Writing Center Research

Extending the Conversation

Paula Gillespie, Alice Gillam, Lady Falls Brown, Byron Stay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135663056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

There are writing centers at almost every college and university in the United States, and there is an emerging body of professional discourse, research, and writing about them. The goal of this book is to open, formalize, and further the dialogue about research in and about writing centers. The original essays in this volume, all written by writing center researchers, directly address current concerns in several ways: they encourage studies, data collection, and publication by offering detailed, reflective accounts of research; they encourage a diversity of approaches by demonstrating a range of methodologies (e.g., ethnography, longitudinal case study; rhetorical analysis, teacher research) available to both veteran and novice writing center professionals; they advance an ongoing conversation about writing center research by explicitly addressing epistemological and ethical issues. The book aims to encourage and guide other researchers, while at the same time offering new knowledge that has resulted from the studies it analyzes.

II

Writing Centers as Sites of Institutional Critique and Contextual Inquiry

Chapter 5

Writing Center Administration: Making Local, Institutional Knowledge in Our Writing Centers

Muriel Harris

Purdue University

In the literature of writing centers, there’s a long history of debate about their marginalization. Some claim that writing centers are undervalued; others prefer the margins as places of freedom from institutional constraints; and still others proudly proclaim the writing center as cutting edge. It’s not clear whether cutting edges are in the center or on the margins or even whether such spatial conceptions clarify or muddy the issues. But in such discussions, there is usually general agreement in calling for writing center research as an answer to strengthen whatever spatial context is being put forth as the writing center’s appropriate place. Research, it is generally agreed, will give writing centers substance and weight and “centrality” in the field; writing center research will be the instrument of institutional change; writing center research will forge new paths. If arguments are to be made about writing centers as sites of substantive research, then we need to expand those discussions to include a type of writing center research—research on writing center administration—that is carried out with great frequency and effectiveness. There’s a large body of knowledge being generated by this research, but it is less visible because it often does not employ empirical research practices, is local in nature, and is usually hidden under the rubric of “service” or “administrative responsibilities.” Certainly, too many writing center directors fail to credit themselves when review time comes around for all the institutional research they do in order to run their centers well. And writing centers haven’t exactly spotlighted themselves publicly as places with intense programs of institutional research. When such inquiry is noticed in the literature of writing centers, it is more likely to be devalued as “merely justify[ing] the center’s existence to administrators” or as “responsible record keeping” (Severino, 1994, 51).

I describe writing center research on administration as localized because I want to distinguish such research from the studies done by those who investigate organizational or institutional structures in a more abstract or general way, displaced from their local contexts. Although writing centers could fruitfully be a source of highly interesting studies of an organization typically structured collaboratively and nonhierarchically (with innovative patterns of organizational communication among its personnel), the form of inquiry under discussion here is that type of research being done year after year, semester after semester, as part of a writing center administrator’s work. It is the localized, contextualized inquiry in which a director studies aspects of his or her own center and institution as part of the process of shaping the writing center. To a degree even greater than is the case with composition programs, writing centers are—and must be—shaped to fit their particularized surroundings. In an essay arguing that “writing center personnel live and move and have their being within institutions on which they are dependent for their professional identity,” Dave Healy (1995) notes, “It is difficult to imagine most writing centers divorced from their institutional context” (22–23). When creating a taxonomy of types of writing centers, Joyce Kinkead and Jeanette Harris (1993), in Writing Centers in Context, limited their case studies to 12 types, but writing centers are most successful when they are closely interwoven with the writing programs at their particular institutions. Thus, given the variety of structures of educational institutions at all levels, at least 12 more models could easily be added to Kinkead and Harris’ book. Coming up with a universal picture of a writing center is not only impossible but also untrue to the nature of writing centers.

General theories, practices, and research on writing centers must all be worked into the decision-making processes of structuring and directing a center, but reality is much messier than theory, and the locality of each writing center has its defining features and constraints that impinge on the structure of the center and the solutions to the various problems and questions that arise. A well-functioning, effective writing center folds itself into and around the localized features, building on them. But how does the director know what those features are? That’s where localized institutional research arises. By studying the particular place, with its particular staff, student body, institutional mission, administrative structures, and faculty needs, a writing center director makes knowledge—localized knowledge that is critically important as a basis for the administrative decisions that have to be made and problems that have to be solved. To dismiss the knowledge gained from such inquiry as mere record keeping or attempts to justify the center’s existence is to misread the role—and importance—of this work, as well as its scope. To look more closely at this issue, I need to examine first the question of how and why institutional knowledge-making in writing centers is research, then to review topics and examples of such writing center research that have been shared in print, and—hoping I’ve made the case that there is such a form of inquiry—to argue for why recognizing and emphasizing this form of writing center research is important.

INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE-MAKING AS RESEARCH

Writing center directors regularly confront a number of administrative issues that are best answered when the directors have local, institutional knowledge at their fingertips. How does the writing center fit into the institution’s mission? What is the best way to publicize the center? What do the faculty want to know in the notes tutors send to them? Writing center directors reading such questions will recognize them as ones that need answers (usually yesterday). They will also recognize how difficult it is to obtain data for some of the answers needed, because writing center administration is the process of solving the messy problems of the real world. Working in the realm of the real world is where Donald Schon (1987, 1993) finds the true challenge for the professional practitioner. On one hand, there are manageable problems, Schon explains, those that lend themselves to solutions through the application of research-based theory and technique. It is here that control groups can be set up and conditions for study can be isolated from the welter of factors that impinge in the real world. Traditionally, this research has been assumed to be superior to the work of practitioners, for its findings provide the base for practitioners. Or, as Stephen North (1987), describes this traditional hierarchy in The Making of Knowledge in Composition, researchers make knowledge, and practitioners apply it. Unfortunately, as Schon has argued at great length, such research hasn’t helped a lot when practitioners move into the real world. Drawing on examples of doctors, engineers, teachers, architects, and others at work, he (1993) offers glimpses of practitioners facing situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict. The real world presents us with conditions unlike those in the tidy world of pure research. One of Schon’s examples gives us a taste of working in the real world as he describes it:

When professionals consider what road to build, for example, they deal usually with a complex and ill-defined situation in which geographic, topological, financial, economic, and political issues are all mixed up together. Once they have somehow decided what road to build and go on to consider how best to build it, they may have a problem they can solve by the application of available techniques, but when the road they have built leads unexpectedly to the destruction of a neighborhood, they may find themselves again in a situation of uncertainty. (1993, 40)

Schon describes this reality where practitioners work as a swampy lowland where we find the messy, confusing problems that defy neat, clean technical solutions. In real life, he notes, “problems are interconnected, environments are turbulent” (1993, 16) and the situations of practice are characterized by unique events. To add to the messiness, Schon reminds us that “practitioners are frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes, and interests” (1993, 17). The irony, as Schon repeatedly points out, is that the problems of the high ground, the manageable ones, tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals and to society at large whereas in the swamps lie the problems of greatest human concern. If the practitioner descends to the lowland, he or she must be prepared for doing nonrigorous inquiry (1987, 3). Inquiry of this form, which Schon terms the work of the “reflective practitioner,” consists of reflection-in-action, questioning the assumptional structure of knowing-in-action, that is, thinking critically about something in the middle of doing it. This can lead to restructuring or to on-the-spot experimentation where new actions are tried, tested, and either affirmed or become the starting point for further reflection and experimentation (1987, 28). What is particularly important to writing centers is Schon’s affirmation of the importance of acknowledging that we work in real, particularized settings where universal principles, theories, and findings from pure research may conflict or collide—or be of very little help. Other forces, those present in the particular situation at the particular time and particular place where the practitioner is practicing his or her art, dictate a different mode of response—if appropriate and valuable solutions are to be found. And this mode of response—reflection-in-action—is another type of research, differing from the pure form of traditional research. In “Practical Wisdom and the Geography of Knowledge in Composition,” Louise Wetherbee Phelps (1991) points out that reflection-in-action “closely parallels academic research methods, but has a distinctive type of rigor” (873).

Thinking critically, or to use Schon’s term, “reflectively,” about real-world situations is, interestingly enough, becoming increasingly valued in composition studies as is evident in the rapid growth of the teacher-researcher movement. Books such as The Writing Teacher as Researcher: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Class-Based Research, edited by Donald Daiker and Max Morenberg (1990); Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge, by Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan L. Lytle (1993); and The Practice of Theory: Teacher Research in Composition, by Ruth E. Ray (1993) provide eloquent and illuminating discussions of teacher-research in composition and its grounding in the particular classrooms where teachers practice their art. (Phelps extends this research to the arena of curriculum development while Irwin Weiser and Shirley Rose’s collection of essays, The Writing Program Administrator as Researcher: Inquiry in Action and Reflection (1999), moves the discussion of institutionally oriented, reflective research into the work writing program administrators.) Chapter 3 of Ray’s book offers sound arguments and a history of the teacher-research movement. The voices we hear in the Daiker and Morenberg collection offer guidelines that are immediately relevant to the work of the writing center director. For example, James Berlin (1990) notes that the aim of the teacher-researcher “is not primarily to publish” (9) but to “conduct her own research, to investigate the conditions of her own social setting in determining instructional content and strategies” (10). Yet, as Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) remind us, there is a rationale for making such work public: “When teachers study and write about their work, they make their own distinctive ways of knowing about teaching and learning more visible to themselves and others” (115).

In their chapter entitled “Learning from Teacher Research: A Working Typology” (Chapter 2), Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) offer an analytic framework for teacher research, defining it as “systematic and intentional inquiry about teaching, learning, and schooling carried out by teachers in their own school and classroom settings” (27). The first type of research in this framework is empirical investigation—using collection, analysis, and interpretation of data—and is conducted through journals, oral inquiries, and classroom/school studies. The other kind of research is conceptual—using theoretical/philosophical work or the analysis of ideas—and is conducted by means of writing essays recollecting and reflecting on what they see or read. The terms in Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s working definition of teacher research are worth examining in more depth, because the words are carefully chosen and aptly characterize the nature of this kind of inquiry. Such research is “systematic” in that it follows ordered ways of gathering and recording information and analyzing events for which there may only be partial or unwritten records. It is “intentional” in that it is planned and not spontaneous, and can be characterized as true “inquiry” in that it stems from or generates questions and reflects teachers’ desires to make sense of their experiences (23–24). But Cochran-Smith and Lytle refer to the work of Anne Berthoff to remind readers that, according to Berthoff, “it is not even necessary that teacher research involve new information but rather that it interpret the information one already has—what she calls ‘REsearching’” (24). At a research conference on reading and English, Julie Jensen (1987) sought to broaden the view of what constitutes research: “I wish we could encourage a redefinition of the word ‘researcher.’ To the ranks of thesis and dissertation writers, assistant professors seeking tenure,… let’s recruit anyone who has a question and a disciplined approach to finding an answer” (57).

KNOWLEDGE-MAKING IN ACTION IN THE WRITING CENTER

Certainly, writing center directors have questions, and the information they seek out makes knowledge. Generally, the knowledge made in localized writing center research stays local, where it is constantly being used, and that may be the reason why this form of knowledge-making often goes unnoticed outside the center. But a typical example, one that was shared in print, illustrates the features of such research—Patricia Terry’s (1994) “Things Your Mentor Never Told You: Discovering Writing Lab Identity in the Institutional Environment.” In her essay, Terry details her work in defining her writing lab’s place in the particular institution, Gonzaga University, where she began her new job as director. Quickly realizing that in order to understand whom it is that the lab serves, what services it should provide, what demands are being placed on the director, and how to fund and staff the place, she details for her readers the stages of her research. She investigated by means of questionnaires, interviews, surveys, and analyses of documents such as the institutional mission statement and financial aid systems. The result was that, as a director, she learned what she needed to know in order to begin functioning as an effective administrator. Even questions about how Terry might compensate tutors were answered by learning how students finance their education and what the campu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors and Editors
• Preface
• Introduction
• I. Writing Centers as Sites of Self-Reflective Inquiry
• II. Writing Centers as Sites of Institutional Critique and Contextual Inquiry
• III Writing Centers as Sites of Inquiry Into Practice
• Author Index
• Subject Index