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2.1 (2004): EXPANDING BORDERS

VOL 2, NO 1 (2004): EXPANDING BORDERS TABLE OF CONTENTS COLUMNS From the Editors • 1 The Praxis Editorial Board Intellectual Property Paranoia and the Writing Center • 2 Ginger Jurecka Changing Hearts and Minds • 5 Jessica Clark Homer, Lady Day and Elvis: The Postmodern Poetics of the Center • 8 Stephen Newton

FOCUS ARTICLES Launching a High School Writing Center • 10 Peggy Silva The Pen Pal Project • 12 Frankie Condon Building a Community Around the Writing Center • 14 Ginger Cooper The Writing Center and the Parallel Curriculum • 16 Ann E. Green The Secondary School Writing Center: A Place to Build Confident, Competent Writers • 20 Pamela B. Childers, Dawn Fels, and Jeanette Jordan

CONSULTING Existentialism in the Writing Center: The Path to Individuality • 25 Joseph Hill An Outreach First • 27 Jennifer Cooper

Writing Center as Contact Zone: Meeting ESL Writers Halfway • 29 Jared Bezet Writing Center as Contact Zone: Resources for Mediation • 31 Jessica Murray

TRAINING Featured Center • 33 Consultant Spotlight • 35 The Merciless Grammarian • 37 !

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004)

FROM THE EDITORS The Praxis Editorial Board The University of Texas at Austin Some of the most innovative writing center work is happening in secondary school and community writing centers.

The Praxis Editorial Board reflects.

This issue of Praxis pairs what may at first appear to be two very disparate areas of writing center practice: secondary school and community writing centers. The differences between them are clear: secondary school writing centers serve a fixed population of young writers in an academic setting and they maintain the stability and instability that comes from academic funding; community writing centers, on the other hand, serve writers who bring a wide range of skill levels, ages, and writing projects, and they rely upon some combination of academic, grant, government, and charity funding. What they have in common may seem less evident at first, but is in fact what makes both dynamic and fruitful areas for inquiry. Because writing center scholarship has tended to emphasize writing centers located in institutions of higher education, community and secondary writing centers have not received the attention they deserve. Yet these are the very places where writing centers are growing–and innovating–fastest. In our efforts to remain on the cusp of new scholarship, Praxis is excited at the opportunity to explore these sites further.

While the methods and means of practice may differ among these writing centers and programs, they do tend to share similar philosophies and goals, especially concerning the advancement of social equity, service-learning, and self-enrichment that is taking place both inside and outside the academy, among younger students and our communities’ citizens. Common to all these centers and programs is a conscious movement towards inclusion, access, and collaboration–a “reaching out,” as contributor Jennifer Cooper puts it, that is the practical step towards providing more writers opportunities for expression and the public more opportunities for social and civic engagement.

You may notice some changes in Praxis’ format. In the past, all articles in each issue related to a main theme, and the Praxis staff penned a “focus” article framing that theme. In an effort to bring more expert voices to the fore, the Praxis editorial board will now select a group of “focus” articles that lend different perspectives to the issue’s theme. In this issue, whether it is through exchanging letters with inner city pen pals as Frankie Condon discusses in her article or instilling confidence in secondary school writers as Pamela Childers, Dawn Fels, and Jeanette Jordan discuss in theirs, there is at the center of each focus article an outreach-oriented core. Jennifer Cooper and Peggy Silva continue in this direction in their articles on providing university tutoring services for secondary school ESL students and establishing a secondary school center, respectively. And it is from these centers’ philosophies and practices that other, more traditional or familiarly located writing centers might also expand their conceptions of the kind of work we do–and for whom–when we talk about and teach writing.

The second major change in format is that Praxis is now opening the training, consulting, and columns sections for submissions of non-theme related pieces. In the first year of our existence, we regretted not being able to find a place for excellent articles that fell outside the theme. By grouping the theme-related articles in the focus section, we now have the opportunity to include articles such as Jessica Clark’s piece on improving the institutional status of a writing center, Ginger Jurecka’s reflection on writing centers’ interactions with intellectual property debates, Joseph Hill’s article on existentialism and the writing center, and Jared Bezet and Jessica Murray’s considerations of contact zone theory and ESL consultations. We are pleased to continue our regular featured center and consultant spotlight. In this issue you will be introduced to the Salt Lake City Community Writing Center and Marilyn Little from the College of Lake County.

Intellectual Property Paranoia • 2

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PARANOIA AND THE WRITING CENTER Ginger Jurecka Southwestern University How writing center practice confronts, complicates, and reconfigures institutional codes of ethics.

The current atmosphere of numerous academic institutions is one of suspicion regarding intellectual ethical transgressions. Universities that have longstanding honor systems, like Southwestern University, dismiss this paranoia as being unrelated to their establishment because the honor code system protects them. The honor code incites additional thought regarding consultation methods in writing centers like Southwestern’s Debbie Ellis Writing Center (DEWC).

One must question what Southwestern students are truly affirming when writing “I have neither given nor received aid on this examination, nor have I seen anyone else do so” on an assignment they have taken to the writing center (Southwestern University 58).

Are they saying they did not benefit from their visit to the writing center, or are they merely affirming that they did not engage in unethical behavior? According to Stephen North, “Nearly everyone who writes likes– and needs–to talk about his or her writing…. A writing center is an institutional response to this need” (North 71). In addition to fulfilling the needs of the university’s writers by creating a place for discussions about writing, the writing center complicates the supposedly clear ethical and non-ethical dichotomy of the honor code system by being an institutionalized exception to that system. As an exception to the honor code system, the DEWC calls into question the viability of that system and the ideas of intellectual property that serve as its foundations.

The writing centers’ location in the academic institution contributes to its ability to pose questions about conflicts of honor code principles within the school’s policies. As Irene Clark and Dave Healy observe, “the fact is that writing centers are well positioned to question the status quo” (253). The separation from typical institutional instructional methods is what makes the writing center an appealing individual-centered space. However, while the writing center is empowered by functioning as a quasiindependent entity, this separation also places the writing center under ethical suspicion. The concept of an unethical center is entrenched in the concepts of intellectual property and the individualist creation of thought that are problematized by writing centers’

collaborative practices. In fulfilling the institutional need to “manage cultural anxiety about literacy,” writing centers become the focus of paranoia directed towards students’ intellectual development (Grimm 527). Thus, the concept of an unethical writing center has more to do with archaic notions of ownership within academia than actual moral faltering within the center.

The need for writing centers to justify their practices and confirm themselves as legitimate parts of academia illustrates those notions of ownership. The emphasis on intellectual property has not been altered or reviewed to fit within the actual learning environment of a university. It does not allow for students to acknowledge that they are working within and expanding upon a discourse. Rather, it implies that their thought development occurred in an intellectual vacuum. This inadequate definition of plagiarism makes it difficult to determine if truly unethical behavior has taken place, while feeding the suspicions surrounding writing center methods. Indeed, “the historical construct of the author as private laboror/owener must inevitably conflict with the public concept of labor implicit in writing group theory, which calls upon students to create their own essays in an atmosphere of oral and written exchange” (Spigelman 241). This conflict illustrates that the definitions used in delineating honor codes are incomplete at best, required as they are to apply a single concept of intellectual property across cultures, academic disciplines and circumstances. Writing centers’ ability to demonstrate that what one can claim as one’s “own” academic production is more complicated than institutional honor codes allow therefore makes writing centers dangerous within academia.

Another instance in which writing centers challenge institutional ideas of honor code ethics is in regard to rendering aid to students. Rendering aid is different from plagiarism in that plagiarism involves supplying ideas and content or simply writing the paper, whereas aid involves providing assistance in the writing process. The Southwestern University honor code requires that every student upon submission of an academic assignment affirm that they have not given or received aid but does not define what giving or receiving aid is. To complicate matters, within this

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Intellectual Property Paranoia • 3 institution, concerned enough to place placards of the honor code in every classroom and require it on all assignments, there is a writing center, whose very institutional purpose is to aid students. Faced with a similar situation, Joseph Munch states, “Because giving or receiving aid on any assignment violates this code, every consultation at the writing center contains a possible threat to what is arguably the foundation of the honor code” (14). Thus, the co-existence of a writing center and an honor code that prohibits providing any kind of aid illustrates a clash of different ideologies of intellectual property.

In an attempt to remedy the dissonance between universities’ honor codes and their need for writing centers, there have been several adjustments to the manner in which the centers operate. Some universities have established a hands-off approach to consulting with students in an attempt to avoid unethical aid. In several instances, this translates into consultants being unable to discuss the students’ actual assignments. Centers even go so far as to prohibit students from consulting with those who are in the same area of study. This practice deprives students of contact with the very people that could prove to be the most beneficial. Consultants aware of the stylistic minutia of a specific discipline would be the most valuable resource for a student attempting to replicate that academic style. Yet some believe that “the procedures are not only beneficial to the operation of the center, but they also help establish the tutor’s ethical consciousness, enhancing his or her ability to help a student” (Herek and Nequette 15). Even if hands-off procedures help consultants to better serve the students who come to the writing center, the language of the interaction is still one of assistance or aid. One does not need to physically touch a text to be a participant in the writing process of its creator.

Rather than making the consultant more ethical, keeping consultants from interacting with students actually degrades the ethical obligation of the writing center to aid writers. “It is worse than simplistic,” Clark and Healy argue, “to require that writing centers withhold helpful information and refrain from helpful practices out of a misguided sense of what is ethical” (255). However, withholding aid is the very requirement of most university honor codes.

To deal with the unavoidability of receiving aid in a writing center, some universities recommend that students indicate the involvement of the writing center while affirming the honor code. In the case of the Debbie Ellis Writing Center, students are encouraged to write “I went to the writing center” at the end of the assignment as an addendum to the honor code.

However, this honor code addition is not incorporated

into any aspect of Southwestern’s honor system constitution. This omission demonstrates that the addendum does not alter the code, but rather serves to establish ethical intent. The need to establish intent confirms the presence of a dichotomy of ethical and unethical aid to further complicate honor code morality. As Joseph Munch contends, “in actuality, only the unsanctioned giving or receiving of aid is an honor code violation” (15). However, the acknowledgement of multiple forms of aid confirms the inappropriateness of utilizing the term as the sole definition of intellectual propriety.

Where do all of these honor code and intellectual property issues leave the writing center? Pending institutional administrators’ becoming more aware of the conflicts between honor codes and writing centers, the center must continue to function as both a marginalized and empowered academic community, committed to its purpose of aiding writers. By serving as a physical location for discussions of writing and the implications of word-based actions, such as the honor code, the writing center incites members of the intellectual community to examine textual representations critically. Thus, writing centers heighten awareness of institutional flaws and move toward their solutions. Ultimately, writing centers’ challenge to traditional honor codes will encourage institutions to get beyond their intellectual property paranoia and to develop a more modern and holistic concept of academic ownership that focuses on ethics rather than aid.

Works Cited Clark, Irene L. and Dave Healy. “Are Writing Centers Ethical?” The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Ed. Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blummer. Boston: Allyn and Bacon 2001, 242-259.

Grimm, Nancy Maloney. “Rearticulating the Work of the Writing Center” College Composition and Communication 47:4 (1996): 523-548.

Herek, Jennifer and Mark Niquette. “Ethics in the Writing Lab: Tutoring Under the Honor Code” The Writing Lab Newsletter 14:5 (1990): 12-15.

“Honor System” Southwestern University Student Handbook. Georgetown, TX: Southwestern University, 2003.

Munch, Joseph A. “I did not receive aid from that consultant: Operating a writing center under an honor code” The Writing Lab Newsletter 26:10 (2002): 14-16.

North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center” The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center

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Intellectual Property Paranoia • 4 Theory and Practice. Ed. Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blummer Boston: Allyn and Bacon 2001 63-78.

Pemberton, Michael. “Writing Center Ethics: Questioning Our Own Existence” The Writing Lab Newsletter 19:5 (1995): 8-9.

Spigelman, Candace. “Habits of Mind: Historical Configurations of Textual Ownership in Peer Writing Groups” College Composition and Communication 49:2 (1998): 234-255

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Changing Hearts and Minds • 5

CHANGING HEARTS AND MINDS Jessica Clark How you too can improve the institutional status incorporated surveys of graduate students in rhetoric of your writing center. and composition and a literature review of articles A composition colleague, one with whom I about writing centers in composition journals. My own regularly talk about teaching and writing, sends a frustrating stories prompted me to begin this student to the writing center with these words written investigation of the attitudes, expectations, and beliefs across the top of the page: ”Your ideas are acceptable of the composition community toward writing center but your writing is marginal.” (Welch 51) work. We who work in writing centers know that they Recently, a writing center friend told about are wonderful places filled with possibilities for tutors coming up behind a group of fellow faculty members and their clients, but what do our colleagues in gathered around a bulletin board. From a distance she composition really know about writing center work? could see her name on the recently posted list of The response I received from the surveys was, at best, nominations for the outstanding teacher award. Next lukewarm. Too few were returned to provide reliable, to her name, someone had drawn several large valid conclusions, but I would like to note that two of question marks. As she drew nearer to the group, she the questions, “As a writing instructor, how would you heard her colleagues question her eligibility. Even describe the primary role of writing centers in helping though she had recently earned tenure and regularly students?” and “How do you see writing center theory taught courses for graduate and undergraduate and pedagogy complementing rhetoric and students, the fact that she also worked with students in composition theory and pedagogy?” received a variety the writing center placed her outside the circle of of answers. The varying answers that the first question those regarded as teachers eligible for awards. (Grimm received leads me to believe that these respondents did 524) not have a clear sense about the services offered by As a newly assigned Teaching Assistant rethe writing center, and the majority of answers to the entering a graduate program after a substantial hiatus second question either honestly expressed the from teaching, I didn’t have much time to spare in an respondent’s lack of knowledge about writing center already overloaded schedule.… I remembered the flyer theory and pedagogy or were so incoherent that we I had recently received from the university’s writing who coded the data were at a loss about what the center. The center identified itself briefly as a recently respondent did or did not know. established facility operating under the supervision of Reviewing articles from composition journals was the English department and staffed by graduate a slightly easier process, but these articles revealed teaching assistants. As a fledgling center, its statement stories that are equally as frustrating as the survey of purpose was brief. It offered tutorial help with answers. One of the positive aspects of these articles students experiencing writing difficulties and from journals like College Composition and suggested to composition teachers that they refer any Communication, Composition Studies, and the Journal students that might benefit from such help. (Powers of Advanced Composition is the authors’ efforts to 17) make recommendations that can be used by the Those of us working in writing centers probably writing center community to form more productive have stories similar to these to share. Although my relationships with composition colleagues and their career is still in its early stages, I already possess quite a programs and with other programs across campuses. few of my own stories that frustrate and disturb me.

These recommendations are diverse and versatile, and My experiences also revolve around colleagues in their differences allow them to be used in a variety of rhetoric and composition and from disciplines across contexts. Suzanne Powers, whose story appears at the the university who either do not know what we do in beginning of this article, constructs her the writing center or have conceptions of writing recommendations based on qualitative research of center work that differ greatly from the reality. While three different writing centers and their directors, but we can all find a great many stories like these in the she began this research based on her own experience pages of literature written primarily for a writing as a new graduate instructor who was uncertain about center audience, I found the passages above in the her university writing center’s services. Her pages of composition journals. I began looking in recommendations to writing center directors focus on these sources as part of a research project that developing relationships with new instructors. This Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004) www.praxisuwc.com!

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Changing Hearts and Minds • 6 emphasis is reflected especially in her third and fourth recommendations: [3] Work with English faculty to develop the notion that developing better writers rather than better papers is a mutual goal, one that suggests moving away from the ‘fix-it shop’ idea as the sole rationale for writing center existence. At the same time, centers need to be sufficiently politically astute to accommodate and work cooperatively with the English department.

[4] Educate faculty about the important role they play in establishing student attitudes toward referrals. (21) The strategies she recommends are intended primarily to help instructors have a clearer understanding of and more positive attitudes toward writing center work.

Her recommendations should be considered useful, as well, to “fledgling” writing centers like the one in Powers’ institution.

Powers’ first and second recommendations should produce the same effect but in a more indirect manner because they are aimed specifically at writing center directors. She suggests that directors should “clarify their conceptual alignment with writing as process and define the roles they would like to play in accordance with this alignment.” Directors also need to “test their assumptions about tutoring and its effectiveness in developing more independent writers by encouraging further research of those assumptions” (21). Although most writing centers probably could benefit, on some level, from implementing these recommendations, they will probably be most useful to writing centers in the earlier stages of their development because established writing centers typically have been using and refining these strategies for some time to fit their mission and their local institutional contexts.

The tenured writing center director and professor in Nancy Grimm’s story implies that the writing center is well established but its work, and the director’s position, continues to be perceived incorrectly by others in the institution. Just as Powers’ recommendations reflect the needs of writing centers in specific institutional contexts, Grimm’s recommendations are aimed at writing centers that have already implemented advice similar to Powers’ and have met with a measure of success but that are still struggling with “should-be colleagues, especially in composition, [who] have not often regarded writing centers as equal partners in critical and creative teaching but instead as doing the lowly, gritty work of making sure that students have mastered norms” (Welch 52). One of Grimm’s strategies addresses the issue of writing centers helping students “master

norms” widely accepted by others in the university.

She recommends that writing centers give up the protection of old beliefs about normalizing students to academic community and literacy because “revisionist literacy theorists have demonstrated that language is a site of cultural conflict and that we often use language for exclusionary rather than inclusionary purposes, [although] writing center workers and composition teachers continue to talk about their work as that of enabling students to understand and enter the academic community” (528). An established writing center with a history of success might be well placed to challenge these widely held beliefs about community and literacy and to begin educating students about how these beliefs can exclude some while including others.

Another of Grimm’s somewhat controversial recommendations challenges writing centers to stop “checking to see how they are regarded by others and adjusting their behavior and adapting their services to improve this regard” (534). She believes that writing centers need to focus change on the self in order to become “legitimate academic units” (534). To achieve this change in focus and status, Grimm suggests that writing centers use theory instead of numbers to justify their practice. This kind of justification would require that writing centers make some decisions based on more than just local institutional demands and would greatly change the nature of administrative decision making in many centers. Again, Grimm’s recommendation might prove more fruitful for a writing center that has already proved its effectiveness by using numbers and that needs to find more radical alternatives to help colleagues understand that it is more than just a fix-it shop.

Like Powers, Grimm advocates that writing centers increase their sharing of theory, practice, development, and histories with composition programs. Both authors view increased communication as a means of shaping more productive relationships between the center and the institution, but Grimm warns that this process is more complex than it seems on the surface. Because universities are resistant to change, creating a space for communication can be tricky and should be undertaken only after reflection on and research of what is at stake in the future and what has been at stake in the past. Once the center has articulated its position, it can then move toward creating a space to discuss the positions and needs of other departments and groups on campus, and then it can rearticulate its position based on these discussions.

My research foray into this topic revealed that writing centers continue to be plagued by the problem

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Changing Hearts and Minds • 7 of marginalized status on university campuses; my research also revealed that our close relatives in composition studies continue to fail to see writing centers as places that can teach writing. However, stories and recommendations from scholars like Grimm, Welch, and Powers can be useful to those who want writing centers to be recognized as equal partners with composition programs as well as other campus programs.

Works Cited Grimm, Nancy. “Rearticulating the Work of the Writing Center.” College Composition and Communication 47 (1996): 523-48.

Powers, Suzanne. “What Composition Teachers Need to Know about Writing Centers.” Composition Studies 19 (1991): 15-21.

Welch, Nancy. “Playing with Reality: Writing Centers after the Mirror Stage.” College Composition and Communication 51 (1999): 51-69.

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Homer, Lady Day, and Elvis • 8

HOMER, LADY DAY AND ELVIS: THE POSTMODERN POETICS OF THE CENTER Stephen Newton William Paterson University The transformative power of decor at the William Paterson University Writing Center.

One of the most common reactions people have when they visit the William Paterson University Writing Center is to comment upon the décor. Who puts up all these weird postcards? Why are characters from The Simpsons all over the place? What is up with all the gorillas? Who takes care of the plants? And who, pray tell, is obsessed with Elvis? He seems to be everywhere around here, along with Groucho Marx, John Lennon, Charlie Parker, Billy Holiday, and Bob Marley.

It may seem self-evident to suggest that the atmosphere in a writing center is crucially important, but I want to go further, and risk hyperbole, by saying that it can be as influential as almost anything that we do. It has become a given in much contemporary pedagogy that all teaching is political, whether or not one recognizes the political content of the teaching practice. According to this line of thinking one can be unreflective about political ramifications in the classroom, but one can't escape them.

One might argue that the decor of writing centers is a similar situation. We may be unaware of the fact that the ways that our spaces are decorated are important, but we cannot escape the fact that they are.

The impression one gets upon first walking in the front door is crucial, but it goes much further than that–this atmosphere surrounds the clients and staff the entire time they are in the writing center. It helps to define who we are and what we do.

This may seem unremarkable to many writing center administrators: decor matters. What's new about that? Nothing really, but I want to argue that we need to be moving beyond the institutional, officestyle, government-issue sterility that characterizes so many workplaces, because the more that we embrace this antiseptic, regimented image, the more that we are also endorsing a world of things that we probably don’t want to be expressing to our students.

Writing is stressful no matter how you cut it. It is also personal, tied to identity in ways that other academic issues are not. We all know how important it is to be kind and patient, helpful and encouraging in tutorials. We know how delicate the process of writing can be and how insecure so many people are about their work. As writing center professionals these are

truths that we hold to be self-evident. We should not be surprised to find out, then, that many of the students who come to the writing center for help are nervous when they walk in the front door. They are frequently embarrassed by the fact that they need help with something. Sometimes they feel stupid, and sometimes a teacher has made them feel this way.

Many of the times when students go to offices around campus, at least at the campuses where I have worked or visited, it is not a particularly pleasant experience. In addition offices frequently have unfortunate echoes attached to them, connected to memories of the temp agency where they sat in a cubicle and listened to customers yell at them through a head-set or the doctor's office where they went to be poked and prodded in a check-up.

Let me be clear about this. There are many, many people in university offices across the country doing fantastic work and treating students with the utmost respect. But there are also people in these situations who do not act in student's best interests, and when I have talked to students about these office encounters the message has remained remarkably consistent. The message is that students at least perceive themselves to be ill-treated in offices, and the more that our writing center décor echoes the atmosphere in other workplaces around the university, the more that we are going to contribute to the overall anxiety of students coming to the writing center, especially the ones who are coming for the first time.

One way to help counteract these effects is through the conscious use of irreverent, subversive humor, frequently achieved by the surrealistic juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous images. I have found that this postmodern turn is almost a commonplace on many faculty office doors. Most of us have seen the same potpourri of images.

Advertisers, novelists, poets, musicians, painters, and movie directors have been using similar techniques–collage, pastiche, mixing high and low culture–for at least the last hundred years, the same strategies that I am currently employing in the writing center to decorate the walls and that professors use to decorate their office doors.

We embrace chaos. We depend upon random improvisation. I resist aligning myself in any kind of rigid way with the dogma of any one group or point of

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Homer, Lady Day, and Elvis • 9 view, but we clearly are expressing something, or something is expressing itself through us, when we put these pictures or postcards up on the walls. Many times this happens through the collaboration of aligned sensibilities, with a kind of collective writing center consciousness emerging, the lineaments of its contours taking shape in front of our eyes.

Tastes are going to vary from context to context, from college to college. In a sense the details don't matter all that much. The important thing is that we find ways to energize the space so that it feels alive and people want to spend time there. Students have had telling responses. “ You guys never make anyone feel stupid–that’s why we like this place.”

“The WPU Writing Center, so much better than Starbucks.” “ That place looks like a Gustav Klimt painting.”

In our writing center we open our doors to the rich matrix of culture. We are embodying postmodernity in ways that are consonant with writing center theory and practice, but without trying to sell anything more than the richness of the world and the wonder of Homer Simpson slapping himself on the head.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004)

LAUNCHING A HIGH SCHOOL WRITING CENTER Peggy Silva Souhegan High School A behind-the-scenes look at how one high school developed a center that not only helps students fix their writing, but also helps promote and celebrate it.

We cast a very wide net when we established our high school’s writing center in 2002. The Center’s mission statement promises “to foster an active writing community for all members of Souhegan High School.” We had a writing center twelve years ago at our school’s inception, but in that start-up environment we did not have a clear sense of the primacy of this work with student writers.

Consequently, we did not retain this position when our writing teacher left the school. Our student population grew from 550 to over 1000, however, and our parents were urging us to dedicate more resources to student writing to support classroom instruction. I left my position as an English teacher on an interdisciplinary, heterogeneous ninth-grade team to become the school’s writing coordinator. We are now working to place our writing center at the intersection of teaching and learning in our school.

Although we initially wrote a very broad statement of purpose outlining a wide range of writing opportunities and support, I knew that the school community would eventually define the appropriate work of the Writing Center. It was important to me that the Center address the entire continuum of student ability. I wanted to support struggling writers and also to work with students for whom writing is a joy. I wanted students to learn basic skills, and I wanted to help students and adults seek publication for their writing.

It was important to me that the Center address the entire continuum of student ability. I wanted to support struggling writers and also to work with students for whom writing is a joy.

It was difficult to find sustainable models of high school writing centers that were not strictly places of remediation. I met one writing coordinator who trained students to work with peers and was successful in his work. He taught a full schedule of courses, however, which severely limited his time in his writing center. His program has since disbanded–a cautionary !

tale for writing center work at a high-school level.

Fortunately, our administration recognizes that the writing coordinator needs to be available full-time to support students, and we designed a comfortable environment with comfortably tacky cast-off furniture, eight computers, a printer, and a small copier.

Souhegan High School Writing Center I knew that from a marketing perspective the first initiatives had to be very public, so I designed a series of monthly writing contests in celebration of writing.

Broad themes have worked best. Students do not want to write on specific topics. One of the contest themes, “From the Refrigerator Door,” encouraged students to submit a piece of writing that they had written for one of their courses. The most popular contest themes have been “Simply Good Writing”; “Gatherings,” personal narratives or memoirs of seasonal memories; “To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme,” our annual poetry contest; and “Witches and Wizards and Elves, Oh My!” our fantasy and science fiction contest.

I convene panels to discuss anonymous submissions and select winning entries. The student panels give me immediate insight into the work happening in our English classrooms; students are able to provide thoughtful feedback, posed in terms of strengths and suggestions. Each contest participant receives a letter that includes both warm and cool feedback. During the first year of the contest, 130 students contributed writing to these contests; this year that number has been much, much lower. One reason is that as more students use the Writing Center, I have less time to market the contests. Until this initiative gains strong institutional support, the number of entries will be erratic.

Looking for opportunities to contribute to writing initiatives within the school, I have helped the guidance department develop a packet of sample college recommendations, resumés, and application essays. I guide students in the writing component of our Senior Project and have worked with others to develop an assessment rubric for our mandatory junior-year research paper. I also offer workshops for English teachers in memoir and nature writing, research various publishing opportunities for my

Launching a High School Writing Center • 11 colleagues, and respond to alumni who would like feedback on their first college writing assignments.

Our English department has indicated a desire to sponsor a Writing Fellows program, similar to one offered by Brown University. We would train student fellows in writing and mentoring skills and assign them to assist a specific teacher. Fellows would receive an honors designation for their work. We will wait until the Writing Center is operating at full capacity to investigate this option further. Until a majority of teachers request help with student writing, there will not be widespread commitment to working with student fellows.

In the Writing Center’s second year of operations we have doubled last year’s contacts with students and teachers. Over 350 individuals have scheduled time at the Center: seniors come to work on their college essays and their Senior Projects, juniors come to write or revise their research papers, and sophomores schedule time to work on narratives for their portfolio presentations. Although I participate in writing conferences in ninth-grade classrooms, very few of our youngest students ask for help. The ninth grade will therefore be a focus of next year’s work.

our school’s Web site–another focus for next year. I am eager to enter the conversation about the power of places in which students can engage in serious work that matters to them. I have only begun to scratch the surface of opportunities to make a difference in my work with student writers.

In order to serve the needs of all constituencies within our high school, I have to be very attuned to the work happening in our classrooms.

In order to serve the needs of all constituencies within our high school, I have to be very attuned to the work happening in our classrooms. Our district has decided to implement the 6+1 Traits model of writing instruction and assessment. Over time this program will give students and teachers from all academic disciplines a common language to discuss effective traits of writing. Students from kindergarten through twelfth grade will use common tools to discuss ideas, organization, voice, fluency, word choice, conventions, and presentation. This program will make the coordination of writing initiatives flow more smoothly and demonstrate successes as students rise through our school system. It will also give us many more opportunities to celebrate rather than bemoan students’ writing habits.

Although I have published two books and several articles, I am a novice in technology. I carry only a vague awareness of the influence we can have in our small New England setting to affect others with our work. Our technology coordinator encourages, cajoles, and nags me to place student and faculty writing on Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004) www.praxisuwc.com!

The Pen Pal Project • 12

THE PEN PAL PROJECT Frankie Condon Saint Cloud State University One look at the power of a service learning project to connect writing center tutors with students in an inner-city elementary school.

In the early 1990’s, at a CUNY writing center conference, I heard about a pen pal project between writing center tutors at an Eastern Pennsylvanian University and children from an inner-city primary school. I was intrigued by the description and filed the idea as one that I would like to try if ever I could create the opportunity. By the fall of 2002, conditions and circumstances seemed right to experiment at last with organizing a service-learning project that would connect writing center tutors from my university with children from an inner-city elementary school in a neighborhood that adjoins my university’s.

By the end of the project, pen pals are exchanging hints for defeating PlayStation 2 games, confidences about lost teeth, and bad dreams.

Simply put, the Saint Cloud State University Pen Pal Project connects university students enrolled in my writing center theory and practice course who are future and current tutors from the university’s writing center with children in a multi-age classroom (first and second grades) at Lincoln Elementary School, one of District 742’s inner city schools. The pen pals exchange 7 to 10 letters with one another over the course of a semester. Towards the end of the semester, the university students travel to Lincoln to work with their pen pals on a writing project. The letters exchanged by pen pals typically begin as exchanges of information about favorite friends, games, and classes or subjects. By the end of the project, pen pals are exchanging hints for defeating PlayStation 2 games, confidences about lost teeth, and bad dreams. In the spring of 2004, the writing project entailed creating a shield depicting each child’s home, community, school, and future. University pen pals helped the children to design and color their shields and then to write an accompanying story describing each of the four depictions. The semester culminated when the children traveled to the university's writing center for an end of the year celebration. There, they drew pictures with their pen pals, heard stories, had a snack and generally frolicked together.

Lincoln Elementary School is nestled between Division Street (a major St. Cloud thoroughfare) and a set of tracks along which dozens of freight trains pass each day. Days at Lincoln are punctuated by the long, slow, insistent whistles of those trains as they pass.

Across Division Street is a bread factory, and often by the afternoon, the smell of fresh-baked bread has wafted over the pedestrian walkway, enveloping the school. Lincoln is a relatively small school with roughly 340 students ranging in age from 5 to 11 or 12. Approximately 64% of the students at Lincoln qualify for free or reduced lunches, a significantly higher percentage than at any other school in the district. And 9% of the students at Lincoln are transient, living in shelters, with relatives on an emergency basis, or in other sorts of temporary housing. Homelessness among students in the district’s other schools, however, is virtually nonexistent.

I first visited Lincoln during the spring of 2002 while looking for an elementary school for my son, Dan. Walking down the hall that first day, I was struck by the quality of art on the walls. The writing and pictures proclaimed what students would do if they were mayor. I remember feeling warmed by the tenderness of those missives, many of which asserted that if the writer were mayor he or she would make sure that every child had a home to live in, enough food to eat, and lots and lots of love. Needless to say, we chose Lincoln for Dan, and it is through Dan that I came to know his teacher, Kathy Arnold.

Thus the Pen Pal Project became possible for a number of rather pragmatic reasons. I had a connection with a committed and interested teacher at Lincoln. The school’s location was accessible to my university students. The children of the school could benefit from supplementary experiences with writing as well as the kinds of friendship and mentoring relationships that Mrs. Arnold and I hoped would form between tutors and their pen pals. The Pen Pal Project is successful, I think, for reasons that are far more difficult to articulate.

I must admit to some cynicism when I hear writing center directors describe in glowing terms some practice or set of practices with which they are currently enthralled. Therefore, I welcome you to engage as critical readers of what follows. I believe our

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The Pen Pal Project • 13 discipline would be well served by some scholarship addressing writing centers and service learning. I’m so slaphappy about the Pen Pal Project, however, that I’m sure I’m not the right person to take a more measured look at it from a critical, scholarly perspective just yet.

That said, the Pen Pal Project has been the most joyful experience of my teaching, directing, and tutoring career. I have treasured watching from the most tentative beginnings friendships form between my students and the children with whom they exchange correspondence. The Pen Pal Project has made a different kind and depth of conversation possible in my writing center theory and practice course. In particular, our talk about the development and cultivation of voice has been deepened and extended by the Pen Pal Project.

In staff meetings and the writing center theory and practice course, the SCSU tutors have worried over the degree to which the student writing they encounter “sounds” stilted and imitative. The tutors struggle with their sense that student writing often fails to communicate the intellectual and creative engagement of the writer in the subject matter of his or her compositions. They wonder whether and how to raise the matter of how a piece of writing represents its writer. They wonder how to work with students who seem unable to imagine a reader about whom they care or with whom they wish to communicate.

Using our experiences in the Pen Pal Project, we can compare, for example, the kind and quality of voice in writing produced by children given more traditional academic prompts with the writing produced by the pen pals. Building on this conversation, we can talk about university student-writer engagement and writer alienation differently and better because of the Pen Pal Project. In particular, the Pen Pal Project has enabled tutors to understand in practice Vygotskii’s concept of “zones of proximal development.” They begin to recognize in their relationship with their pen pals the value of teaching not only the nature of reader expectations for particular genres, but also the processes by which such texts are produced and reader expectations are addressed and/or challenged and the kinds of labor such processes require. The tutors have begun not only to notice the difference between the writing produced by students who are working at the outside edge of their ability with assistance and the writing of students working alone, but also to imagine and test ways of talking with university student-writers about the relationship between writing, learning, teaching, and subjectivity.

Most interestingly and importantly to me, the Pen Pal Project has made possible a more reflective conversation about a writing center ethos and praxis that might be characterized by compassion, humility, and responsiveness.

The Pen Pal Project seems to help current and future tutors to think in more creative and improvisational terms about the work of tutoring.

Most interestingly and importantly to me, the Pen Pal Project has made possible a more reflective conversation about a writing center ethos and praxis that might be characterized by compassion, humility, and responsiveness. My students and tutors seem less inclined than formerly toward judgmental paternalism or toward some misplaced and misguided sense of altruism when they think and talk about the whys of what they do. The current and future tutors seem more inclined now toward a conviction that the privileges we possess do not belong to us–we have not, in fact, necessarily earned them. There might be alternative explanations for apparently dysfunctional student-writer behaviors and processes like the material conditions of students’ lives and the degree to which systemic inequalities structure student consciousness.

The quality of relationships forged in and through the Pen Pal Project seems to me to have helped my students to grow as tutors in ways that I could not have taught them in any classroom or staff meeting. Truthfully, the children in Mrs. Arnold’s class are teaching my students that which I most want my students to learn–and perhaps far more effectively than I could ever hope to do. Historian and critical race theorist Manning Marable once wrote that “grace is the ability to redefine the limits of possibility.” For me, and, I believe, for my students, tutors, and the children of Mrs. Arnold’s class, the Pen Pal Project continues to be an instantiation of grace understood in this way. Together, we are redefining the limits of possibility not only within our institutions, but also in our relationships with one another.

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Building a Community • 14

BUILDING A COMMUNITY AROUND THE WRITING CENTER Ginger Cooper Casper College How to promote a college writing center as a community resource--and serve recruitment and retention needs in the process.

Recruitment and retention are important issues on every campus but especially so on small campuses like that of Casper College. My predecessor, Bob Mittan, believed as I do that the Writing Center should serve as a community as well as a campus resource. His reasons focused on how the community could be involved with the writing center while my reasons focus on how the writing center can be involved with the community. In becoming a community resource, our center serves to demystify academe both for those in the community who feel they are too old or incapable to succeed in college and for young writers in high school who may not have decided to attend college yet. As a result, we are acquiring something of a reputation for helping students and community members with résumé cover letters and creative writing projects as well as scholarship letters and essays.

While I have always believed that writing centers are as much a community resource as libraries, making our presence known hasn’t been as easily achieved. We depend on word of mouth to give our flyers credibility, so we try to make ourselves visible in the classroom and in the community. Since many of our adjuncts teach in local high schools, we are fortunate in that we can give our writing presentations to high school students who are taking Advanced Placement courses for college credit. Each of us, the writing assistants and I, give a ten- to twenty-minute presentation describing the services we offer, and we emphasize the number of people who have used our center for help in writing successful scholarship and admittance application essays, resumé cover letters, letters to the editor, short stories, non-fiction articles, and grant applications. The presentations end with our encouraging those students to tell their families and friends that we are available to help them even though they aren’t taking college classes. We attempt to make six hundred contacts each year through presentations.

Word of mouth works well if we consider that some clients are referred to us by their employers, spouses, friends and children.

I like to take part in first-year orientation because students remember the person who stood on stage

and encouraged them to use every resource available in order to succeed. I also like giving presentations for the Boys and Girls Club of Central Wyoming for the same reason I like giving classroom presentations.

They give me the opportunity to encourage potential first-generation college students to consider coming to college here, where it’s affordable and accessible, before moving on to a university. They remember me and sometimes stop in to say hello, stop me in the store to find out when we are open, or wave to me after first-year orientation. Annually, I volunteer for the Science Olympiad, where I evaluate the technical writing competition. College-bound middle and high school students from all over Wyoming participate in this competition, and I take the opportunity to introduce myself and encourage them to make use of writing center services during their academic years, especially when they prepare scholarship and admittance letters and essays. The local high schools also bring eleventh and twelfth graders to the college for tours, and we give them the thirty-minute special presentation and Writing Center tour, which usually consists of showing them the computer classroom, where the popcorn and microwave are, and discussions of how we can help them get through the roughest semester they’ll ever have–the first one.

Occasionally, we are asked by a business to give a writing workshop.

We have one community volunteer, Jeanne Aro, a literacy volunteer who once tutored math but prefers to donate her time helping those students who can’t visit us during our scheduled hours. We schedule after-hours appointments with her for nontraditional students who need help with papers for distance education or evening courses. These students may not take classes every semester, but once they know that we’re available, they call to ask questions about workrelated or personal writing projects or to make appointments for face-to-face or screen-to-screen assistance.

Our online writing center is undergoing changes as my research in online pedagogies continues.

Currently, the synchronous operation is located in WebCT, but we will be moving to an IRC-based channel that we can customize to fit our needs. My goal is to provide both current distance education students and potential students with accessible and

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Building a Community • 15 immediate writing assistance. I suspect that our audience will acquire a more global sense of community because word of mouth travels more quickly online than offline. As time passes, more of our local students will find online technologies to be less of a barrier because more schools teach by means of technology. We encourage them to return to us when they have questions about word processing formats or need a reader to respond to non-academic writing projects. By making ourselves available to them after graduation, we make ourselves more visible, more accessible, and more inviting to the larger community.

We are a community of writers, and we want our Writing Center to reflect our identity. As a community, we work to make our center accessible and inviting to all. Our efforts in turn contribute to the college’s recruitment and retention efforts, a service to the institution we had not intentionally set out to provide, but one that we’re glad to do.

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Parallel Curriculum • 16

THE WRITING CENTER AND THE PARALLEL CURRICULUM Ann E. Green St. Joseph University Complementing our writing center work and lives with creative writing and service-learning.

Our university is currently in the middle of a comprehensive curriculum review and revision. One of our recent speakers on curriculum, Joe Appleyard, S.J., focused on the idea of the “parallel curriculum”: the series of extra-curricular activities, abroad and immersion programs, and student run groups, where much of student energy is spent. He argued that in many contemporary universities the “parallel curriculum” is much more viable and interesting (particularly in teaching the Jesuit ideal of “discernment,” or reflection)1 than the actual general education curriculum. Over lunch at another curriculum committee meeting, one of my colleagues from the business school pointed out to me that the Writing Center is a location of a kind of parallel curriculum, where there are no grades, where students initiate contact with one another, and where students drive the work. This idea intrigued me for several reasons, but particularly because it helped me to think about what students do in the Writing Center that they don’t do in their general education courses and about how work that may begin in the “Writing Fellows: The Theory and Practice of Peer Tutoring” course grows after the course is over and impacts other aspects of Writing Center work.

My colleague’s comment about the Writing Center as a part of parallel curriculum rang true--we are a student-driven place; I had just done a workshop for Writing Fellows on effective resume and cover letters that they had asked for, that they scheduled, and that they contributed to. The graduating Writing Fellows distributed their own resumes for workshopping, and the under classmen requested the workshop because it was the time of year when we get a number of resumes and cover letter writers. In thinking further about the Writing Center as a location for parallel curriculum, two particular aspects of our work at Saint Joseph’s come to mind–creative writing and servicelearning for social change.

The service-learning and the creative writing components of the Writing Fellows course are linked both in the actual course work that tutors do, and the work that they do with learners at their servicelearning sites. In the Writing Fellows course, we begin by writing “creatively.”

[T]his assignment often changes their ideas of creative writing from the isolatedwriter-in-the-attic to a more collaborative and inclusive model.

When tutors receive the assignment to write “creatively,” and have the opportunity to define their own writing, they take this opportunity to write something that is not “school writing.” For those who are not practicing creative writers, this assignment encourages them to try something new and experiment with an unfamiliar form. For those who are creative writers, this assignment often changes their ideas of creative writing from the isolated-writerin-the-attic to a more collaborative and inclusive model. Both kinds of changes are useful for writing tutors as they begin to conceptualize their work as collaborative and mutual rather than as top down and hierarchical. And as the assignment progresses, tutors often begin to think about how their previous definitions of creative writing (writing without rules or constraints) is complicated by their ideas of what “good” writing is.

After doing creative writing exercises in class, brainstorming, and taking the piece through several levels of revision, tutors write a reflective paper on their process of writing as related to the theories of writing that we’ve read. They return to their reflective writing at the end of the semester in the their final assignment where they develop their own philosophy of peer tutoring.

The process of creative writing encourages tutors to discern what their roles are as tutors as they consider what kinds of feedback and writing practices have been most helpful for their development. For many tutors this is the first time that they have taken a piece of writing through multiple, global revisions; because each tutor is allowed to define the parameters for his or her own writing, they are often extremely invested in the process. This creative writing is important for two additional reasons: 1) tutors can engage and reflect on their own writing processes; 2) much of the work that we engage in at the servicelearning sites is teaching “creative” writing.2 Through these creative writing exercises, and the student-led writing groups they often generate, students are engaged in writing on their own terms, students have agency in defining those terms, and

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Parallel Curriculum • 17 students have created a spot, an oasis in the parallel curriculum for writing poetry for its own sake.

The service-learning component of the Writing Fellows course came from the creative writing work we had started in the Center. The university’s servicelearning program had a long-term commitment to a local, Catholic, urban K-8 school, and five years ago I began talking with a fourth grade teacher there about writing in her classroom. I spent time in her classroom writing and talking with students about their poetry.

From those origins, our work has evolved to include tutoring in adult literacy programs and English as a Second language programs, and at a shelter for homeless youth. Tutors end up dividing their time about equally between the Writing Center and the service-learning site for a total of thirty hours of tutoring for the semester. While the service-learning component is not in and of itself student-driven, it has become one of the aspects of Writing Center work which the tutors name as most important to their experience in the Center.

[T]his is often a place where they can write about what is important to them, explore language, and have the kind of experience with the joy and beauty of language that is being lost as elementary and secondary schools focus on preparation for standardized tests.

Tutors engage learners in preparation for the high school equivalency exam, in learning to speak English, in writing college applications and essays, and in creative writing, sometimes moving from one genre to another in the same session. Our tutors have tutored fifth graders’ poetry, homeless youth’s raps and essays, and elementary school students’ autobiographies.

When running creative writing groups, tutors write with students, free write, and create ‘zines and collections of student writing. For students who attend under-funded, urban elementary and high schools (both public and Catholic), this is often a place where they can write about what is important to them, explore language, and have the kind of experience with the joy and beauty of language that is being lost as elementary and secondary schools focus on preparation for standardized tests. In this way, the tutors enact a kind of parallel curriculum for the students at the schools, providing places for exploration and experimentation that are not graded, thus modeling different ways of engaging with writing.

Tutoring writing at these various service-learning sites also makes certain aspects of the tutoring paradigm

more apparent to new tutors. They are–depending on location–both a peer and not a peer, both insider and outsider, and sometimes both at once. As the Chicana lesbian feminist writer Gloria Anzaldua suggested in her interview with Andrea Lunsford: Living in a multicultural society, we cross into each others’ worlds all the time. . . .We all of us find ourselves in the position of being simultaneously insider/outsider. (254)3 The service-learning component has this kind of an impact on students. While I attempt to recruit a diverse group of tutors, some of them always seem to enter the course convinced that they are insiders in academic discourse (which they may be) and that their mission is to bring others “inside.” By sending the tutors outside of the university, they often begin to recognize their subject position as complicated by elements of both “insider” and “outsider” status. The service-learning component enriches the peer tutoring course and leads to a deeper level of understanding of language use, social class, race, and gender, and systemic inequalities. (For more on this, see Green, “Difficult Stories: Service-Learning, Race, Class, and Whiteness” College Composition and Communication 55.2, 276-301.) It has also led to tutors’ work beyond the course and in the community.

Most recently, two Writing Fellows designed their own year-long honor’s thesis projects that engaged in community-based research at their service-learning sites. During these projects, each tutor continued her service over the course of an academic year, took field notes, and researched aspects of writing development as they evolved at the sites. Each tutor engaged in complex negotiations with the sites to work toward a more mutually beneficial ideal of research as social action. It was our attempt to “Work . . . within a social action model of research that involves students as participants . . . [to] be less connected with the need to serve and to please and more connected with the desire to understand, to articulate, and to interpret” (Grimm 88). Each tutor wrote her honor’s thesis analyzing her own literacy practices and subject position through a reflective literacy narrative, seeking approval for the project through our Institutional Review Board (not an easy task as the IRB was largely unfamiliar with community-based research methodology), and defining her own subject for investigation (in one case the idea of the writer among homeless youth and in the other case a consideration of how community is formed in inner-city classrooms). Having just finished reading these projects, I am amazed at the level of engagement and thoughtfulness that went into each piece of work.

Each tutor has spent about 19 months at the service

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Parallel Curriculum • 18 site talking with and working with writers. Each tutor went beyond my expectations for these projects and wrote critically, creatively, and analytically over a sustained period of time. Based on their work, I suspect that each of these tutors will work for social change for at least part of their careers as teachers, writers, and activists.

And here’s where I think that the idea of a parallel curriculum resonates for our Writing Center. During my six years of directing the Writing Center, I have had a number of students go on to careers as teachers, particularly teachers in inner city, urban settings.

Students begin this work through a service-learning course, and then keep going, taking additional servicelearning courses, doing the service independent of any course, and thinking about issues of justice. I’ve begun placing service-learning students with teachers who are former service-learning students of mine, who are committed to urban education, who think about issues of social change. And it is in these relationships that I think contributions to the parallel curriculum are most effectively made.

[T]he Writing Center work we do here is based not in a number of texts read or tests given, but in the kind of human contact which may lead to dramatic change.

The Office of Faith and Justice which houses our service-learning program refers to service-learning here as “relationship-based,” as opposed to more taskoriented programs. As Frankie Condon’s letter writing project in this issue of Praxis began with a relationship with her son’s teacher, the basis of the parallel curriculum in the Writing Center work we do here is based not in a number of texts read or tests given, but in the kind of human contact which may lead to dramatic change, through which authentic learning is possible.

When teaching service-learning at Saint Joseph’s, we often talk about who we are “in relationship” with, who we are interacting with who is changing us or challenging us. Tutors write about the difficult tutee who might have responded in anger or in pain as well as the joy of seeing someone achieve something through a piece of writing. Part of what I think happens in the parallel curriculum that makes discernment possible is the fact of the relationship, the emphasis not only on the positive aspects of interaction, but on the struggles as well. The relationships that students build connect isolated fragments of knowledge to people and issues outside of the classroom. These relationships help students

internalize what they're learning and connect it to larger issues. Ideally, these relationships broaden our vision of what's possible.

So rather than the actual curriculum which is based on exams, credit-hours, and numbers of books read, the parallel curriculum rests squarely on the relationships that students form in the creative writing group, in the Writing Center, or at the service-site.

These relationships take time–and some of this time cannot be planned or structured and often does not look like traditional learning. The potluck in the Writing Center, the take out Chinese with the teachers from the service-learning sites, the time spent hanging out in the Center and chatting between tutorials, encourages us all to believe that change is possible, to engage in action for systemic social change, and to work for justice.

Works Cited Appleyard, Joseph, S.J. “The Parallel Curriculum and Other Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education.”

October 22, 2003. http://www.sju.edu/academics/cr/symposium.ht ml.

Grimm, Nancy Maloney. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999.

Lunsford, Andrea. “Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldua on Composition and Postcoloniality.” JAC 18.1. (1998).

Mairs, Nancy. Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Wood, Monica. The Pocket Muse: Ideas and Inspirations for Writing. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2002.

Notes !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1!Discernment, in a Jesuit sense, is a practice of reflecting on God's presence in your daily life. In a more general way, I am using discernment here to indicate the practice of reflection whereby students and faculty build connections between disparate ideas and create synthesis between intellectual work and the work of daily life. Thank you to Tom Brennan, S.J. for the discussions of discernment.!

2!This past year we used The Pocket Muse: Ideas & Inspirations for Writing by Monica Wood (Cincinnati, Writer’s Digest Books, 2002) as a way of beginning writing. It is a wonderful, small book of pictures and starters that tutors and elementary school children alike enjoyed, particularly the exercise about how the hippos arrived in the Catholic school parking lot.!

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Parallel Curriculum • 19 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

3!Thank you to Susan Naomi Bernstein for drawing my attention to this quote.

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The Secondary School Writing Center • 20

THE SECONDARY SCHOOL WRITING CENTER: A PLACE TO BUILD CONFIDENT, COMPETENT WRITERS Pamela B. Childers Glenbrook North High School

Dawn Fels McCallie School

Three secondary school writing center veterans demonstrate how these centers benefit student writers, tutors, and the school as a whole.

The three of us led an International Writing Centers Association-sponsored all-day workshop on secondary school writing centers at the NCTE Convention. Writing centers at all levels follow the theoretical background of Bruffee, Murray, Elbow, and North, to name a few. They are not remedial facilities, as some schools would like them to be, or ESL facilities to improve basic writing in English. No, a secondary school writing center is primarily a place where we work with all students, regardless of their innate talent, to build their confidence and competency as writers. Whether we are talking about students who need to fine-tune excellent papers or students who need to discover what they really want to say, a writing center can be a safe harbor within the sometimes stormy seas of the school day. We can think of no better way to reform writing instruction.

We teach and direct writing centers at different kinds of schools, but we all started out as English teachers and have taught in public schools in New Jersey, Missouri, and Illinois. One of us currently teaches in an independent college preparatory school for boys in Tennessee. What we have discovered is that as different as our schools might be, all secondary schools have teachers who can learn to direct a writing center within the school because they have had training in teaching writing process and in how to respond to student writing. Readings and participation in IWCA-sponsored workshops, as well as national and regional writing center conferences, will only help these trained professionals to create a clear vision of how to make writing centers function in their own institutions. However, by creating such a low-risk environment (Farrell) with its goal to make students better writers and thinkers beyond the paper they are working on (North), good English teachers or even teachers of other subjects will gain as much as the students they work with in the writing center.

Consider the importance of gaining confidence as one becomes a better writer. Consider how peer consultants improve their own writing by asking questions of peers and teachers. Consider the opportunity to improve reading skills while improving

Jeanette Jordan University City High School

writing skills. Consider how a writing center can improve any teacher’s own writing and teaching by developing a better understanding of the connection between students’ thinking and writing processes.

These are just a few advantages of a secondary school writing center.

All three of us are English teachers who chose to start or develop writing centers. Jeanette and Dawn both became involved in university writing centers in graduate school, while Pam earned a second graduate degree that focused on the teaching of writing. We all believe our strong foundations in responding to student writing and studying writing center theory and pedagogy enable us to help not only our students but also other teachers’ students through our work in the writing center. If you asked each of us to describe the importance of writing centers to our profession and lives as English teachers, we would all say that the writing center work is a calling that inspires us to be better classroom teachers as well.

How Writing Centers Help Students Who Use Them “The writing center allows every type of writer to come in and get the help they need to be successful” (Senior).

“The Write Place gives students somewhere to go to get a second opinion” (Junior).

At Glenbrook North High School, McCallie School, and University City High School, college preparatory, ESL, and at-risk students all find someone in the writing center to work with them to improve their writing, thinking, and learning. Here are a few ways that writing centers help students: • Writing centers create opportunities for individualized writing conferences. The class loads that English teachers carry are prohibitive to our doing what we know is best for writers: sitting down with each and every student and discussing his or her work on a regular basis. What writing teachers WANT to do but don’t have TIME to do is exactly what the writing center is all about. Students hang out in a comfortable setting and chat about their ideas and their writing. These conferences can also take place during class

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The Secondary School Writing Center • 21

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time. If just two writing center staff members assist a teacher with conferences in a fiftyminute class, they can conduct individual sixminute conferences with all 25 students in the class. Without the assistants, the teacher could talk with each student for a maximum of two minutes. Needless to say, six-minute conference is a lot more productive than a two-minute one.

Writing centers help reinforce writing as a process. When students visit the writing center before submitting their projects, they are forced to slow down and take their work through an extra draft. When students re-visit the papers they wrote the previous day, they almost always spot many of their own mistakes. Without the trip to the writing center, they would have turned in the weak draft. Sometimes students come at the last minute for a quick fix, but soon discover that quick fixes aren’t what we do. Next time they appear earlier, with an understanding that working on drafts, revising, and editing are all part of the writing process.

Writing improves when writers focus on the writing — not on the grade. In “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process,” Peter Elbow addresses the conflicts inherent in the role of a teacher and emphasizes the power of a collaborative relationship. When the teacher (or in the case of a writing center, a peer consultant) is seen “wholly [as] an ally, students are more willing to take risks, connect the self to the material, and experiment. Here is the source not just of learning but also of genuine development and growth” (221). Since writing center staff members don’t assign a grade, the writer is free to focus on the words on the page without worrying about the reader’s judgment.

The writer has control over what happens with the revision and can ignore the reader’s suggestions without fear of making the reader mad or not giving her “what she’s looking for.”

Writing centers support what the classroom teacher does. Writing centers do not replace writing instruction in the classroom. We reinforce what goes on in the classroom, sometimes giving mini-lessons to students who have specific concerns with their writing, to assist teachers’ writing instruction.

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Writing centers create an environment where writers can bounce their ideas off others, questions can lead to new ideas, writing for self or publication can blossom, and resources on writing abound. Students interested in creative writing or publication opportunities can find resources in the writing center. Some schools even offer independent study courses taught by writing center directors. These courses allow students interested in specific genres of writing to find instruction. For example, McCallie School has offered independent study courses in sports writing, authoring computer games, poetry, fiction writing, and creative nonfiction.

How Writing Centers Benefit Student Consultants “Working in the Write Place has not only improved my writing, but my self-confidence as well” (Junior tutor).

“My experience working in the writing center helped me become more familiar with the revision process. I can ask myself a series of questions that I might ask when reading another student’s paper in the writing center. Does my introduction actually introduce the paper well? Are my thoughts well supported? Am I too repetitive?” (Senior tutor).

Writing centers may be staffed by trained volunteers, professionals, peers, or a combination of these. Some schools recruit retired educators or professionals whose careers require expertise in writing. Other schools tap into nearby colleges and universities for tutors. The peer consultants may volunteer or work as part of a course requirement.

Regardless of who staffs the writing center, everyone benefits: • Tutors become communicators. What do the tutors learn? How to listen. How to question. How to look objectively at their own writing. How to appreciate other people’s writing styles. How to develop their own writing styles. How to think on the fly.

How to communicate effectively with others.

And they learn that talking about writing and discussing ideas can actually be fun!

• Students learn that readers other than teachers can give helpful advice. Helpfulness as a responder is not tied to intelligence or age. We all try to ensure that our writing center staff members are not only AP and Honors students for several reasons.

First, if a center is staffed by a cross-section

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of the school, students feel more comfortable bringing in their work. They don’t feel as if they are remedial students being helped by the smart people. It’s important to create the climate that all writers need others with whom to discuss their ideas and review their writing.

Additionally, really talented writers sometimes have difficulty letting the author take the lead and maintain ownership. Strong writers sometimes become absorbed by how they would personally write the piece and lose sight of the fact that it isn’t their paper. Some super-talented writers are, however, great writing center staff members; the key is not the writing ability but the listening ability. In fact, some of the tutors with weaknesses in their writing samples end up being some of the strongest tutors because they truly listen to what their peers are saying, and they don’t try to fix their papers. They question and guide the authors without taking over. They also learn to question and guide themselves with their own writing based on this experience working with the writing of others.

Student consultants collaborate with their peers and director on publication and presentation opportunities. These are realworld writing experiences, whether it is advertising for the writing center, a letter to parents, a script for a promotional video, or an article about writing for the school newspaper. Through the sharing of professional articles on writing, students consider the possible articles they would like to write and new ways to present ideas on aspects of writing in a classroom or small group workshop. This experience gives students knowledge that will help them in their future careers as well.

How Writing Centers Can Positively Impact Writing Throughout the School “My students’ writing and thinking improve when we work with the writing center” (Science teacher).

“The Writer’s Room has made me a better teacher. It has really made me focus on how to create writing assignments” (Social Studies teacher).

Although some schools have their writing centers as part of the English department, they don’t have to be. We are part of a cross-curricular, school-wide program and, therefore, work with all disciplines.

Since writing is integral to learning in all areas, writing

centers can have a powerful impact on teaching and learning throughout the school: • Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) based writing centers emphasize the importance of writing as a lifelong skill regardless of a specialty field. At Glenbrook North High School, for instance, the writing center supports a culture that values writing throughout the school.

Students receive writing advisory grades in their academic areas and teachers value writing as an integral part of their cla sses, using writing as a tool for learning as well as a means for measuring what students have learned. Students see that writing matters in all of their classes (Farrell-Childers, Gere, and Young). Cross-curricular staffing of the writing center is an important part of the WAC program. Teachers who are on the WAC committee, Writers’ Bloc, fulfill their extra duty assignments by working in the writing center. This shows students that teachers throughout the school value writing and that it is a skill that transfers from one discipline to another. Teachers in the writing center function just like the student tutors in that they work with students on their writing in any subject area–not just their own disciplines. In all of our schools, teachers introduce students to the writing center as ninth graders. Students in science, history and English classes get to know the value of the writing center to their writing in all subjects and feel comfortable returning on their own.

• Through school-wide staff development initiatives, writing centers create consistency and unity. It is important that students receive consistent messages about expectations and standards. Teachers throughout the school need to be on the same page when it comes to language used with writing since it is a skill used in every class. To help develop this unity, teachers at University City High School are trained in the methods used in The Writer’s Room, and teachers are invited to volunteer in the writing center or use the methods in their classrooms. McCallie School faculty use a standard research format (MLA) and refer to the writing center website for other helpful information. At Glenbrook North, the Writers’ Bloc created a series of publications. Initially, the committee published quarterly newsletters focusing on different writing issues and highlighting how

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teachers within the school used writing in their classes. Over the course of several summer curriculum projects, the committee also published three faculty manuals: Designing and Assessing Assignments, Writing as a Tool for Learning, and Research and Writing Across the Curriculum. In relation to research writing, centers work with faculty to gain a common understanding of plagiarism, keep up-to-date with the latest MLA style guidelines, and discuss reasonable expectations for various grade levels.

Discussing these issues with colleagues from other departments is a valuable experience for all involved and creates a common thread that winds through the school.

Writing centers serve as a resource, supporting classroom instruction. Tutors can create special workshops and handouts to support classroom instruction. For example, writing center staff members go to history classes to discuss plagiarism and MLA style.

Others work with librarians to support the research paper process in classes across disciplines. Writing center staff can also work with the college and career office, assisting seniors who are working on their college essays. Writing center staff members can help support teachers by talking through assignments with them, assisting them in their classes, and developing materials for their use.

Writing centers support and encourage the writing efforts of faculty and staff. At University City High School, a group of writers from the faculty and community meet each month to share their writing. The Caldwell Writing Center at the McCallie School sponsors a student and faculty dinner and reading each year. At all of our schools, faculty members applying to graduate school or completing graduate work have stopped by for help with resumes, grant proposals and papers. In the writing center, teachers find a supportive ear and a critical eye to assist in writing about themselves or for themselves.

Writing center directors offer an element of privacy and professionalism for staff members no matter the writing “assignment.”

Conclusion When Dave Eggers, writer and founder of 826 Valencia, a community-based writing center in San Francisco, spoke at the CEE luncheon at the NCTE convention, he mentioned the impact -- positive and

negative -- of teacher comments on student papers.

He could still picture the comments written on some of his high school and college papers by teachers who encouraged him. But what happens to those students who do not receive such encouragement? How can we honor what every student brings to the writing table and avoid disparaging comments that lead to feelings of ineptitude or fear? How do we improve writing in our schools and address curricular concerns? How do we encourage our students to become their own first critical readers? How do we help them to see themselves as writers? We set up a writing center, throw open its doors, and invite writers in for a conversation about writing.

The three of us started writing centers in spaces that were underutilized in our schools and then proved the value and need for our centers. All one really needs to start a writing center is an idea of what that writing center will be. In Teaching Lives, Wendy Bishop uses Hemingway’s words, likening the writing center to “a well-lighted place.” Stephen North’s “Idea of a Writing Center” gives all of us a great starting point as well. Both Bishop and North point to one of the most critical elements of a writing center’s success: its mission. How will the writing center benefit students?

Faculty? The school community? Will the writing center be a location or something more metaphysical that can “travel” around the school? What role will the writing center play in improving writing and writing instruction in the school? Should the writing center concern itself with improving the reading skills of writers?

For the three of us, Donald Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing has had an impact on the methodology we use. Murray’s approach to conference teaching, which he cites as the best way to teach writing, takes a collaborative, non-directive, “responsive” approach.

Muriel Harris asserts, “The writing teacher in a conference is like a coach working with the writer through all the ‘ings’ of writing–thinking, planning, drafting, revising, editing–even these occur almost simultaneously” (9). In fact, one of the things writers learn during conferences is that “the process” is not a step-by-step approach as the textbooks imply, but rather a process more akin to discovery, a recursive process that leads a writer in one direction, only to discover an intriguing new one. There is no better place for this discovery to take place than during a writing conference.

In Expecting the Unexpected, Murray writes that those “who want to improve writing must learn to commit an unnatural act: listening” (113). Listening is what we do in writing centers and how we can help teachers who have more students than they can instruct

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The Secondary School Writing Center • 24 individually and little time to listen, question, and respond one-to-one. Murray describes a similar situation: Again and again I was confronted with papers that were rhetorical and linguistic catastrophes. I not only had nothing constructive to say, I had nothing destructive to say. I couldn’t understand the drafts well enough to attack them. But when I gave students a chance to explain what they had intended and what they did, and why, I always found that there was a theory or a misunderstood instruction or an inappropriate rule that caused the disaster. They knew what they were doing and why, and once they knew, they knew that they could suggest better ways of working in the future. (131) For the three of us, that better way of working on writing has been through a writing center.

Works Cited Bishop, Wendy. Teaching Lives. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1997.

Bruffee, Kenneth A. “The Brooklyn Plan: Attaining Intellectual Growth Through Peer-Group Tutoring.” Liberal Education 64 (1978):447-68.

Elbow, Peter. “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process.” College English 45 (1983): 327-339. Rpt. in The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook. 2nd ed. Eds. Gary Tate and Edward P.J. Corbett. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 219-231.

---. Writing with Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

---. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Farrell, Pamela B. The High School Writing Center: Establishing and Maintaining One. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989.

Farrell-Childers, Pamela, Anne Gere and Art Young. Programs and Practices: Writing Across the Secondary School Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1994.

Harris, Muriel. Teaching One to One: The Writing Conference. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1986.

Murray, Donald M. Expecting the Unexpected. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1989.

---. Learning by Teaching. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1982.

---. “The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference.” College English 41 (1979): 13-18.

---. A Writer Teaches Writing. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English 46 (1984):433-46.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004)

EXISTENTIALISM IN THE WRITING CENTER: THE PATH TO INDIVIDUALITY Joseph Hill University of California Davis jshill@ucdavis.edu Being a philosophy minor and English major, I constantly look at interactions that take place between the different disciplines and ways in which life can be approached from a philosophical standpoint.

Existentialism is a philosophy that piqued my interest with its reliance on the precedence of the individual and the consequentiality of man’s choices. And like Jean- Paul Sartre once stated, I believe that “Existentialism must be lived to be really sincere” (47).

Working at the Writing Center at Sam Houston State University, I have discovered a way to incorporate existential philosophy into my interactions with students. Aspects of the versions espoused by Sartre and Kierkegaard are particularly applicable in my involvement with the various people that I tutored.

Their philosophies have allowed me to approach tutoring with a new outlook and profound enjoyment.

Soren Kierkegaard, forerunner of Sartre in the existential tradition, states that the existentialist individual has two duties. One is to contemplate his or her existence as an individual; another is to contemplate his or her existence as an individual in the eyes of society. The individual does not exist in a vacuum. It is only through both his or her facing the void/nothingness and making a claim by one’s interactions with it and others that existence is possible. Kierkegaard identifies this, then, as a fundamental duality in the existentialist individual.

There is the charming societal individual and the alienated individual who contemplates his or her existence with fear and trembling.

At the Writing Center, we all occasionally receive a horrible paper, a paper that makes us want to relinquish our tasks as tutors. But we don’t. We don’t because our interactions with these clients, even on the small level it is, defines both us and them at the same time. When student writers are alone, in front of that computer screen, they are undergoing Kierkegaardian fear and trembling stemming from their insecurities about their existence as both writers and individuals. But, when the students bring the papers to us, the tutors, it is our function to engage them, and force them to realize that they can exist as an independent and individual writer. Alone, they ponder with typical “fear and trembling” their existence, but in the presence of a tutor they are !

existing in the fullest sense of the word. Their individuality is reassured.

Kierkegaard also makes mention, in his work Point of View, of the individual and the crowd. The crowd, according to Kierkegaard, is the untruth and the prevailing attitude of the masses. The crowd is the Roman mob, easily swayed and intimidated by the individual. The individual, on the other hand, is truth.

Due to this realization of the simplicity of his or her freedom, the individual exists fully on his or her own, coming to his or her own truths. This freedom draws its power from the ability to choose.

As a tutor, I must realize what the driving force behind tutoring is. For me, it is the making of individuals. Helping people to think and to question their own writing and their prospective abilities as a writer is paramount. Writing, to hear some of the clients tell it, is something they are never going to be good at. “Writing sucks.” “Writing is terrible.” “I can’t write.”

This is the attitude of the crowd. It is the crowd that has forced the students to adopt this attitude. And it is the crowd, this influential power, that students must abandon. The crowd does not think, it merely acts. And writing is a process of intense thought.

Writing is a process that scares the crowd, due to the intense examination and re-evaluation of self that accompanies it. Through tutoring, we teach students to lose the excess baggage of the crowd and become truly self-confident writers.

Most students struggle with self-doubt. And it is this attitude of self-doubt that pervades through a majority of students’ psyches. But, through subtle nudges in the right direction, we tutors allow the students to re-evaluate themselves constantly. By doing this, by engaging them in a dialogue about their writing, we allow them to create a unique self, a self that has gone through the internal discourse and thought development that is accomplished by writing.

There is also Sartre’s brand of existentialism, which is often looked on as a philosophy that condemns life in general. However, in all actuality, rather than condemning life, his philosophy condemns the individual to be in control of the burden of his or her own freedom. It resurrects the individual and forces him or her to cast off the essences that enslave.

Existentialism in the Writing Center: The Path to Individuality • 26 According to Sartre, “Man is condemned to be free...man is free...man is freedom” (295). Each individual, after realizing that one’s actions are limited to one’s individual will, experiences despair to some degree. This despair, in turn, leads to a corresponding positive abandonment, when the individual realizes that there is no higher power and that he or she is free to control his or her own life. Sartre puts it best by saying, “In fashioning myself, I fashion man” (292).

The existential individual also constantly faces the void: being free to define himself or herself, the individual must constantly face the void or nothingness in order to exist actively.

Sartre gives an example of a man asking for his advice about a major decision. Sartre answers the man’s query with a single word, the only word with which he feels he could answer: “Choose.” The man is thus burdened, so to speak, with the freedom of choice. Many times in the Writing Center a student will ask as blatantly for your advice. “What should I do in this case?” “What does the teacher really want?”

“What will get me an A?” (“Write my paper for me.”)

As tutors, we can only answer them as Sartre would, by freely offering them the option of choice. We must say “Choose.” Choose what you, as a student, think works. Choose what you think will earn you an A. Choose what you think the teacher wants. Like Sartre, all we can really do for students is to have them explore their options. We can guide students to the path to choice.

With this newfound freedom, students may then undergo a period of despair and an overwhelming sense of abandonment. They might enter into an intellectual stasis, not quite yet free to define themselves, not quite fully free to choose, yet still feeling that they have a freedom of choice. Of course, they are abandoned only in the sense that their writing ability now exists within them as their choice. It is our job as tutors not to show them what to choose, but to

guide them on the path to individuality, at least as far as their writing is concerned. Their writing must exist on its own, without any sort of cause or blame lying in the hands or at the feet of other parties.

Also part of becoming an individual, according to Sartre, ties into the concept of self- deception. This self-deception is the denial of one’s true existence and the subjugation of this existence beneath another existence. Sartre uses the example of a man who has become a bartender and has led himself to believe that his only existence is that of a bartender. In effect, the bartender lies to himself about his existence, his choices.

I often tutor many clients who begin the initial sessions with little confidence in their writing. So I ask them, “What’s your paper about? What’s your thesis statement? Do you understand the assignment?” And through the weeks, and often months, their papers improve. Their writing begins to take a more wellreasoned and clear shape, reflecting the thinking of a self- confident writer. That is to say that these students lose the crowd’s intellectual instability and have started instead down the path to individuality. Moreover, they are no longer in a state of self-deception as far as their writing is concerned.

Finally, the Writing Center has worked for me personally as an existential tool. One of the main premises of existentialism is the ability to act, but act within one’s means. Rather than protesting futilely about my responsibilities as a freely choosing individual, and affecting few in the process, I work at the Writing Center, slowly nurturing students towards intellectual confidence and individuality. Acting within my means I defy the void. I exist.

Works Cited Kaufmann, Walter. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian Books, 1956.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004)

AN OUTREACH FIRST Jennifer Cooper “How many of you knew there was a writing center that helped students with writing essays?” No hands went up. The response of this small group of Hispanic students, three in all, was the perfect motivation for our writing center to start an outreach program. During the first summer session in 2003, the Communication Skills Center (CSC) at Texas A&MCommerce began a small outreach effort to help ESL students enter the university. This “reaching out” to ESL high school students started as a way for them to improve basic writing skills under the guise of test preparation. Using computer-based practices enabled the students to connect with the tutor, the computer, and each other. This development created an opportunity for the writing center to play an integral part in not only preparing these students for impending standardized tests, but also developing a relationship with new students from the start It also promises many benefits in recruiting, mentorship, bridging departmental gaps, and writing across the curriculum.

The program began at the recruiting office. An ESL recruiter came to the CSC director, Dr. Shannon Carter, for assistance with potential students. In light of the growing Hispanic population, recruiting these students straight out of high school would only enrich the diversity of the campus. In a relaxed atmosphere, the students were brought to the CSC and introduced to the tutor.

College can be scary in and of itself for most students because it is so unfamiliar. For ESL students, the cultural and language barriers may multiply these fears. Because the tutor interacted with the high school students and guided them through the writing process for test preparation, the computer provided a shared medium for mentorship between the established writer and the basic writing student. After the tutor introduced practice essay questions and vocabulary builder exercises, students worked independently as the tutor stood by to observe their progress. Person-to-person interaction often took place when the students did not understand a word or its context. It was clear that the tutor was a vital part of the process both as helper and as cultural translator.

Accessing the technology was the first lesson for these future students. The second lesson was that a familiar face in a new and sometimes terrifying environment can mean safety and lead to continued success in the university !

system. The tutor as well learned the benefit of being able to relate to culturally diverse students.

Getting there was the first step for these students to establishing a long and successful relationship with the writing center. Interviews with one of the students following both his completion of the program and his eventual admission into the university showed that his tutor had become that familiar and friendly face. The writing center had played a significant role to familiarize him and other ESL students with this campus for future enrollment.

Because there seems to be a department for everything in the university system, you might ask, “Why don’t these students get this kind of help within the ESL program?” The answer is simple for TAMUCommerce: there is no official ESL program.

Therefore, the Writing Center is the place where the majority of ESL students receive the support they need to negotiate standard American academic discourse. The CSC helps bridge the gap between the isolated world of ESL and the rest of the university.

Writing Center staff and tutors have just as much to learn about the special needs and considerations of these students as the students do about writing at the college level. As a student without specific education geared toward ESL, this had been an exceptional learning experience for me as a tutor. It was also an added benefit to the student to communicate successfully with another student who did not have ESL training or bilingual skills.

Our purpose is to help students across the spectrum of curricula at the university, not just basic writers or English majors. The ESL students in our program are, in fact, an essential part of Writing Across the Curriculum. No matter where these students move within the education process, they will be connected to the writing center. Two of the high school students are now enrolled in the university and have been frequent visitors to the CSC over a span of two semesters. When asked if the program encouraged future participation, the answer was emphatically “Yes.” There is no doubt that utilizing the writing center has been a significant part of their studies thus far.

From this small introductory outreach program, it is difficult to determine if it was a success. As researchers generally understand, credibility comes from measurable numbers. However, Rogelio, one of the three former high school students who is now

An Outreach First • 28 enrolled at the university, expressed his satisfaction with the program. In response to the question of whether the program was helpful, he stated, “Yes, you will feel more secure to know what you are going to write. If [I] have questions, you can explain me what the details are and get an idea of what to write on.”

This was affirmation for me as a consultant.

Although this was a first run, the CSC has high hopes that future ESL students will feel more at ease in the writing center atmosphere and see it as an integral part of their educational experience. While the computer certainly was integral to the program at first,

in the end, it was the interaction between tutor and writer that has produced longstanding effects. The CSC’s outreach program has opened a door to benefit the university by encouraging and fostering new admissions, creating tutor-student relationships, emphasizing departmental interdependence, and supporting writing across the curriculum. It is my hope that this outreach will continue each summer and will grow to meet the needs of the increasing ESL population.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004)

WRITING CENTER AS CONTACT ZONE: MEETING ESL WRITERS HALFWAY Jared Bezet Paired with Jessica Murray's article (see below), Jared Bezet's piece theorizes the challenges of introducing ESL writers to standard academic English.

One role of the writing center in the American academy is to include the segment of the student population unfamiliar not only with American academic discourse, but also standard American English. Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone” and Muriel Harris’s “Individualized Instruction in Writing Centers: Attending to Cross-Cultural Differences” offer terms useful in this consideration.

These terms allow us to distinguish the writing center’s role from that of the composition classroom in student writers’ development.

Harris posits that many composition teachers are unprepared to recognize the pressures placed on students to conform to American academia. As writing consultants, we are aware that speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL) may follow different culturally-based rhetorical and grammatical processes.

However, many American composition teachers may not be familiar with this phenomenon, known as contrastive rhetoric. Awareness of contrastive rhetoric is what enables instructors and writing center consultants to help ESL writers situate themselves profitably within academic discourse.

ESL students may feel that their own ways of writing are wrong or undesirable because many composition teachers misunderstand the root of the writer’s difficulties. This situation results in assimilation in which the writer’s native rhetorical style and cultural identity become subsumed under and lost in the rhetorical style to which the writer is trying to adapt.

Pratt’s concept of the contact zone–“social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”–invites us to conclude that this policy of assimilation is patently flawed (607). The purpose of the composition classroom is not to create a uniform, monolithic understanding of the world.

Rather, the purpose of the composition classroom and the writing center should be one of acculturation, a process by which the writer becomes fluent in multiple composition styles. Acculturation never endangers the writer’s cultural identity by replacing it with something else: it can only ever expand and augment that identity.

Rhetorical style is a tool to be utilized according to the writer’s audience, and ESL writers should be allowed !

to add various culturally identifiable styles to their “toolboxes,” enriching their stylistic repertoires.

Encouraging writers to assimilate to any one style is reductive and also carries an implicit undertone of ethnocentrism that has no place in the academy.

Certainly human beings are more likely to reject a voice we feel is foreign, uncomfortable, “other,” but, as Pratt would have it, when envisioning the academy as a contact zone, we are not looking to comfort ourselves or to hide in “safe houses,” “social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression” (618). We are instead attempting to bridge a gap of meaning, to allow cultures to “meet, clash and grapple” (607).

Pratt’s terms are important because we must recognize language not simply as a way of communicating universally comprehensible and translatable ideas, but as a signifier of a cultural standpoint. We must remember, as Harris observes, that the way in which a writer constructs his or her thoughts is necessarily connected with the way a writer speaks and writes. With this in mind, asking a student to switch between ways of writing in cross-cultural communication is a daunting prospect, especially for a composition teacher in charge of an entire class.

This is the point at which the writing center’s attention to the individual becomes most significant. Rather than focus on grammar and spelling in a prescriptive “tutorial” mindset, the writing center’s goal should be to guide writers not so much in their ways of writing but in their ways of thinking. The individual attention that consultants in a writing center are able to invest in a writer lends unique authority to help students acculturate.

Giving credence to Pratt’s argument that systems of meaning-making will necessarily signify differently to members of different cultures (612-13), we can construct the writing center as a more controlled contact zone in which cultures must still struggle and grapple with each other in order to make meaning, but where this struggle is nonthreatening. Nonthreatening as it may be, the tutor/student relationship–much like the teacher/pupil relationship cited by Pratt–creates different cultures that keep us from directly understanding systems of meaning- making as the writer does. However, the conflict and oppositional

Meeting ESL Writers Halfway • 30 discourse that characterize the contact zone for Pratt can be ameliorated by a leveling of “highly asymmetrical power relations” in the writing center.

This can occur because the operation of the writing center is neither punitive (we don’t grade writers) nor prescriptive (we don’t demand anything of writers); it is merely suggestive (we only offer advice).

Harris recognizes this circumstance: “Writing center theory specifies that we do not ‘teach’ students anything, we help them learn by themselves” (107).

We do not force writers to conform to an ethnocentric system that labels competing systems of meaningmaking “right” or “wrong”; we offer alternatives to help writers within the American academy. The vocation of the writing center is giving credence and respect to the writer’s cultural identity, enfranchising the writer, providing a forum in which to be heard without fear of rejection or penalty. We must extend to our students an invitation into the cultural and

academic discourse, providing them with a social space in which their ideas and identities can be validated. By doing so, we can meet ESL writers halfway in their efforts, enacting what Pratt calls “the all-important concept of cultural mediation” (618).

Works Cited Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Ways of Reading. Eds. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. 605618. Harris, Muriel. “Individualized Instruction in Writing Centers: Attending to Cross-Cultural Differences.” Intersections: Theory-Practice in the Writing Center. Ed. Joan Mullin and Ray Wallace.

Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. 96-110.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2014)

WRITING CENTER AS CONTACT ZONE: RESOURCES FOR MEDIATION Jessica Murray Florida Atlantic University When ESL writers write, they are attempting to be heard in an academic community. One of the academy’s shortcomings is its disinclination to hear from writers who struggle with academic discourse. In a contact zone, such as a university that includes accomplished and novice academics, communication becomes a casualty (particularly with novices whose first language is not English). If writing centers and their staffs are the cultural mediators of this contact zone, then we must first be afforded the tools to do our work: a good text, skilled teachers, sufficient funding, and an un-marginalized place on the campus.

Irrespective of these resources, however, writing consultants can provide ESL writers with knowledge of contrastive rhetorics and how a failure to acculturate to demands for standard American academic writing may limit their success at the university level.

A contact zone featuring professional and beginning academics becomes particularly divisive when ESL students new to the rigors of academia feel obligated to assimilate to writing standards of an American university rather than acculturate to them.

This issue is especially relevant in the University Center for Excellence in Writing (UCEW) at Florida Atlantic University, where almost forty percent of the students utilizing the UCEW speak English as a second language. This statistic is consistent with FAU’s diverse student population, with forty percent of its students claiming ethnic and international origins.[1] In our writing center we frequently find ourselves working with frustrated writers whose only significant writing problem, according to an untrained eye, is that their first language is not English. It is easy for instructors untrained in ESL to write off non-standard English as laziness or as ignorance. Writing center consultants not only inherit stymied writers but are also expected to fix the problems. The writing issues some untrained teachers label as problems, ESLtrained consultants and instructors call differences. In this contentious difference of opinions, we wondered why ESL writers have not been included in the dialogue.

As contact zone mediators between ESL writers and the American academy, writing consultants help ESL students negotiate writing success in response to the university’s demand for standard American !

academic prose. As such, we tend to do as Muriel Harris suggests in her 1994 article “Individualized Instruction in Writing Centers: Attending to CrossCultural Differences.” In order to “attend to crosscultural differences,” Harris offers three guidelines for writing center consultants: 1. Look for patterns of thinking that seem at odds with accepted patterns in American discourse conventions.

2. Look for hidden or unarticulated assumptions.

3. Look for tendencies to create stereotypes in our thinking. (107-108) Diligent as her work is, there is a deficiency in Harris’s article when she considers “to what degree we ought to acquaint students from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds with the norms expected in the academic society they have entered” (108). Harris delegates the responsibility of “attending to crosscultural differences” exclusively to writing centers, consultants, and tutors. Yet, how do writing consultants enact Harris’s recommendations without using metadiscourse about contrastive rhetorics? This conversation between consultants and ESL writers may lessen the tension in the writing center contact zone because it includes them and mimics the activity of metadiscourse going on in universities. We recognize that this is neither an easy task nor a panacea. A conversation this complex, perhaps even unfamiliar, is not likely to be completed in a single session. We recommend, not unusually, that ESL writers make multiple visits to their writing centers where consultants can establish comfortable working relationships so that writers feel at ease in an environment exclusively devoted to writing.

To say that “Writing center theory specifies that we do not ‘teach’ students anything” (107) depends upon Harris’s definitions of teaching and learning. If, for Harris, teaching is a punitive and prescriptive exercise, she is correct in saying that it has no function in the writing center. However, teaching can be suggestive, a series of choices for students to make on their own. We see this kind of teaching as inherently applicable in the writing center, where writers are wholly responsible for what they “learn” during each

Resources For Mediation • 32 session. Metadiscourse is one strategy to suggest ways ESL writers can acculturate to the American academy so that the academy will welcome them. To overlook the conversation about contrastive rhetorics, however, is to inhibit a dialogue with the potential to inspire writers and encourage the learning process.

What is interesting about Harris’s work is that she very clearly sets up a metadiscourse in her text, Prentice Hall Reference Guide to Grammar and Usage. The rhetoric she uses in this grammar manual is carefully calibrated such that it avoids prescription, offering instead information about preferences in American academic writing. She writes to ESL writers about culturally based writing practices, making it a point to include them in her textbook. In this way, it functions as a specific incarnation of metadiscourse. Despite the shortcoming in her article, Harris’s Prentice Hall Reference Guide to Grammar and Usage becomes a talking point in this one because Harris’s text was the grammar manual selected by FAU’s Writing Committee to replace Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference. Scrutiny of the ESL sections in both manuals reveals interesting and subtle differences in the treatment of ESL writing issues, differences which make Harris’s guide more useful than Hacker’s in the context of writing center as contact zone.

While Hacker’s and Harris’s grammar textbooks each devote over twenty pages to ESL issues, Hacker’s chapter entitled “ESL Trouble Spots” suggests ESL writing issues are hit-or-miss problems, not indications of language differences and rhetorical patterns.

Harris’s more syntactically sensitive chapter “ESL” acknowledges contrastive rhetorics outright. In terms

of tone, Hacker’s writing inadvertently privileges nonESL writers over ESL writers. Hacker also writes about ESL writers not directly to them as Muriel Harris does.

In Harris’s ESL chapter, she directs these students to “talk with a tutor in the writing center” (249), in effect starting the conversation between ESL writers and writing center tutors. However, in her article, she does not illuminate ways tutors, consultants, and administrators could talk to ESL writers about ESL writing issues.

Because the grammar manual is an important tool in our consultations, it is important to us that it includes ESL writers and eases their acculturation into the American academy. This is why, at a widely diverse university such as FAU, Harris’s grammar manual is preferable to Hacker’s. Tutors and consultants can do more than simply reinforce the grammar manual’s rules and guidelines and look for differences between ESL writing and expectations within the American academy. What may bridge the gap between simply looking for differences and substantial rhetorical inclusion may lie in the discussion about contrastive rhetorics, which has the potential to offer ESL students an expanded knowledge of their rhetorical options.

Note [1]Most of these students’ primary language is not English, and the UCEW’s questionnaire indicates that our ESL writers list at least 28 different primary languages, not including English.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004) www.praxisuwc.com!

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004)

FEATURED CENTER Name of center: Community Writing Center Institutional affiliation: Salt Lake Community College Location: Salt Lake City, Utah Web address: http://www.slcc.edu/wc/community/ Director: Tiffany Rousculp Year opened: 2001 History: The basic idea for the Community Writing Center emerged during a tennis match. Stephen Ruffus, SLCC’s Writing Program Coordinator, and Stephen Goldsmith, then director of a non- profit neighborhood developer–Artspace, Inc., hit balls across the net and discussed how the college might share in Artspace’s new downtown development: the Bridge. Artspace was planning an entire neighborhood of mixed-income housing that would also house nonprofits, an art gallery, community radio station, a public meeting space and retail restaurants and shops.

Together, the two Stephens envisioned a home in the Bridge Projects for community literacy, run by the community college.

That was six years ago. The first step was to build a relationship between the college and Artspace. I was asked to develop a special-studies course through which students could create a newsletter to tell the stories of the neighborhood’s diverse past, present and future. Seven students started it all, naming the awardwinning newsletter Bridges: Building a Neighborhood through Story, collecting stories, and putting out the first issue. Artspace was able to use this newsletter–which has been produced once each semester for the past four and a half years--to raise over $1 million towards their neighborhood-building projects.

Building on this success, I spent the next three summers teaching writing for Artspace’s Institute of Art and Imagination. By doing this, I became part of the Artspace “team” and took the risk of moving fully into a different discourse community. Through this relationship, the CWC became a part of Artspace’s neighborhood, rather than simply a resident. The relationship was sound; as long as the college would support it, the CWC would find a home in the Bridge Projects.

It did, and we opened three years ago. At first, we fumbled through and found ways into the community, !

but we have since solidified into five separate programming areas: The Center, Individual Assistance, Workshops, Partners, and the DiverseCity Writing Series.

Sponsoring department, school, or organization: Funding provided through the Associate Academic Vice President of Salt Lake Community College. The CWC Director also serves on advisory board of the Writing Program Council, which also includes the English, Developmental Writing, ESL and Communication Departments and the Student Writing Center.

Number of consultations in the last year: • Approximately 500 individual consultations • Twelve workshops • Five Writing Partnerships • Forty members of the DiverseCity Writing Series Square footage: 1000 Services offered: • Individual Writing Assistance on any kind of writing, both at the CWC and in multiple offsite locations across the valley (libraries, computer centers, etc.).

• Writing workshops on a variety of topics for the public and in collaboration with community organizations.

• Writing Partners--long term collaborations with community organizations to create sustainable change through writing.

• DiverseCity Writing Series: a year-round, multi-group writing and publication program.

• The Center: access to word processing and email, a library, and meeting space.

Staff: • •

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Director: Full-time English Department faculty member.

Writing assistants: Typically between 5 to 7 part-time, paid staff.

Typically undergraduates, but also community members.

Volunteers: Approximately 20. Mostly community members, some students, and teachers.

Consultant Spotlight • 34 Interns: From 1 to 3 student interns from SLCC and our neighbor, the University of Utah.

serves, and individuals and organizations should be active participants in the education of their communities.

Clientele: Nearly 900 community members have used the CWC services over 4000 times.

2. Writing effectively supports the ability of individuals and organizations to participate in their communities and to reach personal and professional goals, and writing with advice and response from others is a way to become an effective writer.

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Education: The largest percentage of our writers have high school degrees/GEDs. The next largest group has bachelor’s degrees. The next, associates degrees.

We have worked with some people with only 3rd grade educations and others with PhDs. Common concerns: Resumes, memoirs, poetry, letters to legislators, grantwriting, journalism...everything.

3. Successful urban communities have thoughtful conversations about social and economic quality, acceptance of diversity, and peaceful relations, and thoughtful writing for others is one important way to promote these conversations.

Money Matters: The annual budget is approximately $140,000/year, hard-line funded by Salt Lake Community College. We have raised nearly $30,000 in grants and donations. We are just beginning an income stream through memberships and workshop fees.

Philosophy: Because writing effectively is a means to improving people's lives, the mission of the SLCC Community Writing Center is to support the writing goals of outof-school adults. We fulfill this mission by initiating and developing short and long term writing programs and projects and by collaborating with working alliances to identify ways that our resources can serve the community. The CWC also provides training and opportunities for college students and the general public to contribute to our mission.

We undertake this with the following assumptions about education, writing and community: 1. Quality education should provide alternative and on-going learning opportunities to the communities it

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004) www.praxisuwc.com!

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004)

CONSULTANT SPOTLIGHT Name: Marilyn E. Little

stop and ask for an explanation. We then rework the sentence together.

Age: A perennial 39 Writing center: College of Lake County Writing Center Grayslake, IL (A two-year college) School enrollment: 15,828 Year in school and area of study: I earned an Associate of Arts degree in Languages in 2003. I’m currently enrolled in an ESL for teachers certificate program.

Number of years working in writing center: Approximately three years.

Job title: Specialist Tutor Describe the work you do in the writing center.

My duties in the Writing Center include teaching English 104 students, who are mostly ESL students. I also tutor other students who are in college-level classes. Occasionally, I conduct tours of the Center for incoming classes.

Describe the training you’ve participated in.

During my first semester of tutoring, the faculty coordinator, Martin Ley, conducted a class in methods of tutoring. We also participated in workshops conducted by others in the field. The current faculty coordinator is Jennifer Staben, who will be completing her doctorate later this year. She has carried on the tradition of special classes and additional workshops.

Both she and the acting writing center specialist, Katherine Fiorelli, are on hand for consultation. I am currently enrolled in a linguistics course as part of a certificate program.

How do you normally start a consultation?

Normally, I begin a consultation by introducing myself and asking the student for his/her name and information about the assignment. I also like to have the student explain what her/his goals are for the paper.

Describe your consulting style. A method that has consistently worked for me is to read the paper back to the student. This way the student often finds her/his own errors. If a sentence isn’t clear to me, I

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My greatest strength as a consultant is . . .

Listening. Listening to the writer and asking for information related to the paper is very important. To complete a well-written paper it is important that the tutor has information about the assignment and the writer’s ideas on the subject.

My greatest weakness is . . . Being impatient. It is hard for me not to show my dismay when a student drops his/her paper in front of me and says, “Fix it.”

Many times the paper is due in an hour. Not much can be done within so short a time.

What I like about working in a writing center is . .

Being part of the Writing Center has given me a greater understanding of the problems newcomers to the United States face. They not only have to learn a new language, but also have personal struggles with red tape and a new culture. I am constantly amazed at the stories they tell of the trials they have gone through to reach our shores.

What I don’t like is . . . Not having continuity with students. My first tutoring assignment was in an ESL class. I enjoyed this class so much because I could see over time a group of students improve and find their own voices. I am now in the Writing Center and have a variety of students. However, I do have groups of students who are enrolled in a specialized course, English 104. This course is structured according to the students’ needs and consists of twelve one-hour sessions. It is gratifying to see them improve and to have them feel more comfortable as writers.

My oddest consultation was. . . when a student brought in an especially graphic and very controversial paper. I began reading the paper back to him and by the time I reached the middle of the first page, I handed it back to him and asked him to take the paper to another tutor. I felt that this paper was written for shock value and not to be informative.

What advice would you give to beginning consultants? My advice to a beginning tutor would be to relax and listen to the writer. Find out all you can about the assignment. Remember that in a thirtyminute session there is only so much that can be done when there are more than surface level errors. Try to

Consultant Spotlight • 36 help with the most important points, encourage them to return when revisions are done and be sure to never correct with a red pen or pencil.

What kind of writing do you do? I have written a paper and two poems that have been published in the College of Lake County journal, Prairie Voices. I am also working on a TV script and additional prose poems.

What else do you want to tell us about yourself?

My plans are to continue tutoring in the Writing Center while taking additional classes in ESL for teachers. I also wish to devote more time to my writing.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 2, No 1 (2004) www.praxisuwc.com!

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The Merciless Grammarian • 37

THE MERCILESS GRAMMARIAN The Merciless Grammarian spews his wrath on nasty problems of grammar, mechanics, and style.

Most Merciless of Grammarians, I was finishing up a paper on Athanasius Kircher for my history of science class when I decided to run it by two of my housemates. When one of them read it, she flagged the following sentence: Kircher went on to publish over thirty works on subjects ranging from hieroglyphics to magnetism.

She said I should write the thirty as a numeral (30), but when I passed the paper along to my other housemate, he said I should change it back. What gives?

Numerically challenged, Gregory Thomas Woolridge, Esq. Dear Challenged, How good to read the name of the Master of a Hundred Arts! How often have I pored over his subtle and ingenious diagrams, hoping to twist them to my own benighted ends. Your housemates, as you call them, seem to be pawns in a stylistic Cold War. Consider the superpowers: on the one side are the newspapers and their minions, on the other the vaunted scribes of academe. Various college writing handbooks have fallen in with either camp, now touting one approach to spelling out numbers, now another. Your first reader is in league with the journalistic powers. Associated Press style advocates spelling out whole numbers less than ten and using numerals for larger numbers. The American Psychological Association and theScott, Foresman Handbook have followed suit. Your second reader has cast his lot with the academic cabal. The Chicago Manual of Style prescribes spelling “whole numbers from one to ninety-nine and any of these whole numbers followed by hundred, thousand, hundred thousand, million, etc.” All other numbers are to be written as numerals. The Modern Language Association promotes this approach, as do the Penguin Handbook and the New Century Handbook. All styles, regardless of their allegiance, agree that numbers at the beginning of a sentence should be spelled out: Fifty feet is a long way to plummet to one’s doom.

So the choice lays before you, Master Woolridge: do you raise the monochrome banner of the press or the tweed oriflamme of the academy? Let context be your guide. Does your teacher prefer one style over the other? Would using too many numerals make your paper look like a ledger book, or would spelling out numbers slow the reader down too much? While I despise vacillation with a horror usually reserved for intestinal flukes, in this case I must leave you to your choice.

Ruthlessly yours, The Merciless One

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 1, No 2 (2004) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu!

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