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Home » Archives » Spring 2008 (Volume 5 Issue 2) - Authority and Cooperation
From the Editors: Authority and Cooperation Spring 2008 / Columns
Praxis explores authority and cooperation in the writing center In this issue, Praxis takes a look at two forces operating at many levels of writing center operations: authority and cooperation. Of the two, the second perhaps plays a more straightforward role in thinking about writing centers, which are commonly thought of as safe spaces for cooperation, collaboration, and learning. Authority is more complicated. Those in the writing center world often see their work in opposition to the authority of the larger academic world. At the same time, they work to develop students’ authority over their writing (and perhaps do so by developing students’ competence in the discourse of the academy). Contradictions in these goals are accompanied by difficult questions about process. “Peer consultants” strive to be “nondirective” and not to usurp students’ ownership of their writing. But in practice the consultant’s authority is an integral part of the consultation. The key is to balance authority and cooperation, but the proper proportion of the two, and the way to achieve the right balance, are open to debate. The articles in our Spring 2008 issue contribute to this important discussion. Our Focus section begins with two pieces surveying major issues at the heart of the matters of authority and cooperation. Steven J. Corbett reviews influential arguments in the directive/nondirective debate, and Matthew Ortoleva looks at the benefits of student-centered versus text-centered consulting. Carol Hawkins and Tom Truesdell, meanwhile, consider the writing center’s role in students’ induction into the discourse of the academy. In affirming the importance of the writing center’s role in listening to students, Hawkins recalls her own struggles to assert her personal voice in the face of academic authority. Truesdell reexamines the influence of Kenneth Bruffee, suggesting that the methods Bruffee advocates might lead centers to mimic, rather than oppose, the authority of the academy. Finally, two Focus articles contemplate the ways in which authority and cooperation play out in email consultations. Andrea Ascuena and Julia Kiernan explore various strategies for encouraging collaboration in asynchronous email consultations, and Lori B. Baker looks at how targeted email consultations raise questions about “oversight” that can shed light on the consultant-student-instructor dynamic. Two Consulting articles look at the identity that consultants project in the writing center. Graduate student Elizabeth Chilbert writes of the challenge of balancing instructor and consultant identities, and undergraduate Samantha Mudd discusses the experience of being the only female consultant in her writing center. Glenda Conway considers how writing centers might take a liberatory approach to education in attempting to rescue students from apathetic attitudes toward academic writing assignments. And rounding out the Consulting section, Praxis interviews neuroscience student and UCLA Graduate Writing Center consultant Elizabeth O’Hare and visits two satellite writing
centers at San Marcos High School and the Hays County Juvenile Center, each sponsored by the Texas State University Writing Center. Our Training section contains four articles that approach the theme of authority and cooperation from a variety of perspectives. These articles focus on ways in which training techniques and management structures can influence writing center dynamics. Doug Dangler, Michele Eodice, Carol Peterson Haviland, Jill Pennington, and Tiffany Turcotte, using Robert Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t, examine how to spot, address, and overcome “asshole” behaviors with the goal of building a positive work environment within the writing center. Gayla Mills describes how she has fostered independence in her tutors through a hands-off approach to directing: de-centering authority and encouraging collaboration between tutors. Cindy Cochran explores writing lab pedagogy of the past in her search for ways in which grammar instruction can avoid being overly authoritative and, instead, promote lively, collaborative learning in the right setting. Finally, Alaina Feltenberger, in relating her experience with community and cooperation in building a high school writing center, discusses the need for more writing centers at the secondary level. Finally, in our Columns section, Praxis presents and discusses the results of a survey about authority and cooperation given to writing center directors. Praxis asked five writing center directors to describe their writing center philosophy, their center’s dynamics, their training methods, and the interactions between consultants and consultees in regards to our issue’s theme, authority and cooperation. Each survey is linked in its entirety to a Praxis editors’ column discussing the results. Kimberly Hoffman, Kanaka Sathasivan, Scott Blackwood and Lisa Leit, from our research group at the University of Texas at Austin Undergraduate Writing Center, discuss strategies for maintaining collaboration in consultations addressing local-level concerns such as editing and structural issues. Also in Columns, our very own Merciless Grammarian offers advice on when, if ever, one should use “scare quotes.” ‹ Featured Center: The Rattler Writing Center
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