Let’s Talk: Writing Centers in Oppositional Spaces

Writing center studies has long had to respond to criticism from those who fail to understand our mission (or worse, impose their own mission on us). Our most cited article, which I don’t even have to name for you to know exactly the one I’m talking about, is centered on misunderstanding. Other well-known books in the field, such as Noise from the Writing Center, also frame their work around it. As these works age, they remain critical in our continuing discussions with finding our space in the academy. Do I wish an article published in 1984 clearly delineating the aims of a writing center was less relevant than it still is? Well, yes. I think many of us have compartmentalized our thinking, though, into two branches. We have our public-facing responses to the academic community, and then we have how we talk to each other.

All writing centers are different, and the missions of writing centers vary all over the world. A center that caters to L2 writers will have very different expectations than one that serves a population of native speakers. There is a tension, however, that comes up sometimes, when our colleagues at our own institutions misunderstand our work, no matter the kinds of students we serve.

At a conference recently, I joked with some colleagues that I’d like to hold a panel on the absurd emails we get, from those asking us to grade papers to those concerned about how we arrange our furniture. We commiserated over the silliness of it all, and felt better about not being alone. It’s not always this easy, though, because on occasion the misunderstanding spills out into the U.S. news. Once, conservative provocateur Tucker Carlson spent a segment talking about one of the Purdue OWL’s handouts on avoiding sexist language. The handout had been available on the OWL for the better part of a decade and the issue settled, all but universally among academics, decades before that. Carlson knew this, though, and was just creating outrage on what was surely a slow news day. Around the same time, the University of Washington-Tacoma writing center, then directed by Asao Inoue, was attacked by some right-wing journalists for advocating for language rights. Again, this is hardly a controversial opinion in the field, but this didn’t matter to these writers any more than Carlson cared that non-sexist language hasn’t been up for debate among any serious academics for some time. I don’t think, though, that we should lose sleep over this kind of bad press (and there is definitely bad press). There’s no interest in engagement. It’s outrage manufacture, designed to drive traffic to websites and cable news networks. It’s a big deal if you show up on a major news channel but the response is similar to our responses within the academy. The stakes can be higher, since it’s a much larger audience, most of whom watch or read these sites to affirm things they already believe, but the answers are pretty similar. We then return to our writing center communities, vent a little, and get back to the work of helping students find their voices.

And so a forty-year old article remains central to writing center studies and our public-facing conversations focused on the basics of our work remain relevant. We may make inroads with a lot of our colleagues on individual campuses; we develop relationships and find allies to support us in the day-to-day life as writing center professionals. We don’t convince everyone, though, and sometimes stories pop up in places closer to home than prime time news – the higher education journalism beat. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed return to some version of the “kids these days” story about twice a year, it seems to me, publishing articles or opinion pieces that reveal a fundamental lack of understanding of writing centers, composition pedagogy, or both. One article several years ago (that I will not link here) even interviewed a writing center director and then substantially misrepresented what they said, making a salacious story out of some innovative and compelling writing center work. They eventually published a response from that director, but those kinds of responses don’t get attention from readers. The headline for the original was news for a day or two, picked up by those who already look down on writing centers already, who could then say “I told you so,” and then forgotten, leaving directors to reestablish credibility. I remember this vividly; I was applying for my current position, at a school that did not have a writing center, and there was some resistance to the idea that it was necessary, so I went to my campus visit prepared to address the question.

I think there are two reasons why these articles keep coming up. One, they feed the narrative of contemporary college students being unprepared or unwilling to work hard. More importantly here, though, is that it shows that other academics have a resistance to recognizing writing center work (and to a lesser extent, first-year writing) as a legitimate field of study.

So it was when The Chronicle published “Against Writing Centers” earlier this year. The WCenter listserv lit up. The conversation—the private, in-community one—was frustrated, angry and ready to lash out. After a day or two, the IWCA decided, wisely, that there was no need to respond. The writer, Blake Smith, admits in the piece that he is often a polemical essayist. He and The Chronicle need clicks, just like major news channels do. A portion of his aims was drive an outrage machine. The Chronicle’s readers tend to be quieter in their outrage than Tucker Carlson’s viewers, but it’s the same thing.

Smith’s article felt worse because he said the quiet parts out loud. Referring to writing center work using terminology like “what passes for scholarship” is, at best, dismissive. More importantly, it’s ignorant. As is always the case, the problem isn’t saying the quiet part out loud; it’s having a quiet part at all. It reveals a profound unwillingness to learn. Writing centers are in good company, though; elsewhere in the essay he dismisses Aristotle as irrelevant. In place of these, he substitutes a vague sense of style, and in doing so implying that there is a single appropriate style for academic writing.

Part of me wants to give Smith credit for at least saying it out loud. The endless questions from those who choose not to learn do the same thing, but without the Smith’s transparency. We’re regularly asked why a student’s paper isn’t a polished, sophisticated argument after one thirty minute appointment, even though we give regular explanations of how our work works. Professors sometimes refer to student writing using racialized pejoratives, showing a continued failure to accept even the possibility that there are multiple grammars. The frustrating thing isn’t that people have questions. We like questions in writing centers. It’s that the questions are loaded, and Smith diagnoses the issue himself: “Most instructors never set foot in the writing center or learn anything about its practices and pedagogical theories.” I generally trust that our hopes for our students are the same across campus. With a visit to a writing center and a conversation—one of our strengths—we could come to understand one another and work toward that goal together.

Photo by Raychel Sanner on Unsplash

About the Author

Dr. Graham Stowe is the Director of the Writing Center at Canisius College. He has been a guest author for the blog’s column “Dear CWCAB”. Dr. Stowe specializes in writing center theory and composition pedagogy. He has taught first-year writing courses with focuses on education theory, cultural studies, and the Harry Potter novels. He has also recently taught upper division courses on writing center theory and practice, the teaching of writing, and American literature. Writing is central to each of Dr. Stowe’s classes, both as a way to learn course material and to help students grow academically and personally.