To start this reflection, I want to first think about my own development with regards to writing centers. As an undergraduate student, I suffered from the misconceptions that plague many writing centers. I saw the writing center as a place for “bad writers” to get help and assumed that this wasn’t the place for me.…
Writing Instructor & Scholar
Category: 810 Papers
Paper 5: Epistemological Alignment
In aligning myself within the writing center field, I find that I am highly influenced by foundational texts and scholars in the field. In thinking about the overall mission of a writing center, I agree with North’s (1984) assertion in “Idea” that “Our job is to produce better writers, not better writing. Any given project-a…
Paper 4: Theories, Methods, & a Continuing Quest for Legitimacy
As a field growing from rhetoric and composition, writing center work and scholarship centers on the theory of teaching writing as process. Similarly North’s “Idea” of writing centers as places that support writers as opposed to individual assignments, and Bruffee’s work on collaborative learning through peer tutoring undergird the work and scholarship of writing center…
Paper 3: Objects of Study
What is the object of study in writing center studies? The obvious answer: writing centers. As discussed in my examination of the history of writing center studies, “writing center,” can refer to a place or a method, and often both simultaneously. This notion of place, however, helps to limit what is acceptable to study in…
Paper 2: Major Questions
Scholarship in writing center studies seems to revolve around the four big questions: what, where, why, and how. In this paper, I will tackle the two seemingly simple questions of what and where to show how these are complex and interconnected major questions with the field of writing center studies. The question what? encompasses questions…
Paper 1: A Historical Exploration of Writing Center Studies
Tracing a history of Writing Center Studies is complicated by a central question: is “writing center” a place or a method? In tracing the history of writing centers, we can see that the answer to this question oscillates during different times and often it is actually both simultaneously. Early incarnations of writing centers in the…
