Writing Center Pedagogy: A Pragmatic Process Theory

Ah, Writing Center Pedagogy – this is where I’ve come to feel most at home this semester, owing to my participation in the Writing Center Seminar. As Hobson points out and Keva reiterated in her presentation, there are likely as many methods of enacting Writing Center Pedagogy as there are Writing Centers throughout the country, and it is rare for professors whose students make use of this resource to understand either its activities or purposes. They often believe it is a “fix-it shop,” a place where students can get help to “clean up” their grammar and mechanics, but this is in reality generally one of its lowest priorities. In fact, within its literature, these concerns are often defined as “lower-order concerns” or LOCs. What most Writing Centers endeavor to do is to help students with the organization and development of their ideas, termed “higher-order concerns” (HOCs).

James Moffett puts forth a process-oriented enactment of writing center pedagogy in the chapter entitled “Learning to Write by Writing” in his 1968 Teaching the Universe of Discourse where he also explicates the importance of students interacting with other students: one “may write off the comments of a teacher … but when his fellow human beings misread him, he has to accommodate the feedback” (195). His theory follows that of language acquisition, based on the same principles of feedback and trial-and-error that is our most natural mode of learning. “Ideally,” he says, a student’s “writing would be read and discussed by the audience, who would also be the coaches. Their response would be candid and specific. Adjustments in language, form, and content would come as the writer’s response to his audience’s response” (193).

But where does the teacher fit into this pedagogy? Doesn’t having students review each others’ papers invite incorrect revision? Like Keva said in her presentation, the teacher should guide students not to correct each others’ papers, but respond to them. Students are more than qualified to point out lack of clarity and frequently can identify problem areas but not know how to fix them. This is where the expert comes in. What is most valuable about this method is that students seek out the teacher’s knowledge out of need; it comes as a solicited response to a direct, personally motivated question. Moffett explains: “the teacher … helps students to interpret their initially vague responses and to translate them into the technical features of the paper that gives rise to them…. This amounts to sharpening response while keeping it paramount” (196). By aligning in-class activities with both natural feedback and trial-and-error processes, writing center pedagogy can be a highly pragmatic method to enact otherwise nebulous process theory.