Chapter 1: What is a Writing Center?
The Importance of a Writing Center Mission Statement
Written by Ashley Burchett, Associate Director, University of Washington Tacoma Writing Center
When students hear the term “Writing Center,” they may not know what that is or what benefits the Writing Center (WC) offers them. It’s an important part of the work that you’ll do as a representative of the WC to help students understand what the WC is and what you can offer them via an appointment. We’ll start by thinking about the mission of the WC. How does past and current scholarship on WCs describe “mission” and help us communicate this to students, faculty, etc.?
WCs’ missions have been described in former scholarship in a myriad of ways from a remedial mission illustrated via the nomenclature of “lab” or “clinic” popular in 1930s as scholars like Neal Learner (2009), Peter Carino (1995), Warner Taylor’s 1929 survey, and Stephen North’s “fix-it shop” (1984) describe. North’s seminal work in the field “The Idea of a Writing Center” (1984), moved the conversation and research forward to a focus on a dialogic mission: “In short, we are not here to serve, supplement, back up, complement, reinforce, or otherwise be defined by any external curriculum. We are here to talk to writers” (p. 440).
However, moving into 1990s and 2000s research and up to most current scholarship, the conversation allows for room to reimagine more radical, alternative visions of the WC beyond the service mission or role. Scholars who include, but are not limited to, Nancy Grimm (1999, 2003), Shannon Carter (2009), Elizabeth Boquet (1999, 2002), Marilyn Cooper (1994), Alice Gillam (1991), Anne DiPardo (1992, 1993), and Anis Bawarshi and Stephanie Pelkowski (1999) claim that the center’s service to the institution also transforms from compliance to meet an immediate teacher- or class-specific need to critique that allows the student-writer and writing center tutor/consultant freedom to deconstruct what they know, and more importantly, create a space that suits the individual.
Nancy Grimm (2003) argues that “Too often, writing center work is perceived as service, service, and more service” (p. 42). Her repetitive use of this word signifies the extent of this viewpoint over the years in scholarship. “What a noble ethos!” some in scholarship may proclaim. And, while this description of service does, on the surface, send a seemingly positive message, the description can communicate a harmfully confusing and conflicting ethos to both students and faculty alike. This harmful and conflicting issue of identity can send a message to students and faculty that the writing center is a “fix-it shop” or other serviceable space that focuses on fixing rather than developing and challenging student-writing (Carino, 1995, p. 103).
This disciplinary exigency targets a confusion and negative attitude toward WCs that is common and should be addressed. Moreover, asserting an alternative identity of the WC that does not fall prey to this service identity allows the WC to work as a vital part of institutional instruction for a student-writer. Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede (2011) speak to another issue of exigency, arguing that the center’s location and its merging with other “’support’ or service units” can “threaten the autonomy of the original writing center by removing it from the academic core, by putting it in competition with that core for resources, or by linking it with units that challenge or even contradict the foundational philosophy and mission of the center” (p. 14). The authors conclude concerning this issue that they hope WCs will seek to actively preserve their autonomy and forge their own institutional relationships (p. 15). Questioning the identity of the WC via its missional language provides a starting point not only to this conversation of service identity but also to other conceptions of WC identity. Interrogating the ethos that WC mission statements convey to student-writers in terms of affirmative, non-gatekeeping language can also help educators strive to measure the accessibility of the WC as a space seeking to primarily serve the student-writer.
These lingering metaphors continue to perpetuate an understanding of the WC and its resources as providing a response to a problem, a means of fixing the issues or “deficiencies” of student writing observed in the classroom. While these metaphors of “clinics” and “labs” may have been viewed as positive reinforcement in their time, they focus on a prescriptive approach and an adherence to correctness in writing as the goal. The vision of correctness that English writing instruction has long centered on is reflected in this notion of a writing clinic or lab where writers can visit to fix or remedy their disease of poor writing. This approach does not encourage learning or uplifting a process of growth for the student-writer that the key terms support/strengthen and independent, along with their associational clusters, would communicate via the WC mission statements that exist to frame WC ethos.
The problem with the continued use of these metaphors is that they perpetuate a point of contention that WC scholars and administrators balk against—an institutional misunderstanding of what writing centers do. Through this attention to metaphor and missional language of inclusion/exclusion, the focus on grammar or sentence-level issues that many WCs make clear they do not want to be a part of regularly scheduled sessions with students can also be linked to this metaphor that communicates a diagnosis of writing, which is often focused on the sentence-level issues that WCs do not want to entertain in sessions. These metaphors do not help WC administrators build a case for their center’s practice, the naming breaks down an understanding and clear communication of practice institutionally, leaving both faculty and students with faulty perceptions of not only the center’s practice but also the center’s philosophy of the writing process. If the WC does not communicate an understanding and pedagogical approach of writing that is consistent with other instructional spaces on a campus that focus on current, relevant writing research and pedagogy, then the WC will often be perceived as an illegitimate form of writing instruction.
On the surface, these centers’ metaphoric language conveys negative connotations of student writing and negative connotations of the centers themselves, a concern illuminated by Carino (1995), who claims that it “degrades students by enclosing them in a metaphor of illness” (p. 33). Overall, this clinical language used to describe the WC and its practice can often reflect a prescriptive mission enacted by either the institution or WC administrators as a problem-fixing means for ill-equipped students. Herding their students to be treated at the WC, the center becomes a daunting space that students may dread as their fear of illness via error in the classroom leads them to subsequently fear the center by association with their writerly illness. These mission statements perpetuate hazardous misconceptions that drive away students, distance faculty, and diminish the long-term opportunities the center may have with writers, leading to their maturation as thinkers, communicators, and emotionally intelligent people.
Similarly, Michael Pemberton (1992) argues that viewing WCs through the clinical metaphor is reductive to the very nature of writing as a complex process (p. 14). Carino (1995) adds to this understanding by noting that “Writing clinics were associated with drill and kill pedagogy…. This pedagogy did not, however, consider that learning is a negotiation of new habits, values, expectations, turns of mind, strategies of representation and the like” (p. 34). By utilizing missional language that includes metaphors perpetuating pedagogy that reduces the WC to a “clinic,” this space and its aid to students is articulated not as a means for progression and regular support—as a classroom setting would invite/encourage. The message that is communicated via these metaphors may not be what was or is consistently practiced within the writing “clinic;” however, by naming the place and describing what is offered with this metaphor, there is an undeniable connection made between what is being named and what is being practiced. The question must be considered to account for consistency between articulation of mission with the evidence of practice—if the way that WCs “characterize [their] work tells us something about that work,” then is the metaphor revealing a breakdown in effective pedagogy (Boquet, 2002, p. 8)?
The university is a place for critical inquiry. The classroom is a place for critical inquiry. The WC is a place for critical inquiry. Gardner and Ramsey (2005) claim that “students come to the writing center from all courses all across the curriculum, and that in the writing center a university’s curricular effectiveness is therefore magnified many times over” (p. 37). The WC exists on the same plane of affecting student development as the classroom and works with (ideally) an institution’s mission by servicing student-writers toward the ultimate goal: student success. How WCs articulate their mission directly corresponds to how their practice manifests. Naming for the sake of naming serves no one; there is purpose in communicating the ethos of a center that connects with a multi-faceted audience and exists as a vital educational space within the university.
How do we implement naming that compliments practice of the center but also the institution, ultimately converging within recent, critical writing pedagogy? Some WC scholars, like Feltenberger and Carr (2011) have proposed alternative metaphors that still exist within the medical model, but with a reclaiming flare, to which they indicate the tutor or consultant functioning as a therapist since “over time, consultants can help clients learn to stand on their own” (p. 16). However, Jenn Goddu (2012) pokes a hole in this metaphor, claiming “a patient typically visits a physical therapist only after a diagnosis of injury. If we wait for students to receive such diagnoses from faculty or to self-diagnose their own writing maladies, we are doing nothing to combat the negative perception of the Writing Center as merely a place where writing gets fixed” (p. 2). Taking the medical metaphor model and reclaiming it to assert a “preventive” mission for the WC where the center inserts itself during the writing process instead of after, the focus on mission is more at stake than a metaphor. In this right direction that complements the tenants of writing instruction, the WC can focus on a missional identity beyond a metaphoric reduction and “center” itself as valuable throughout the students’ writing process.
However, one of the most poignant metaphors I came across that current scholars offer is the metaphor of the WC as an ecotone. Michelle Kells is one scholar that utilizes this metaphor to argue that “The writing center as metaphorical construct and institutional space represents a cultural ecotone, a site that environmentalist Florence Krall describes as the ‘edges where differences come together’ (4). The ecotone as a biological transition zone constitutes a locus of tremendous diversity and transformation. Extending the metaphor to social spaces, Krall argues, ‘Cultural ecotones are the pluralistic contexts out of which conflict and change emerge’” (p. 27). Kells’ adopted metaphor highlights the practice of many WCs that seek to champion diversity and inclusivity. If the WC was actually viewed as a central means of the dynamic writing instruction on campus, how would that change the value placed on articulating mission and allowing practice to champion that mission?