Book Review

by

MaryAnn Crawford, Ellen Schendel, Barbara Toth

MaryAnn Crawford is the Director of the Writing Center/Basic Writing and University Writing Program and a Professor of English at Central Michigan University

Ellen Schendel is an Associate Professor in the Writing Department, and the Director of the Fred Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors at Grand Valley State University.

Barbara Toth is the Assistant Director of the Office of Academic Enhancement and the Writing Center Coordinator at Bowling Green State University.

Marginal Words, Marginal Work?: Tutoring the Academy in the Work of Writing Centers. Eds. William J. Macauley, Jr. and Nicholas Mauriello. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc. 2007. 277 pages. Index. [27.50] ISBN 1-57273-770by

Introduction
This collection represents the testimonials of writing center workers claiming the current writing center predicament: Catch- 22s, struggles toward disciplinary recognition, and celebrations. As the title Marginal Words, Marginal Works? suggests, the testimonials situate current writing center praxis relative to often marginal and inferior positioning of writing centers within academia. They also speak to some advantages of marginal positioning but also to the dangers of passively accepting life on the margins as destiny. And, yes, the testimonials speak about the recognition and success of their work as well as the work that still needs to be done.

Encompassing fifteen different articles, this book is anything but marginal. The question mark in the title captures the point: despite (or perhaps “in spite of”) the lore of writing centers as marginalized, e.g., housed in garrets (or basements), underfunded, and fighting fix-it shop and remedial identities, this collection suggests that writing centers have arrived on the academic scene (and possibly elsewhere, although the articles in this book speak only to academic settings). If these articles are any indication, writing centers are prominent and visible in their institutions, and, if not exactly at their respective centers, then at least in the middle of a wonderful mix of ideas and practices that foster writing and learning. Perhaps, as Ben Rafoth suggests in his foreword, “our words and work are on the move and quietly leading the academy” (x).

This book asks us to reconsider this notion of “margins” and sets up a conversation to that end – a Burkean parlor that one can enter in medias res. The editors do not mention any kind of organizational pattern, and that absence reinforces the sense that the articles are “speaking” to each other and to us, about who we, and they, are. Like most good conversationalists, the authors reveal things about themselves and their centers while giving ideas for what other centers might want to become. There are many such ideas offered. A reader can dip in and out of the book, reading early, middle, late, backward or forward, and come away with an understanding of how another center functions, of practical ways of designing or redesigning a program, and of the current issues in our profession.

While the book as a whole examines the work of writing centers in a variety of configurations and contexts, some themes appear while reading it. Loosely, the three themes we consider are: identity within institutional contexts, expansion and collaboration, and the importance of viewing writing centers as more than service facilities.

Identity at Heart

MaryAnn K. Crawford

This book suggests various definitions for “margin.” As a writing center director, I thought about the tension between margins and centers as metaphors for what we do. I remembered a conference session ten years ago devoted to the benefits of living in the margins. I thought about the meaning of “being marginalized” and the difference between that meaning and the notion of “having margins.” Being marginalized implies a victim, while living within margins means defining who we are and what we will and won’t do. I found such identity work explicit in chapters 1, 4, 9, 12, and 15.

The book begins with the way stories shape identities. In “Why There Is No ‘Happily Ever After’: A Look At The Stories And Images That Sustain Us,” Melissa Nichols reminds us of an all too familiar origin story: once a upon a time, there was created a writing center to take care of students who just couldn’t write; it was hidden away in a basement (or garret), with few resources and an underpaid staff (2). Subsequent metaphors such as “midwife, parlor, wife” continue a feminine, subservient view of writing centers. Instead of feminized spaces, Nicolas advocates rearticulating writing centers as feminist. She encourages us to be activist both on campus and in our professional relationships: identifying the stories that encode us, examining our relationships to composition studies, agitating for more recognition, moving from directive/nondirective pedagogy to thinking about a rhetorical framework, finding those whom we do not serve and then deciding how we can. While these strategies will not necessarily lead to “happily ever after,” we can begin to tell new stories that will better support an adult identity for writing centers, one that looks toward the promise of future generations of students, faculty, and professionals.

Chapter 4, “Situated Learning in the Writing Center,” by Neal Lerner, is one of my favorite pieces in the book. Thinking about my reaction, I realized just how important having a common language is to identity. I’m familiar with situated learning, the concepts are familiar and comfortable; the references Lerner cites are people I’ve read: Gee, Wenger. In this way, writing centers share “an affinity group” (57) across institutions. The ease with which I read brought home even more quickly Lerner’s point: that students also need to find such familiarities and writing center work can help them do so. Our tutors interpret the college world in which they and student writers live at the same time that they share the intricacies of writing. Much like the conversations represented in this book, writing centers provide a “parlor” in which talk of writing and learning (in whatever discipline) can take place. Rather than marginal, writing centers are at the heart of a particular kind of learning opportunity, one rarely if ever available otherwise.

Chapters 9 and 12 both focus explicitly on issues of identity. In Chapter 9, “Two Centers, Not One,” Derek Owen questions writing centers as being a “service.” While a center obviously performs a service, to the students and to the university, it is not “only” a service, he claims. In fact, Owen suggests, centers do something much more important and much more subtle: they do the cultural work that underpins an institution. As sites of multi-disciplinary learning, often incorporating multimedia and current technology, writing centers are at the forefront of the critical and creative literacy learning crucial to education today. Similarly, Jennifer Beach (Chapter 12) examines the roles writing centers are assigned by their institutions and that they assign for themselves in relation to the ideals of the profession. She brings Goffman’s notion of “underlife” (198) to her analysis. Here, Beach looks not so much at what people say about her center as at how identities are encoded in the very documents used to report writing center work. I wanted to revisit my annual report immediately.

The book ends, appropriately so, with a success story – of sorts. In the final chapter, “Expanding the Center: A Narrative about Resources, Roles, and the Right Tutors,” Terry Myers Zawacki notes the benefits he sees in being director of both the writing center and the writing across the curriculum program, especially in leveraging resources. The combined existence of the two programs under one identity also meant that he was the go-to person when his college’s new campuses wanted to cash-in, so to speak, on providing the same benefits for their students. The difficulties he encountered across campuses remind us of centers needing to be responsive to local needs and pressures. This article, as do many others in this collection, illustrates the extent to which our writing centers are part and parcel of the local cultures in which we, and they, exist. And yet, despite such local exigencies, the ease with which these articles speak to me and for me points out that we are also part of a larger but equally important professional identity and conversation. This book is a fine example of just how vibrant such conversations are today.

Moving Out Into the Larger Community

Ellen Schendel

This is the sort of scholarship I enjoy reading. The chapters in Macauley and Mauriello’s book make important theoretical and disciplinary arguments about the centrality of writing center work to teaching and learning, and they give readers innovative models to follow in planning how to make their writing centers more proactive on their campuses. Its positive, can-do tone is inspiring and motivating.
The five chapters I examined share the themes of expansion and collaboration, of moving the writing center outward, into other classrooms, other programs—into the thinking and teaching and learning of students and faculty across the university.

“Exporting Writing Center Pedagogy: Writing Fellows Programs as Ambassadors for the Writing Center” is the story of the University of Iowa’s fellows program, and it’s centered on the idea that the writing center can be a force of profound change. In fact, the final section of the article is titled, “The University as Writing Center,” underscoring the potential Carol Severino and Megan Knight see for connecting writing center pedagogy and staff to other programs on campus.

Collaboration: Accountability as We Move Beyond the Center’s Walls” is the story of yet another fellows program, that of the Illinois State University writing center. It’s a celebratory (and yet cautionary) tale about the possibility and limits of bringing the collaborative spirit of the writing center into the realm of classroom-based work, in which tutors lead peer response groups and therefore realize a collaboration, of sorts, between the writing center and the classroom instructor.

Muriel Harris’s “Writing Ourselves into Writing Instruction: Beyond Sound Bytes, Tours, Reports, Orientations and Brochures” is a useful essay that discusses the challenges writing center directors face in finding the right metaphor or description to promote the center’s services to such a diverse audience: students, composition faculty, faculty in other disciplines, administrators. Harris’s solution is to resist the sound byte, at least some of the time, by facilitating a workshop for faculty that connects their own writing processes to the way they go about assigning writing in their classes and addressing the problems they seem to identify in student writing. And Chapters 13 and 14 are problem-solving narratives as well. In “Encouraging or Alarming?” Jill Frey recounts how the writing center at Presbyterian College caught the attention of the college’s new president, and how that precipitated a series of opportunities for the writing center to become involved with a number of programs and initiatives across campus. In “Quietly Creating an Identity for a Writing Center,” Jill Gladstein describes how internal changes in the training and expectations of the writing center staff as well as responsiveness to the student culture on campus led Swarthmore’s writing center to reinvent itself—and she focuses on how these changes came about in subtle, though powerful, ways that very few people even noticed.

What I most appreciate about all of these chapters is the level of detail they include about their programmatic success and challenges. For example, Severino and Knight’s chapter on the University of Iowa’s fellows program describes the recruitment and training of tutors, their funding, the programmatic relationship between the writing center and the WAC program, and the duties/responsibilities of the fellows. An appendix includes relevant resources on beginning a fellows program as well as the cover sheet students are required to fill out before submitting their work to a fellow for response. Likewise, Harris gives
enough detail about the workshop that it would be relatively easy for a writing center director to offer something similar on his or her campus. The narration and analysis in the other chapters would help readers to anticipate a number of complicating factors in beginning and expanding a fellows program, changing the culture of the writing center from within, or following an administrator’s vision for college initiatives.

Perhaps with all these examples of proactive expansion and collaboration, more writing centers will seize opportunities to leave the margins of their institutional culture and become central to the teaching and learning that happens at their university and beyond.

After all, writing centers are powerful spaces. The offerings in Marginal Words, Marginal Works? make this fact clear.

In and Out of (the) Margins–But Not Just a Service Facility Anymore

Barbara Toth

Numerous articles in this anthology testify to writing center work across oceans, across research projects, across new purposes, across writing programs, and across tutor/faculty interactions. Implicit in all of these articles are strong arguments for active participation of writing centers in the construction of universities and against writing centers as mere service facilities.

Kate Chanock in “On Being a Colleague” writes from Australia describing successes that she has experienced with a faculty-based model that positions her writing center staff to interact with faculty as colleagues, rather than as service workers. Chanock cites “othering that contributes most to the sense of insult felt by writing tutors” (91) when the “multidimensional” (87) nature of writing center work is misunderstood or ignored.

Paula Gillespie, Bradley Hughes, and Harvey Kail in “Nothing Marginal About This Writing Center Experience: Using Research About Peer Tutor Alumni to Educate Others” speak powerfully and persuasively to the disciplinary recognition due writing centers. According to Gillespie et al., “We want to argue that once a writing center has ‘graduated’ peer tutors, it is no longer exclusively a service facility that provides tutoring for struggling writers” (37). The research Gillespie et al. have conducted, eliciting feedback from “graduated tutors” about the role writing center work has played in their post-writing center life, substantiates
their claims.

In “Institutionalizing Ethical Collaboration Across Difference In Writing Centers,” Christopher Wilkey and Donelle Dreese call for “a citizenship-driven writing center” as “an ethical one” (173). Wilkey and Dreese remind readers of Nancy Grimm’s postulation and write that “writing centers should move away from an autonomous model of literacy towards an ideological model that explicitly places texts into social and cultural contexts” (172). They claim that initiating such changes will “transform perceptions of the service role of writing centers.” According to Wilkey and Dreese, “At stake in making convincing arguments about the appropriate role of writing centers is nothing less than the status and the role of literacy as a genuine contributor to the values and mission of a university education” (173).

In “Dialogue and Collaboration: Writing Lab Applied Tutoring Techniques to Relations with Other Writing Programs,” Linda S. Bergman and Tammy Conard-Salvo describe what happens when they apply the writing center signature of collaboration to negotiate meaning with staff in the first-year composition and professional writing programs on their campus. Bergman’s and Conard-Salvo’s use of “ongoing professional conversation” (195) as means to cope with change and construct mechanisms for student success provide valuable examples for writing center administrators to learn from and emulate.

Crystal Bickford in “Inside Looking Out: Trading Immediate Autonomy for Long-Term Centrality” describes her center as one in which “tutors, students, and faculty are talking and negotiating writing and learning” (149). Bickford’s tutor-centered approach and ability to negotiate an internship by which a tutor received academic credits argues strongly against the perception of the writing center as remedial and operating on the margins of her university’s mission. Bickford warns that “working behind closed doors,” i.e., in the margins, “only increases the opportunities for negative speculation” (149).

In a sense, these articles are a call to work toward perhaps whole new spaces where ideas and language get forged into new meanings and maps. They call not only for context-specific re-modeling but also for a rethinking about how writing center professionals define who they are and where they work. As Nicolas reminds us in “Stories and Images That Sustain Us,” the Burkean parlor’s connections to “women and the home” (5) promote a feminine rather than feminist message that may be counterproductive to “creating an adult identity” (15).

These moving and resounding articles deserve a place on our physical, virtual, and mental bookshelves. Perhaps Ben Rafoth may be suggesting too gingerly in the introduction that writing center “words and work are on the move and quietly leading the academy” (x). I, along with Beth Boquet, would assert perhaps not so “quietly.”

The authors in this anthology present lucid and candid records of writing center struggles and achievements at the start of the 21st century. These articles are useful not only for writing center people but also, perhaps more importantly, for non writing center readers who are interested in viable models of collaboration, interested in persons not merely personnel. It is a call to non-writing center colleagues to work along side us to take responsibility for student literacies in more dialogic ways.