The Writing Center Director's Resource Book

Christina Murphy, Byron Stay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135600402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Writing Center Director's Resource Book has been developed to serve as a guide to writing center professionals in carrying out their various roles, duties, and responsibilities. It is a resource for those whose jobs not only encompass a wide range of tasks but also require a broad knowledge of multiple issues.The volume provides information on the most significant areas of writing center work that writing center professionals--both new and seasoned--are likely to encounter. It is structured for use in diverse institutional settings, providing both current knowledge as well as case studies of specific settings that represent the types of challenges and possible outcomes writing center professionals may experience. This blend of theory with actual practice provides a multi-dimensional view of writing center work.
In the end, this book serves not only as a resource but also as a guide to future directions for the writing center, which will continue to evolve in response to a myriad of new challenges that will lie ahead.

Part I

Writing Centers
and Institutional Change

Time Warp: Historical Representations of Writing Center Directors

Neal Lerner

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I have long been interested in the question of where writing center directors come from. Now, I don’t mean a story of the birds and the bees or an analysis of writing center geography or even a tale about graduate school training. What I mean is, where did this all start? Who was the first writing center director? And what can an understanding of our roots offer a new or established writing center director?

That last question is the tricky one. It is difficult to answer because to many in our field, writing centers have come of age relatively recently or, most likely, their particular writing center is relatively young. In her 2001 survey of 107 writing center directors, Rachel Perkes found that 96% reported origins in the 1970s, and just two reported origins going back to the 1940s or 1950s. I have found, however, that our roots stretch much deeper, that writing centers, clinics, or laboratories have long been offered to help students learn to write. And the role and requirements of the person who directs those efforts have also been discussed for sometime. Overall, the professional qualities and attributes of a writing center director have been part of larger issues of the financial and time constraints that influence teaching and learning, particularly in the contested space that writing centers continue to occupy.

My intent in this chapter is to provide historical grounding in these long-standing issues and concerns for our field. In particular, the focus is on two relative heydays for writing centers: the late 1920s/early 1930s, when the “laboratory approach” to teaching writing achieved widespread support, and the early 1950s, when the free-standing writing center as we now know it came into its own. My premise is that although forming strong relationships with other writing center directors is essential to success, understanding one’s relationship to those who have come before provides a strong measure of continuity and connectedness and indicates what work still needs to be done.

The Laboratory as a Counter to Mass Instruction

Although the discussion first focuses on the representation of writing center directors in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it is important to note that the roots of writing centers reach still further back. Starting in the 1890s, writers and teachers began to decry the “mass instruction” that had dominated American schooling at all levels. In what educator Frederic Burk described as “the smug impertinence of an ancient, persistent, and preposterous pedantry” (1), students largely learned by lecture, memorization, and recitation, and little attempt was made to individualize instruction. This system was accepted in an era when higher education was populated by a relatively small, homogenous elite, but an increase in enrollments from 52,000 students in 1869 to 238,000 in 1899 (National Center for Education Statistics) sent college and university administrators scrambling for alternatives. One solution was the use of “laboratory methods,” particularly for increasingly common required composition classes.

In 1894, The Dial magazine ran a series on the practices of English departments at twenty institutions, and several writers invoked the idea of a laboratory to describe their approach. John Franklin Genung of Amherst College summed up his college’s attempts to solve the “problem” of poor student writing by noting that “[t]he best term, perhaps, by which to characterize the way in which the teachers of English at Amherst have met these problems is laboratory work” (112). Fred Newton Scott agreed when he described the practices at the University of Michigan, “As Professor Genung has well said, the teaching of composition is properly laboratory work” (122). By 1904, high school teacher Philo Buck offered before the National Education Association, an account of his use of “laboratory methods in English composition,” and the seemingly contemporary idea of teaching writing as a process of drafting, feedback, and revision was widely hailed. Brander Matthews of Columbia described a remarkably contemporary approach in his contribution to The Dial series:

As the best way to teach students to write is to have them write freely and frequently, they are called upon to express themselves on topics in which they are interested, and often of their own choice.… These essays are criticized by the instructors in private talks with every individual student. The general tendency of the instruction is affirmative rather than negative. In other words, instead of telling the student what he must not do, and of dwelling on the faults he should avoid, the aim of the instructors is to show him how to express himself easily and vigorously. (40–41)

By the late 1920s, laboratory methods in the teaching of writing had achieved relative acceptance (Carino, “Early Writing Centers”). One mark of that acceptance is that such methods became the dissertation topic for E. F. Lindquist of the University of Iowa. Lindquist’s intent was to offer his institution a means of handling large numbers of students who populated freshman English. Lindquist described his plan as follows:

[T]he student will learn to write, primarily, by writing, and he will do his writing—all of it—under the eye of a person trained to detect errors and to aid the pupil in overcoming individual difficulties. This writing will be done in a large “laboratory”—a specially equipped room with a capacity sufficient to handle a large fraction of the entire freshman class. All of the time which the student devotes to English composition, in addition to the one hour a week of attendance at the general lectures, will be spent in this laboratory. (31–32)

Lindquist was particularly concerned with the teacher or supervisor of this operation, and his descriptions serve as the basis for both the possibilities and limitations of the contemporary writing center director. Lindquist called for instructors in his method to be more highly skilled than the contingent and part-time faculty who generally staffed freshman English during this era (Connors):

While the position of laboratory supervisor will be one that is highly technical, it should never become merely mechanical. In the interest of continued progress, it is essential that the methods used in the writing laboratory be always considered as experimental methods.… [I]t should be one of the most important functions of the laboratory supervisor to engage in the research and study that will effect such improvements. This research function will necessitate the services of people of just as high, or higher calibre than those at present engaged in the teaching of Freshman English, and will furnish the appeal needed to attract high-calibre people to the work. (38)

While anticipating the teacher research movement by some seventy years or so, Lindquist was also describing an ideal that most institutions would be hard-pressed to meet given limited resources and uneasy relationships with those hired to teach students most in need of intensive writing instruction. Lindquist’s description of the laboratory supervisor still remains a challenge to fulfill:

The position of the laboratory supervisor will be, then, a position quite different from that now found in a university faculty. Because of the specialized and technical nature of the position, its attainment will be considered as an end in itself, rather than as a “stepping stone” to other positions. With it will go a professional spirit, a dignity and respectability, a permanence of tenure, and a financial remuneration that will raise its attractiveness far above that of the present position of instructor in Freshman English. (38)

In my more speculative moments, I wonder what might have occurred had Lindquist’s recommendations been accepted, triumphed, and duplicated. The idea of our field with an eighty-year head start on securing its professional status, on providing sound writing instruction to all students, is compelling. But one dissertation does not change the course of history (or at least Lindquist’s did not). The structural impediments to Lindquist’s ideal and the reliance on less expensive solutions would dominate for a very long time. That’s not to say that laboratory methods were abandoned; instead, writing instruction as practice under the supervision of an instructor was well accepted by the 1930s. However, the working conditions for those instructors and their status vis-à-vis the English department and the larger institution would be contested for years to come.

Another example of the possibilities and limitations in this era comes from the University of Minnesota General College, which in 1932 instituted an approach similar to Lindquist’s ideal. At Minnesota, Dean Malcolm MacLean and his staff created an institution dedicated to serve students who thought they were not “college material” or who had tried but dropped out of the regular course of study. An essential component of this approach was the Writing Laboratory, a substitute for freshman composition, and an elective course in which students would find “a room … equipped with desks and chairs designed for convenience in writing” (Appel, “A Writing Laboratory” 74). Although students received course credit for enrolling in the Writing Laboratory, the approach was remarkably similar to a contemporary writing center. As described by its director, Francis Appel, a student’s “instructor in the laboratory merely conspires with him to achieve clear expression and never assigns him a theme” (“A Writing Laboratory” 71). In this setting, students wrote letters, assignments from their other courses, or any meaningful text while Appel and his assistant, Lorraine Kranhold, circulated and conferenced over the work in progress. Malcolm MacLean described the setup:

In a quiet skylight room we provide chairs and slanting tables for ease in writing. There the students write all or parts of their papers; the instructor and his assistant criticize and help when called upon by the student during the progress and at the completion of each paper. We believe that habits of clear writing can be built only upon an interest in and sense of need for writing; therefore, at the outset we give no instruction in the so-called essentials of composition. The student is urged to write only on subjects which interest him or on which he is required to write for other courses, or, by home compulsions, to correspond. (244)

Francis Appel directed this operation on a three-quarter time appointment, but Lorraine Kranhold was assigned full time to the Writing Laboratory. Given this level of staffing, the two faced considerable challenges in meeting the needs of all students. In one of his accounts of the laboratory, Appel described some of those challenges: “The limitations of staff and classrooms forced us to accept 35 students in each section, but when by accident we have had only 25 students we have found that they made greater progress and had greater satisfaction in the course, and that there was much less strain on the instructors” (“Writing Laboratory” 296).

By spring 1935, Appel reported that although nearly three hundred students had enrolled in the Writing Laboratory for two-hour weekly sessions (“A Writing Laboratory” 77), staffing remained the same, and he and Kranhold continued “to handle the laboratory, as well as to teach or assist in several other courses” (“A Writing Laboratory” 77). No surprise, then, that Appel, in the same article, ended with a caution for any institution adopting a writing laboratory: “It is not, however, a method to be forced upon a staff, for the laboratory method requires enthusiastic and not mere perfunctory teaching by the instructors. They, too, must break down the walls which have been built around the study of composition” (“A Writing Laboratory” 77).

Certainly, walls are difficult to break without the money for demolition equipment. For Appel and Kranhold, the work must have been overwhelming at times. For students, the promise of constant feedback from an eager instructor instead became a relatively brief conference once every two weeks. As Appel described, “During the laboratory periods the instructor has conferences with about half the students in a section and answers general questions for the others” (“Writing Laboratory” 295). Although this level of contact seems far better than might occur in a large composition class, it does not quite fulfill Appel’s promise. In his 1936 description of the lab, he noted that “[m]ore than half the achievement of the writing laboratory, I am sure, can be attributed to the fact that conferences with the student take place when the student is writing” (“A Writing Laboratory” 75). That leads one to wonder what students were doing in the much more frequent times when they were not conferencing. Francis Appel, in his work at Minnesota, might have been the kind of high-caliber writing laboratory director that E. F. Lindquist envisioned in 1927; however, the demands on his time surely challenged that ideal, just as they would the contemporary writing center director.

One other graduate student helps to shed light on the status and conditions of writing center directors in this era. In 1938, Beulah Stebno Thornton conducted for her University of Oregon master’s thesis “A Limited Survey of the Laboratory Method in Teaching English Composition.” Covering nine institutions, Thornton’s thesis offers a snapshot of writing laboratory practices consistent with the “laboratory-as-classroom” approach that had been around since the turn of the century. One exception was at Syracuse University, where “laboratory work is handled through personal, scheduled conferences by one of the assistant professors in his office. Attendance is optional to fit the students’ time and need. The work is done with single individuals, and the length of the scheduled period is from twenty minutes to an hour” (34). The contemporary aspects of this approach—staffing by faculty members rather than by lab instructors, individually scheduled conferences rather than an assigned time for an entire group—would have to wait quite awhile longer before they became more widely accepted.

In terms of administration, the supervisors of the writing labs that Thornton studied were far from Lindquist’s ideal. According to Thornton,

Apparently no special method of selecting teachers for the Writing Laboratory is used in any of the schools investigated, and no school reported that any particular kind of academic training was necessary to qualify for this work.… All of the laboratory directors agreed, however, that personality factors are important elements in the services of a laboratory instructor or supervisor. (48)

We later find that such personality attributes as “tactfulness, cheerfulness, and ease of manner” (51) were key to the successful writing lab director. Any contemporary writing center director would likely agree with these needs, but the reduction of the writing lab director to merely these qualities is an indication of the struggle for status at this point. It is difficult to imagine the characterization of a dean, department chair, or even a rank-and-file faculty member solely along the lines of a “winning smile,” but such a quality seemed sufficient in the writing laboratory of the late 1930s. It would not be until the next era in the evolution of writing centers that “specialized training” would be valued and writing laboratories began to look as they do today.

The Writing Laboratory Comes of Age

By the early 1950s, the idea of a writing laboratory seemed tightly woven into the fabric of higher education. Workshops titled “The Organization and Use of the Writing Laboratory” were held during the first three Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) meetings, 1949 to 1951, and by 1953 Claude F. Shouse, a graduate student at the University of Southern California and the director of the writing laboratory at San Diego State College (now University), focused on this growing movement for his dissertation research. Shouse’s survey of si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Writing Centers and Institutional Change
• Part II: Writing Centers and Praxis.
• Contributor Bios
• Author Index
• Subject Index