In the diversity of their clients as well as their professional and student staff, writing centers present a complicated set of relationships that inevitably affect the instruction they offer. In Facing the Center, Harry Denny unpacks the identity matrices that enrich teachable moments, and he explores the pedagogical dynamics and implications of identity within the writing center.
The face of the writing center, be it mainstream or marginal, majority or miority, orthodox or subversive, always has implications for teaching and learning. Facing the Center will extend current research in writing center theory to bring it in touch with theories now common in cultural studies curricula. Denny takes up issues of power, agency, language, and meaning, and pushes his readers to ask how they themselves, or the centers in which they work, might be perpetuating cultures that undermine inclusive, progressive education.
FACING THE CENTER
Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One MentoringBy HARRY C. DENNYUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-767-4Contents
Acknowledgments...................................................................................................ix1 Introduction: Identity Politics, Face, and the Pedagogy of One-to-one Mentoring of Writing.....................1Interchapter 1....................................................................................................292 Facing Race & Ethnicity in the Writing Center..................................................................32Interchapter 2....................................................................................................573 Facing Class in the Writing Center.............................................................................62Interchapter 3....................................................................................................844 Facing Sex & Gender in the Writing Center......................................................................87Interchapter 4....................................................................................................1135 Facing Nationality in the Writing Center.......................................................................117Interchapter 5....................................................................................................1396 Facing the Center Redux........................................................................................144References........................................................................................................168Index.............................................................................................................174About the Author..................................................................................................177
Chapter One
INTRODUCTION Identity Politics, Face, and the Pedagogy of One-to-one Mentoring of Writing
I could tell a tale of swagger and pride, about a group of writing centers great in innumerable ways. The ones at St. John's University provide a glimpse into the pulse of college life in New York City. It's a world different from the sleepy casualness of typical college towns, and it's an environment unlike the crush of humanity at our public sister schools. On our Staten Island campus, the writing center is nestled on an oddly pastoral campus overlooking the city's harbor. The pace and energy are more subdued than its partner site across town, yet the tutors are just as bustling, from online conferences with students across the world to face-to-face sessions with classmates commuting from classes and jobs. In Queens, activity is as frenetic as Midtown on a business day: at one table, a first-year student debates a foreword she's creating for a classmate's book, while on a couch a tutor listens to a graduate student talk through the skeleton of a thesis's argument. In another part of the center, a small group of students workshops article reviews for an environmental studies course. These sorts of everyday exchanges are unremarkable and electric; they bear witness to the powerful, yet quotidian learning experiences in writing centers. Looking out across them, what strikes so many who happen upon the spaces is their look and buzz. They have a hum of academic life that's exhilarating on campuses torn between their commuter pasts and residential futures. Just as exciting as the what's happening in St. John's writing centers is the who's there. Where writing centers elsewhere struggle for staffs that mirror their academic communities, the clients and tutors at St. John's represent campus diversity, not just in terms of race, ethnicity and gender, but also with respect to discipline.
Just as easily, I could reflect on those very same writing centers and tell another tale of ongoing struggle to train the staff. It might be a cautionary story of what happens when the well-intentioned plans go wrong, or it might be a triumph about when some hopelessly lost or nave tutor has an epiphany that cross-pollinates, spurring on and bettering the wider crew. Such narratives have an archive in the Writing Lab Newsletter, the monthly publication whose volumes provide a rich education in writing center thought and practice. I might share tutoring and tutor-training case studies that reinforce what we already know works well. The pages of Landmark Essays, research monographs, essays in Writing Center Journal and the postings on WCenter, the field's digital clearinghouse and support kiosk, well document the field's collective wisdom. Points of comparison for pay rates, staffing levels, and institution positioning can be found at the Writing Centers Research Project. Any of this work-what-to-do sorts of questions-operates on the assumption, on some level, that writing centers can just bank and replicate without regard to local context or culture or without deep thinking in collaboration with a staff and other stakeholders-faculty, students, and administrators. Granted, research in composition and writing center studies offers crucial guidance, benchmarks and best practices, none of them of much utility outside the everyday realities of our sites and experiences, whether they are emergent, established or senior. The writers of The Everyday Writing Center are the most recent to address and reinforce those sorts of insights (Geller et al. 2007).
I want to tell another tale, a set of tales in fact, rooted in a phenomenon that cuts across writing centers, that resists easy answers and offers up tough questions, that invites problem-posing and believing and doubting. Typically when the issue of "face" is addressed, people pose it is as a sort of rhetorical sort of problem: "How do we put the best face forward?" "What's the best face to put on this issue?" "Let's face the facts." "Putting a face on ..." This book posits face as a starting point for inquiry, asking us to think about it in multiple ways, and pushing us to bracket quick recipes for resolution. Facing the Center is about process and politics and their implications for learning and teaching, particularly in the context of one-to-one collaborations. At its core, face is about identity and raises questions about who we are, and how we come to know and present identity, as a phenomenon that's unified, coherent, and captured in a singular essence, or as something more multi-faceted and dynamic. While on one level, I want us to think about face vis--vis writing centers; I also want us to be aware of margins and center, to think of the ways of privileging, to explore the dynamics of ordinary caste. Put simply, as much as I hope for us to grapple with the identities that circulate through writing centers and tutoring, I also want us to think about the transparency of identity, where bodies and affects seem to exist and perform beyond or post identity, where they seem the "same" or "other." Facing the center requires an awareness that the identities at the center signify just as richly as those at the margin. In the move to foreground identity, I commit to the principle that the center, like the margin, has a face and needs interrogation and mapping. In an ever-globalizing world where corporate America and colleges and universities race to embrace and champion diversity, it remains illusive because Others often don't seem present, but a face and a center are...
