THE EVERYDAY WRITING CENTER

A Community of PracticeBy ANNE ELLEN GELLER MICHELE EODICE FRANKIE CONDON MEG CARROLL ELIZABETH H. BOQUET

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-656-1

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments.............................................................11 Introduction..........................................................................52 Trickster at Your Table...............................................................153 Beat (Not) the (Poor) Clock...........................................................324 Origami Anyone? Tutors as Learners....................................................485 Straighten Up and Fly Right: Writers as Tutors, Tutors as Writers.....................726 Everyday Racism: Anti-Racism Work and Writing Center Practice.........................877 Everyday Administration, or Are We Having Fun Yet?....................................110Notes...................................................................................133References..............................................................................138Index...................................................................................142About the Authors.......................................................................145

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION And I forgot the element of chance introduced by circumstances, calm or haste, sun or cold, dawn or dusk, the taste of strawberries or abandonment, the half-understood message, the front page of newspapers, the voice on the telephone, the most anodyne conversation, the most anonymous man or woman, everything that speaks, makes noise, passes by, touches us lightly, meets us head on. Jacques Sojcher, qtd in de Certeau, xvi

Walk through a morning with us-we're out the door, heading to campus, strolling into the building, pulling out the office keys, and flipping on the lights. You know, the routine: turn on the computer, take off the coat, get to work. The voice mail message light blinks "Good Morning" in its own Morse code; the computer sings as it powers up, dinging one, two, twenty-five new email messages received. The clock continues its steady march toward the first class, and payroll must receive an accurate accounting of tutors' hours by noon today if checks are to appear in their boxes on Friday. These kinds of needs, and dozens more, demand our attention every hour. Yet it is all too easy to leave the writing center at the end of the day feeling complacent, believing that preparing a payroll, stepping in for a sick tutor, or even planning an upcoming staff meeting comprises the extent of our writing center's work. As necessary as these tasks are, we might be so consumed by them that we miss something else: the most interesting moments in our workday have probably not demanded our attention at all. As we shut off the lights and turn the key in the lock once more, we should wonder about the significance of all that we could have noticed in our everyday spaces: the role reversal of two of the writing center's prized action figures, Pokey and Shakespeare-Will, on this day, uncharacteristically, giving Pokey a ride. Pokey's skinny orange front legs are perched on the Bard's shoulders-a real switch in human-horse relations, a quiet surprise. Who did it, and why? The culprit, when finally identified, simply replies, "Equality." Or the scene composed of a bright red cardinal puppet, an all-too-realistic gun, and the Western literature anthology. Some kind of threat? A weapon waiting to be retrieved later? No, a "tableau," set up by one of the tutors, called "shooting the canon."

Our attention is constantly split between moments like these and the larger, louder issues that relentlessly nip at us, demanding our attention and response. In the face of institutional deadlines, we are tempted to relegate such moments to the backburner, to assume they are beneath consideration, amusing but not pressing. In our haste, we may fail to consider the ways these moments hint at the degree to which our tutors feel invested in the work of the writing center, the connections our tutors are making to their intellectual interests and to their lives outside the center. We may not capitalize, in other words, on the ability of everyday exchanges to tell us something about our writing centers as representing what Etienne Wenger calls "communities of practice." Perhaps we've lost our ability to slow down, notice, and consider most of the specific moments within the seemingly routine demands we are so often pressed to meet as directors. Arguing that our field has become "trapped in theory," Kurt Spellmeyer calls for us instead to turn to "an alternative so mundane that we have passed it over time after time in our scramble for sophistication and prestige. That alternative is ordinary sensuous life, which is not an `effect' of how we think but the ground of thought itself" (893-894).

In conversation with each other, the five of us realized that we wanted more permission, from one another, from our staffs, from our colleagues within our institutions and within our field, to practice what Michel de Certeau calls "ways of dwelling" in uncomfortable places (30), to embrace situations in which we and our tutors have been thrust. We wanted to bring the smallest moments of our work, thought about deeply, together with our largest institutional and intellectual concerns. And we sought ways to support ourselves and our staffs as we began that work.

Wenger explains, "We all have our own theories and ways of understanding the world, and our communities of practice are places where we develop, negotiate, and share them" (48). Through these communities, participants develop a "shared repertoire" (82) of practice, exchanges where there exists no "dichotomy between the practical and the theoretical, ideals and reality, or talking and doing" (48). To understand Wenger is to understand that multiple communities of practice intersect in overlapping spheres in each person's life each day. By the time you arrive at work, you have already interacted with members of several of your own communities of practice (whether you would call them such or not). Morning negotiations with your family, helpful hints from a trainer at your gym, meeting with faculty to discuss the choices for next fall's first-year seminar book-all of these moments place you in relation to others with whom you share what Wenger describes as "the dynamics of everyday existence, improvisation, coordination, and interactional choreography" (13). If you are reading this book, you are part of yet another community of practice: writing centers. Writing centers, as communities of practice, have a history of exploring the ways in which meaning is negotiated among mutually engaged participants, negotiation that "in practice always involves the whole person" (47). If we accept this characterization of writing centers, set next to Wenger's ideas, then we have to consider a philosophy of writing center work which is designed for learning, and as Wenger claims, "designing for learning cannot be based on a division of labor between learners and nonlearners, between those who organize learning and those who realize it, or between those who create meaning and those who execute it" (234). In other words, this design must be based on something other than the familiar stratification between directors and tutors, tutors and writers, directors and professors, peer tutors and professional instructors. Though all of these participants come from their own many sites of practice, within the writing center they become members of the writing center community of practice and, as such, should be viewed as learners on common ground. Lest you think us nave, we don't imagine we have succeeded in one paragraph in eliminating conflict, disagreement, competition, and disenfranchising hierarchical relations. Instead, we acknowledge that writing centers-like all communities of practice-are "neither a haven for togetherness nor an island of intimacy insulated from political and social relations" (77).

Writing center scholarship has long positioned writing centers as potentially insulated from these tensions-we often conceive of our spaces as safe houses, for example-and some fear the dissolution of community that might result from acknowledging tension; but avoiding this kind of work, according to Wenger, denies the potential of such tension-a tension that is dynamic, necessary and ever present. Although recent scholarship does address the tensions and challenges outlined above, the goal of such acknowledgment should not be, according to Wenger, to rid ourselves of these challenges, which would be futile and unrealistic, but rather to embrace the idea that "[d]isagreement, challenges, and competition can all be forms of participation" (77).

We cannot and are not advocating that "disagreement, challenges, and competition" should thrive in all forms and at all costs. In fact, it has long been acknowledged by scholars in our field that in the context of traditional schooling, this trio of factors contributes to the potentially alienating effects of typical instruction. Despite all our talk about collaboration and community, we walk through our classes, through our buildings, through our campuses, through our neighborhoods, disconnected from what matters to us. If we attempt to ignore these negative influences on our work and on our students, we reify troubling institutional impulses in other ways: participating in or somehow supporting rote training, standardized tests, and obsessive bean-counting, for example. How does the writing center function as an institutional space that lets us step in and speak to those matters? Could what Nancy Grimm terms our "good intentions" be keeping students from building on their own cultural capital in safe and productive ways? What about school matters? How do we make one another matter?

We believe we matter because of what we do. Wenger reminds us that "communities of practice are about content-about learning as a living experience of negotiating meaning-not about form" (229). And not about (filling out) forms. We look to Ivan Illich, who claims, "Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because educators insist on packaging instruction with certification" (11). As new staff education manuals land on our desks, as discussions of CRLA certification for tutors surface again and again and again on the WCenter listserv, we sense a move toward knowledge as containment, as commodity, and a move away from the genuine moments of collaboration that lead to knowledge-(re)creation. In some ways, this move toward certification simply reduces the complexity of tutoring, as de Certeau writes, to "the data that can most easily be grasped, recorded, transported, and examined in secure places" (20). Is it possibly true, as the author of Leadership Jazz, Max DePree, states, that "the health of an organization is inversely proportional to the size of the manual?" We worry about the degree to which the neatly-packaged representation of our rich, multi-layered, everyday writing center lives becomes a set of "symbolic practices that substitute for action all too easily" (Spellmeyer 894), and fear that we may, as Spellmeyer warns, be close to accepting symbolic practices in place of "actions that can lead to meaningful change" (894). Wenger echoes this in noting that "whereas training aims to create an inbound trajectory targeted at competence in a specific practice, education must strive to open new dimensions for the negotiation of self" (263). We want to envision a writing center that is, as Anne Ruggles Gere describes in her work on the literacy practices of 19th century women's writing groups, "constructed by desire, by the aspirations and imaginations of its participants" ("Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms" 80).

Rather than exchange pedagogical currency (a pre-fabricated script, for example, of a "model" tutoring session), our aim here is to articulate and elaborate the conditions under which writing center staff can be supported in their search to be in-the-moment-at-the-point-of-need knowledge producers in the writing center. In his book, Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre writes:

Where economy and philosophy meet lies the theory of fetishism. Money, currency, commodities, capital, are nothing more than relations between human beings (between "individual," qualitative, human tasks). And yet these relations take on the appearance and the form of things external to human beings. The appearance becomes the reality; because [people] believe that these "fetishes" exist outside of themselves they really do function like objective things. (178)

Throughout this book, we argue that we are guilty, in our writing centers as in our culture at large, of fetishizing the commodities-like time, normalized practices, identifiable policies-rather than focusing on the interactions between and among these categories. In contrast, we see the pedagogy for which we advocate as praxis compellingly situated in the relational-not as things, but as ways of acting with and for one another. We see the ways of knowing of which we speak as a gift to be passed on and passed around rather than as a form of currency to be exchanged.

In his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde writes that "in a group that derives its cohesion from a circulation of gifts, the conversion of gifts to commodities will have the effect of fragmenting the group, or even destroying it" (75). We seek in this book not to codify and prescribe, not to commodify what we have done and continue to do singly and together (a practice that we believe would reproduce the conditions of fragmentation and alienation Hyde warns us of), but perhaps to teach and "learn by faint clues and indirections" (Whitman in Hyde 280) and hence to "widen out the boundaries of our being" (Neruda in Hyde 281). We see ourselves united with one another and with the writing center community, not by virtue of shared mastery of a body of concretized practices, but rather by virtue of shared gifts.

This book is concerned with the betwixt-and-between state in which so much of our work must be done. As such, within and among chapters, readers will find theoretical explorations woven into descriptions of life on the ground in the writing center, as we make an effort to use the hows to illuminate the whys and the whys to illuminate the hows.

We ask you to think with us about what it might mean to revel in the in-between of everyday writing center occasions, to experience the time pressures of our days differently, to give tutors ways to truly inhabit the intellectual as well as the physical space of the center, to help them bring their most creative selves to the table during each conference, and to address issues of race and racism on our campuses. Rather than seeking agreement and rote responses, tutors can risk anarchy and opt for ebullience, as Ivan Illich observes (36). How do we make these conditions possible in our writing centers? For us, attention first to the everydayness of our work can uncover our communities of practice and make way for a learning culture to emerge. For example, our tutors wait for us to uncover their "messages" (why is Pokey riding Shakespeare?) and to use them as openings for shared laughter as well as for extended conversation about the details of their lives inside and outside the writing center. We in turn have to pay attention, in these cases and in countless others in the days, weeks, months of our writing centers' operations, to the not-quite-said, to the lived moments in the writing center and what they are telling us. By noticing these moments, we signal to our tutors that we are indeed present with them, attending to the subtleties of their writing center days. In our everyday lives in the writing center, moments like those we've cited above, the dozens to follow in this book, and the scores that had to be left out, remind us to keep both uncertainty and opportunity possible at all times.

LEADERS IN A LEARNING CULTURE

Parker Palmer writes in The Courage to Teach (1998) that: Community does not emerge spontaneously from some relational reflex, especially not in the complex and often conflicted institutions where most teachers work. If we are to have communities of discourse about teaching and learning-communities that are intentional about the topics to be pursued and the ground rules to be practiced-we need leaders who can call people toward that vision. (156)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE EVERYDAY WRITING CENTERby ANNE ELLEN GELLER MICHELE EODICE FRANKIE CONDON MEG CARROLL ELIZABETH H. BOQUET Copyright © 2007 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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