by Jon Olson, IWCA President
Mid-morning on Saturday, 18 December 2004, many of us were shocked and saddened when we downloaded our email and read this on the wcenter online discussion list:

Candace Spigelman—who taught at PSU Berks and whose work focused on collaborative groups, intellectual property, and more recently, on the making of knowledge in rhetoric and composition—had surgery on Monday morning [13 December] to remove benign brain tumors. She died Friday [17 December] as a result of complications from the surgery. . . . Candace was asymptomatic and worked through the end of the semester. She had a good prognosis and had every intention of returning to teach in the spring. (Yancey quoting Jeanne Rose)

The news hit hard, especially for those of us who knew Candace as a friend as well as a writing-centered scholar. For those of you who did not know her personally, I am sorry you missed out on someone who was smart, personable, and blessed with an abundance of positive energy.

She was keenly intelligent—you owe it to yourself to (re)read her scholarship. And she was upbeat in a way that enhanced rather than detracted from her intelligence. O that everyone so smart were also so positive.

We need to keep her memory alive, for she was not only a remarkable spirit but a gifted scholar and teacher of writing.

I. I propose that we remember her AS A SCHOLAR: May we all be as well-read, thoughtful, articulate, and student-centered as Candace was. Her scholarly gifts coalesced in a gem of an article for jac, “What Role Virtue?,â€? where she demonstrates her student centeredness, her skill at being a student of her students. In the article, she analyzes a student paper, one in which the student argues for race-based segregation. Then she moves us through an important series of steps: she analyzes her response to the student’s racism, then the student’s response to her response, then the student’s revision in which he attempts to give his teacher what he thinks she wants. In unpacking the steps and the motivations and reactions embedded in each step, Candace helps us (her readers) reflect on values in writing instruction and on issues in pedagogy that come up when we try to help students and ourselves be virtuous. In so doing, she challenges the “postmodern reluctance to confront directly the rhetorics of intolerance, understood as individual world views or competing ideological positionsâ€? (322).

Here is just one of her insights I underlined in my copy of jac: “[W]hile our liberatory classroom efforts are aimed at showing students how to resist domination in society, from the perspective of many students, it is our critical pedagogy that needs most to be resisted� (337). It is the critical pedagogy that leads students to perform mimicry that she most wants to interrogate.

To read about some of Candace’s other scholarship, see the blog Rebecca Moore Howard started for people who wish to reflect on Candace’s work: http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/stepaside/archives/2004/12/candace_spigelm_1.html.

As a writing-centered rhetoric and composition scholar, Candace managed to bridge the boundaries that define us and too often separate us. She did not direct the writing center at her college, but she taught the training class for writing center tutors and for writing fellows. I have been long impressed with her ability to see the writing center as a center for writing. Although she was probably best known as a scholar within circles that tend to view writing centers as ancillary to classrooms as sites of teaching and learning, writing center work was always central to her concerns. Her published scholarship and conference presentations informed the work that goes on in writing classrooms and writing centers, informed them as parallel sites, not as dominant and subordinate sites of writing. In fact, she remained active and invested in a number of varied writing-related groups and activities. I first met Candace at a meeting for Penn State learning center directors, a group that proved to be just one bright thread in the brilliant fabric of her professional life. Of course, she was active at CCCC, but she was also a regular and active participant at writing center conferences such as IWCA and NCPTW. In addition, Candace was an important force in the professional writing major at the Berks-Lehigh Valley College (the only Penn State college to offer the professional writing major).

Writing center, learning center, composition program, professional writing program; CCCC, IWCA, NCPTW; student, tutor, teacher; classical rhetoric, critical pedagogy: for Candace, these were all essential parts of a greater whole, our field.

II. I propose that we remember her AS A TEACHER: May we not only carry on the spirit of Candace by reading widely and writing well, let us also care about the scholarly development of undergraduate students the way she did. You probably know of the journal Candace co-edited with her Penn State Berks colleague Laurie Grobman: Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric. It “seeks theory-driven and/or research-based submissions from undergraduates” on an interesting variety of topics, one of which is “peer tutoring in writing.â€? The 2003 inaugural issue had, among many articles, several of particular interest to writing center professionals and peer tutors: one on peer tutoring, one on a writing fellows program, and two on collaborative learning. See http://www.bklv.psu.edu/academic/pwrit/youngscholars/index.html.

Candace and I taught the same tutor-training course within Penn State’s system of twenty-four campuses—English 250: Peer Tutoring in Writing. May we all be as good a teacher as she was. I have two peer tutors this year in my Undergraduate Writing Center who were trained in her classes. They are solid in theory and practice. Tutoring practices and theories vary so widely across PSU campuses that when tutors from learning centers or writing centers at other campuses transfer to my campus and ask me for employment, I insist, with few exceptions, that they take my training class before they can work in my center—unless Candace Spigelman trained them.

The last time I saw Candace was 30 October at NCPTW, hosted by Centenary College in Hackettstown, NJ. If I have my facts right, she had taken twenty-three professional writing students to New York City to visit Simon & Schuster that Friday the 29th; then on Saturday she had brought around twelve writing fellows to the conference. When she came into the conference registration area Saturday morning, I was sitting at a long table near the central entryway eating a bagel with other writing center directors and tutors: fresh air came into the room behind Candace, literally and figuratively. After I hailed her and we hugged, the first thing she said was, “Isn’t Laura wonderful?” She was talking about the most recent tutor she had trained who was now my tutor. And then we talked about the other excellent tutor she’d recommended to me also, Adam. That seemed like such a Candace Spigelman moment: talking with high-energy positive regard about students.

Laura kept me informed of the sad news over the weekend. In her message that told me that “Dr. Spigelman has passed away,� she expressed a rekindled desire to publish as a scholar:

I have a question for you. This latest occurrence has renewed in me the need—and want—to get the independent study I did with her help published. I think I need to split it up into different sections, though, and I’m also not really sure who to send it to. Would you consider helping me out with this? I’m hoping it wouldn’t take too much of your time, but I really do want to try my hardest to get it published—for Dr. Spigelman. (Lawfer 17 Dec. 2004)

When Laura gave me permission to quote her, she added, “I hope every student is as lucky as I was to have a professor as caring and devoted as Dr. Spigelman. She motivated me to do my best and work beyond what is expected of . . . only a college sophomore� (Lawfer 23 Dec. 2004).

May thoughts of Dr. Spigelman renew in us all the need and want to publish our scholarship and to work beyond what is expected of us.

III. Finally, I propose that we remember Candace AS A PERSON: All of us who knew her know that her humanity and humility underpinned her successes as a scholar and teacher. In response to a message I had posted about what Candace meant to me and why, Kami Day wrote,

Candace and I were working on a couple of projects and had another one planned, so I was looking forward to a fruitful working relationship with her. But much more than that, we had become friends, and it’s the long friendship I was looking forward to that I’m missing already. Yes, I want to be like her too. She was remarkable.

May we all look to Candace as a model scholar, teacher, and friend.

* * *

Resolve is often seen as a cliche, particularly at the beginning of the year. Nevertheless, I hope our memories of Candace Spigelman will lead us to resolution. She represented the finest impulses within our field, whether you define “our field� narrowly as writing center work or broadly as rhetorical education in any setting. When we think of her, may it be at times when we resolve to be our best.

Works Cited

Day, Kami. Email to the author. 20 Dec. 2004.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Candace Spigelman.” StepAside. 18 Dec. 2004. Online blog. 21
Dec. 2004. .

Lawfer, Laura. Email to the author. 17 Dec. 2004.

—. Email to the author. 23 Dec. 2004.

Spigelman, Candace. “What Role Virtur?” jac 21.2 (2001): 321-48.

Yancey, Kathleen B. “Sad News.” 18 Dec. 2004. wcenter. 21 Dec. 2004.
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