The Writing Center Journal Vol 30 Nu 1

[From "The Polarities of Context in the Writing Center Conference" by Joseph Janangelo, WCJ 8.2 (1988) 31-6]

Conferences with one's own students are always influenced by personal context. They differ from first-time tutorial encounters in that teachers have "personal knowledge" of their student writers' strengths and weaknesses-- where they are with a piece of writing and where our experience tells us they need to be in order to succeed in the academic community. -16

[From "Introduction to 'Multicultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center" by Nancy Maloney grimm]

Although we have plenty of multicultural readers to use in classrooms, as a field we have yet to develop practices, principles, and genres that encourage student writers to represent bicultural experiences, to articulate their cultural backgrounds in ways that attain academic validation and to connect literacy with meaningful personal aspirations. -37

There is clearly a persistent reappearing thread of change-agent aspiration in writing center scholarship, an aspiration that becomes less idealistic and more realistic when we start changing the things we can, such as the linguistic, cultural, racial, social, and disciplinary diversity of our undergraduate staff. As other introductions in this anniversary issue indicate, much of what we can accomplish in writing centers has to do with how we construe the contexts in which we work. -38

[From Multi-cultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center, WCJ 12.1 (1991): 11-33

Our version of critical reflection in tutor-training programs focuses on conscious explorations of language within a society stratified by race and cultural background and the implications of this social context for education. -41

As Knoblauch and Brannon point out it is important for teacher--and similarly tutors--to develop a conscious philosophical basis for their work because "nothing short of that consciousness will make instruction sensible and deliberate, the result of knowledge, not folklore, and of design, not just custom or accident. -45

[New writer]
In my own writing classes, I had studied the ways that educational, cultural, and social hierarchies inhibited students' use of writing for liberation (most students seemed to see writing as a means of coercion), enforced a formalist agenda of correctness over the force of meaning, and functioned to exclude non-mainstream students instead of empower them. -52

[Multiliteracies, Social Futures, and Writing Centers

This notion of multiliteracies has to do in part with new text forms and new means of communication associated with the information age and knowledge economies of the globalized markets and societies of late capitalism. -88

My guess is that writing centers will more and more define themselves as multiliteracy centers. Many are already doing so--tutoring oral presentations, adding online tutorials, offering workshops in evaluating web sources, being more conscious of document design. -89

[Queering the Writing Center by Harry Denney, WCJ 25.2 (2005): 39-62]
Gillespie and Lerner describe commonplace mindsets about writing centers as garrets for skills--builging and testing, as generative spaces for confidence and collaboration, and as critical arenas in which to problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices (147-150). -95

Producing better writers, to extend Stephen North's aphorism, involves understanding the manufacture and dynamics of identity, a process that involves on-going self-discovery and reconciliation with collective identities and discourse communities. -96

Learning to code-switch between "standard" discourse practices and community-based ones does not necessarily translate into practical empowerment: speaking a white, middle-class, academic vernacular enables outsiders to gain access to that discourse community, but such code-switchers do not eliminate the ubiquitous presence of racism, sexism, and nationalism and their marginalizing effects. -102

As students learn to construct essays with an attention to audience that forces them away from safe confines of the personal and the local, their ways of knowing confront a complex interplay of the dominant, the oppositional, the subversive, and the self. -103