Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne Ellen Geller is professor of English and director of Writing Across Communities at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. She is a coauthor of Working with Faculty Writers and The Everyday Writing Center.

Michele Eodice is emeritus director of the writing center at the University of Oklahoma and is currently in the role of Senior Writing Fellow for the Center for Faculty Excellence. She is a codirector of The Meaningful Writing Project (meaningfulwritingproject.net), a coauthor of The Meaningful Writing Project, Working with Faculty Writers, The Everyday Writing Center, and (First Person)², and a coeditor of Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers. With Shannon Madden, she also coedited a special issue of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal on access and equity for graduate-student writers. 

Frankie Condon is associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her books include I Hope I Join the Band; Performing Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, coedited with Vershawn Ashanti Young; and The Everyday Writing Center, coauthored with Michele Eodice, Elizabeth Boquet, Anne Ellen Geller, and Margaret Carroll. She is the recipient of the Federation of Students Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award (Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance) and the Outstanding Performance Award (for excellence in teaching and scholarship) from the University of Waterloo.

Meg Carroll is the director of the Rhode Island College Writing Center.

Elizabeth H. Boquet is professor of English and director of the Writing Center at Fairfield University. She is the coauthor of The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice and author of Noise from the Writing Center.

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THE EVERYDAY WRITING CENTER

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments.............................................................11 Introduction..........................................................................52 Trickster at Your Table...............................................................153 Beat (Not) the (Poor) Clock...........................................................324 Origami Anyone? Tutors as Learners....................................................485 Straighten Up and Fly Right: Writers as Tutors, Tutors as Writers.....................726 Everyday Racism: Anti-Racism Work and Writing Center Practice.........................877 Everyday Administration, or Are We Having Fun Yet?....................................110Notes...................................................................................133References..............................................................................138Index...................................................................................142About the Authors.......................................................................145

Chapter One

Walk through a morning with us-we're out the door, heading to campus, strolling into the building, pulling out the office keys, and flipping on the lights. You know, the routine: turn on the computer, take off the coat, get to work. The voice mail message light blinks "Good Morning" in its own Morse code; the computer sings as it powers up, dinging one, two, twenty-five new email messages received. The clock continues its steady march toward the first class, and payroll must receive an accurate accounting of tutors' hours by noon today if checks are to appear in their boxes on Friday. These kinds of needs, and dozens more, demand our attention every hour. Yet it is all too easy to leave the writing center at the end of the day feeling complacent, believing that preparing a payroll, stepping in for a sick tutor, or even planning an upcoming staff meeting comprises the extent of our writing center's work. As necessary as these tasks are, we might be so consumed by them that we miss something else: the most interesting moments in our workday have probably not demanded our attention at all. As we shut off the lights and turn the key in the lock once more, we should wonder about the significance of all that we could have noticed in our everyday spaces: the role reversal of two of the writing center's prized action figures, Pokey and Shakespeare-Will, on this day, uncharacteristically, giving Pokey a ride. Pokey's skinny orange front legs are perched on the Bard's shoulders-a real switch in human-horse relations, a quiet surprise. Who did it, and why? The culprit, when finally identified, simply replies, "Equality." Or the scene composed of a bright red cardinal puppet, an all-too-realistic gun, and the Western literature anthology. Some kind of threat? A weapon waiting to be retrieved later? No, a "tableau," set up by one of the tutors, called "shooting the canon."

Our attention is constantly split between moments like these and the larger, louder issues that relentlessly nip at us, demanding our attention and response. In the face of institutional deadlines, we are tempted to relegate such moments to the backburner, to assume they are beneath consideration, amusing but not pressing. In our haste, we may fail to consider the ways these moments hint at the degree to which our tutors feel invested in the work of the writing center, the connections our tutors are making to their intellectual interests and to their lives outside the center. We may not capitalize, in other words, on the ability of everyday exchanges to tell us something about our writing centers as representing what Etienne Wenger calls "communities of practice." Perhaps we've lost our ability to slow down, notice, and consider most of the specific moments within the seemingly routine demands we are so often pressed to meet as directors. Arguing that our field has become "trapped in theory," Kurt Spellmeyer calls for us instead to turn to "an alternative so mundane that we have passed it over time after time in our scramble for sophistication and prestige. That alternative is ordinary sensuous life, which is not an `effect' of how we think but the ground of thought itself" (893-894).

In conversation with each other, the five of us realized that we wanted more permission, from one another, from our staffs, from our colleagues within our institutions and within our field, to practice what Michel de Certeau calls "ways of dwelling" in uncomfortable places (30), to embrace situations in which we and our tutors have been thrust. We wanted to bring the smallest moments of our work, thought about deeply, together with our largest institutional and intellectual concerns. And we sought ways to support ourselves and our staffs as we began that work.

Wenger explains, "We all have our own theories and ways of understanding the world, and our communities of practice are places where we develop, negotiate, and share them" (48). Through these communities, participants develop a "shared repertoire" (82) of practice, exchanges where there exists no "dichotomy between the practical and the theoretical, ideals and reality, or talking and doing" (48). To understand Wenger is to understand that multiple communities of practice intersect in overlapping spheres in each person's life each day. By the time you arrive at work, you have already interacted with members of several of your own communities of practice (whether you would call them such or not). Morning negotiations with your family, helpful hints from a trainer at your gym, meeting with faculty to discuss the choices for next fall's first-year seminar book-all of these moments place you in relation to others with whom you share what Wenger describes as "the dynamics of everyday existence, improvisation, coordination, and interactional choreography" (13). If you are reading this book, you are part of yet another community of practice: writing centers. Writing centers, as communities of practice, have a history of exploring the ways in which meaning is negotiated among mutually engaged participants, negotiation that "in practice always involves the whole person" (47). If we accept this characterization of writing centers, set next to Wenger's ideas, then we have to consider a philosophy of writing center work which is designed for learning, and as Wenger claims, "designing for learning cannot be based on a division of labor between learners and nonlearners, between those who organize learning and those who realize it, or between those who create meaning and those who execute it" (234). In other words, this design must be based on something other than the familiar stratification between directors and tutors, tutors and...