Being Green: Reaction to Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center,” by a writing center rookie

 

I am a senior undergraduate student working towards a Bachelor’s degree in English and Economics, and a published writer within several distinct avenues — entertainment pieces in the Greek paper, op-editorials in the Daily Nebraskan, long-form explorations of student life and health, published in the Lincoln Journal Star, poetry in the Laurus — and I have a confession to make.

I have no experience with writing centers.

Indeed, if you would have asked me what type of work is done in writing centers even a month ago, I would have manifested the type of ignorance Stephen North describes in “The Idea of a Writing Center.” My idea of a writing center, see, was the classic one, and thus, the problematic one. I believed writing centers were a space where students could go to “get their papers ‘cleaned up,'” to fix “‘skills’ or ‘fundamentals,'” where those with “special problems” could be essentially saved, transformed, by their Messianic tutors. Here I was, the English major with an investment in conversation, influenced by thinkers like Paulo Freire and his revolutionary aims for “problem-posing” education; with semesters of tutelage under teachers who expounded on the insidious nature of authoritative pedagogy, white male hegemony, and the “master’s house” as described by Audre Lorde; who, even with such experiences under my belt, still didn’t understand that a writing center could be anything other than a prescriptive-style jack-of-all-trades fix ’em up machine. A month ago, just as scholar Barbara E Fassler Walvoord mistakenly published, I would have proudly conflated “writing centers” with “skills centers,” thinking myself correct in coupling the two.

So here’s my question. If students who think they have an investment in alternative styles of education, who pride themselves for being “learned” in the humanities, who engage themselves in dialogues with peers and commit to conscious critical thinking, and/or who think themselves valuable members of the English community — if these students do not understand the essential work a writing center does, how can anyone?

It seems to me that, in this instance, the nature of the institution has done it no favors. As North notes, “even those of you who, out of genuine concern, bring students to a writing center… even you are essentially out of line.” And so we hit the central paradox of the institution itself. If, in the center, tutors “look beyond or through that particular project…and see it as an occasion for addressing our primary concern, the process by which it is produced,” then that specific aim should (in an idealized world) be clarified before students needing help enter into the center, and not during or after they meet with a tutor, right? Yet it seems unlikely students who do not cognitively view themselves as “writers” and who do not understand writing and producing as a “process” instead of viewing their writing as a “product” could find in themselves the agency to seek out a tutor with whom they could talk about writing as a “process.” These students probably don’t even have pre-existing experience with nontraditional attitudes towards writing, having only been exposed to rigid five-paragraph structures,  imposing MLA/APA formatting rules, and other byproducts of the current institutional structure of education.

North prefaces his conclusion by reminding his audience that “none of [the] efforts to promote writing centers suggest that there is any changed understanding of the idea of a writing center.” Keeping in mind the context of his essay — namely, that it was written over 30 years ago — I might be of the mind to say, “well, perhaps things have changed since then, perhaps the view of writing centers HAS changed!” But at this point I am reminded that, as I asserted at the beginning of this blog, even an invested English major such as myself did not understand what North would consider a “true” writing center.

North’s aim, for tutors to accept the “primary responsibility to talk to writers,” is, in different words, dedication to opening up dialogue. The dedication to dialogue should really be the responsibility of any educator, as well as the primary aim of a student to participate in such conversation. But it is not to easy to make that aim a reality. I have no experience with writing centers, but even my preliminary readings on the subject (through North, Harris, Lunsford) have begun convincing me that that fact is a veritable tragedy, widespread as it seems to be among my fellow English majors. This conversation, then, is my first step towards evolving how I think of writing, writers, and the dialogues we set ourselves up to engage in.