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Overview
In Noise from the Writing Center, Boquet develops a theory of "noise" and excess as an important element of difference between the pedagogy of writing centers and the academy in general. Addressing administrative issues, Boquet strains against the bean-counting anxiety that seems to drive so much of writing center administration. Pedagogically, she urges a more courageous practice, developed via metaphors of music and improvisation, and argues for "noise," excess, and performance as uniquely appropriate to the education of writers and tutors in the center.
Personal, even irreverent in style, Boquet is also theoretically sophisticated, and she draws from an eclectic range of work in academic and popular culture-from Foucault to Attali to Jimi Hendrix. She includes, as well, the voices of writing center tutors with whom she conducted research, and she finds some of her most inspiring moments in the words and work of those tutors.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780874214673 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 180 |
| File size: | 356 KB |
Read an Excerpt
NOISE FROM THE WRITING CENTER
By ELIZABETH H. BOQUET
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2002 Utah State University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-434-5
Chapter One
TUTORING AS (HARD) LABOR The Writing Clinic, The Writing Laboratory, The Writing Center
I now direct a writing center that I do not imagine to be characterized by the same sense of dislocation as the one in which I worked with Todd. But I can't be sure of that. In fact, I am less sure of it at this point in the semester, having just held the last class meeting of the year in my tutor-training course. The final few weeks of that course are usually marked-and this class was no exception-by a stream of students visiting my office, not to talk about end-of-term projects (as we might expect) but to work through, quietly and individually, their concerns about beginning to tutor. One after another, they express their nervousness, their uncertainty about their preparation, their concerns even about the appropriateness of their personalities. As they enter and exit my office, they parade through a writing center that, though modest in its appointments, is nonetheless bright and cheery enough, with magnetic poetry and Magna Doodles dotting its tables and student artwork on its walls. Through the doors of my office, these students can hear the low tones of talk between tutors and writers punctuated occasionally (or frequently, depending on the tutor) with bursts of laughter or with rolls of giggles. Yet they don't seem to notice. I wonder about that, and I try to remember what I felt as a beginning tutor.
I don't recall when I first realized that writing centers were called anything at all. I don't think it was when I was an undergraduate, when I rose from the table in the dining hall after lunch, announcing that I had to "go tutor." Elkins Hall was simply the place where I went to do that. I do believe, thinking back, that a faded, hand-lettered sign on the door indicated that this room housed the "Tutoring Center," but the designation seemed insignificant to me.
Such a take on tutoring seems hard to imagine now-now that I have spent more than a decade thinking about and working in writing centers, now that I am writing a book focused largely on the signification of naming, the correspondence between how we talk about ourselves (writing labs, writing clinics, writing centers) and what we do. Nevertheless, I do feel certain that the "Tutoring Center" designation was insignificant to me at the time. And I can't help but believe that the lack of that sign (The Writing Center) and my failure to identify a system within which I was working, beyond "just tutoring," were intimately related. There was no there there. I like to think, and I do have some confirmation of this, that the tutors here at Fairfield name the writing center somewhere in their job descriptions. Often I'll hear them say that they "work in the Writing Center" or that they "tutor in the Writing Center." They seem to attach a sense of place to their work, even as I become increasingly suspicious of the connection between the work of creating a community and the tutors' own experiences in the writing center. (More on this problem later in the chapter.)
This chapter, then, takes up the issue of naming not to privilege one designation over another-to assert that writing labs "experiment" on students or to claim that writing clinics "medicalize" them-but to imagine nonetheless that calling a thing a thing somehow matters, to consider that the ways in which we characterize work tells us something about that work. To do so, I will both review what others in the writing center community have written and said about the terms clinic, lab, and center as ways of imagining work with students, and I will extend those discussions in ways that I hope will prove provocative no matter what we call ourselves.
MUDDY WATERS: THE WRITING CLINIC AND THE WRITING LAB
My initial attempts at drafting this chapter made more significant, hard-and-fast distinctions between the writing clinic and the writing laboratory, in part because considering each metaphor independently (clinic, lab, and center) seemed to be accepted practice (see Pemberton 1992 and Carino 1992) but also because, like Michael Pemberton and Peter Carino, I had hoped to tease apart distinctions that might become fused should I consider the two in tandem.
I began by reading (and re-reading ... and taking notes on) Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic, searching ... searching ... searching for a hook. The book was thought-provoking. It gave me lots of ideas, and they led me, ultimately, here-to a place where I have decided not to artificially impose distinctions between the two metaphors (clinic and lab) for which I can, frankly, find little evidence in the literature. A cop-out? We'll see.
Carino seems comfortable distinguishing between the two, arguing that the term clinic "degrades students by enclosing them in a metaphor of illness" (33). Quoting from the OED, Carino does consider the secondary sense of clinic as "[a]n institution, class, or conference, etc. for instruction in or the study of a particular subject; a seminar," but he ultimately rejects this notion of a writing clinic (as opposed to, say, a business clinic) because the student bodies he sees so obviously marked by visits to the writing clinic invoke, for Carino, the medicalized sense of the term.
Pemberton is more willing than Carino to see elision between the clinic metaphor and others, but he too treats it separately. The structure of his article, "The Prison, the Hospital and the Madhouse: Redefining Metaphors for the Writing Center," in fact, effectively demands that he do so. Pemberton sees the clinic as preferable to the prison and madhouse metaphors (small comfort), primarily because the clinic metaphor at least affords writing center staff a modicum of professionalism and because clinics (or hospitals, to use Pemberton's metaphor) "are places of compassion and healing" (13).
Both authors ultimately conclude that the metaphor of the clinic oversimplifies the work of the clinic and, by extension, the complexity of writing. Here's Pemberton: "Most writing problems are deeply ingrained and quite complex; they are resolved gradually, over time, often over a period of years. They do not lend themselves to quick cures or simple panaceas" (14). And Carino: "Writing clinics were associated with drill and kill pedagogy.... This pedagogy did not, however, consider that learning is a negotiation of new habits, values, expectations, turns of mind, strategies of representation, and the like" (34).
While Pemberton finds no redemption in metaphors other than the center metaphor (which I will consider later), Carino views the lab metaphor as providing "a powerful counter narrative, advancing a cultural ideology more akin to the ways we perceive ourselves today" (34). According to Carino, labs were places where writing was more likely to be viewed as a process, where staff would be reconceiving notions of pedagogy according to this new paradigm of composition studies, where people found "a place to experiment, to pose questions, and to seek solutions" (35). Carino does admit, however, that "the metaphor of the lab came to signify a place as marginal as most clinics" (35).
That the metaphoric lab has more to recommend it than the metaphoric clinic is evidenced for Carino by the fact that the lab moniker persists today, despite its negative connotations, precisely because labs can also connote possibility and play (strengths of writing centers that I'd like to take up again later). As I have written elsewhere, however, writing centers have always functioned in the face of inherent contradictions, and it is a mistake, I believe, to underwrite the history of the writing center as one in which practices at any given time and among any self-identified entities are actually monolithic. (See my February 1999 CCC article for more on this subject.) So labs were not the only places for possibility and play. Clinics, even though their names might not have implied this, could be such places as well. In fact, one of the most progressive early centers was a clinic, the University of Denver's Writing Clinic, where Davidson and Sorenson, who co-directed it, advocated a psychotherapeutic approach to tutoring sessions. While psychotherapy is a medical model of sorts (and some psychotherapy did follow the diagnostic model), the tutors at the University of Denver were not drilling-and-skilling, were not diagnosing and treating, at least as far as we can tell from the published literature. They were instead advised to question and draw students out using "Rogerian nondirective counseling" (1946, 84), a precursor to the nondirective or mirroring method that dominated writing center practice for decades and is still advocated today.
We can also find a great deal of evidence in the literature of writing labs where drill-and-(s)kill type remediation is a priority and where cures for conditions were frequently prescribed. I am reminded of one of my favorite (so to speak) pieces of (fairly) early writing on writing labs, J.O. Bailey's "Remedial Composition for Advanced Students." Bailey, then director of the laboratory at the University of North Carolina, describes UNC's Composition Condition Laboratory (or "CC" for short), designed for students who had advanced academically but who were still poor writers (1946, 145). If an instructor thought that a student needed to work on his (or possibly her) writing, the instructor would place a "CC" behind the final grade to indicate that the student had a "composition condition" and should be sent to the lab. This lab doesn't sound like the kind of place where there were many possibilities or much play.
In fact, my readings of the early literature on writing centers convinced me that the naming of those early labs was probably largely accidental. In other words, we can tell very little-nothing reliably, really-about the work of a writing center by considering what it was called within its own institution. While many of us now spend a great deal of time inquiring as to what other centers call themselves-not only "The Writing Center" or "The Writing Lab" but "The Writer's Room" or "The Writer's Workshop"-that kind of self-conscious attention to the relationship between the signified and the signifier was absent until recently. As my earlier anecdote suggests, people in those places were, for the most part, "just tutoring." Published pieces on writing labs were quite likely to medicalize students, and published pieces on writing clinics might well report experiments on/with students. In practice, these centers were probably doing all that and more every day. And, in reality, all of our centers are probably doing all that and more still today. I know mine is.
* * *
As I played with these metaphors, as I failed to find a reliable correspondence between the name and the thing, I became more interested in the relationship between medicine and science, a relationship that has become increasingly less evident in our day-to-day life, where most of us deal with medical doctors who are not, or at least would not consider their primary functions to be, scientists. They are not involved in cutting-edge research; they don't work in labs; they may not even be formally affiliated with hospitals (particularly if they are primary-care physicians); and if they are affiliated with hospitals, those hospitals are likely not to be teaching hospitals or research hospitals. These people (and patient-care advocates remind us and them that they are, in fact, people) are "just" doctors. Michel Foucault makes the relationship between medicine and science seem self-evident, so the more I read, and the more I wrote, and the more I thought, the more I was forced to reconsider my original intention to distinguish between the two, clinic (medical) versus lab (scientific), in those particular terms.
I put the clinics aside for a while and turned my attention to labs, particularly to early science teaching labs. We certainly seem to take for granted in this field that writing labs were modeled on science labs, but I wanted more details. Rather than answers, I found questions. In particular, I learned that there is little agreement in the science-teaching community as to the key features of a teaching lab. Issues such as the amount of space needed for a lab (or for different types of labs) are hotly contested, funding is a constant source of distress, ideal reporting lines are debatable, course credit and full-time equivalents for graduation are confusing. It all began to sound strangely familiar.
What seemed less familiar was the gendering of the discussion. Thirteen of the fifteen articles to which I was referred had been authored by men; discussions on the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) listserv to which I subscribed were dominated by male voices. What was I to make of the nagging feeling I got from these NARST threads? It took an exchange between two students to prompt me.
Martin, the one male student who shows up at our end of the semester meeting for potential tutors, sits quietly in his seat as I talk about procedures and policies in the Writing Center: This is how students sign up for appointments in the Writing Center. This is the database into which records need to be inputted. This is the schedule you will fill out to tell me your preferred hours. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Any questions?
A few students have questions of clarification. And finally, a soft "okay" from Martin's side of the room as his hand lifts halfway. I acknowledge him, and he asks with a smirk, "Uh ... Am I going to be the only guy tutoring in the Writing Center?"
I offer a "Probably" followed by a quick "but": "But we've had male tutors in the past; we just happen not to have any right now." True enough. But. When we have had male tutors, they have been in the extreme minority-one, at most two or (during really wild times) three, out of a staff of approximately twelve.
One woman asks Martin if he has "a problem with that," to which he dutifully replies, "No." Another student then asks why this is and whether our situation is typical. This is not the discussion I had planned. (They so rarely are, aren't they?)
I am apt to forget (until I am reminded, until I am on a listserv for scientists, until a student asks a question about the male-female ratio/n in the writing center) the extent to which I am engaged in work that is historically feminized. Even once I am reminded, I have to think hard, over and over again, about what this means.
The feminization of composition studies-and particularly of composition teaching (of which writing centers are obviously one manifestation)-remains an issue that has been subjected to a fair amount of analysis. In Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, Susan Miller (1991) distinguishes between a gendered division of the labor of composition and a sexual division of that labor. Miller argues that a gendered reading highlights the degree to which these activities express social power relations rather than mere (or exclusively) biological distinctions. In a chapter entitled "The Sad Women in the Basement," Miller nods to Freudian psychoanalysis to consider the "matrix of functions" (136) working to feminize the composition instructor:
[O]ne figure of a composition teacher is overloaded with symbolic as well as actual functions. These functions include the dual (or even triple) roles that are washed together in these teachers: the nurse who cares for and tempts her young charge toward "adult" uses of language that will not "count" because they are, for now, engaged in only with hired help; the "mother" (tongue) that is an ideal/idol and can humiliate, regulate, and suppress the child's desires; and finally the disciplinarian, now not a father figure but a sadomasochistic Barbarella version of either maid or mother. (137)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from NOISE FROM THE WRITING CENTER by ELIZABETH H. BOQUET Copyright © 2002 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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