The Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone

Randall W. Monty

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137540942
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Writing centers are complex. They are places of scholarly work, spaces of interdisciplinary interaction, and programs of service, among other things. With this complexity in mind, this book theorizes writing center studies as a function of its own rhetorical and discursive practices. In other words, the things we do and make define who we are and what we value. Through a comprehensive methodological framework grounded in critical discourse analysis, this book takes a closer look at prominent writing center discourses by temporarily shifting attention away from the stakeholders, work, locations, and scholarship of the discipline, and onto things—the artifacts and networks that make up the discipline. Through this approach, we can see the ways the discipline reinforces, challenges, reproduces, and subverts structures of institutional power. As a result, writing center studies can be seen a vast ecosystem of interconnectivity and intertextuality.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Randall W. MontyThe Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone10.1057/978-1-137-54094-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Little Rooms

Randall W. Monty¹

(1)

University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, Texas, USA

Abstract

In “Little Rooms,” Monty introduces an argument for a new way of thinking about writing center studies (WCS) as a discursive and rhetorical discipline. Using a central metaphor of cell theory, this identification is grounded in the amalgamated system of cultural and disciplinary contact zones negotiated by and through local writing centers. It is then expanded to account for the network of disciplinary methods and feedback, and in doing so, redefines disciplinarity as a function of those varied interactions. This argument is made through a series of critical analyses of disciplinary discourses, artifacts that work individually and collectively to create writing center place and space.

Keywords

writing centers • cell theory • disciplinarity

End Abstract

Situatedness

The first time I walked into a writing center was the first day I had ever heard of a writing center. It was on the first week of class, and my composition instructor had required everyone to find the center as a homework assignment. Conveniently enough, the center was housed on the ground floor of the same building as my class, although the arbitrarily sloped topography of the campus rendered designations like that in the abstract. I was in my first week as an undergraduate student at a medium-sized, private institution in the northeast USA, before the winter began its usual 8-month residency, before every first-year student wondered on what campus the dulcet autumn photos in the school’s recruitment brochure had been staged.

The center itself did not look like an academic space—it was a far cry from the cramped room with too few desks in the building’s basement where our class had met—although there were clearly people busy with academic work, in spite of it being early in the semester. Two of the walls were floor-to-ceiling glass, and the late-afternoon sun provided all the necessary light. The walls were lined with computers that no one in my tax bracket owned, and scattered around the room was an incidental arrangement of modifiable tables and chairs. It would have been a jarring sight if it weren’t also so inviting. I ended up spending much of the next four years in that room.

For a discipline whose work has been historically and inextricably linked to physical space, writing center studies (WCS), as a field of study and as a community, has long had difficulty explaining where the heck it was. Depending on who was doing the situating, as well as where and when the situating occurred, writing centers have been “at the heart, rather than the periphery, of current theory in composition studies” (Ede, 1989, pp. 5–6), “marginalized in relation to the central institutional structures of writing pedagogy” (Cooper, 1994, p. 106), and even “marginalized within their own host departments and within their institutions” (Bergman & Conrad-Salvo, 2007, p. 185). What’s more, writing centers are “cropping up with increasing regularity” (Ede & Lunsford, 2000, p. 33), safe harbors for “several types of non-main-stream students… and non-traditional students” (Mendez Newman, 2003, p. 44), akin to “an intense church service or revival” (Esters, 2011, p. 291), and “recognized [as] campus leaders whose vision of how learning environments should be structured has come to dominate educational thinking” (Harris, 2000, p. 13). Above all, though, writing centers carved out identities, “so that [their] placement and meaning made sense within the broader frame of university spatial politics” (Peters, 2009, p. 192). As a result, the contemporary identification of WCS is one with as many facets as there are local writing centers comprising the discipline.

In this book, I argue for a new way of thinking about WCS as a discursive and rhetorical discipline. This identification is grounded in the amalgamated system of cultural and disciplinary contact zones negotiated by and through local writing centers. It is then expanded to account for the network of disciplinary methods and feedback, and in doing so, redefines disciplinarity as a function of those varied interactions. I will make my argument through a series of critical analysis of disciplinary discourses that work individually and collectively to create writing center place and space. Over the subsequent chapter, I will go into greater detail to explain what I think all of these things mean, but before delving into that deeper analysis, I’d like to talk a little bit about cells.

Small Rooms

Writing centers, also referred to as “writing labs,” “learning centers,” “tutoring centers,” “writing studios,” “student support centers,” “writing across the curriculum centers,” and by other names, were initially modeled on science labs, places where investigative, collaborative, and thorough inquiry would take place (Boquet, 2002). This theme has persisted within the scholarship of rhetoric and composition, a discipline with close professional and theoretical ties to WCS, for instance, as some have borrowed terminology from ecology to develop useful models for understanding systems of writing (Dobrin, 2001; Keller, 2001; Reynolds, 2004), while others have used botany-influenced metaphors, like rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and crosspollination (Goggin, 2000), to describe the seemingly naturally occurring network of interactive exchanges among writers. Clearly, the natural sciences have provided compositionists with fertile ground for metaphor making.

In order to add to this lineage, I propose a schematic model that draws from Biology, itself a discipline concerned with negotiating and rationalizing its own disciplinarity and the intertwining theoretical concepts in its discussions of physical spaces. Illustrating these points directly, biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson (2005) wrote:

Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so. (p. 1)

It is with this image in mind that I argue that by thinking about WCS as a system of individualized but nevertheless interconnected cells, we can move it toward a more unified disciplinary identification, one that more actively embraces and supports the diversity of localized places and spaces, as well as those people that do work as part of the larger disciplinary organism.

In their 1839 explication of cell theory, biologists Matthias Jakob Schleiden, Theodor Schwann, and Rudolf Virchow, themselves building off Robert Hooke’s initial observations of the nature of cells, postulated that living organisms are made up of collections of microscopic cells serving structural and functional purposes, most significant of these being the transport and transfer of hereditary traits (Maton, 1997). Since its initial introduction into scientific discourses, cell theory has been a bedrock principle in studies of science and medicine, and pertinent to the discussion presented in this book, cell theory provides an apt metaphor for understanding the functions of disciplinarity.

This cell/discipline analogy can be a rewarding one to explore, because for nearly every feature that a cell possesses, there seems to be an applicable metaphor for academic disciplines waiting to be expanded. At the macro level, different cells combine with one another in order to create larger, more complex organisms. This can be compared to how individual fields coalesce to make academic disciplines—disciplines are clustered into departments, groups of separate departments are organized into colleges, collections of colleges comprise institutions, and institutions form university systems. Or, in an analogy that will be as useful for the purposes of this project, this comparison can refer to disciplines working across institutions: local centers interact with other centers at other institutions in order to create larger disciplinary identifications. In each case—with cells as well as with academic disciplines—the autonomous units work both individually and collectively, communicating and providing responsive feedback, sometimes in symbiosis, sometimes in competition for resources, and sometimes at the uneven benefit of one side (and thus, occasionally, at the detriment of the others).

Shifting focus to the (even more) microscopic level reveals further possible metaphors. The cell wall, for instance, proves particularly useful in the cell/discipline analogy. Better known for the roles they serve in plant cells, the cell wall is a rigid yet flexible membrane that surrounds the cell, encasing and protecting the cell’s other components. The cell wall provides structure and regulates what is allowed to flow in and out of the cell (water, e.g., can almost freely permeate cell walls). The wall’s strength is tensile, but not absolute; it is permeable, but selectively so; it is sturdy, but not fixed. Thanks to the wall, cells bend but do not easily break. While the wall provides stability, its shape can be altered depending upon a number of variables—temperature, time of year, age of the organism, and other factors all contribute to the actual shape of a cell at any given moment (Abkarian & Viallat, 2008). Most significantly, plant cells do not function in spite of the wall’s variance, but because of it. As surrounding contexts change, cells—and the organisms they combine to form—can also change.

Cell walls naturally serve as apt metaphors for the boundaries separating groups such as academic disciplines, as they likewise function with a great deal of variability. Considering an academic discipline in biological terms, then, the cell wall is the contact zone that separates one discipline from the next and provides its definition. Mary Louise Pratt (1991) seminally recognized a tension in this place, which would result in both contacted cultures hashing out their perimeters and defining themselves on their own terms, as well as in contrast with each other. This latter characteristic, as noted by Janet Alsup (2011) and indicative of the cell wall’s selective permeability, represents “a consensus in ideas and opinions” between different groups (p. 47). In other words, when functioning on the contact zone, groups necessarily act in reaction to and in concert with those other groups that they contact. Academic disciplines are also defined by their own cultures—histories, social norms, vocabularies and jargons, modes of discourse, and so on—and as such, according to Rolf Norgaard (1999), it is valuable to use these physical metaphors of the contact zone when discussing them. The cultural contact zones that are academic disciplinary boundaries function similar to cell walls: they provide shape and definition, and they serve as demarcations of what is included and excluded.

Animal cells provide their own applicable metaphors for disciplinary critique. Lacking the rigid wall of plant cells, animal cells are surrounded by an armored membrane that is comparably less adhesive. They are structured in their own right, but more fluid and capable of movement than their plant counterparts, traits that result in noticeable spaces between individual cells when viewed through a microscope. These spaces contribute to important functions in animal systems, such as blood coagulation, and they allow individual cells to move to different areas of the organism as needed. However, the lack of a cell wall in animal cells also leaves them susceptible to invasion and outside influence. As with the example of cell walls in plant cells, there are drawbacks as well as advantages to the animal cell’s structure that are comparable to those noticed on disciplinary contact zones. When academic disciplines engage in interdisciplinary collaborations, the negotiation can result in the emergence of “a common interest that might connect and advance a variety of pedagogical and curricular experiments” (Norgaard, 1999, p. 45). Yet, in situations where one discipline holds significant power (whether political, social, economic, racial, gendered, or some other manifestation) over the other, this negotiation can result in the subordinate discipline being inequitably influenced, changed, or worse yet, disregarded altogether.

Similar to the spaces that exist between animal cells, Rhonda Grego and Nancy Thompson (2008) considered the “gaps and fissures” between academic disciplines, which they registered as unclaimed (or dually claimed) spaces that could prove to be problematic locations when staking out disciplinary identity (p. 48). These gaps manifest in the lived reality of practitioners as unclaimed areas of potential scholarship, or as contested ground that could lead to in-fighting, misappropriation of funds, and disciplinary ambiguity. Take, for example, the role of First-Year Composition (FYC). At many schools in the USA, the FYC program is housed in the English Department, a situation that often can lead to numerous conflicts of interest that inhibit the autonomy, development, and efficacy of the composition program. What’s more, just as rhetoric and composition programs located in English Departments can have their disciplinary interests compromised, so too have writing centers “[suffered] in their association with the positioning of composition and the teaching of writing at these beginning levels” by all-too-often being relegated to the status of support services and coded as remedial or developmental (Grego & Thompson, 2008, p. 15). More succinctly, without the institutional...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Little Rooms
• 2. Discourse as Framework
• 3. Discursively Constructing the Session
• 4. Decentering Writing in the Institution
• 5. Disciplinarity Through Discourse
• 6. Writing Center Webspaces as Ecosystem
• 7. Discourse as Heuristic
• Backmatter