Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers

Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers

In this article, Marilyn Cooper discusses tutors' roles in helping students understand the cultural constraints that affect their writing. -53 She suggests that a writing center rooted in a cultural studies approach can help to empower student writers by teaching them to find within professors' restrictive writing assignments autonomous spaces from which to address their own experiences and beliefs. -54 . . . students come for help in making their document perfect (for very good reasons, like getting into law school, getting their dissertation proposal approved, passing the course and getting their degree) and are confronted with tutors who have their own primary concern, a concern with the process of writing. In this situation, I think that tutors must not only make clear what their concern in tutoring sessions is but also explain why they think this concern should be primary for students as well, and they must negotiate a common goal in their sessions, one that does not simply ignore the students' concerns. -57 Agency in writing is not a mater of simply taking up the subject positions offered by assignments but of actively constructing subject positions that negotiate between institutional demands and individual needs. -59 When a social group becomes well established and dominant, its intellectuals often come to see what they do as valuable in and of itself and see themselves as somehow specially qualified for intellectual activities: they lose sight of how their activities function primarily to further the goals of their particular social group. -61 Rather than "always focusing on the paper at hand (Brooks 2), tutors build personal relationships with their students and come to understand how their students' lives and experiences shape their writing practices. Rather than insisting that students are the only ones responsible for their texts, tutors help students understand how their words and their texts are inhabited by multiple and often alien voices that they must learn to deal with. Rather than "supporting the teacher's position completely" (North 441), tutors celebrate students' ability to develop new "templates" for texts. Rather than learning to sit across from the student and not write on their papers, tutors learn to critique the social and institutional setting of writing pedagogy and to reflect on their practices in light of theories of writing and language. -65-66