Are Writing Centers Remedial?

I've never considered the Chronicle of Higher Education as a click-bait publication. Maybe I'm naive. I always thought of it as a reputable periodical serving faculty and administration of colleges and universities nationwide.

This February, I began to rethink its approach when it published an article "What's Wrong with the Writing Center?" basically an interview of Lori Salem about her research with the writing center at Temple University, asking the very interesting research questions, why students do and do not visit their writing center. The article's writer, Rose Jacobs, basically set out to suggest that Salem was an outsider in the the writing center subfield of rhetoric and composition, a voice in the wilderness decrying the orthodoxy of writing center tutoring--serving the privileged and ignoring or poorly serving the underprepared.

Salem, in an immediate letter to the editors, countered the tone and position espoused by Jacobs--that she was very much a colleague within the profession, and not at all alone in questioning what is working and what is not within writing centers across the nation. As she pointed out, "my colleagues have embraced my research--they gave me a reward for heaven's sake!" She ends her letter with the following: "To be clear, I don't believe that there is anything fundamentally 'wrong' with writing centers."

Even so, looking past Jacob's "mischaracterizations" of writing center professionals, the article did lead to some fruitful discussion on our campus.

This semester, I'm the interim faculty coordinator for the Lansing Community College Writing Center. So when I began to hear talk among colleagues about directive vs. non-directive tutoring, especially in conjunction with asynchronous online writing feedback some students were receiving from Brainfuse, and discussed it with the real writing center coordinator (who is on sabbatical), I decided to have the writing assistants working with me read and discuss during our staff meetings the interview, letter to the editor, and the original article Salem published in the Writing Center Journal, "Decisions…Decisions: Who Chooses to Use the Writing Center?." The conversations centered around whether or not writing tutors should be directive in their work with student writers--asserting suggestions for writing improvement, more like a teacher might do, or non-directive--asking questions, leading students to discovery of improvements in their writing, more like a peer would do. Salem's research suggests that directive response should be part of the mix, especially with first-generation, ESOL, or developmental students who have less experience with writing than do students from families where the parents had gone to college.

The faculty working in the writing center were pleased to hear that they could put on their teacherly hats when they felt it best served students. The paraprofessional and student writing assistants already recognized the need to do so at times.

Which is fine with me.

However, I am concerned.

Not with the possibility of writing assistants asserting writerly advice at times. But at a shift, it seems, on the purpose of writing centers. Salem mentions in her research article that writing centers can espouse who they are and what they do, but they cannot necessarily control what writing centers mean to students.

One of the student writing assistants, when we were discussing why students seek out writing centers, and why they don't, shared her own experience, that when she was in a composition class while submitting her first paper, she was pretty convinced she would need to go to the Writing Center to get help. But when she got back her essay with a 3.5 grade, she realized she didn't need to.

Writing Centers were a place to get help when one's writing was deficient. And that seemed to be the overwhelming view among the staff, at least when discussing these articles.

But that's not at all what writing centers meant when we started one at LCC twenty years ago.

Now mind you, maybe I just misunderstood. I participated in the initial discussions about starting a writing center at LCC in the mid 90s; my oldest daughter and youngest son worked as peer writing assistants in the early 2000s, as did a number of my students; and I've encouraged many students to take advantage of the writing center through the years. But I'm in no wise an expert on writing center pedagogy. As most readers of this blog will attest, my focus has been more on online and virtual-world pedagogy, especially in the last ten years.

But from the beginning, the writing center was not a place to get help, but a place to get feedback. It wasn't just for those who had deficiencies in writing skill, but for writers. All writers.

One claim by Salem for why writing centers avoided calling themselves remedial was for the sake of status. If they were remedial in focus, working only with those who needed help, then they would be looked down upon at universities.

But that's not why the Writing Center at LCC avoided being called a place for remedial writers. It was because doing so was too narrow. The center was for all writers. And all writers--those who struggle, and those who excel--need feedback, a place where their ownership of writing is assumed, their ability to express something insightful is recognized, their intelligence and experience are celebrated. Not a place, as had been so in the past, to fix their writing, to be drilled with worksheets, to be remediated.

Years ago, my oldest daughter and her friends when attending LCC used the writing center all the time--and as I noted above, she eventually became a writing assistant. She and her friends were in honors composition courses--and they went to the center, again, multiple times, to get feedback even though they had been recognized as responsible students and skilled writers. When I've taught honors courses, again, I've encouraged students to work in the writing center at any stage of their writing.

It's a place for writers to engage, discuss, get feedback, try out ideas, style, expression. And yes, to improve, both one's writing and one's strategies as a writer.

Writers at all levels. Not simply those who need remediation.

I guess it's part of the whole mindset that has engulfed higher education in recent years, a totally utilitarian approach where education is only job training. Now of course higher education has always been a means to a career or profession. But its focus has been to include a liberal education, to learn broadly, to expand one's thinking and approach to life and society, to become a part of an educated citizenry, not just a worker.

I hope it's still worthwhile to resist, to approach our work with more of a sense of the whole student in mind. To realize that the ownership of writing, the celebration of insight, is a right and a gift that all students should be given--first generation, people of color, speakers of other languages included. They may not at first recognize their ownership of writing, their insight, their agency with their education (and newsflash--many second+ generation students don't as well).

But we should.

A Writing Center should be a place for writers--all writers.

High Impact Practices in an online class

Inside Higher Ed published an article recently entitled "Making an Impact in Online Courses," a report on a session at the annual Association of American Colleges and Universities conference at Washington, D.C. (a professional organization who advocates for the inclusion of liberal arts in all aspects of higher education).

The focus was on the incorporation of high-impact practices, an AAC&U term that incorporates researched activities that have proven to enhance student learning, such as learning communities, writing-intensive courses or collaborative assignments and projects.

The three member panel from Mary Washington University, McDaniel College, and St. Edward's University discussed a variety of projects and practices, mostly focused on encouraging students to write, and collaborate, and interview people in their communities.

Sounds good, though--as I experienced when attending this conference a couple years ago--as someone who has taught online for decades, I found much discussed obvious--for example, one professor mentioned how much better participation in interviewing became when she first had students submit a proposal about who to interview.

So, good stuff, and if you're new to online learning, helpful to recognize some things that are helpful when teaching in that venue. However, most of it is asynchronous, even though interactive at some level, disembodied, and substantially lacking in presence among students or with the professor.

At the end of the article, one participant brought up something that was quite interesting:

Jesse Stommel, executive director of the division of teaching and learning technologies at Mary Washington, said ... that he wants to see informal, self-motivated discussions considered as a high-impact practice of sorts. In his face-to-face classes, he sometimes starts class by asking how students spent their weekends, and students sometimes approach him after class for free-flowing conversations that last 10 minutes or more. 

He thinks creating an environment where similar spontaneity can flourish would make a high impact as well.

It brought me back to a conversation I had years ago with a colleague who had tried teaching online, and did so for several semesters, but then gave it up and went back to face-to-face teaching. He told me that he missed the informal interaction with students, being able to joke around, talk about their weekend, the give and take that he saw and enjoyed in a real-time, f2f environment. This lack is exactly what Stommel seems to be decrying and suggesting is as integral to an educational experience as other high-impact practices.

My observation is that when we limit online learning to asynchronous 2D, text-based environments, we lose that spontaneity, that opportunity to create community with students where more informal, though vital, interaction can take place. Yes, we can create a simulation of informality through our emails, or assignment language, or syllabus. We can jump into discussion forums and interact with students asynchronously. We can even do some real-time text chat, or even audio, or even video conferencing that helps some. But notice that none of that real-time getting together as a learning community was mentioned in the article, and rarely is with online classes.

Our campus is no different at Lansing Community College. We've had online classes, online degrees offered since 1997 (as I've mentioned some years ago in this blog). But the push has always been asynchronous, with very little recognition of the value of synchronous interaction.

For the last eight years, I've been using Second Life with my online classes, where we meet as a whole class once a week. It operates just like f2f meetings. We talk about our weekends, movies, the weather before class. We work as a whole class, in groups, do peer review, writing exercises, visit sims related to their work (especially for the creative writing students where they are able to interact with other poets, fiction writers, storytellers in world). We are doing Stommel's high-impact practice.

Is it perfect? Of course not, any more than f2f interaction is. But with embodied avatars operating in a 3D space, students can see a representation of each other, work together in a place (rather than a computer 2D window), hear each other and participate in a learning community each week; I've seen (as have others) "an environment where similar spontaneity can flourish" as it can in a classroom on campus.

But it's difficult with little support from administration. I'm allowed to teach this way in online classes. But I'm on my own. I have no technical support, and the ability to get what I do (Is it an online class? Is it a hybrid class? Is it an online but hybrid class? What is it?) has been difficult to comprehend by overworked staff, administration, even academic advisers. And explaining it as an overworked professor! I've not had the time, or energy, to promote as I could, and even if I did, I'm not sure it would do much good. Online=asynchronous learning to many--students, staff, faculty and administration.

It's really a shame. Because with 3D environments, the experience that online students have could be so much more. Sure, they can still learn in a 2D learning management system like Blackboard and Desire2Learn, and such is integral to my class. But that spontaneous interaction--as my colleague put it, the ability to joke around--is largely missing, and there is no good reason, today, for such to be the case in online learning.