.
With the dialectic of a system driven by objective-related motives, the activity within
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composition classrooms at the end of the nineteenthcentury situates the laboratory movement as a response to a lecture-recitation model that did not result in writing improvement among new populations of students. My argument herein posits that writing center development, emerging from the laboratory movement, remains in constant flux with tensions mediated throughout its evolution. As Blunden explains “the whole point [of CHAT is] to bring out the contradictions and show how they are resolved in actuality” (173). Marking the beginning of the laboratory movement then, and ultimately the writing center, Engeström’s CHAT frame is useful in illustrating contradictions in the system of the lecture-recitation model. By examining John Franklin Genung’s and Fred Newton Scott’s early critique of nineteenth century composition classrooms, we see a rationale for the placement of laboratory classrooms within composition classrooms, and we can see the birth of the writing center.
For example, in Genung’s 1887 description of "The Study of Rhetoric in the College Course”, he identifies contradictions in the composition classroom: English is at a disadvantage; the very fact that it is compulsory weights it with an odium which in many colleges makes it the bugbear of the course. This ill repute was increased in the oldfashioned college course by the makeshift way in which time was grudged out to it in the curriculum. . . Now every teacher knows a once-a-week study cannot be carried on with much profit or interest; it cannot but be a weariness to student and instructor alike. (173) Noting the marginal treatment and poor results of composition curricula, Genung sees the whole of composition curricula in need of reform. Similarly, at the University of Michigan, Scott argues: “We hardly learn the names and faces of our hundreds of students before they break ranks and go their ways, and then we must resume our Sisyphean labors” (179-80). Thus, Genung’s and Scott’s criticisms offer a view of how Engeström’s CHAT framework may be applied.
Figure 3 reveals that while the lecture-recitation classroom certainly uses its tools, some, if not all, of them disrupt the achievement of objectives, for such a curriculum fails to engage students, and a breakdown of the system ensues. With lecturing as a tool, students do not engage writing in any real-world sense. The lecture fails to develop students’ composing skills with its impractical application in large, heterogeneous classrooms, and recitation and theme work fail to stimulate or challenge students’ individual growth. This, in turn, generates ambiguous rules for the composition classroom promoting a skewed division of labor. Certainly, instructors employ the banking model with ease, but as Freire’s work suggests, this does not necessarily help students’ understanding of writing concepts.2 In turn, the outcome of a broken system is to develop a new one: Laboratory Teaching.
Genung argues that “laboratory work” best defines his approach at Amherst: “each of these courses is a veritable workshop . . . each professor being supreme in his sphere, to plan, carry out, and complete according to his own ideas a trio in which the members work side-by-side, in co-operation rather than in subordination” (174). In their approach to using a laboratory writing praxis, Genung and Scott exemplify the collaborative and reciprocal nature of education. Today, this coincides with Stephen North’s leading essay, “The Idea of a Writing Center”: “What we want to do in a writing center is fit into observe and participate in this ordinarily solo ritual of writing” (70). Thus, with Genung and Scott’s implementation of the “laboratory method” or “laboratory system”, a new and more practical method in developing student writing emerges. In turn, as practitioners begin identifying contradictions and seeking responses to system tensions, the available literature provides a striking sense that during this period and into the early
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twentieth-century, teachers of composition began experimenting widely with laboratory methods, ultimately laying the groundwork for the emergence of today’s writing laboratories and writing centers.
With the initial movement by Genung and Scott, Engeström’s CHAT framework helps reveal how a community may develop or recreate itself. Therefore, using Engeström’s CHAT model as a ‘whole,’ I look to develop a complex web of interrelated parts developed and detailed over time. Engeström explains: “Goaldirected individual and group actions, as well as automatic operations, are relatively independent but subordinate units of analysis, eventually understandable only when interpreted against the background of entire activity systems” (“Expansive Learning” 136). With an application of CHAT to review activities stretching across generations, contradictions begin to appear, and new generations are required to adjust or modify practices from an earlier period as they adapt to new conditions.
To realize my goals of connecting current conceptualizations of writing praxis to that of the laboratory writing movement of the late 1800s, I have closely reviewed scholarship from 1887 through the late 1940s revealing how laboratory writing was first adopted by the field of composition. Here, I will begin to provide modern-day writing center practitioners with an interpretive history of writing center practices; what shaped them; through what contradictions they arose; what precipitated those contradictions; and what resolved them. In sum, I use CHAT to chart the movement of laboratory teaching from the composition classroom to that of the independent writing laboratory from which our current ideas of writing centers have emerged.
Defining a Practice
After Genung and Scott’s nascent laboratory approaches to composition instruction, the laboratory model reaches middle, secondary, and post-secondary institutions. In his 1894 article titled “Individual Teaching: The Pueblo Plan,” Preston W. Search, Superintendent of Schools in Pueblo, Colorado, departs from the current-traditional model by arguing that laboratory teaching should not aim to “consume time by entertainment, lecturing, and development of subjects; but to pass from desk to desk as the inspiring director and pupil’s assistant, with but one intent and that the development of the self-reliant and independent worker” (158). With increased student enrollment and large classrooms creating increasingly heterogeneous environments, laboratory instructional methods become
a new tool for teaching composition during the early part of the writing center’s Formative Period.
Here, nurturing, student-centered, collaborative, and flexible environments function as tools in the new system of teaching: “Teachers are instructed to provide carefully for the discouraged pupil and to give more time to the lower half of the school, remembering that the bright ones may always be cared for by supplemental or advanced assignments of work” (Search 161). As a part of the emerging laboratory praxis, this philosophy is evidenced through some of the earliest laboratory work (Walker 1917; Horner 1929; “Organization” 1951) and remain as guiding principles for writing center work today. During the latter part of the nineteenth-century, writing instruction departs from a one-size-fits-all curricular model to one with laboratory practitioners developing students through one-on-one consultations or through students engaging in the work together.
Much like writing centers today, Search’s Pueblo Plan, one of the earliest examples of an emerging laboratory setting, predominantly furthers the laboratory teaching model by engaging a practical and active approach to learning focusing on the individual student: “The fundamental characteristic of the plan on which the schools are organized is its conservation of the individual” (Search 154). Thus, the Pueblo schools find employing a laboratory model, that is, a learningby-doing methodology, develops a collaborative and flexible working environment for the individual student:
Every room is a true studio or workshop, in which the pupils work as individuals. The province of the teacher is not to line up the pupils and to consume time by entertainment, lecturing, and development of subjects; but to pass from desk to desk as the inspiring director and pupil’s assistant, with but one intent and that the development of the self-reliant and independent worker. (Search 158)
Making note of the basic structure of the laboratory setting, Search reveals contradictions existent in the current-traditional system where the “deeply communal motive” (Engeström “Activity Theory as a Framework” 964) of developing students’ composing skills loses coherence and meaning, for, in Genung’s words, a lecture-recitation framed course becomes a “bugbear” and drudgery (173). Importantly, however, identifying contradictions such as these also reveals how the new, experimental laboratory approach precipitates the future writing center movement.
For example, work in the Pueblo schools an institution that focuses on the “love of work” is not
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graded, and students only gain promotion on their ability “to do.” As such, the Pueblo schools engage student-centered efforts to encourage the work of individual students. Students work largely uninterrupted except during conferences with the instructor when guidance is needed, thus, co-mingling collaboration alongside flexible and student-centered approaches become part of the rules in the laboratory model. Here, students engage subjects at their own pace with “no assignment to-day [sic] of what shall be done to-morrow [sic]; if the teacher has any general working directions, they are given at the beginning of the working period” (Search 158). With the school’s focus on flexible, student-centered work, practices focus on motivating the student through the practicality of the classroom that provides “no recitation as generally conducted in schools” (Search 157). Such practices are reflected as rules in today’s writing center scholarship as Mackiewicz and Thompson argue that “motivation is both reflected in and enhanced by students’ active participation and engagement in learning and is particularly well supported in collaborative environments such as writing center conferences” (“Motivational” 39). With these practices beginning to take shape at the end of the nineteenth century, today, flexible, student-centered work and collaboration are cornerstones of writing center praxes.
Search’s Pueblo Plan also introduces the tool of record-keeping as another enduring principle of the laboratory model and mainstay of the writing center of today: the use of technology. In the Pueblo program, “the individual work is systematized, and a carefully kept record shows the advancement of the various pupils” (Search 159). While the work is student-centered, collaborative, and flexible, records become a form of technology that chronicles student work. Such documentation enhances the structure of the school’s laboratory plan and is essential in meeting the larger objective of developing students’ self-regulated work. Through the teacher’s careful instruction during oneon-one conferencing, each record keeps track of students’ successful completion of work and demonstrates the collaboration each student has engaged. It is this flexible and ingenious work that begins a course of record keeping that continues in writing centers today.
By adopting a laboratory methodology, the Pueblo schools cultivated the most formulated system of laboratory activity at the turn of the century, representing a course of curriculum exploration but also one rich for program analysis. Search’s article demonstrates the development of rules such as the guiding principles recognized in writing centers today:
the work is student-centered, collaborative, and flexible with the use of technology being a central component of recording student work. Further, with Search’s workshop as a central scene of activity, we might also imagine how those rooms provide an environmentally sound space for the work in which students and faculty are engaged. While the particulars of the workshop studio space are not articulated, the Pueblo Plan roundly represents the rising movement of laboratory teaching in the public-school system of Colorado in 1894. With this, the movement continues in higher education as the academy continues to build upon the principles established thus far.
A Burgeoning System
Noting a continued boom in enrollment in 1895, Professor George E. MacLean declares in his article titled “English at the University of Minnesota” how “institutions of the New West . . . ‘stand for experiment, fertility of invention, and the broadening of standards’” (155). With ongoing movement away from a method of recitation and daily themes, part of the experimentation at the University of Minnesota includes developing instructional plans focusing on the interests of individual students:
If one term had to be used, the ‘laboratory method’ would describe ours. Indeed, the method has grown to such proportions that we have just been equipped with a literary laboratory. The English department is housed in an extensive suite of rooms in which are offices, seminary rooms, graduate workroom, and recitation rooms. These rooms are in the large new central library building just completed. The Departmental Library, especially classified to suit the work of the Department, will be distributed through these rooms. (MacLean 158)
This passage not only reinforces the developing laboratory teaching praxis in writing, but as a site for experimentation and fertility, the University of Minnesota initiates the future of laboratory teaching practices and writing center development by examining students’ needs. In doing so, the university builds upon the tool and guiding principle of considering environmental factors as part of laboratory work. However, MacLean’s laboratories also become one of the first examples of laboratories, or centers, placed in the campus library, thus enhancing tools and broadening the community available for instruction.
For freshmen, the instructor engages students as they undergo “constant practice in writing, constant
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attention to correct grammatical and rhetorical forms in speech, and thorough drill in the text-book” (MacLean 159). And for sophomore students, the focus on process continues with “the criticism of the student’s own work” (MacLean 160). While this may seem commonplace today, in 1895 it was surely a novelty. And for juniors and seniors in MacLean’s English Department, this practice, coupled with “the helpful criticism given by students to each other, applying general principles and noting progress in correcting faults,” helps develop student’s collaboration and selfassessment (161). Thus, with the continual development of the student, laboratory teaching ushers in the beginnings of writing center mentorship, for through the methodology of the laboratory classroom, students acquire skills for assessing their work as well as their peers’.
Though the two educational contexts differ, the setting at the University of Minnesota, like the Pueblo schools, functions as an environment where tools and subjects interact to engage the object, or objective, laboratory teaching pursues: the development of the self-reliant student. With student-centered, collaborative, flexible, and technological and environmental factors included as guiding principles, strategies established early in the developing laboratory praxis create an environment focused on developing self-reliant “students of investigation, thought, originality, and power” (Search 162). Additionally, the laboratory practices/experiments underway at the University of Minnesota demonstrate how laboratory practices begin developing and gaining definition. As the system builds momentum at the beginning of the twentieth century, the contributions of Search’s laboratory experiments and MacLean’s considerations continue to develop alongside other guiding principles as rules and tools become enduring components of the new system.
The Laboratory Teacher
A central component of the new order of laboratory teaching in composition characterizes the teacher not as a passive facilitator of instructional methods, but as one who engages each student on an individual basis: “Bright, attractive, and carefully prepared work and a warm-hearted, enthusiastic, cooperative teacher will always make the willing and energetic pupil” (Search 159). Here, Search’s Pueblo Plan establishes an enduring point for writing center consultants, for the success of laboratory methods and writing center practices largely depends on dynamic and well-qualified teachers to continue the expansion of
laboratory teaching at the turn of the century. Accordingly, Search makes it known that “this method of work calls for strong teachers . . . The teacher cannot rely merely upon the preparation of the previous evening to meet the demands of the day. She must be equally ready on a hundred points” (169). Thus, not only must the laboratory teacher of Search’s era be informed, but much like the consultants of today, they must also possess flexibility in their approaches with individual students.
Further, from Los Angeles, California, Frances W. Lewis’ 1902 article “The Qualifications of the English Teacher” echoes this attention on the developed and flexible teacher. Lewis believes that “while the scientist must specialize, the English student who hopes to teach her specialty, must as far as possible make all knowledge her province” (19). If the object of the initial laboratory system is the development of a practical curriculum, the continually developing or evolving teacher becomes phenomenological as an outcome of the laboratory system’s activity. With laboratory teaching gaining momentum at the turn of the century, teachers and their abilities lie at the center of laboratory work with Lewis further arguing that the teacher “should also be a mistress of the art of questioning” (23). As a defining tool within the schema of laboratory teaching, this practice is still engrained in writing center practices today.3
As we see, then, the emerging dialectical system not only corrects itself to result in a new tool (laboratory teaching) to help subjects meet objectives of the system, but the system simultaneously recognizes the teacher (the conscious actor) as a dynamic cultural personality fundamental to laboratory teaching. In this role, the dynamic teacher passes “from desk to desk, assisting, quizzing, testing and qualifying students” (Search 158). In fact, this process is still at work today in many writing center contexts, furthering the student-centered principle to which writing centers adhere. Through the lens of CHAT, revealing contradictions “[gives] rise to those failures and [creates] innovations as if ‘behind the backs’ of the conscious actors” (Engeström, “Activity Theory and Individual” 32). In other words, through the earliest incarnations of the laboratory teaching movement, heretofore forgotten teachers like Search, Maclean, and Lewis play a central role in the development of the movement that, simultaneously, inform today’s practices through their identification of the laboratory teacher’s qualifications found in today’s laboratory and writing center praxis.
Additionally, at the National Education Association (NEA) conference in 1904, Philo Buck, Head of the English Department at William McKinley
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High School in St. Louis, Missouri, addresses attributes of the laboratory teacher. He begins his speech, “Laboratory Method in English Composition” from the Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Forty-Third Annual Meeting, with a charge for the teacher: “Speak as one with authority, but also as one who knows the heart and feelings of those he has in charge” (507). Mirroring earlier references to teachers as “inspiring directors” and “pupil’s assistants,” Buck’s language represents a direct indictment against faculty who resign to lecturing in large halls, engaging the uninspiring work of recitation, or combatting the “unmitigated bore” of theme work (Buck 507). While Buck strengthens his support for teachers, his assessment simultaneously advocates that teachers engage collaborative work as a flexible rule for the laboratory classroom in composition. He argues that themes should get “passed around the class by the pupils, and let the class criticize and correct each other’s work” (507). By no means are these revolutionary ideas today, but at the turn of the century, they represent a major shift toward adopting the flexible, self-evaluative, and collaborative strategies which we see in contemporary writing centers.
In addition to Search, MacLean, Lewis, and Buck’s work, Frances Ingold Walker demonstrates the prominence of the laboratory teacher’s role. From the New Trier Township High School in Kenilworth, Illinois, Walker, in her 1917 English Journal article, “The Laboratory System in English,” articulates the qualifications of the teacher: “The resourceful teacher possesses tact, sound judgement, a thorough knowledge of the individual needs of his pupils, and the ability to minister to those needs quickly and efficiently” (449). A teacher’s tools, and consequently, their praxes, mature. Thus, the scholarship from the beginning of the laboratory movement demonstrates how five guiding principles for laboratory work, and ultimately for future writing center work, have emerged.
Cultivating the Movement
During the early twentieth century (roughly 1919-1930) laboratory practices and our guiding principles continue to get honed particularly through the considerations of environmental factors and advancement and incorporation of technology in the classroom. These advancements demonstrate how writing laboratories, and writing centers of today, continue to evolve with each site incorporating environmental factors to provide students amenable space in which to work with the latest technological advances to accompany learning in those settings.
In 1919, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, for example, Central High School teacher Carl Zeigler’s classrooms began to adopt specific environmental and technological characteristics that augment students’ laboratory space. Features in many of the early writing labs such as Zeigler’s range from time-specific attributes such as “the most up-to-date pamphlets and volumes on social conditions, on democracy, and on the present war” to the décor of “comfortable chairs . . . arranged in a hollow-square formation . . .” (Zeigler 144-5). In early writing labs, students also had access to reflectoscopes, Victrola cabinets, and moving picture machines, all for use “under the wise guidance of the quiet, active teacher in charge” (Zeigler 145; Peck 753). Tools like these, which Ziegler infuses into his classrooms, are certainly part of our writing centers today, and with the development of the NCTE in 1911, we may see how the dissemination of information continues to spread (during the early part of the 20thcenteury as well as today). In turn, those dialectical contributions ultimately assist in developing rules and tools like those found in laboratory writing classrooms as educators and institutions continually adapt to changing student populations. . . much like we do today. Additionally, with Zeigler’s work demonstrating early incarnations of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), for each class “is an English class” (Zeigler 145), the contradiction of lectures versus engaging students individually in laboratory settings and providing them time to write is mediated with writing in-session. First mentioned in 1912, the article “Can Good Composition Teaching be done Under Present Conditions?” by University of Kansas Professor Edwin Hopkins, argues “pupils should learn to write by writing” (2). For practitioners like Zeigler, the practice of in-session writing, both student-centered and collaborative, continues the work established by Search et al. In fact, with the tools of environmental and technological considerations unveiled by Zeigler, students do not passively receive information from a lecture; instead, they actively engage their own learning in consultation with the teacher.
With the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) providing more opportunities for collaboration after its development in 1911, Hopkin’s claim and Ziegler’s classrooms demonstrate how information sharing advances the laboratory movement at the beginning of the twentieth century and through today. For Hopkins and Zeigler, and many writing centers today, writing in-session is seen as compulsory, and with technology and environmental factors continuing to build onto previous models, guiding principles of laboratory work become solidified as part
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of the pedagogy. By the end of the 1920’s, formal assessment of these practices and inquiry into how laboratory practices were working began.
Calibrating the Paradigm: Testing Assumptions
Around 1929, with laboratory teaching in practice for roughly 40 years, the laboratory classroom in composition encountered a contradiction of its own making as questions about its reliability and validity began to circulate.4 At this time, Warren B. Horner carried out an experiment to assess the viability of laboratory teaching versus recitation methods. Identifying writing in-session and individual student records as central components of laboratory teaching methods, Horner’s assessment advocates the continuation of previous practitioners’ durable practices our guiding principles. The practices Horner notes in his explanation of the laboratory movement demonstrate the practicality of the laboratory method as opposed to that of the recitation method. Thus, the experimental nature of the pedagogy and the development of tools, which we find so compelling today, continues in laboratory teaching’s evolution through the 1930s.
For instance, Johns Hopkins University Professor Paul Mowbray Wheeler advanced the experimental nature of laboratory teaching in his 1930 article “Advanced English Composition: A Laboratory Course.” Through his work, Wheeler introduced student volunteers into the community component of the CHAT frame through his advanced course of English composition: “A member [of the class] should volunteer to act as a secretary for each meeting. He jots down what transpires and the most important criticisms which are brought out. Then these ‘minutes’ are filed and are available to any student who is forced to be absent or late” (558). As an early concept, these practices of note taking have not changed that drastically over the years. Today, consultants take notes to record what transpires during a session, thereby enhancing the technological resolve record keeping holds. These records, just as in Wheeler’s case, get filed so other consultants can see a students’ progress or assess a student’s areas of concern as each gets noted during a conference.
Through Horner’s and Wheeler’s experiments, the development of the laboratory classroom’s guiding principles, which are now rules and tools for the modern writing center, become further discernible. The experimental praxis must be student-centered; teachers offer flexible plans and possess flexible, nurturing qualities; collaboration is at the center of this student-
centered and teacher-enhanced praxis; and technology and environmental factors play central roles in providing an atmosphere where work can flourish.
Expanding the System: A Model Writing Center from the Laboratory
In 1936, the laboratory, as it had been conceived for nearly 50 years, was described as a new and independent venture by the University of Minnesota General College’s Writing Laboratory’s first director, Francis S. Appel. As part of the General College, the Writing Laboratory at the University of Minnesota began as a voluntary course where students studied for an hour or two per week: “Composition as a subject is studied in the laboratory only when the student runs into difficulty writing things which he wishes to write in answer to natural demands” (Appel 71). Though Appel’s course was still a “course,” it was not an addendum to the composition course. In fact, with his method for administering activities, Appel’s course embodied the guiding principles culminated throughout the past 50 years of laboratory experiments and ultimately served as the blueprint of the modernday writing center.
Appel claims that when students enter his lab, they “are told at the first meeting that they are to write anything they wish to, [and] the sudden freedom confuses them” (72). Under Appel’s direction, the laboratory adhered to a student-centered approach as he encouraged them to write about real situations that appeal to them. His approach is like starting over; he has to de-program students, and he does so with flexible, yet effective tactics further adding to the already growing resourcefulness of the laboratory teacher. Appel’s rulesbased schema illustrates the intimacy offered in his lab, allowing the teacher to act as a model to transfer skills to his students. Thus, the flexibility and collaboration Appel offers in his lab engages students so they may more fully develop a genuine concern for their writing, and engage in self-evaluative work, thereby encouraging the continual development of the self-reliant student.
In-session writing and student revision a staple practice in Appel’s laboratory also becomes more prominent tool and rule for the student-centered philosophy for engaging students:
The only interruptions in [a student’s] work are those caused by his going to the bookshelves for a reference book or by the instructor’s sitting down with him for a brief conference about the work he is doing. And that is the time for a conference! More than half of the achievement of the writing laboratory, I am
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sure, can be attributed to the fact that conferences with the student take place when the student is writing. (75)
The practice of writing in-session, now recognizably a practice in circulation for over 20 years at the time of Appel’s article, helps define how learning opportunities “occur in a changing mosaic of interconnected activity systems” (Engeström, “Expansive Learning” 140). First realized in 1912, the activity system that introduces writing in-session now overlaps with the system of Appel’s Writing Laboratory.
Moreover, in this workplace environment where revision is key, Appel continued to enhance the presence of technology as an enduring tool in the lab as he added student files to the archive with multiple drafts collected, thereby constituting an early conceptualization of the portfolio, for “throwing away rough drafts constituted a major crime . . . Our files now contain, fortunately, many examples of careful, independent revision” (74). What started in 1887 as a collection of individual student work for the purposes of keeping track of student progress has now evolved into archival work allowing students to see their development through a portfolio-type file. Much like Wheeler’s work, this exercise also provides future students and teachers multiple opportunities to view examples at multiple points through which learning might occur.
Finally, Appel’s evaluation of his system also notes the multiple roles instructors play in the laboratory: “instructors in the laboratory try to tie in with the counseling system of the college” (75). As Muriel Harris discusses, in her 1980 article “The Roles a Tutor Plays,” the tutor may act as a coach, commentator, or a counselor. Thus, laboratory teaching specialists and today’s writing center consultants assess their practices while simultaneously cultivating the nurturing and flexible environments established throughout this beginning period of cultivating laboratory writing classrooms. Instructors in the laboratory must be able to determine how to engage each student, and they must be equipped to handle multiple situations as they arise. They become coaches, collaborators, and counselors, and they must be amenable to the work: “It is not . . . a method to be forced upon a staff, for the laboratory method requires enthusiastic and not mere perfunctory teaching by the instructors” (Appel 77). Noted throughout the Formative Period, Appel highlights the attribute of an enthusiastic participant as a prominent role of the consultant in the evolution of our writing center gestalt.
Conclusion
Offering an interpretation of ways in which guiding principles of writing center praxis have evolved, this article offers a view of writing center pedagogical beginnings. In 1940, at the end of the Formative Period, George Washington University (GWU) Professor Elbridge Colby’s article “‘Laboratory Work’ in English” demonstrates how the university adheres to the fundamental guiding principle of providing environmentally adequate space for their new writing laboratory. With technology readily available, the environmental characteristics of the library as a setting suitable for a writing laboratory are not coincidental. In such a setting, directed by knowledgeable teachers, insession writing, collaboration, and a student-centered approach to developing self-sufficient writers opens the door to all university students. GWU’s expansion to include a writing laboratory in the new library precedes its future as an effort to build “close co-operation between the English and other departments of the university” (Colby 68-69). It is this interconnection of activity systems within the university that continues to develop and demonstrate a growing community of scholars looking to further develop laboratory practices at their institutions.
While variations exist in how laboratories function, Figure 4 exhibits the theoretical and environmental structuring of the writing laboratory at the end of the Formative Period, which is (almost) an exact model of writing center activity today. With the guiding principles underlined, mediating artifacts, or tools, have developed extensively over the previous 60 years with environmental factors such as tables and chairs in a well-lit room continuing to provide a relaxed environment where students can focus on the work at
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hand. Additionally, technology, a resource library, student files, empirical research, and the NCTE operating as an important information sharing tool have all added to the burgeoning laboratory system. Further, a student-centered approach and collaboration operate as rules for the system, and while this figure includes the continually developing teacher in the outcome, it is possible teachers, and their flexibility, may also get situated as rules or tools in the system. Laboratories have the same goals of developing self-sufficient students in flexible and nurturing environments; however, with the addition of student workers and the view that the lab may also act as a teaching lab for preteachers, the developing teacher becomes an outcome of the activity system developed by the end of the Formative Period.
In this setting, writing laboratories of the 1940s have the same goals of developing self-sufficient students in flexible and nurturing environments as our modern-day writing centers do; however, the new rationale of the next generation, 1940-1960, will threaten the existence of the model so fortuitously developed during this initial period. While the model ending the Formative Period is seen as progressive and fruitful, most resembling that which we see as writing center activity today, the next era viewed it as a bastardization of educational principles. The next generation will throw out most of our emerging guiding principles and usher in an agenda that will stratify and categorize an entire generation of students. “Remediation,” “prescription,” “remedy,” and other terms get injected into the new clinic model and leave a lasting residue that still taints many of our best efforts today. As a result, new contradictions emerge to throw the 1940s writing laboratory, and our current writing center archetype, into a regressive condition. Stay tuned for The Clinical Period.
Notes
1. For more on Vygotsky’s original triad, see David Russell’s discussion of Activity Theory in “Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction.”
2. The banking model of education is described by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “Narration (with the teacher as the narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The
more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. . . This is the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the student extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits” (52-3).
3. See, for example, Don Murray: “The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference”; Joanne B. Johnson: “Reevaluation of the Questions as a Teaching Tool”; David Brooke: “Lacan, Transference, and Writing Instruction”; Isabelle Thompson and Jo Mackiewicz “Questioning in Writing center Conferences.”
4. From Elizabeth Boquet’s endnotes in “Our Little Secret”: “Horner's article summarizes the findings of his master's thesis, an empirical study which sought to compare the effectiveness of the laboratory method to the effectiveness of the lecture method. In the end, the results, which are fairly inconclusive, are far less interesting than his point-by-point explanation of the laboratory method” (57-58).
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Boquet, Elizabeth H. “‘Our Little Secret’: A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-Open Admissions.” The Longman’s Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice, edited by Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blumner, Pearson, 2008, pp. 41-62.
Brooke, Robert. “Lacan, Transference, and Writing Instruction.” College English, vol. 49, no. 6, 1987, pp. 679-691.
Buck, Philo Melvin. “Laboratory Method in English Composition.” Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Forty-Third Annual Meeting Held at St. Louis, Missouri in Connection with The Louisiana Purchase Exposition. National Education Association, 1904, pp. 506-510.
Carino, Peter. “Early Writing Centers: Toward a History.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 15, no. 2, 1995, pp. 103-115.
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Colby, Elbridge. “‘Laboratory Work’ in English.” College English, vol. 2, no. 1, 1940, pp. 67-69. Davydov, Vassily V. “The Content and Unsolved Problems of Activity Theory.” Perspectives on Activity Theory, edited by Yrjö Engeström, Reijo Miettinen, and Raija-Leena Punamaki, Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 39-52.
Engeström, Yrjö. “Activity Theory and Individual and Social Transformation.” Perspectives on Activity Theory, edited by Yrjö Engeström, Reijo Miettinen, and Raija-Leena Punamaki, Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 19-38.
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Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Books. 1993.
Genung, John Franklin. “The Study of Rhetoric in the College Course.” The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925, edited by John C. Brereton, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, pp. 172-177.
Grimm, Nancy Maloney. “New Conceptual Frameworks for Writing Center Work.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 29, no. 2, 2009, pp. 11-27.
Hopkins, Edwin M. “Can Good Composition Teaching Be Done Under Present Conditions?” The English Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 1912, pp. 1-8.
Horner, Warren B. “The Economy of the Laboratory Method.” The English Journal, vol. 18, no. 3, 1929, pp. 214-221.
Lerner, Neal. The Idea of a Writing Laboratory, Southern Illinois UP, 2009.
Lerner, Neal. “Punishment and Possibility: Representing Writing Centers, 1939-1970.” Composition Studies, vol. 31, no. 2, 2003, pp. 53-72.
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MacLean, George E. “English at the University of Minnesota.” English in American Universities, edited by William Morton Payne, Heath, 1895, pp. 155-161.
Murray, Donald M. “The Listening Eye: Reflections on a Writing Conference.” College English, vol. 41, no. 1, 1979, pp. 13-18.
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“The Organization and Use of a Writing Laboratory: The Report of Workshop No. 9.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 2, no. 4, 1951, pp. 17-19.
Peck, Juanita Small. “The English Laboratory.” The English Journal, vol. 23, no. 9, 1934, pp. 751764.
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THE GLOBAL-LOCAL DUALISM IN WRITING CENTER STUDIES
Jo Mackiewicz Iowa State University jomack@iastate.edu
Abstract
We trace the history of the global-local dualism, noting how writing center researchers and practitioners have employed it. We next discuss problems and complications inherent in the dualism, such as the way it obscures the interconnectedness of text components. We illustrate our points with excerpts from writing center conferences. We end by discussing possible implications of our analysis for tutor training. Our goal is to provide a more nuanced understanding of this ubiquitous dualism in writing center studies.
Introduction
For decades, writing center practitioners and researchers have divided text components such as thesis and grammar into two groups: global and local. Various alternative terms have appeared. The terms “higher order concerns” and “lower order concerns” (Reigstad and McAndrew 11; refer also to Harris) have become particularly common in writing center studies. Writing center specialists adopted this global-local dualism to facilitate discussion of components of writing they wanted to prioritize at a given time, usually beginning with a text’s focus, development, and organization, and saving components such as punctuation, grammar, and word choice for last. For example, writing in 2002 about writing center tutors, Blau and Hall pointed out, “Tutors are consistently advised to … deal with higher-order concerns (HOCs) of focus, organization, and development before lower-order concerns (LOCs) of grammar and mechanics, no matter whom they are tutoring” (24). Because of its utility, the global-local dualism has become a common shorthand. However, in simplifying the writing process, the dualism obscures important connections among text elements, such as word choice and organization. We argue that tutor training should acknowledge the ways that meaning arises out from spelling, word choice, and punctuation. In this article, we first sketch the history of the global-local dualism. We next discuss problems inherent in the dualism. We use excerpts of conference transcripts that we collected for prior studies to illustrate our points.1 We end by discussing possible implications of our analysis for tutor training.
History of the Global-Local Dualism
The global-local dualism common in writing center research and training today stems from
Isabelle Thompson Auburn University isabelle.thompson1950@gmail.com
assessment practices, both in outside-of-the-classroom testing and in teachers’ responses and grading. Until the 1970s, many assessment methods did not include direct measurements of writing performance. However, in their discussion of the state of composition in the early 1960s, Braddock et al. advocated an “analytic method” (13) for scoring writing produced under controlled circumstances. Although it is currently criticized as “sterile” (Hamp-Lyons A2), the analytic method has influenced other forms of scoring in large-scale writing assessment by separating what came to be known as global concerns central ideas and analysis, supporting material, and organization from what came to be known as local concerns diction, sentence style, grammar, and mechanics. Interestingly, even though grammar and mechanics received a smaller number of points in the assessment, Braddock et al. noticed that raters “permitted their impression of the grammar and the mechanics of the compositions to create a halo effect which suffuses their general rating” (19). In other words, the global-local dualism helped Braddock et al. think about and report on writing as bifurcated, enough so that they faulted raters who failed to accurately separate writers’ words from their ideas. For them, writing quality equated to the sum of an essay’s parts. Further research about assessment conducted in the 1970s reflected similar scoring criteria. Diederich outlined eight “qualities” (ideas, organization, wording, flavor [style], usage, punctuation, spelling, and handwriting) rated on scales, with global concerns rated as more important than local concerns (54). In 1977, in two other well-known contributions to assessment, both Cooper and Lloyd-Jones described holistic assessment with rubrics that separated global from local concerns. From the beginning, rubrics have reinforced the hold of the global-local dualism in the minds of writing specialists. (The 2014 special issue of Assessing Writing discussed the merits of rubrics.)
In the 1970s and 1980s, writing specialists such as Murray and Elbow advised students to focus on global concerns during free writing. Murray and Elbow and a few others rejected grammar-focused, productbased research and pronouncements about writing that occurred before and to a large extent during the 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., Becker; Christensen; D’Angelo; Winterowd). They argued against the notion that
teachers cannot help students with global concerns because that knowledge has already accrued in the writer’s mind. This view manifests in what Hairston referred to as the “Current Traditional Paradigm,” which held “that competent writers know what they are going to say before they begin to write” (78), whether from their own minds or from outside sources. Thus, writing instruction for followers of the Current Traditional Paradigm would focus on local issues.
In the mid-1970s and 1980s, however, processbased research became popular. For example, in discussing writing as problem solving, Flower and Hayes argued for brainstorming before editing for exactness and correctness. Similarly, Perl pointed out that less expert students’ “premature and rigid attempts to correct and edit their work truncate the flow of composing” (23). Bridwell said that “students who did a great deal of surface-level revising were mired in spelling and mechanical problems during drafting” (210). Hence, research about the composing process, in switching from the earlier product focus on local concerns to emphasize global concerns, adopted and promulgated the global-local dualism.
The global-local dualism has also played an implicit role in early research on writing teachers’ comments on students’ writing. For example, Sommers examined comments that 35 teachers wrote on first and second drafts and interviewed a sample of teachers and students. She studied the content of teachers’ betweenlines and marginal comments–about local concerns–and essay-beginning, and essay-ending comments–what Connors and Lunsford later called “rhetorical concerns” (200). Sommers found that these comments appearing together can send mixed signals, encouraging students “to edit and develop, to condense and elaborate” and thus constituting a “remarkable contradiction” (151). In her analysis, Sommers employed the global-local dualism to argue for the importance of prioritizing suggestions about ideas over suggestions about punctuation. She argued that when teachers’ use “editing”-related comments, they encourage students “to see their writing as a series of parts words, sentences, paragraphs and not as a whole discourse” (151).
The global-local dualism entered the realm of writing center studies with the 1984 publication of Reigstad and McAndrew’s guide to training writing center tutors. They used the terms HOCs and LOCs in their third principle of tutoring writing: “Higher-order concerns come before lower-order concerns” (1). Reigstad and McAndrew delineated four HOCs: (1) thesis/focus; (2) appropriate voice or tone; (3) organization; and (4) development. In turn, they defined
LOCs as “concerns that deal with units of sentence length or smaller. The emphasis shifts from the draft as a whole to sentence structure, punctuation, usage, and spelling” (18). Their goal, too, was to ensure a proper order of attention, cautioning: “Tutors may wait and treat LOCs at the end of the session or work on them during the revision of HOCs as long as this concern for less important kinds of problems does not shift the focus of revision from the much more significant HOCs. [Tutors] must be very careful not to become distracted by LOCs at the expense of HOCs” (18). Shortly afterwards, Harris used these terms in her book about writing conferences.
Subsequent writing center researchers have followed suit, employing the dualism albeit with slightly varying terminology as they attempted to quantify students’ outcomes after writing center interventions. For example, Niiler and Pleasant et al. used “global” and “local” as they studied the extent to which students’ essays improved after a writing center conference. Huang used the terms “macro-” and “micro-level” features to categorize text characteristics. In a meta-analysis summarizing the results of studies that investigated the effects of writing center visits on students’ outcomes (e.g., writing quality, grades, exam scores), Salazar labeled prior studies’ measurement targets as “higher-order” and “lower-order.” For example, Salazar characterized findings of Maize’s 1954 study not in terms of the Rinsland-Beck Natural Test of English Usage, the instrument that Maize used, but instead as higher-order and lower-order gains (88).
This history of bifurcating writing into global and local holds today in resources aimed at writing tutors and the directors who train them. The Purdue OWL, for example, instructs student writers to prioritize HOCs: “When you are revising your papers, not every element of your work should have equal priority. The most important parts of your paper, often called ‘Higher Order Concerns (HOCs),’ are the ‘big picture’ elements such as thesis or focus, audience and purpose, organization, and development.” The Writing Studio at Duke University differentiates between HOCs and LOCs and suggests that peer reviewers address HOCs first: “It can be helpful to use a system of Higher Order Concerns (HOCs) and Lower Order Concerns (LOCs) to plan your feedback strategy. For instance, there is little point in pointing out all the comma errors in a paper if the author’s central claim (thesis) isn’t working” (1). Similarly, the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan suggests that after a reviewer reads the entire paper, they should “identify the two or three most important ‘higher order’ things” that the writer could improve. The dualism, then, has pushed
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students as writers and as tutors to think about content as something distinct from the words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that comprise it.
Manuals for writing center tutors have followed the path set by Reigstad and McAndrew and Harris, dividing revision and feedback into two categories: global and local. Ryan and Zimmerelli, for example, claimed that “Revision consists of two stages: global revision in which we improve the ‘big picture’ of our papers by looking at issues like content, organization, and tone and sentence-level revision in which we attend to the finer points of our writing by strengthening and clarifying sentences and correcting errors in grammar, punctuation, and mechanics” (9). Gillespie and Lerner cited Reigstad and McAndrew when suggesting that tutors attend to HOCs before LOCs: “One of the most important things you can do as a tutor is to deal first with what Thomas Reigstad and Donald MacAndrew [sic] call higher-order concerns. As a tutor, you’ll save grammar and correctness for later” (35). Thus, tutoring guides have employed the dualism to ensure that tutors avoid error correction and focus on developing students’ ability to formulate texts that effectively address specific rhetorical situations. The dualism, based on components of writing such as development and grammar, simplifies discussions about writing by allowing us to say “focus on this, not that” or, at least, “focus on this before that.”
This history, along with current practice, shows that the global-local dualism has been prevalent in writing center studies for many years and indicates its usefulness. Discussing instructional focus as local and global helped enable the 1970s shift from meaning as fully formed outside of writing to writing as discovery. Further, the accompanying advice to focus on global concerns helped writers see writing as recursive and revision as necessary. Overall, the global-local dualism has helped writing center researchers and practitioners to discuss writing as a complex system of behaviors that can be taught. That said, the dualism has shortcomings. In the section below, we discuss some conceptual and practical problems with the global-local dualism, drawing examples from excerpts of tutoring sessions we have recorded and transcribed for prior research.
Shortcomings of the Dualism
Because the local-global dualism divides components of writing, it obscures the interconnectedness of global concerns, such as text focus, and local concerns, such as sentence structure. For instance, seemingly simple clarifications of a single word can evolve into substantive discussions of ideas.
In Excerpt 1 below the first excerpt from our previously gathered conference data Tamara2 asked a pumping question aimed to get the student to articulate what she meant by the term “fantasize disorder.” The tutor’s goal, it seems, was to determine whether “fantasize” was indeed the best word to describe the disorder or whether “fantasizing” or “fantasized” might be better. The choice would depend on whether the student intended to convey the disorder was perceived by (fantasized by) the patient or whether the disorder was one characterized by fantasizing. In other words, the choice between “fantasized” and “fantasizing” involved a choice between two meanings:
Excerpt 13
Tamara: Ok, you actually want ‘nor,’ sorry, instead of “or”. Um, and so “fantasize disorder”. What do you mean by “fantasize disorder”?
Sandy: Like I feel like people, um, sometimes don’t really understand that, how serious it is and like people really do not remember what the personalities do and like they really have no control. So like sometimes I feel like it’s just like they’re like, oh they just have different ways they act some days, you know. Hold on I just- Because then I’m going to end my evaluation. I was going to go say that I feel like because we’re supposed to talk about is this disorder going to be relevant in the years to come, and I said that, or I was thinking about saying, um something along the lines of that. I feel like the more people find out about the disorder the more people are going to try to fake it. So they’re like relevant. Because it only affects like, uh, one to three percent of the North American population and then in other parts of the world it’s like point five to zero percent.
Tamara: Oh wow, ok. Um, yeah ok, well maybe let’s- That’s not right or wrong. It just kind of jumps out me because it’s like ‘fantasized’-
Sandy: Should I use a different describedescriptor?
Tamara: Seems like, um- Let me see what your next sentence is. ‘Fantasizing,’ you know, it kind of seems like, yeah, it’s just not real for anyone, but obviously it was for Sybil, right?
Sandy: Mmhm.
Tamara used a pumping question to get the student to explain the disorder so that she could then ascertain the term’s appropriateness. In explaining the term, however, Sandy expanded the conversation beyond one oddsounding term into productive talk about potential content for the paper. Discussion of what is supposed to be a lower-level concern word choice led to the so-called higher level of planning text development. This interconnectedness of global and local concerns is something Denny noted in her dissertation on “oral revision.”4 In her study, Denny (“The Discourse”) used Reigstad and McAndrew’s delineation of HOCs and LOCs to operationalize tutors’ and students’ talk about potential revisions.5 In doing so, she noted that in trying to separate HOCs from LOCs, the line between the two at times became blurry: Further, many of these categories overlap in some ways. For example, in the Alyssa transcript, the pair was attempting to rewrite the thesis statement (possibly categorized as thesis/topic) by discussing specific word choice (possibly categorized as usage) to aid in organizing the entire paper (possibly categorized as organization). In cases such as these, I was forced to make a judgment call and code the episode for what I thought to be the “main” idea of the episode (149). Denny’s honest explication of her research procedure revealed the complex interconnectedness behind the dualism’s supposed simplicity.
Other researchers and practitioners have pointed out this interconnectedness. Raymond and Quinn, comparing writing center tutees’ priorities for their conferences with tutors’ priorities, acknowledged that “improving a local concern such as grammar is not, by any means, mutually exclusive with addressing a writer’s thought processes” (73). Similarly, in their tutoring guide, Fitzgerald and Ianetta noted that “sometimes global and sentence-level issues are so deeply interrelated that it is difficult to separate them. For instance, you might come across a sentence in which a writer has difficulty clearly articulating an idea but that, if revised, could help readers understand the entire argument of the piece” (74). Such researchers and practitioners have tried to convey the dualism’s
oversimplification of revision and, consequently, feedback.
In a striking departure from the dualism in 2005, Kavadlo addressed the bifurcation of HOCs and LOCs: “HOCs and LOCs are frequently correlations, not chains of being” (221). Arguing in favor of addressing style in writing center conferences, Kavadlo pointed out that repetition, a supposed LOC, can mask lack of support for claims, an HOC. Further, transitions stem in part from conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, and introductory clauses, and audience appropriateness arises from jargon, inflammatory language, and slang (222). In other words, Kavadlo convincingly argued that the two intertwine and thus, the practice of addressing LOCs after HOCs can lead to “ignoring language entirely” even though language shapes the author’s main point (223). Indeed, he contended, mistakes such as comma splices “frequently show a student who is struggling to weigh and measure contrasting or contradictory yet sophisticated and significant ideas” (224). As Kavadlo explained, while the globallocal dualism provides a useful shorthand, it obscures the relationships among text components.
Building on their prior work on L2 students in the writing center, Severino and Cogie made the same point but focused specifically on the shortcomings of the dualism in discussions of second and foreign language learners in the writing center: “The line between HOCs and LOCs becomes so blurred it is hard to distinguish them from one another. Especially in lower proficiency second (and first) language writing, supposedly lower-level language problems can so impede communication and comprehension that they therefore affect the higher levels of focus, purpose, content, and argument” (462). Severino and Cogie pointed to Blau and Hall’s critique of the HOC/LOC dualism, particularly in relation to second-language writers: “Blau and Hall expressed for the first time in print what many second language writers already knew and what many tutors had already discovered – that language for many NNS writers IS a Higher Order Concern” (464). Indeed, Blau and Hall went on to call the tendency to reduce writing to HOCs and LOCs “troublesome” (43, note 1).
Nakamaru, too, pointed out the main problem that arises when discouraging tutors from attending to LOCs associated with proofreading in conferences with L2 writers: “This general admonishment against editing and proofreading papers has been applied to sessions with L2 writers as well, despite the fact that L2 writers’ language concerns are very different from L1 writers’ and are much more likely to affect meaningmaking than merely editing or proofreading needs” (98).
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In her small-scale study, Nakamaru found that “the tutors characterized the feedback they provided in the session in terms of ‘content’ and ‘grammar,’ almost completely failing to articulate the lexical needs of the students. This orientation may be the result of internalizing the ways writing center discourse in general treats students’ language needs” (110). The global-local dualism led tutors to see L2 students’ need for lexical help help with the form and meaning of a word as grammar and thus as areas to avoid for fear of appropriating students’ texts.
Indeed, as these writing studies researchers have indicated, word choices contribute to the meaning a text conveys, as Excerpt 2, a conversation between an English L1 tutor and an English L2 student, demonstrates. Tony began by reading aloud Sheng’s thesis that imperialism and colonialism are unhealthy ideologies. Then Tony repeated what Sheng had written, but this time he provided potential wording, exchanging “ideologies” for “social structures”:
Excerpt 2
Tony: That is what we’re working on. Um[Clears throat] Oh yeah. So you’re basically wanting to say that“Imperialism and colonialism are unhealthy ideologies.”
Sheng: Yeah.
Tony: So some of the- I mean, that’s pretty simple, right? “Imperialism and colonialism are unhealthy ideologies,” or ‘unhealthy social structures.’
Sheng: Oh, I like that. Um-
This change alone a change to the student’s main point redirected the student’s paper from a focus on imperialism and colonialism as ideologies to a focus on them as systems for structuring a society. The tutor’s word choice suggestion, then, altered the overall direction of the student’s paper.
In addition, after Sheng affirmed that “social structures” was preferable to the original “ideologies,” Tony continued with a series of pumping questions, intended, it seems, to push Sheng to elaborate on what a particular word “unhealthy” might mean: Excerpt 2 (continued)
Tony: And you can, you can even go into, like, why, or, like- What does it mean to be an ‘unhealthy social structure’? Because maybe
your, uh, your reader might not know exactly what you mean by that. What do you mean by unhealthy? Like, it’s not good for the people? It’s not good for the country? It’s not good for theSheng: Not good for people, I guess. This excerpt shows how one word can play a strong role in conveying (or not) a student’s intended meaning. The tutor used pumping questions to help the student explain the word “unhealthy,” an explanation that could potentially frame the rest of the paper. Discussion of this word, then, became potential content for the paper. Moreover, articulating what “unhealthy” meant made it possible for Sheng to organize the paper around types of unhealthiness and the ways that colonialism and imperialism generate them. In sum, then, discussion of one word did substantial focusing and organizational work.
Despite the admonition that tutors should address global before local concerns, the fact remains that the two frequently intertwine in conversations about writing. In Excerpt 3, Tyra asked Steven a pumping question aimed at getting him to explain a sentence that ended with “colors and the need to dominate.” From that sentence-level focus, Steven panned out, moving to the text level of the teacher’s instruction to discuss ethos, pathos, and logos in the paper:
Excerpt 3
Tyra: “Colors and the need to dominate,” what does that mean?
Steven: It was one of the things, on- She gave us like a list, I don’t- I think it was online, I can’t remember.
Tyra: Ok.
Steven: No, it was in class. She pulled it up in class. It was like, different, um- I don’t even know how to describe it.
Tyra: Yeah.
Steven: Like, um. I don’t even know how to describe it. It was like-
Tyra: Yeah that makes sense.
Steven: Ethos, pathos, and logos stuff though.
Tyra: Ok.
Steven: So, like, the need to dominate isn’t like, this is kind of the best lure that they have.
Later, after Steven attempted to explain the assignment, Tyra changed course to focus on punctuation, specifically, the addition of an Oxford comma. Immediately afterward, though, Tyra panned out again, asking a pumping question (“Why are they using these?”) that was certainly related to the sentence’s wording but also opened up the possibility of going beyond that single sentence to more fully answer the question:
Excerpt 3 (continued)
Tyra: Ok, that makes sense. So, what I would do is, add a comma here, um, so it’s like the Oxford comma so it’s like a list. And then I would say why are they using these? So, ‘They use ethos, color, and the need to dominate to, like, promote or advertise their product,’ or something like that.
Steven: Just at the end of that sentence?
Tyra: Yeah.
A few turns later, Tyra and Steven shifted focus back and forth again from punctuation to determining the meaning of “ethos” to punctuation yet again:
Excerpt 3 (continued)
Tyra: What is ethos, again?
Steven: It’s, um, oh man. I’m going to look it up.
Tyra: Ok.
Steven: It was the, um, uh, like, using a credible source I’m pretty sure.
Tyra: Ok, gotcha. So.
Steven: Yeah. It’s like persuasion with a credible source.
Tyra: Ok. And so the company is the credible source?
Steven: Yeah.
Tyra: Ok. Um.
Steven: It’s a- It’s a pretty popular fishing company, and they’re using Jacob Wheeler, he’s kind of, like, the number one fisherman. [Laughs] So it’s pretty credible.
Tyra: Ok. Um. So this is actually just going to go here.
Steven: Where at?
Tyra: Right here. And then you’ll end it with a period. It’s a little weird with the quotation kind of things.
After Steven responded to Tyra’s questions about the meaning of ethos (“What is ethos, again?”) and fishing company’s credibility (“And so the company is the credible source?”), both Tyra and Steven swung back to correct punctuation for in-text citations.
As these exchanges between Tyra and Steven make clear, talk about audience, purpose, and development is likely to unfold in conjunction with talk about punctuation and other local concerns. Tyra and Steven’s conversation exemplifies how it is possible to readily shift from one focus to another without a stumble.
Still another shortcoming of the global-local dualism is the inconsistency with which researchers have operationalized its bifurcated halves. For example, in their study of the effects of writing consultations on L2 students’ essays, Tiruchitampalam et al. operationalized HOCs as task fulfillment and organization and coherence (8), whereas Reigstad and McAndrew as well as others who have followed Reigstad and McAndrew’s delineation operationalized HOCs as thesis/focus, appropriate voice or tone, organization, and development (19). In short, although there is overlap, researchers vary somewhat in what they include as global components of writing.
Similarly, researchers differ in how they operationalize tone and style. Studying writing center tutors’ and students’ perceptions of help given and received, Winder et al. wrote that LOCs comprised “word choice, tone, style” (327). Pleasant et al. included “style, surface, and presentation” as LOCs (117). On the
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other hand, Reigstad and McAndrew classified “voice or tone” as an HOC (19). Similarly, van den Bos and Tan classified style as an HOC (8) and Strobl classified it as global (8). Such differences arose from the slipperiness of style and tone as concepts. As Kavadlo and others (e.g., Garza) have noted, style and tone arise out of choices made at the word, phrase, and sentence levels, and together those choices generate an overarching tone and style for the text. Another exchange between Tyra and Steven (Excerpt 4) shows how changes in word choice can contribute to changes in a text’s tone and style. Tyra suggested that Steven exchange “like” with “similar to”:
Excerpt 4
Tyra: Because I mean it’s obviously not my paper. “The color they’re promoting is like a forest green,” I would say, ‘similar to.’
Steven: [Laughs] Ok.
Tyra: And then it just makes it sound more formal. You don’t have to, I’m just being picky now.
Steven: Yeah
Tyra suggested the change to “similar to” to elevate the paper’s tone, or register, rather than to correct a grammatical problem. Because tone and style lie at the boundary of the global-local dualism, researchers have differed in which side of the boundary they categorize them.
Conclusion
As we noted at the outset, our intent here is to show the embeddedness of the global-local dualism in the history of writing center studies and to exemplify the ways that the dualism falters. We want to conclude by describing how our analysis might manifest in training on providing feedback for teachers, tutors, and peer reviewers.
First, however, we want to underscore the dualism’s utility. As we discussed earlier, it became rooted in writing centers from assessment research and practice (e.g., Cooper; Lloyd-Jones). It then became a useful way to guide students’ focus at different points in the composing process. It helped students attune first to big-picture issues, such as main point, evidence for claims, and organization, and then to sentence- and
word-level issues, such as punctuation and word choice. In other words, the dualism helped put into practice the findings of then-current research (e.g., Flower and Hayes; Perl) on the composing process. In this capacity, the global-local dualism facilitated the composing process for writing students.
But as we also discussed earlier, the dualism soon after migrated to discussions of effective tutoring and feedback, and in this capacity it began to show some limitations, as our analysis has attempted to illustrate. For instance, our analysis has clarified how the dualism fails to account for style and tone. Local choices at the word, phrase, and sentence levels create a pervasive textual style and tone. Indeed, in a recent study of students’ uptake of peer feedback, Abens et al. coded three categories of feedback: feedback on style, feedback on LOCs, and feedback on HOCs. Their choice acknowledged and rectified how prior research studies had differed in their treatment of style and tone some treating them as an LOC and some as an HOC (refer to Reigstad and McAndrew; Strobl; van den Bos and Tan; Winder et al.). Thus, when we discuss the utility of the global-local dualism during training sessions, we might nuance our conversations, acknowledging the slipperiness of the characteristics that create style and tone. We could, for example, analyze the components of a formal tone in government documents, looking for words and phrases such as shall be deemed and let us always
We might also, in those training sessions, consider how choices signal an author’s stance on their subject matter. We might analyze empirical research articles from STEM and social science fields for their use of high-value modal verbs (e.g., will) and low-value modal verbs (e.g., can) to understand how modal-verb choice generates an ethos of certainty or uncertainty within a results section versus a conclusion. In addition, we have all recently seen how using the spelling Kyiv instead of Kiev and using the name Ukraine instead of the Ukraine convey an author’s perspective. Similarly, authors show their understanding of history and support for marginalized groups when they employ terms such as enslaved people or escapees rather than slaves or runaways Such localized choices reveal an author’s stance. Indeed, in writing this article, we considered whether to use the downgrader so-called when discussing LOCs and HOCs. This choice would have conveyed we fundamentally disagree with the notion that components of writing such as grammar and organization should be characterized as low and high.
Such training might also acknowledge the critical role that vocabulary (i.e., word choice) plays as writers revise their work. Research on L2 writing has
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made clear that vocabulary size correlates with writing performance (e.g., Engber; Johnson et al.); that is, L2 students who use words that appear less frequently in the language perform better on assessments of writing quality. More specifically in relation to the global-local dualism, writers both L1 and L2 choose vocabulary based on their understanding of their audience’s background and their expertise in the subject matter. For example, a writer could use the high-frequency word house, but potential synonyms such as residence and dwelling signal a writer’s conceptualization of the discourse community. Similarly, vocabulary and even grammar choices can contribute to genre. For example, a writer who wants to develop a set of instructions considers the content the steps in terms of imperative-mood sentences.
In addition to examining how local-level choices create style, stance, audience, and genre, we might also consider how a given change in the text affects the text’s meaning. Meaning played a central role in the taxonomy of revision that Faigley and Witte suggested over 40 years ago and that numerous researchers from the 1980s onward have continued to use to operationalize revision and type of feedback (e.g., Bell; Berg; Cho and MacArthur; Min; Paulus et al.; Van Horne). Some revisions, Faigley and Witte noted, preserve meaning. Such was the case when a tutor suggested “controlling mother” instead of “controller mother”:
Excerpt 5
Tawia: Um, so her mom is, like, a control freak?
Sadia: Yeah.
Tawia: Like, she wants to control everything. [Laughs]
Sadia: Everything.
Tawia: Um. Ok, so I think you can just go by “controlling,” instead of “controller mother.”
Sadia: Mmhm.
The change from “controller” to “controlling” maintained the student’s meaning but corrected the form of the adjective.
But other changes, including local changes, do indeed affect meaning. Training discussions might then
account for how a given change affects meaning on a word, sentence, or text level. We’ve seen how local choices can play a role in a text’s content, most notably through a text’s main claim, as Denny noted (“The Discourse,” 149) and as Excerpt 2 shows. Local choices also play a role in a text’s organization and cohesiveness, perhaps most notably via transitional words and phrases, such as Similarly, the second problem stems from and As we pointed out in chapter 2. Such words and phrases operate at a global level, tying one section to another or recalling content that appeared earlier in the text.
Conceptualizing writing in terms of the globallocal dualism makes it easy to equate global changes with meaning changes and local changes with meaningpreserving changes, as Strobl’s research question exemplifies: “Is it true that peer-induced revision mainly focuses on surface-level, meaning-preserving changes, that is, LOCs?” (2). As we and others have shown, such associations don’t necessarily hold. In training sessions, it’s possible to consider how changes to individual words and phrases can change a text’s main point, style, stance, intended audience, and genre.
We’re certainly not the first to suggest that focusing on meaning could facilitate revision and feedback. Back in 1993, Harris and Silva reappropriated the terms “global” and “local” by associating them not with specific components of a text but instead with meaning. They wrote that global errors “interfere with the intended reader’s understanding of the text” (526). Thus, they wrote, a student who has written “Those students are boring” instead of “Those students are bored” has made a global rather than a local error (527). Similarly, Ritter associated global errors with meaning, as opposed to text components: “Global errors affect reading comprehension and can include word choice, relative clauses, and word order” (55).
What we’ve tried to accomplish here is to illuminate a dualism that we in writing center studies often rather unconsciously, yet quite readily, use and thus to clarify the ways that the dualism has guided and continues to guide our research and practice. We’ve suggested some ideas to nuance and supplement the dualism in tutor training on revision and feedback. Simplifications like the global-local dualism certainly have their place, but it’s important as well to help those becoming writing specialists to see beyond the either-or thinking that the dualism provokes.
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Appendix: Transcription Conventions
This study employed orthographic transcription. The following extralinguistic features were transcribed in addition to the spoken words:
• Silent reading, with “reading silently” in brackets, as in [reading silently]
• Occurrences of unintelligible talk, with “unclear” in brackets, as in [unclear]
• Laughter, with “laughs” in brackets, as in [laughs]
• Pauses longer than one second, with the number of seconds in brackets, as in [2s]
• Pauses one second or less, with a comma
• Rising intonation for an inquiry, with a question mark
• Cut-off speech, with a hyphen
• Reference to a word as a word, with double quotation marks, as in the following example: S: I had “tell” but the computer wouldn’t let me do “tell.” It kept underlining it and saying “tells.”
• Occurrences of overlapping talk, denoted with brackets as in the following exchange:
T: Ok. Alright. Well, thanks for coming by. I’ll give you your stuff back here. And I just keep this so I can put it in the computer. [So. But, um, you have a good day
S: [Uhhuh.
T: and I hope that it goes well for you.
• Occurrences of reading aloud, with double quotation marks, as in the following example: T: “For example, in the article, there is an example.” Uh, you could say…
• Spoken written-language, with single quotation marks, as in the following example: Like, ‘one character, Momma Gump,’ dot dot dot.
Notes
1. We use excerpts from conference data collected with IRB permission from Iowa State University, Jo Mackiewicz’s university and from the University of Wisconsin-Superior, the university where the writing center conferences were recorded. Refer to Mackiewicz’s book Writing Center Talk over Time for more information about the data collection and transcription methods.
2. Throughout, we use names that begin with T for tutors and names that begin with S for student writers.
3. Appendix A contains our transcription conventions.
4. Denny published part of her dissertation study in the 2014 article “The Oral Writing-Revision Space: Identifying a New and Common Discourse Feature of Writing Center Consultations.”
5. She added format to their list of LOCs, however.
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WHAT DO STUDENTS
LEARN AND EXPECT TO LEARN FROM CONSULTANTS AND FACULTY IN COURSES SUPPORTED BY COURSE-EMBEDDED CONSULTANTS?
Julia Bleakney
Elon University jbleakney@elon.edu
Abstract
Julia Herman
Elon University jherman9@elon.edu
This study presents the results of our analysis of a subset of student survey data, collected over seven years of Elon University’s courseembedded consultant (CEC) program. Our analysis aims to understand how students in courses with an assigned CEC perceive to benefit from working with their CEC in tandem with the guidance they receive from the instructor. Since the synergy between the CEC and instructor is crucial to the success of the program, we hoped to see that students were learning complimentary things about writing from their CEC and their instructor. We analyzed students’ responses to survey questions about their learning from the CEC and the instructor by individual course, seeking to pinpoint how students’ expectations for learning at the beginning of the course align with or compare to their perceived learning at the end of the course. Many previous studies have sought to determine the benefits to students of CEC programs, and our study seeks to embrace the variation across individual courses and to look at learning in the course more holistically. Finally, our analysis helps us understand what we might do differently to manage students’ expectations and enhance their perceptions of learning in the course.
Introduction
For as long as course-embedded writing consultant (CEC) programs have been around, there have been attempts to explain how to effectively create them, which features such programs need in order to be successful, and how to determine their success or effectiveness. Bradley Hughes and Emily Hall detail the positive experiences that faculty have when working with a CEC who is well-trained to support students in the course. A previous study to which we contributed (Bleakney et al.) presents faculty’s and CECs’ perspectives on the positive benefits of working with a CEC: both faculty and CECs observed students benefiting from a conversation on their writing and on attention to the writing process. Other studies (Titus et al; Glotfelter et al; Carpenter and Whiddon; Dvorak et al. [2020]; Zawacki) describe the benefits to students of working with a CEC, from the perspective of the CEC or the faculty. However, there are some studies that look at students’ self-reported learning. In “Getting the Writing Center into FYC Classrooms,” Kevin Dvorak, Shanti Bruce, and Claire Lutkewitte (2012) asked students in an end-of-semester survey to report on what they had learned from their CEC. Completed by 113 of 125 students, the students’ most frequent response was that
Paula Rosinski
Elon University prosinski@elon.edu
they “learned the value of working with another person on their writing,” followed by learning “specific writing skills,” followed by “the value of revising their writing.” More recently, Laura Miller’s mixed methods research on mindset and CECs uses an experimental model (with a control group of students without a CEC), a pre- and post-survey, and analysis of students’ writing from the course, and found that students who worked with a CEC demonstrated “dramatic mindset changes” (114). A throughline in these studies is the assumption that CEC programs are absolutely worth the time, effort, and cost as there are clear benefits to faculty, CECs, and students.
These benefits are apparent in the scholarship regardless of whether the CEC supports first-year writing (FYW) courses or more advanced or disciplinespecific writing courses. For FYW support, some CEC programs make a CEC available for every course; other programs are more selective or limited. For advanced or discipline-specific writing support, CEC programs typically recruit or select interested instructors with whom to pair a CEC. In some programs, CECs attend the class and provide support during class time; in other programs CECs provide consulting support outside of class time. Some programs seek to provide consistency of support across courses; but other programs–such as the one we discuss in this article–permit a great deal of variation and flexibility, as individual CECs, partnered with different courses in the disciplines, provide writing support tailored to each individual course and instructor.
While this flexibility helps meet students’ specific needs within different disciplines, and allows for academic freedom prized on many campuses, the variations in students, consultants, instructors, and course contexts makes assessing the program challenging. In our context, we have been collecting student survey data on our CEC program since the program’s inception in 2016. Students are asked to comment on their expected learning (in a survey administered at the start of the term) and what they perceived to have learned (in a survey administered at the end of the term). As we determined how to make
sense of the data, we decided to embrace this variation, rather than attempt to control for it. Thus, our analysis aims to understand how students in courses with an assigned CEC perceive to benefit, holistically, from working with their CEC in tandem with the guidance they receive from the instructor. Since the synergy between the CEC and instructor is crucial to the success of the program, we might expect to see in our analysis that students are learning complementary things about writing from their CEC and their instructor.
To understand how our program is working, we analyzed students’ responses to survey questions about their learning from the CEC and the instructor by individual course, seeking to pinpoint how students’ expectations for learning at the beginning of the course compare to their perceived learning at the end of the course. Building on our previous study of CECs’ and professors’ perspectives (see Bleakney et al.), this current study of student feedback adds a layer of understanding to our programmatic assessment, from the students’ perspectives. The value of looking at students’ feedback based on individual courses and regarding their experiences with both CECs and faculty is that it allows us to not only embrace variation by discipline and to look at learning in the course more holistically but also to understand what we might do differently to manage students’ expectations and enhance their perceptions of learning in the course. In our analysis of the survey responses, we found a wide variety of student expectations for learning, including some high expectations that went beyond what might be covered in the course, and we found less evidence of students’ perceptions of learning especially compared to their (high) expectations. Students expected to learn different things from their CEC and their professor, and though there was little evidence of perceptions of learning, some students did perceive learning things about writing from their professor. This finding that students’ perceived they learned about writing from their professors but not their CECs might seem to run contrary to the goals of CEC programs and published research, and so deserves some interrogation. After presenting our methods and findings, this article ends with some recommendations for other writing programs creating CEC programs.
Scholarly Context: The Challenge of Determining Learning in CEC Programs
We understood early on in the process of designing this study that it would be difficult to reliably generalize about students’ learning from and experiences with Disciplinary Writing Consultants (our
name for Course-Embedded Consultants) across courses. Each student brings to the course their own prior learning and experiences with writing; faculty, from across the disciplines, have varying degrees of experience teaching writing prior to working with a Disciplinary Writing Consultant (DWC); and DWCs bring different levels of experience as well. Our program goal is not to offer a standardized model of consulting, but rather for our DWCs and faculty to work together to enhance writing instruction in the course, bring a model of writing center consulting to students, and identify ways to support students’ writing needs within the context of the course. Given these purposes, variation is to be expected and indeed welcomed.
Other CEC programs experience similar variation in consulting which, though understandable and even welcomed, can also lead to variation in a program’s success. In their article as part of a Praxis special issue on course-embedded consultants, published in 2014, Kelly Webster and Jake Hanson discuss several publications that reflect on the “striking” unevenness in CEC programs’ success. For instance, Terry Zawacki discusses tensions between tutors and faculty that can prevent faculty growth in teaching with writing; Hughes and Hall found faculty who resisted fully integrating the CEC or who did not effectively negotiate a shared authority (27; see also Soven 206). Webster and Hanson identify additional features that complicate success: managing collaborative logistics, need for faculty buy-in (especially regarding the writing process), feedback on writing, and collaboration with CEC; faculty-CEC integration; and student and faculty willingness to consider and respond to feedback. While the student survey responses did not reveal this unevenness, and thus we don’t report on it here, we know from experience working with the program that some of the same factors showed up in participating courses over the years.
From extensive research conducted in the writing studies field, we know that students’ writing development takes time, and because writing development is so complex and context-specific, it is challenging to isolate features of writing to assess with an eye to identifying improvement. In some contexts, looking at both direct (e.g., student writing) and indirect (e.g., students’ perspectives, course assignments, instructional techniques) instruments together can lead to an understanding of student writing improvement, with “writing improvement” clearly defined; however, with the variation in our DWC program, any definition of improvement would vary from course to course, making it challenging to assess the program overall. Additionally, previous studies have described how
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difficult it can be to assess the efficacy of writing consulting on student writing improvement: as early as 2001, Casey Jones suggests that “the quantitative study of writing center efficacy is invalid” because consulting sessions differ so widely and because it is so difficult to define “good writing” or “growth in writing proficiency” (5). In a review article from 2012, Mariam Gofine found only two studies published after Jones’ article that attempted to measure the writing quality before and after consulting (44). Questioning what is meant by writing quality or improvement, Teresa Thonus argues that “it is imperative . . . to ask what factors students and tutors appeal to in accounting for the perceived ‘success’ of writing tutorials” (112-113). And, more recently, Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson (2015) acknowledge that identifying the impact of tutoring on student writing “is not only vastly complex but also theoretically questionable” (179). Beyond these challenges, perhaps more valuable, then, is to focus on aspects of writing that invite us to think more broadly about students’ writing experiences, such as their attitudes toward writing, sense of control over the writing process, openness to feedback on their writing, and feelings of confidence, agency, or efficacy as a writer. Our study, which surveyed students on their perceptions of learning, attempts to contribute to this broader understanding of writerly growth.
Institutional Context
This study presents the results of our analysis of a selected subset of student survey data, collected over seven years of Elon University’s Disciplinary Writing Consultant (DWC) Program, housed within the university’s Center for Writing Excellence (comprising The Writing Center and Writing Across the University, our version of WAC). The DWC program assigns writing consultants who have extensive academic preparation and hands-on experience working in The Writing Center to discipline-specific courses as DWCs From Fall 2016 to Spring 2023, the CWE provided DWCs to 82 courses across the disciplines, including Arts Administration, Communications, Economics, Education, English, History, Public Health, and Political Science. Each semester, we have between 4-9 DWCs attached to the same number of courses. In the first couple of years of the program, during the pilot phase, we invited selected faculty to participate–typically faculty who had previously participated in faculty development through Writing Across the University. Since 2019, we’ve invited faculty participants to apply via the campus listserv. In the earlier years of the program, we permitted faculty to continue indefinitely;
however, as interest has grown, we now limit participation to one year, at which point faculty must take a break before being eligible to reapply after a year off. Each semester, some faculty request to see their course’s survey responses in order to make improvements for future semesters. Beyond this local assessment, our goal for gathering student feedback is to assess, over the long term, the benefits of providing DWCs to discipline-specific courses. The survey instrument has IRB exemption status, and students sign a consent form at the beginning of the semester; the consent form indicates their willingness to complete the survey anonymously.
Elon’s Disciplinary Writing Consultant (DWC) Program emerged as one of many writing initiatives from our university’s Quality Enhancement Plan (20132018), which focused on enhancing writing and writing instruction across the university. The goal of the DWC program is to provide consultant support for writing in the disciplines and to enhance the instruction of writing across campus by inviting faculty to integrate writing and peer support into their courses. Now that the application process for participating is open to all faculty, we find that faculty who have been involved with some prior WAU programming tend to be better prepared to take on a DWC for their course. Faculty receive a stipend for participating–this is a way to demonstrate that their time is valued and so that we can expect faculty to attend training, mentor the DWC, and administer the survey. One important aspect to note about the program is that because the DWC does not regularly attend class, most faculty require or incentivize their students to meet with their DWCs in one-to-one meetings outside of class, typically several times over the course of the semester.
Study Methods
Survey Instrument
Since Elon University’s Disciplinary Writing Consultant program commenced, each semester we have asked faculty teaching a course with an assigned DWC to administer two surveys to students in the course. The first survey (start-of-semester, or “startsurvey”) is administered at the beginning of the semester, after the DWC role has been explained to the students but before the students have started meeting with them. The second survey (end-of semester, or “end-survey”) is administered in the last week or two of the course. We strongly encourage faculty to dedicate class time to administering the survey as this leads to a higher response rate. The survey was created in Qualtrics and can be viewed in this Google document.
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Following a question that asks students to identify which course they are in, the start-survey comprises seven questions in two sections. The first section asks them to select writing strategies they learned prior to the class or strategies they already use: four questions ask them to identify brainstorming/invention, arrangement/organization, revising, and editing strategies. There is a pull-down menu of options to choose from and a blank space to write in other options. The second section asks three open-ended questions:
● “What kinds of things about writing do you expect to learn from the Disciplinary Writing Consultant?”
● “What kinds of things about writing do you expect to learn from the Professor?”
● “Do you think your writing process will change after taking this class? If so, please explain.”
The end-survey also begins with a question that asks students to identify which course they are in. The first section asks four questions about the writing strategies they learned in the class, in the same four areas as the start survey (brainstorming/invention, arrangement/organization, revising, and editing). In the end survey, these questions are open-ended. The second section asks students four additional open-ended questions:
● “In what ways, if any, do you think your writing or your writing process has changed after taking this class?”
● “What kinds of things about writing, if any, did you learn from your professor in this class?”
● “What kinds of things about writing did you expect to learn that you did not learn from your professor?”
● “What kinds of things about writing, if any, did you learn from your Disciplinary Writing Consultant in this class?”
The third section is a couple of multiple choice or Likert-scale questions: “Have you worked with a Writing Consultant in the Writing Center prior to this course?” (Yes/No); and “How likely are you to visit the
Writing Center and work with a consultant on future writing projects?” (on a scale from Extremely likely to Extremely unlikely).
We asked questions regarding the stages of the writing process (brainstorming/invention, arrangement/organization, revising, and editing) because we used these terms during our University’s Quality Enhancement Plan for accreditation, in Writing Across the University (our WAC program) faculty development workshops, and on The Writing Center’s in-take appointment form. Although we also collected de-identifiable information from each student, as we had planned to compare each student's start- and endsurvey responses, we determined that tracking individual student’s perceived growth was unreliable: for each course, some students would miss one of the surveys or they would forget what they had selected or written at the beginning of the semester. In addition, occasionally faculty would forget to administer one or both of the surveys.
Selecting Questions and Responses to Analyze
When we started to analyze survey responses to understand the benefits of the program to students, we quickly realized we needed to be selective. In an attempt to limit some of the variables, we focused on survey responses from courses that had worked with a DWC for two consecutive semesters and courses that had complete survey data (“complete” means that the faculty member had successfully administered both the startand end-surveys for two semesters in a row). These two factors help limit the study to some of the faculty who are most committed to the DWC program. Through this selection process, we ended up with 14 data sets–start and end of semester surveys, from at least two semesters each course (three semesters for one course), and from three courses (see Table 1). Because faculty administer the survey in class, the response rate is consistently high with some exceptions (Economics, Fall 2020, end of semester; Education, Spring 2022, end of semester).
Course
Arts Administration (2000-level)
Economics (1000-level)
Education (2000-level)
Semester and number of students in the course
Fall 2020: 23 students
Spring 2021: 14 students
Fall 2021: 14 students
Spring 2020: 31 students
Fall 2020: 33 students
Fall 2021: 18 students
Spring 2022: 23 students
Table 1: Survey response rate for three courses with an assigned DWC. Coding Process: Stage 1
Using a combination of an emergent and predefined thematic coding process (Saldaña), we read sample survey sets and discussed emergent themes (discussed in more detail below). We then both separately coded topic episodes (Geisler) in two more survey sets, then we swapped, discussed, and drafted a code book. At this point in the coding process, we introduced some predefined themes to help us organize and make sense of the codes and to connect to the goals of the DWC program, as well. The predetermined terms that we introduced relate to the writing process (planning, revising, editing) and had been used during the university’s Quality Enhancement Plan and thus faculty were likely to be familiar with them; we also introduced the theme of “field-specific writing concepts,” as we anticipated that faculty would expect students to learn to write according to the conventions of their discipline. After we introduced these terms, we then coded two more survey sets and again discussed and revised the code book. For this entire process, we focused on two open-ended questions from the survey: “What do you expect to learn about writing from your Disciplinary Writing Consultant?” (from the start survey) and “What did you learn about writing from your Disciplinary Writing Consultant?” (from the end survey). We selected these questions because they were open-ended and needed to be coded iteratively. Once we were done coding these four questions, we decided that we wanted to focus on these data and that we had enough information to analyze.
General; “Intro to College”
Semester and number of survey responses (start/end)
Fall 2020: 19/21
Spring 2021: 14/13
Fall 2021: 11/13
Spring 2020: 29/28
Fall 2020: 28/10
Fall 2021: 16/18
Spring 2022: 17/11
General (college-level) writing
Sounding more professional or formal
"Writing like a[n] ...." (economist/ educator, etc.)
Disciplinary writing concepts–typically genre-based (business memos, grant applications, legal documents, literature reviews, etc.)
Rhetorical knowledge–writing for an authentic audience or context
Table 2: Code Book for “What do you expect to learn about writing from your DWC or professor?” and “What did you learn about writing from your DWC or professor?”
Results
In this section, we present our most commonlyidentified codes in the four survey questions we analyzed for this article for three undergraduate courses with DWCs. As a reminder, the questions are:
START of Semester Survey:
● “What kinds of things about writing do you expect to learn from the Disciplinary Writing Consultant?”
● “What kinds of things about writing do you expect to learn from the Professor?”
END of Semester Survey:
● “What kinds of things about writing, if any, did you learn from your professor in this class?”
“What kinds of things about writing, if any, did you learn from your Disciplinary Writing Consultant in this class?”
Economics 1100: Principles of Economics
This introductory Economics course is one of our most successful DWC-supported courses. The professor has taught the course many times and, over the years, reports that he has found value in partnering with his DWC to revise the course and improve the students’ learning experience. As a 1000-level course, it attracts first-year students interested in Economics; it’s also a general elective requirement for various majors, including Business, Accounting, etc. While the professor was committed to getting his students to complete the survey, note the low response rate to the survey in the second semester (Fall 2020); while students were back to in-person courses at our institution, it remained a challenging semester for instructors and students.
In several areas, students had expectations for learning at the beginning of the semester and did not perceive to have learned these things by the end of the semester. Students expected to learn more “general college writing” and planning from their DWC than from their professor, but this turned out not to be something they reported learning. In addition, students expected to learn how to write like an economist from both their DWC and the faculty member (in the first and second semester) but did not perceive to have learned this by the end of the semester. In these cases, students expected to learn more than they perceived to have learned, with one exception: organization/structure was an expectation and a perceived learning outcome of the course, especially in Spring 2020.
Education 2980, Children’s Literature and Arts Education
This 2000-level course attracts primarily Education majors and minors and, because the topic is related to literature, English majors and minors looking for an elective. As we analyzed the survey responses, we noted that students wrote quite a bit in their open-ended responses (more than for the other courses), perhaps due to their interest in teaching and writing. Although the end-survey response rate is low in the second semester (Spring 2022), the instructor was able to get some students to complete the survey, so it’s included here.
As with the Economics 1100 level course, students in this Education course also expected to learn something about “general college writing” from their DWC, rather than their professor. However, they did perceive learning this from their faculty, at least in the first semester. In the second semester, students expected to learn concise writing from both DWC and faculty; however, no student perceived learning this by the end of the term. Strikingly, most students did not expect to learn anything about field-specific writing and yet 13 perceived learning this from their faculty by the end of the first semester. For this course, field-specific writing included writing a literature review, theoretical framework, analysis and synthesis, and lesson plans for teaching. It’s important to note that in showing the most commonly coded writing elements, the table fails to show the great deal of variation in students’ expectations. For instance, in spring 2022, 17 students identified 13 discrete expectations from their faculty and 10 from the DWC.
Arts Administration 3300: Legal Aspects of Arts and Entertainment
This Arts Administration course attracts primarily Fine Arts and Arts Administration majors and minors. The instructor of this course was able to successfully administer the survey for three consecutive semesters, so we’ve included highlights from all these semesters here.
As with the other courses, the number of responses in each category are small, and patterns are difficult to discern. What is noteworthy is that students indicated they learned planning and brainstorming from their instructor and less so from their DWC in the first and second semesters (though not the third). In this course, planning and brainstorming meant that the instructor broke a project into chunks, or scaffolded, a larger assignment. No student expected to learn about field-specific writing from their DWC, but some expected to learn this from their instructor. Some students (though less than expected to based on their responses to the start-survey) did learn discipline-
specific writing from their instructor, and no one indicated they learned this from their DWC. In this course, discipline-specific writing means grant applications and legal documents. Finally, some students expected to learn about organization and structure from their DWC, but no student indicated that they learned this from them.
As with the other courses, the number of responses in each category are small, and patterns are difficult to discern. What is noteworthy is that students indicated they learned planning and brainstorming from their instructor and less so from their DWC in the first and second semesters (though not the third). In this course, planning and brainstorming meant that the
Code Sem 1 (Spring 2020) START
Expect to learn from:
Sem 1 END
Learn from:
instructor broke a project into chunks, or scaffolded, a larger assignment. No student expected to learn about field-specific writing from their DWC, but some expected to learn this from their instructor. Some students (though less than expected to based on their responses to the start-survey) did learn disciplinespecific writing from their instructor, and no one indicated they learned this from their DWC. In this course, discipline-specific writing means grant applications and legal documents. Finally, some students expected to learn about organization and structure from their DWC, but no student indicated that they learned this from them.
Sem 2 (Fall 2020) START
Expect to learn from:
Table 3: Raw data count of most commonly-identified codes for Economics 1100 course with a DWC. *Because of the higher numbers here, we’ve separated these two codes.
Sem 2 END
Learn from:
Code Sem 1 (Fall 2021) START
Expect to learn from: Sem 1 END
Sem 2 (Spring 2022) START
Learn from:
Expect to learn from: Sem 2 END
Table 4: Raw data count of most commonly-identified codes for Education 2980 course with a DWC.
Code Sem 1 (Fall 2020) START
Learn from:
and Brainstorming
Table 5: Raw data count of most commonly-identified codes for Arts Administration 3200 course with a DWC.
Discussion
Overall, from our analysis of the start and end surveys together, the results seem to show a lack of students’ perceived learning from their DWCs as well as little learning from their instructor, especially in comparison to what they expected. For the Economics course, more students expected to learn about general college writing, planning, field-specific writing, and writing like an economist than they actually did (or perceived to). For the Education course, although the numbers are small, more students expected to learn about general college writing and about concise writing than they actually did (or perceived to). And for the Arts Administration course, few to no students perceived to have learned planning, field-specific writing, and organization/structure from their DWC, though some students learned these things from their instructor. Where we see common expectations for learning (for example, seven students in the first semester of the Arts Administration course expected to learn about organization/structure; in the second semester of the Education course, students expected to learn about concise writing from both their DWC and their instructor), it may be the case that these are writing elements the professor or the DWC specifically mentioned right before the students took the survey, which is why the expectations were on students’ minds. Overall, as researchers and program administrators, we learned more about student expectations for learning than about perceived student learning. While the variation in responses and contexts makes us cautious about identifying patterns across the three courses, it appears that the students expected to learn more general and non-field specific writing aspects (such as elements of the writing process) from their DWC and field-specific writing aspects from their instructor. As the course level advances, students’ expectations appear to become more focused or narrow in scope: for example, in the 1000-level Economics course, 12 students expected to learn about “general college writing” from their DWC and one student expected to learn this from their instructor, whereas no students in the 3000-level course expected to learn about general college writing. As students progress in their degree, it’s to be expected that they no longer feel the need to learn about general college writing and instead their expectations become more specific and advanced. The fact that students expected to learn about general college writing at all, in a disciplinary-writing course, suggests that students’ expectations about writing may be based on a potential lack of understanding of academic writing: what general college
Praxis:
writing is (if general college writing even exists); how disciplinary writing might differ from the writing they did in, say, a first year writing course; how much learning about writing can be achieved in one semester; and what learning related to writing even means (if, for instance, students have a narrow view of learning as content knowledge). When we ask students about their expectations for learning, then, we need to narrowly define writing and learning and teach students language for talking about their learning on a metacognitive level or risk students being unable to identify when learning has actually occurred.
Looking across the survey responses regarding both the DWC and the faculty, we expect that students would have considered the questions about their DWC and their faculty simultaneously, and then chose to write different responses accordingly. However, we don’t know if this is because students believed they would or did learn something different from each or because the very fact of being asked two questions prompted them to assume we must expect them to learn/have learned something different.
Final Thoughts & Next Steps
In our analysis of students’ survey responses to questions about learning in courses with an assigned Disciplinary Writing Consultant, we expected to see that students are learning complementary things about writing from their DWC and their instructor. We also sought to understand how students’ expectations for learning at the beginning of the course align with their perceived learning at the end of the course. While the presentation and analysis of our data embraces variation across individual courses in order to examine learning in the course most holistically, we did not find much alignment between the beginning and end of each course; in fact, we did not find much evidence of students’ perception of learning at all.
While we might feel disappointed by this, we understand that helping students see the benefit of working with a DWC proves hard to do. For example, in Steffen Guenzel, Daniel S. Murphree, and Emily Brenna’s survey-based study, “Re-Envisioning the Brown University Model: Embedding a Disciplinary Writing Consultant in an Introductory U.S. History Course,” they found mixed, even contradictory, attitudes from students who worked with a courseembedded consultant (CEC) in a discipline-specific course. The study reported a range of contradictory responses: two-thirds of students did not find the CEC useful, some students indicated that they benefited from the CEC, students who didn’t work with a CEC
appreciated that a CEC was available, and students wanted the CEC to have a greater role in the course perhaps even the same students who didn’t utilize them (74-75). Seeing the results of Guenzel et al.’s study reminds us of the limitations of student surveys as a sole measure of course learning, as well as the limitations of expecting learning to occur after one or two meetings with a writing consultant.
Our other goal for this study was to analyze the survey responses in order to understand what we might do differently to manage students’ expectations and enhance their perceptions of learning in the course. Regarding students’ expectations, one change we are making is designed to improve students’ understanding of the DWC’s role in their course. We have created a standardized introduction to the DWC program, which each DWC delivers at the beginning of the course; we have also added more focus in the faculty training on the importance of the faculty making expectations clear for the DWC and for the students. Regarding students’ perceptions of learning, because of the contradicting experiences and attitudes of the students, Guenzel et al.’s solution was to require or otherwise incentivize students to meet with their CEC. In our case, most DWC faculty already incentivize students by requiring them to meet with the DWC once or twice during the semester or offering extra credit when the students do meet with a DWC. What this shows us, not surprisingly, is that requiring one or two meetings with the DWC per semester does not lead to an enhanced perception of learning in the course. While we would always hope to see indications of students’ perceptions of learning–and in some cases, we do see this–we also need to consider how the purpose of the DWC program goes beyond providing individual support to student writers. As part of our University’s Quality Enhancement Plan, the DWC program was created to also guide faculty to integrate writing into their courses and to provide an opportunity for mentoring and professionalization for the DWCs. Thus, to fully assess the value and benefits of our DWC program, we would need to holistically study all of these aspects together.
For other programs with course-embedded consultants (CEC) such as ours, we offer some final thoughts and recommendations.
● Select faculty participants carefully. We have found that the most effective faculty the ones who best integrate the CEC into their courses are those who have previously participated in faculty development regarding the teaching of writing.
● Invest time in training and preparing faculty to fully understand the value of peer writing
support and the need for ongoing mentoring of the CEC.
● Train the course-embedded consultant (or faculty) to effectively explain the program to students in the course; this explanation will likely need to be delivered more than once. Emphasize the importance of the CEC visiting the class to introduce the program.
● Ask the faculty to set clear, and perhaps modest, expectations for how the CECs might benefit the students in the course, especially emphasizing that the student is responsible for their own learning and growth.
● Encourage faculty to teach students terminology around writing and learning to write such as audience analysis, revision, and reflection to help students identify moments of learning that they may otherwise fail to recognize.
● Provide opportunities for the CECs to learn from each other, sharing strategies for working with the faculty member and students.
● Finally, design assessments that offer opportunities to learn broadly about students’ experiences and be prepared for wide-ranging responses. This may include giving students an opportunity to reflect on what they learned about writing throughout the term, and especially after completing a writing assignment.
Notes
1. We use Course-Embedded Consultants (CEC) when talking about the model in general, and Disciplinary Writing Consultants (DWC) when talking about the Elon-specific program.
Works Cited
Bleakney, Julia, Russell Carpenter, Kevin Dvorak, Paula Rosinski, and Scott Whiddon. “How Consultants and Faculty Perceive the Benefits of Course-Embedded Writing Consultant Programs.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 44, no. 7-8, Spring 2020, pp. 10-17.
Carpenter, Russell, and Scott Whiddon. “‘The Art of Storytelling’: Examining Faculty Narratives from two Course-embedded Peer-to-Peer Writing Support Pilots.” SDC: A Journal of
Multiliteracy and Innovation, vol. 20, no. 1, 2015, pp. 85-107.
Dvorak, Kevin, Julia Bleakney, Paula Rosinski, and Rusty Carpenter. “Effectively Integrating Course-Embedded Consultants Using the Students as Partners Model.” National Teaching and Learning Forum, vol. 9, no. 1, December 2019, pp. 7-9.
Dvorak, Kevin, Shanti Bruce, and Claire Lutkewitte. “Getting the Writing Center into FYC Classrooms.” Academic Exchange Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4, Winter 2012.
Geisler, Cheryl. Analyzing Streams of Language: Twelve Steps to the Systematic Coding of Text, Talk, and Other Verbal Data. Pearson/Longman, 2004.
Glotfelter, Angela, et al. “Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices: Effects of the Howe Faculty Writing Fellows Program.” Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices: Innovating Teaching across Disciplines, edited by Angela Glotfelter et al., University Press of Colorado, 2022, pp. 27–45. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv335kw99.6
Gofine, Miriam. “How Are We Doing? A Review of Assessments Within Writing Centers.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 2012, pp. 39–49.
Guenzel, Steffen, Daniel S. Murphree, and Emily Brenna. “Re-Envisioning the Brown University Model: Embedding a Disciplinary Writing Consultant in an Introductory U.S. History Course.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 70-76. Henry, Jim, Holly Bruland, and Jennifer SanoFranchini. “Course-Embedded Mentoring for First-Year Students: Melding Academic Subject Support with Role Modeling, PsychoSocial Support, and Goal Setting.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, Article 16.
Hughes, Bradley, and Emily B. Hall. “Rewriting Across the Curriculum: Writing Fellows as Agents of Change in WAC.” Spec. issue of Across the Disciplines: A Journal of Language, Learning, and Academic Writing, 29 Mar. 2008
Jones, Casey. “The Relationship Between Writing Centers and Improvement in Writing Ability: An Assessment of The Literature.” Education, vol. 122, no. 1, 2001, pp. 2-19. Macauley, Jr., William J. “Insiders, Outsiders, And Straddlers: A New Writing Fellows Program in Theory, Context, And Practice.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 45-50.
Mackiewicz, Jo, and Isabelle Thompson. Talk About Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors. 2nd Ed. Routledge, 2018. Miller, Laura K. “Can We Change Their Minds? Investigating an Embedded Tutor's Influence on Students' Mindsets and Writing.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 38, no. 1-2, 2020, pp. 103–130.
Oleson, Kathryn C, and Knar Hovakimyan. “Reflections on Developing the Student Consultants for Teaching and Learning Program at Reed College.” International Journal for Students As Partners, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v1i1.3094.
Regaignon, Dara Rossman, and Pam Bromley. “What Difference Do Writing Fellows Programs Make?” The WAC Journal vol. 22, 2011, pp. 4163. DOI: 10.37514/WAC-J.2011.22.1.04
Webster, Kelly and Jake Hansen, “Vast Potential, Uneven Results: Unraveling The Factors That Influence Course-Embedded Tutoring Success.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 51-56.
Saldaña Johnny. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. 4E [Fourth edition] ed. SAGE, 2021.
Titus, Megan, Jenny Scudder, Josephine Boyle, and Alison Sudol, “Dialoging A Successful Pedagogy For Embedded Tutors.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 15-20.
Zawacki, Terry, et al. “Writing Fellows as WAC Change Agents: Changing What? Changing Whom? Changing How?” WAC Clearinghouse, 29 Mar. 2008.
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TELLING STORIES AND GROWING UP: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY ON WRITING CENTER STORYTELLING
Melanie Doyle Memorial University of Newfoundland mad225@mun.ca
Abstract
Recognizing the power of storytelling as an influencing writing centre practice (McKinney), this paper examines my near-decade long relationship with writing centres and explores stories I have told about writing centre work. Using analytic autoethnography, I analyze three reflective narratives from my writing centre history across two countries, through multiple disciplines. Despite the differing contextual factors of these narratives and the stories they feature, my analysis reveals institutional neoliberalism as the guiding influence on my storytelling. This finding is discussed alongside literature on emotional labour, contingent employment, and institutional interference. Ultimately, this paper highlights the untapped potential of autoethnography as an accessible methodology for precariously employed writing centre scholars and calls on the field to consider the influence of neoliberalism on our communication with students and tutees.
Since my first introduction to writing centres, I have been an undergraduate peer tutor, a graduate tutor, and a writing centre staff member in a disciplinary writing program. More recently, I work adjacent to my institution’s writing centre as a part-time writing instructor and contractual educational developer. These roles have brought me from Canada to the U.S. and back again, across English, education, and health sciences disciplines. Like Stevie Bell, I feel as if I have grown up, academically speaking, in writing centres.
In their seminal guide, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner advised writing centre professionals “to understand where our practices come from and to unravel the various influences on those practices” (154). This understanding not only allows for more effective tutoring, according to Harry Denny, but it is also necessary in order to critically interrogate “commonplace mindsets” about writing and “problempose institutional and social discursive practices” (39). However, given the precarity of many writing centre professionals (Giaimo 4), their related lack of power within the academy (Fels et al. 356), and their winding career trajectories (Geller and Denny 105), many writing centre professionals may not have the ability, opportunity, or authority to do the unraveling Gillespie and Lerner call for. Indeed, there have been few opportunities in my own writing centre history to critically engage in such understanding.
Certainly, a lot has changed since I was first introduced to writing centre work as an undergraduate tutor in 2013, and although some tenets of my writing
centre philosophy have remained steadfast, my specific geographies, disciplines, and pedagogies have shaped the ways in which I have positioned writing centre work and communicated its value. While I have always considered myself a writing centre cheerleader, I recognize that I have told the “story of a writing centre” in multitudinous ways. How have I described writing centre work when speaking as a tutor or to my classmates? Alternatively, how do I advocate for writing centre work when communicating to my own students or from a place of power?
Given that the stories we tell “shape others’ views about what is writing center work” (McKinney 5), I became increasingly curious about how my geographic, disciplinary, and pedagogical identities shaped my own storytelling practices, wondering “What has influenced the stories I tell and have told about writing centre work?” Using autoethnography, I trace my writing centre experience over a decade through two countries and across multiple disciplines to explore the stories I have told about writing centre work and uncover the neoliberal influences on my storytelling. This paper contributes to scholarship on writing centre labour and ultimately calls for increased attention to autoethnography as an underutilized and agentive methodology for writing centre professionals.
Autoethnography as a Methodology
I chose to explore these stories through autoethnography, a qualitative research methodology in which the researcher’s personal stories are the subject of the study, in conversation with the related literature and larger sociocultural contexts (Anderson 375). There are two common approaches to autoethnography: analytic and evocative. Researchers conducting analytic autoethnography focus on understanding and developing their stories through a theoretical lens, whereas evocative autoethnographers prioritize crafting intimate narratives with lasting aesthetic or emotional resonance (Ellingson and Ellis 445). Both are personal in nature, and both rely on authors’ reflexivity to reach levels of analysis and understanding not typically found in autobiographical writing. Yet personal and autobiographical writing are common in writing centre scholarship. Indeed, the personal stories of directors
and tutors comprise the lore for which the field is known (North 23). While these stories can be autoethnographic in nature, autoethnography remains a sparse but growing research methodology across writing studies (Jackson and McKinney 16-17). I believe this methodology holds untapped potential for writing studies researchers due to its accessibility, a trait that may be of particular interest to writing centre scholars and practitioners.
Writing centre staff are often employed precariously, holding non-tenure track positions, working on short contracts, or operating in near-liminal institutional space (Giaimo 4). According to Beth Sabo et al., autoethnography is a uniquely accessible methodology for such contingent staff or temporary staff, as they often do not have the authority or resources to conduct research with human subjects (56). Additionally, Rebecca Jackson and Jackie Grutsch McKinney note that autoethnography has a history of being used by writers and scholars on the margins to write back to those in the centre (13). As a white, cisgendered settler, I am not socially marginalized. I am, however, working from outside the disciplinary writing centre. Deborah Mutnick argues autoethnography can create a “bridge between [a writer’s] communities and the academy” (84). My current academic communities include literature and education departments, as well as the field of educational development, and it is from these perspectives that I hope to reconnect with writing centre studies. Autoethnography is thus an agentive methodology with which to explore the influences on the stories I have told in and around the writing centre; it enables me to complete this study independently without relying on the status of more senior researchers at my institution, and it allows me to tap into personal stories that would be inaccessible through other methodologies.
Methodological Decision Making
Data collection in autoethnography can draw on a number of methods to elicit and mine personal stories or experiences, including observational logs, journaling, artifacts such as artwork, photos, or poetry, and narrative retelling of memory and reflection (Leavy 158). For this study, I first listed and grouped my professional experiences with writing centres into three categories each tied to a specific year, and then wrote a narrative reflection for each category. As a whole, I see these narratives in the form of a triptych, in which the three pieces speak to a particular period and role but work together to tell a more complete story.
While readers are able to generalize from stories told through autoethnography (Ellis, Ethnographic I 194195), the methodology has been subject to criticism due to its rejection of abstraction or generalization as they are traditionally understood (Anderson 377). These calls are not unlike those aimed at writing centre studies researchers for the past two and a half decades (Driscoll et al. 11). Paula Gillespie criticized research coming out of writing centres for relying too heavily on observation, lived experience, and “lore,” arguing that the field requires more replicable, aggregable, and datasupported research in order to grow (39). Leon Anderson likewise calls on autoethnographers to adopt a more analytic approach in order to broadly comment on social phenomena (377). In response to these calls for more rigorous autoethnography, Steven Pace presents a methodological approach that relies on analytic strategies resembling those used within grounded theory. This approach, he writes, preserves the “essential characteristics” of autoethnography while allowing for “improve[d] theoretical understandings” (4). Recognizing the ongoing debates, I approached this study as analytic rather than evocative autoethnography, and I adopted Pace’s processes of analysis to stay true to the stories that, for me, define writing centre research and to enhance the rigor of my autoethnographic study, particularly through its analytic reflexivity.
After writing the three-piece narrative, I completed a round of open coding, followed by iterative rounds of theoretical and selective coding (Pace 12). Some of these codes included multitasking jobs, roles, and identities; loss of control; and feeling pressure to conform or change. This process, particularly the initial round of open coding, was also informed by narrative analysis according to Riessman (2008), as many of the codes I used during this phase were born of the stories’ narrative elements, namely the characters featured (administration, boss, and friend) and where I chose to begin each piece (reporting, communicate, ad, and surveil). Throughout these rounds of coding, I wrote “memos” to help draw connections across codes, and as Pace outlines, from writing and collating memos, I was able to see core themes within each narrative and delimit codes to only those that related to those themes (10-11). For example, through reviewing my memos on multitasking, holding multiple positions, and feelings of pressure or uncertainty, I began to focus on the theme of contingency. This identification led me to revisit my narratives, seeking out other concepts related to this emerging theme. Once the core concepts began to “crystallize” (Pace 12), I returned to the literature in order to put my stories in conversation with the larger sociocultural context. I have chosen to present my
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narratives alongside the literature in order to combine my storytelling and analysis (Ellis, Ethnographic I 198).
Ethical Considerations
Although my autoethnography centers on my individual account of working in writing centres, it is essential to recognize the possible involvement of other individuals in my stories. According to Carolyn Ellis “when we write about ourselves, we also write about others” (“Telling Secrets” 14). Considering that I am writing about my professional roles, my coworkers (past and present) are inherently implicated in this autoethnography even though they are largely absent from the paper itself. As such, I have made reasonable attempts to preserve their privacy by not stating their names or locations, nor that of their institutions. I do recognize, however, should someone close to me read this paper, they may be able to identify to whom I am referring. I thus proceeded with this autoethnography using ethics of care when making many authorial decisions.
Ethics of care are guided by principles of care, empathy, and the needs of others (Botes 1073). I greatly value my professional relationships, and I believe my coworkers deserve care and consideration. As such, I have made reasonable efforts to share this paper with the intimate others (Ellis, “Telling Secrets” 17-18) of my professional life in order to ensure their comfort with the stories I have featured. Further, I locate myself centrally in each vignette, owning that every circumstance described is based on only my own feelings and experience, and like Sarah Wall, I use the first person singular and do not attempt to speak for anyone else (51). Despite the number of ethical considerations at play in this research, I feel it is important to tell these stories as a means of coming to know, and coming to change, my relationship with writing centres, a relationship I hold in high regard (Holman Jones 230).
A Writing Centre Chronology
2013
My shift was ending soon. I still had to complete a post-session write up for a new tutee it had been her first appointment at the Writing Centre. We met in a British literature class last semester. She was an English major like me and I had a friendship-crush on her ever since I heard her describe the idiosyncrasies of her long-haired Maine Coon, Peggy. I bet she’d be a real pal. We could go for hikes, talk about books, order americanos
and pretend to like them. I still hadn’t made many friends in my program.
I finally struck up the nerve to chat with her after we got our grades back on our third essay assignment. She complained about receiving the same grade and feedback as the two assignments prior, and I jumped when I saw an opening. You should visit the Writing Centre, I suggested. I explained that I had worked there for a semester, that it was for writers of all levels, and that her tutor would be an undergraduate like her. Talking through your work can’t hurt, I told her. I never told her that she did better on the essay than I did. As I sat in the Centre with her, I wondered whether anyone noticed us. Do we look like we could be friends? Do I seem professional or convivial? Can my boss see?
As I completed the write-up following her appointment, I made a mental note to tell the Director when I saw her next. A referral. I convinced someone to come, I practiced in my mind, my eyebrows raising with the excitement I planned to portray. Was it helpful? Did she like me? Does she know she’s a better writer than I am?
My experience as an undergraduate peer tutor was, in many ways, exactly as Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail describe: transformative, developmental, and one of the “most important experiences in [my] educational [career], a complex, multi-faceted experience whose influence persists not just years but decades after graduation” (13). Indeed, I have credited that part-time job with igniting my passion for writing and teaching on numerous occasions. When I reflect on that time, I am reminded of the pride I felt in securing the position; the respect and admiration I had for my director; and the sense of community I was building with the other tutors and the university as a whole. I also recall the utter confusion I sometimes felt identifying with the peer writing tutor role.
My feelings are reflected in the literature. For example, Hughes et al. found writing tutors to develop confidence in themselves through their work, and tutors in Jennifer Nicklay’s study reported a strong sense of community within their writing centre. Yet Nicklay also found guilt to be an overwhelming feeling amongst peer writing tutors, particularly as it relates to allyship and loyalty amongst tutors, between tutors and tutees, and between tutors and the institutions in which they work and go to school (25). In his seminal work, John Trimbur unpacks the contradiction between peer and tutor that is at the core of these experiences. He notes that by their very position of employment, peer writing tutors are singled out for their perceived skill or academic success, signaling a difference between them and the tutees with whom they will work. While I can admit to relishing in some “sense of cultural superiority”
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(Trimbur 24) bestowed upon me through my position, as reflected in my narrative by my eagerness to please and impress my employer, this portion of my narrative is also rich in doubt and insecurity. These feelings of disconnect are common among peer writing tutors (see Bouquet; Geller et al.; Trimbur), yet the emotional labour necessary to navigate such cognitive dissonance (Trimbur 23) was not something my tutor handbook covered. I identified this emotional labour as a primary theme of my first narrative.
2017
My boss and I worked collaboratively, responding to one another’s questions in the comments of our Google Doc. She’s probably on the subway now, I thought, coming from class, or from the community college. She taught sessionally, too. The heading “Funding Proposal” looms over our back-and-forth, and each of our pale orange highlights signifies a potential query, a choose-your-own-adventure with branching paths that could lead to more or fewer dollars. I wondered, “Should we start with the number of students who visited, or the number of appointments?” My boss quickly responded in the comments: “the appointments make a stronger case.”
She wasn’t wrong the centre was busy. I was the second hire of a brand-new writing centre, housed in a tiny office away from the rest of the nursing department. I tutored students in hallways, the lobby, and over the phone while they worked evening shifts. Students returning for repeat appointments… That shows real demand, real impact. My reply was marked “resolved” before I convinced even myself. Repeat appointments… Real demand, real impact. The Dean would get that, I wondered aloud. Right?
My eyes turned toward my calendar on the wall. It was a gift from a student. It featured a cheerful toucan with an oversized, tangerine-coloured beak, on which a frothy pint of Guinness rested. It was February, and two dates were circled in the coming months: the day next year’s funding application was due, and the final day I would be permitted to work in this country unless my Visa was renewed.
It is not uncommon for writing centres to operate contingently, supported by precariously employed staff who tread cautiously from one contract to the next (Giaimo 4). Indeed, Anne Geller and Harry Denny refer to the “profound risk and uncertainty” of such contracts and staff’s limited job security (114). Relatedly, Emily Isaacs and Melinda Knight report that many writing centre professionals struggle to find recognition or institutional support for their work.
Similar to Sherry Perdue and Dana Driscoll’s findings, my narrative reflects the burden placed on writing centre staff to continually “court” upper-level administration and story our work in such a way that heightens the writing centre’s visibility and “position[s] it for more resources” (202). For example, the participant in Perdue and Driscoll’s study was encouraged to reduce tutoring appointments by 10 minutes in order to increase the number of possible appointments in a day (202). This experience, as well as my own, suggest a conflation between the quantifiable use of the writing centre with its inherent value and worthiness of support. Reporting on his own role as a first-time writing centre director, Neal Lerner likewise reflects on having to justify his existence and that of the centre through “statistical arguments” (40). This administrative work is additionally riskier for contingent employees whose personal, professional, and financial security may depend on how these statistics are received, valued, and interpreted.
In their recent study on contingent writing centre staff, Dawn Fels et al. found that many professionals feel they have power in their positions but not within their institution at large. Participants were thus unable to “advocate for themselves or their centers without putting their own jobs at risk” (356). Perdue and Driscoll describe a similar phenomenon as lacking “academic currency” (202). Relatedly, Fels et al. uncovered personal risks to contingent staff, including financial insecurity and emotional instability. Indeed, I recall the uncertainty I felt sitting alone in our small writing centre, wondering where I would be living in a year’s time. Although the centre’s funding was renewed, I ultimately decided to return to my home country at the end of the academic year. I do not remember the final numbers I included in the report, but I do know that writing centre staff “become part of the intellectual and social fabric” of universities in ways that are “not easily measured by [writing centre] usage statistics” (Lerner 41). As such, the perils of contingency was the theme I identified from this second narrative.
2022
The new job ad was for a manager, rather than a director, and conveyed no hint of the academic responsibility or privilege the position once held. The chain of reporting was unclear but the writing centre’s lack of autonomy was not. Is the centre under the English as a Second Language Department now? Or is it the Internationalization Office? Did the university move them somewhere else?
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My desk is littered with paper, including a sticky note with a running bullet list titled Ed Dev + WC collab ideas. I’ve been adding to the list since joining the educational development team, though I have let it stagnate since the latest leadership shuffle. Who would the manager be? Would she have the budget or freedom to take on a writing-enriched curriculum initiative with me? We could have done that before.
Come lunch hour, I open a new tab to begin updating my “Intro to Writing” syllabus for the fall semester. I scroll to the Writing Centre heading and pause. After a quick but careful read, I decide to leave the same encouraging statement I’ve used for years. It states the value of peer tutoring for all writers and invokes in me the spacious, warm yellow rooms where I spent so much of my own undergraduate degree. When I walked by last, many of the spider plants that once lined the windowsills were gone, removed during the reign of one of the recent interim non-directors. I think of the dried leaves at the bottom of a waste basket as my text cursor blinks. Has the ethos been tossed out in the shuffle, too?
The writing centre is vulnerable. It is not uncommon to hear of a centre experiencing “[organizational] interference” (Giltrow 18) or of one’s near nomadic existence, being institutionally relocated, reorganized, or reclassified every few years. Perdue and Driscoll highlight the impacts of writing centre location within an institution’s organization chart. They find that when centres are led by and housed within student affairs or larger learning centres, writing centre staff typically have to navigate administrative leadership who “neither understand how writing tutoring differs from other subject tutoring nor appreciate the specialized writing knowledge needed to effectively facilitate tutorials” (201). Further investigating the impacts of a writing centre’s institutional positioning, Michelle Miley takes up an institutional ethnography of her own writing centre to uncover “how [her] work shapes and is shaped by the institutional ecosystem” (104-105). Her findings are varied and rich in detail, but she begins her story by describing a job ad. The vision it depicted, she later learns, did not always align with that of the institution or her colleagues. Miley’s experience depicts the impact of this misalignment on her professionally; however, I believe students can also be implicated when institutional and personal narratives conflict.
Lori Salem states that when students use the writing centre, it is understood as an endorsement of the centre’s pedagogy and location (151). Within institutional discourse, then, what might students or staff and faculty infer about said pedagogy when a writing centre is located within an English literature
department, a learning technology centre, or an English as a Second Language office? For Miley, her understanding of the nature of her role, her institution, and her colleagues was shaped by institutional documentation that presented a particular narrative. When writing centre narratives are continually recreated, reorganized, and rehomed, there can be a lasting impact on others within the institutional ecosystem, including potential staff and faculty partners (see Perdue and Driscoll) and student tutees (see Salem). I identified institutional interference as the primary theme of this narrative.
Discussion
In my decade-long relationship with writing centres, I have told their story to classmates, direct supervisors, upper-level administrators, and my own students. When I began this study, I assumed the stories I have told about writing centre work would be largely shaped by the country I was in or my disciplinary home. While these factors certainly influenced my work, they are not what stands out in the above triptych and accompanying analysis. As a tutor, I grappled with emotional labour; as staff, I faced contingency and insecurity; and now from beyond the writing centre, I stand witness to institutional interference that sidelines this vital work. Exploring these themes within the literature has helped illuminate that from my earliest socialization with writing centres, I was being shaped by the feminized nature of writing centre work within the neoliberal institution.
Neoliberal ideologies are marked by their emphasis on capitalism and the entrepreneurial free market, and they have grown in academic settings over the past 40 years (Iantosca 155-156). As these views systematically creep throughout public institutions, the economic and material value of students’ education becomes privileged over the creation and sharing of knowledge (Monty 38). Randall Monty describes a number of ways neoliberalism is made visible in writing centres, including moving centres out of academic units, modifying their mission towards service programs, transitioning senior leadership roles to lower staff positions, and increasing their emphasis on record keeping and surveillance (40), each of which were present in my own narrative. With that interference comes a rise in contingent staffing, and, in some cases, outsourcing (Stenberg). This contingent labour has historically been tied to gender, as women are more represented in both the growing part-time and nontenured status in academic positions and in writing centres (Sicari 566). Although contingent writing centre
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employment is not a new practice, voices of contingent staff are “dangerously invisible” in this field (Fels et al. 353). In response to this dearth, a recent special issue of the Writing Center Journal reveals the lived experiences of precariously employed writing centre staff, including tutors, part-time employees, administrators, junior lecturers, and other traditionally sidelined roles. These voices bring to light the detriments of contingent employment beyond individual experiences (LeeAmuzie 50).
For tutors, Tony Iantosca identifies that tutoring roles increasingly occupy a similar position to that of a service sector worker within the university (152). As such, they often carry the burden of ethical and emotional labour as well as care work. Hutchinson et al. also identified emotional labour as a key tenet of the contingent tutor’s experience, noting the need for heightened and sustained vulnerability in order to perform the role (76). Personally, I recall the peer tutor role requiring constant attention to relationships. It was often arduous to work with the same tutee multiple times, carefully peeling back layers in an attempt to understand the writer, not just their writing; building trust was slow and meaningful. So, it felt like betrayal when, weeks later, I would have to complete a report to the student’s professor. Or alternatively, when I would see the student working with another tutor and would question my own value: Does she like that tutor more? Is he better at this than I am? Does the relationship we built not matter? In reality, reporting and scheduling are simply facets of the writing centre’s service model and had little to do with who I was as a person. The “feminized” traits of empathy and compassion that caused me to care so much are necessary for tutors to possess, but they are typically least valued in the neoliberal institution except in their capacity to produce high usage statistics and conventional writing. As Trimbur notes, this position is hard to hold, as tutors feel pulled toward a loyalty to their peers, but also to the academic system that has rewarded them for their perceived writing skill, and whose values they may even unknowingly enact and internalize (23).
When I now think of the stories I have told about writing centre work, I more easily see how facets of neoliberalism influence these narratives. As a peer tutor, I told the story of a writing centre to my fellow classmates, attempting to recruit them as tutees, and retold it to my boss in order to earn a “good job” for my efforts. As a ____,/ Later, I told the story of a writing centre to upper administrators through monthly and annual reports, spinning a strategic narrative to hopefully renew the centre’s funding and my own employment. And now I tell stories to the
undergraduates I teach. I tell them to visit the writing centre, praising its pedagogy and lore, but part of me wonders whether these stories should be shared when I see the narrative put forth by the wider institution. As Wonderful Faison and Anna Treviño maintain, some of the writing centre stories we are told are lies (para. 39), and thus I’m left wondering whose version is true.
Ana Maria Guay offers an analysis of writing centre work through the lens of (dis)comfort (Ahmed) and interrogates many of the themes I discuss here, including contingency and emotional labour. She presents these concepts through metaphors of a magician’s smoke and mirrors or sleight of hand (8), and although she does not name the structures of neoliberalism in her essay, it is these structures that are wrapped in star-speckled capes, pretending to pull rabbits from hats. I find her metaphors of magic and trickery to be salient considering my own blindness to the realities of my employment. Indeed, prior to this study, I rarely if ever noticed the neoliberal forces at play in the stories I told. This invisibility, however, is not a mistake of our higher education system but an intentional feature (Guay 13). As Guay asserts, the realities of emotional labour, contingency, and interference are hidden in order to keep “[writing centre] positions underpaid, exploited, and impermanent” (10). Since these traits are hidden, it has become easy to devalue and overlook service-oriented traditions of writing centres (McNamee and Miley). It is for this reason that writing centres and writing centre studies have long been conceptualized as a “feminized” space and field (see Grimm; Stenberg). As Nancy Grimm notes in her seminal article, the writing centre’s history as a remedial service through which students seek comfort, guidance, and support has shaped the view that writing centres are subordinate, “nurturing” students into producing writing deemed fit by the maledominated academy (524). Grimm advocates for moving away from subordinate service positions and transforming the patriarchal institutions that perpetuate them (525), yet it is the care and emotional labour of these service spaces that have the power to enact necessary transformation. Indeed, Stenberg and McNamee and Miley argue that feminized spaces are necessary for resisting the neoliberal culture that devalues such space. Until I stepped outside and did this work, I could not have seen the influence these realities had and thus could not participate in the resistance.
In some ways, engaging in autoethnography research is itself an act of resistance, as some would argue that the level of vulnerability and risk-taking required is a privilege afforded only to those who have already “made it” (Jackson and McKinney 14). While I
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posses the “cultural capital that is the historical birthright of white [straight, cisgendered] women” who dominate writing centres and writing centre studies (Condon and Faison 5), I have not quite “made it” professionally: I am contractually employed in a role that greatly differs from the initial career trajectory I aspired to upon completing my graduate degree, and I teach part-time on a sessional basis (often at night or online) when departmental funding permits. Yet I feel it necessary to share these stories and their influences, even if, like Sabo et al. note, it is risky to do so given the peripheral space I hold within my institution (56). By foregrounding my lived experiences within and around writing centres, despite the neoliberal ideology that inherently does not value my feminized storytelling, I am starting the work of reclaiming these stories from the lens of production or commodity. While the labour associated with storytelling and reclamation may be undervalued in economic terms, it like tutoring may be the most essential for personal and scholarly growth.
Conclusion
I began this study in order to better understand the influences on the stories I have told about writing centre work because, as McKinney asserts, the stories we tell “shape others’ views about what is writing center work” (5). This paper presents my relationship with writing centres and the stories I have told about this work as a peer tutor, writing centre staff, and university instructor. Although I expected to explore how my geographic and disciplinary home shaped these stories, I instead discovered how the neoliberal institution and its feminized positioning of writing centres influenced and continues to influence my stories of the writing centre.
This study has been an exercise in reclaiming my own story within writing centre studies. The greatest influencing factors are not the differences in geography or discipline, but the omnipresent reality of neoliberalism. And I have been able to investigate my own stories? only now that I have stepped outside the literal and figurative centre of this work. Now that I am not tutoring day-to-day and reporting on students, or writing reports for administration, I can see the neoliberal influences on my relationships with writing centres and their stories. Although the writing centre will always be the exigence of my scholarly identity, lifting the veil from these formative moments has been an act of reclamation.
When I reflect now, it is with a critical gaze, one more able to see the cautionary tale lurking beneath the fable. By reclaiming these stories, I hope to no longer
blindly sing the praises of the inviting writing centre to which I credit my career path. Rather, I call on myself to tell more counterstories (Martinez) instead, those of “[students and staff] whose experiences are not often told” (62). This reclamation will also allow me to exert greater agency over the next steps of my professional trajectory. Should I return to the centre, may it not be in search of a familiar comfort, but as an act of resistance to the neoliberal pressures faced by those students and staff struggling to enter or barely hanging on. May I no longer simply accommodate these pressures, but use my power as storyteller to advocate and subvert. These revelations could not have occurred without autoethnography. This paper thus contributes to the value of autoethnography as a research methodology in writing studies. While it is gaining attention in the field (Jackson and McKinney 16-17), this methodology holds untapped potential for writing centre studies as well as other writing scholars whose authority and access to conduct research may be tenuous. Autoethnography is not only accessible to precariously employed staff who may lack status or research funds, but through empowering researchers to voice their experiences and speak back to broader sociocultural institutions, it grants agency.
So what might it mean for writing centre studies to embrace autoethnography? Through this methodology, I believe we can unlock a potential avenue for future research as our field continues to define and redefine what it means to construct and share knowledge. In essence, autoethnography allows scholars to take steps toward more data-supported research while maintaining and affirming the stories that have shaped the field. According to Stacy Holman Jones, these autoethnographic processes are means of becoming. Autoethnography is concerned less with “creating stable, coherent, finished, and identifiable knowledges and more focused on engaging with the world as shifting, partial, unfinished, and animated” (229). For those working in writing centres, it may thus offer a new mode of becoming and show us ways of embodying change at disciplinary, institutional, and personal levels. Although I turned to autoethnography as a means of understanding the self, this paper holds meaningful contributions for individual readers as they consider their own experiences and the influences on their practices. Indeed, as Ellis asserts, it is the readers of autoethnography who determine if and how my stories “[speak] to them about their experience or about the lives of others they know” (Ethnographic I 195). As readers recognize their own experiences within my stories, might our collective storytelling empower others to recognize the neoliberal structure from which the
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writing centre has emerged, and to reflect on how this provenance influences tutees, tutors, and staff as they navigate the emotional labour of this work, precarious employment, and institutional vulnerability.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ginny Ryan for her insightful feedback throughout the revision process. This final draft like so much else is a credit to your friendship and unwavering support. A version of this paper was previously presented at the Canadian Writing Centre Association’s Annual Conference in 2023, so I would also like to thank Chantelle Caissie and Cecile Badenhorst whose comments were integral to the initial presentation and conceptualization of this study.
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