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.

What about Fun?

"...the writing classroom should be a workshop in which [the students] are encouraged through the supportive response of teachers and peers to use writing as a way to figure out what they think and feel and eventually 'publish' their work to be read and celebrated by the community of writers they have become" (Tobin 7).

"Process pedagogy has become so regimented that it has turned into the kind of rules-driven product that it originally critiqued" (Tobin 10).

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This is scary.

What? Blogging? Nah. I love to type, and I've always felt rather confident in my ability to articulate myself in writing. I'd even go so far as to say I'm better on paper than I am verbally. In this place, an environment void of social neediness (well...is that true?), or at least, an environment where those social needs can be tended to with slow, methodical measures (the time I spend editing my writing to make it sound absolutely as I wish), I am at my best.

What's scary is writing academically publicly. If we perceive this blog space to be a little bit more important than a thoughtful journal, the fear creeps in and undercuts what I want to say. Instead of focusing on the kindly peers I want to know are out there, rendezvousing with my thoughts thanks to cyberspace; I imagine instead critics, doubters, and individuals for whom skepticism is often the easiest action--the easiest, and often, the one we are trained to consult with most often.

And I get that: I get that we need to be informed readers who do not take at face value everything that smacks us upside the eyeball. My students and I have already begun talking about angle of vision and how discerning what authors leave out can be as illuminating or important as deciphering what they leave in (what happens to this post if we practice that skill?).

But there's always the fear of creative deviance, the thoughts that sound much like these: Maybe I didn't do what the teacher wanted. I didn't really synthesize my sources very well. I failed to cite a significant passage, and if I did, I've perhaps unfairly juxtaposed two portions of text, and only as an epigraph to my post. I've left this whole business in the realm of the implicit point.

But, oh, what wouldn't we all give for a little fun?

Even in the process-based college classroom, there seems to be no time for experimenting with form, or audience, or word choice or any other rhetorical option. Even our freewrites are meant to funnel eventually into the work of writing a paper. Yeah, right, freewrite.

We need to learn how to play with words. It is in our very nature to do so, but our educational system runs counter to our inclinations. (Thanks, standardized testing.) In our obsession to calculate and quantify how we keep up with the world-wide Joneses, we've shot creativity in the foot.

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Okay.

I know I haven't really said anything too profound (it's Sunday evening and I'm working with 5 hours of sleep--forgive me). I'm interpreting our blog as a place to play, as a place to try without too much pressure.

Here's to fun, and to thinking. *clink*