Centering the South African Writing Centre through Research and Collaboration

Such practices, or rules that we sometimes adopted them as, seemed to be at loggerheads with what was going on during a consultation.

I came into the writing centre quite by chance – an offer by my then Head of Department to ‘investigate’ the possibility of establishing a writing centre, saw me not just investigate, but rather immerse myself in the possibility – and our small faculty-specific writing centre opened just a few months later. Today, we are just a few months short of our eleventh birthday. Our location is not ideal – on the 17h floor of a twenty-three storey building we are not in prime location. Nor are we blessed with the resources that will allow us to function at our full potential. But we persevere – marketing ourselves as a safe and non-judgmental space¹ aimed at supporting students with their writing challenges – and I quote this from the 1000’s of fliers we have handed out on our campus in an effort to market the writing centre, count the feet coming in through our doors and validate our existence to the powers that be. As I familairised myself with the responsibilities of a writing centre coordinator and interrogated carefully the role and function the writing centre played within the faculty and wider institution, I quickly realized the importance of effective writing centre consultant training. Relying on the ample international literature available, I blindly adopted, in recipe format, what these experts advised. And here I hit my first concrete wall! Such practices, or rules that we sometimes adopted them as, seemed to be at loggerheads with what was going on during a consultation.

Months later, reading Nicklay (2012) was the typical ‘lightbulb’, ‘Aha’ moment for me. By this time, I also found myself grappling with the typical writing centre lingo – directive, non-directive, higher order, lower order, improve the writer, lore, or not lore, myths, anecdotal evidence or not – and the long list of seminal texts that I needed to read to be able to fully immerse myself in the discipline. And so began my sojourn into the realm of writing centres – the alternative space Brufee (1984; 2012) alluded to; that uniquely configured learning space (Sefalane-NkohlaI & MtonjeniII, 2019) that practitioners tell us are operating on the margins of their institutions, largely understaffed and underfunded – a point I will return to as I conclude.

Committed to improving the practices at our writing centre, much of my research has focused on the talk that takes place between consultant and student by analysing video-recorded writing centre consultations (see Bibliography). Writing centre literature often foreground theoretical and philosophical debates (Carstens & Rambiritch, 2020). While these make an important contribution to the field, it is crucial that these be extended and combined with practical strategies, advice, and examples that can be applied in the everyday work of the writing centre practitioner. The aspects interrogated include social justice; directiveness (a highly contentious issue in writing centres); politeness; humour (an aspect not written about in SA writing centres) and tutor roles (this research applies Campbell’s Hero’s Journey metaphor and Vogler’s mentor roles to the roles adopted by consultants). Such analysis is a valuable tool in ensuring context-specific solutions to the challenges our students grapple with, and in guiding the training of our writing centre consultants, allowing us to support the diverse cohorts of students at SA public universities, as opposed to relying only on research from places and spaces that may be different to ours.

This commitment to student development has been widely demonstrated by the somewhat small writing centre community in SA. Thus, today the South African writing centre (SAWC) community can boast of major strides despite its relatively short lifespan. Many, if not all, public higher education institutions host faculty and/or institution- wide writing centres, there is an ever-growing body of writing centre research published by SAWC practitioners, book publications, Special Interest Groups (SIGS), associations, colloquiums, conferences and postgraduate studies focused on the support provided in the writing centre. More than thirty years after the establishment of the first SA writing centre, the field of writing centre research in SA is close to firmly cemented. Established as means to provide support to the mass of students entering higher education post-democracy, writing centres are today respected student-centred structures, providing individualised writing support to both undergraduate and postgraduate students. In light of the critical space we hold in universities today, and in our student’s higher education journey, we recognise the imperative to ground our practices in evidence-based research, and to continuously reflect on existing practices to ensure that we provide solutions that speak to the lived reality of our specific cohort.

Equally important is the need to contribute to, and develop, a body of South African writing centre (SAWC) literature that speaks to the rigor of our research practices. I have mentioned elsewhere that while I believe that SAWC practitioners have, and will continue to rely on the research from the Global North, and other parts of the world, recognising that this has served us well and been the foundation of our practices, ‘the time is ripe for us as writing centre practitioners in the South African context to continue writing our own writing centre narrative, to grapple with context-specific issues and questions and to provide context-specific answers and solutions that speak to the lived realities of our students’ (Rambiritch & Drennan, 2023: xv). Now, as a realist, and a pragmatist too, I recognize how such lofty ideals can remain exactly that without action to spear them on. The last ten years that I spent working as a writing centre practitioner has seen me spearhead initiatives in this regard – some of which is shared in this post.

Inspired by writing centre communities across the world, we recognise too, the urgency for a community of practice within which practitioners can discuss and debate best practices, and advance knowledge-sharing, interaction and collaboration. Driven by the need to bring the members of this community together in one room to discuss challenges and successes in writing centre work, and to heed the call by various international writing centre scholars for research-driven practice, our writing centre was the first in the country to do so. A Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) grant from the University of Pretoria enabled Prof. Adelia Carstens (then HOD of the Unit for Academic Literacy), and me to host a colloquium in 2019 on the topic of Tutor training: the relationship between theory, lore and practice. History was made in that it was the first colloquium in SA to bring together writing centre directors and consultants from eight universities around a theme of common interest and concern. The keynote speaker of the event was Professor Terese Thonus from the University of Baltimore in Maryland, in the USA. She adroitly connected the primary strands of the colloquium theme into her presentation titled Connecting research and best practices in tutor training in US and global contexts. A second much larger grant from the South African Digital Language Resources (SADiLAR) afforded us the second opportunity to host a writing centre colloquium as part of a larger conference under the theme: Multilingualism and curriculum decolonisation in higher education: Reflecting on decades of academic literacy and writing centre practice in South African higher education and beyond. This colloquium, held once again at the University of Pretoria in September 2024, saw us bring together a host of writing centre directors and tutors, representing SA universities and universities of technology. Our keynote speaker was Prof. Noreen Lape whose presentation entitled, How Multilingual Writing Centers Can Advance Epistemic Decolonization, generated much stimulating discussion and debate. The many thought-provoking presentations by directors and consultants alike demonstrated attempts by practitioners to fully embrace multilingualism, and the much-desired transformation of the writing centre.

In the Introduction of the book I co-edited with a colleague (Rambiritch & Drennan, 2023), I began by stating that writing centres in South Africa have and continue to make great strides in the ongoing support of our students, having established themselves as fundamental to the development and success of our students despite our largely marginalised, understaffed and underfunded status; and that “through this collection, [however], we hope, as writing centre practitioners in the South African context, to move beyond the lamentations of our daily struggles and to instead foreground the resilience, flexibility and commitment of present-day writing centre work”. I believe that writing centres all over the world, have, and continue to demonstrate this resilience despite our failed budgets, this flexibility despite our challenges and this commitment despite our marginalization.

As a last and final point, and in keeping with my imperative to contribute to a body of SA writing centre research, I believe that our strength as a community lies in the solid foundation we lay for ourselves through the context-specific research we conduct, and the national and international networks we create, both of which will, in the long run, sustain and guide us.

References

Bruffee, K. A. (1984). Collaborative learning and the “conversation of mankind.” College English, 46(7), 635–652.

Bruffee, K. A. (2012). Peer tutoring and the “Conversation of Mankind.” In V. Villanueva, (Ed.) Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, 3rd ed. National Council of Teachers of English: Urbana, IL. 415-436.

Nicklay, Jennifer (2012) “Got Guilt? Consultant Guilt in the Writing Center Community,” Writing Center Journal: 32(1): 14-27.

Carstens, A. & Rambiritch, A. 2019. Writing centre colloquium: first of its kind in South Africa. [Online] Available: https://www.up.ac.za/unit-for-academic-literacy/news/post_2850596-writing-centre-colloquium-first-of-its-kind-in-south-africa. Accessed: 15 October 2024.

Sefalane-Nkohla, P. & Mtonjeni, T. 2019. “We are not a ‘fix-it shop'”: The writing centre as a uniquely configured learning space. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus (SPiL Plus), 57, 1-23.

Bibliography

Rambiritch, A. 2018. A social justice approach to providing academic writing support. Educational Research for Social Change, 7(1): 46-60.

Carstens, A. & Rambiritch, A. 2020. Theoretical grounding of writing centre practices: A foundation for tutor training. ƒ Journal for Language Teaching, 54(1):233-247.

Rambiritch, A. Alston, L. Graham, M. 2020. Diagnosing with care: The academic literacy needs of Theology students. In Weideman, A. Read, J. & du Plessis, T (Eds), Assessing Academic Literacy in a Multilingual Society Transition and Transformation, Multilingual Matters Publishers, 84.

Rambiritch, A. & Carstens, A. 2021. Positive politeness in writing centre consultations with an emphasis on praise. Language Matters, 52:2, 72-95.

Carstens, A. & Rambiritch, A. 2021. Directiveness in tutor talk. Perspectives in Education, 39(3): 151-168.

Rambiritch, A. & Carstens, A. 2022. Good feedback practices related to asynchronous online writing support in a writing centre. The International Journal of Literacies, 29(1): 27-42.

Rambiritch, A., Carstens, A., Prinsloo, S. and Janse van Rensburg, Z. 2022. Skryfsentrumpedagogiek. In: Carstens, W.A.M. & Van Dyk, T. (Eds) Toegepaste Taalkunde in Afrikaans. Pretoria: Van Schaik. 

Rambiritch, A. 2022. Humour in writing centre consultations. Journal for Language Teaching, 56(2): 1-21.

Rambiritch, A. & Drennan, 2023. L. Invoking the Mentor. In Rambiritch, A. & Drennan, L. (Eds), Reimagining writing centre practices: A South African Perspective. ESI Press.

Rambiritch, A. & Drennan, L. (Eds). Reimagining writing centre practices: A South African Perspective. ESI Press.

1. Rambiritch, 2023. A. Navigating the social turn: Reimagining space and safety in the South African writing centre. SKRIB, 1 (1): 1-22. ↩︎

Rambiritch, A. 2024. Reimagining our space: Taking social justice principles online. SoTL, 8 (1): 206-226.

Rambiritch, A. Angu, P.E. & Paulet, E. 2024. Envisioning a multilingual writing centre. Perspectives from writing centre consultants during a training workshop. In Monwabisi K. Ralarala, M.K., Pillay, S., Bock, Z. & Kaschula, R.H. (Eds) Unlocking the chains of knowledge. African Sun Media. 264-287.